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264 Comments
- tvanwyk, on 01/02/2009, -1/+48Have you found Aspell yet? It's probably in your distro's repositories.
- Spr0k3t, on 01/02/2009, -16/+58Going into my third year without windows. Honestly, I don't know why I had not done it any sooner.
- obliviousfool, on 01/02/2009, -23/+61I switched. Buh-bye windowz. Won't miss ya.
- duckyinc, on 01/03/2009, -1/+32My new years resolution: Stop telling everyone what my resolution is..
- db113456, on 01/02/2009, -11/+42Welcome to the good side of computing :-)
I will not try to point out when I switched, but I can say that my first kernel was 0.96 ... and I had to do it with floppies :-) - rmhainlen, on 01/02/2009, -6/+31So, if we already use linux should we go back to windows and document it for a week?
- georanson, on 01/02/2009, -19/+40i already switched wasent to hard
- h4xx3d, on 01/03/2009, -5/+26I switched 5 years ago. I haven't regretted a moment. It's incredible watching the progress. Things that were difficult when I started out are now not only easier but they work better too. On top of it all, linux has become the most gorgeous desktop computing solution around. Thank you Linus and everyone who's followed in your footsteps to bring us such a wonderful OS.
- enkideridu, on 05/15/2009, -2/+23"in reality there is roughly 158,000 million types of Linux, each of them named after a different type of hat."
lol - rusty0101, on 01/03/2009, -0/+20Broke it already eh?
- db113456, on 01/02/2009, -1/+20Some people have already done that ... :-)
- laubscher, on 01/03/2009, -5/+21I gave my mother in law (65-ish) an old laptop for christmas, running ubuntu. She's a bit of a techno-phobe, but she took to it like a duck to water. She's e-mailing long lost relatives, bidding for knick-knacks on e-Bay, leaving ridiculous comments on my Flickr photos. She loves it, keeps complaining that it took her this long to become IT-savvy.
Anyone who thinks linux is only for geeks/basement-dwellers, I can give you her number. - rusty0101, on 01/03/2009, -0/+15Last I checked, auto-spellcheck was enabled by default in Firefox. He must have selected a different browser...
- Shootfast, on 01/03/2009, -1/+15@db113456 Just curious as to where Ubuntu falls short for your needs. I've used many other distro's for many purposes and haven't found any real areas that Ubuntu is specifically lacking in.
- Warom, on 01/03/2009, -1/+15Well, I know why you had not done it any sooner. About 4 years ago Linux was still terrible, try and find builds of all the most popular software for linux about 4 years old and you will see. Linux has made colossal improvements in terms of usability in the past 4 years.
- arnodick, on 01/03/2009, -2/+14Thanks for the comments everyone.
If you want to read my post about my second day's experience you can check it out here.
http://www.zmogo.com/gear/the-new-year-linux-resol ... - Giga, on 01/03/2009, -2/+14As a Linux user, I am getting sick of these "Look at me! I'm switching!" journals. Especially ones that appeal to both Linux lovers and Linux haters at the same time. "Oh my God, it broke my machine! But I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, it was probably my fault in some way and the people were friendly". They come up way too often and add nothing new.
- Eggenheimer, on 01/03/2009, -0/+12I drunkenly told a group of complete strangers at a party that my new years resolution is 1280 x 1024. Bad times.
- maxstr, on 01/03/2009, -3/+15Yes please, give me her number.
- ScottoGato, on 01/03/2009, -1/+131280x1024?
- Origin415, on 01/03/2009, -6/+17I have tried. It was a dark, dark time, filled with the sound of cursing every time I tried to scroll a window that wasn't focused or middle click to copy/paste, or scroll the taskbar, or any sort of programming.
Except it fortunately wasn't a week, its every time I feel like playing a game. :/ - junglejay, on 01/03/2009, -1/+11I switched from XP to Ubuntu over a year ago and haven't looked back.
- lowtolerance, on 01/03/2009, -0/+10i hear you on the floppies. i remember all the "boot disk" and "root disk" stuff. i downloaded my first distro off of a friends BBS back in '96 or so, took me days to get it all. i never did get it to work, either.
- sdcarter, on 01/03/2009, -5/+15Hey, thanks for being a compassionate elitist. I bet you also get everything right the first time and are never afraid of screwing up when attempting something new.
Don't be such an ass-hat. It's condescending dicks like you that make it harder to convert people to linux. - K2H7, on 01/03/2009, -3/+12"great choice for an absolute beginner, a bit short for my needs"
You must be referring to the need to be a pretentious *****. - Smegzor, on 01/03/2009, -1/+10Hey don't diss floppies! I started with tapes and a screwdriver permanently attached to the tuning screw (or the clarity of the playback would drift and the program would not load). I missed out on punched cards, but only just.
- computershack, on 01/03/2009, -2/+10"compile sound drivers? my guess is you never tried Linux. "
I guess you don't own a Creative X-Fi.... - infiniphunk, on 01/03/2009, -5/+12Ubuntu > OS X > Windows 2000 > Windows XP > Windows 7
- galets, on 01/03/2009, -3/+9I gave Ubuntu-EEE laptop to my wife, and she's using it like nobody's business; and she's no geek either.
... and no, you ain't getting her phone :P ... - Killer_Manbeast, on 01/03/2009, -0/+6@7errated
Dude, even installing Ubuntu 8.10 with Windows installed already, as to dual boot, is as easy as saying you want to, and then pulling a slider to the percentages you want and clicking next, going about the rest of the install, i.e. simple questions like Name, Username, password, stuff like that, location, really simple stuff, as you are probably aware. If someone can't install UBUNTU, they are computer retarded. - Origin415, on 01/03/2009, -1/+7Gimp could use some help with simple tasks like that, but I meant programming as in like C, not as in javascript.
It seems exceedingly difficult to set up a nice development environment for, say, Perl or Python. By obscenely difficult, I mean you have to like google and find some weird package to install and set you PATH and all that crap. In linux you can just sudo apt-get install those suckers. And any additional libraries you want are just as easy.
It takes me WAY to long to set up a decent environment to use Eclipse CDT in in Windows (anything else thats FOSS is pretty terrible imo), let alone extra libraries like SDL or trying to get Git running.
In Linux, this stuff just works. - Smuikas, on 01/03/2009, -0/+6Seriously.
Anecdote time:
I'm renting office space at a local warehouse-turned-artist haven (computer lab, desk space for rent, wood shop, metal shop, media lab). For about a month I was taking my laptop in to work every day. Then a miracle happened. Not literally, but hold on: the apartment building I live in has a shelf in the lobby. Occasionally, people leave things there for other folks in the building who might want them. Lightly used clothes, college textbooks, and the like. One morning my room mate informed me: "Hey, there's a computer downstairs. You might want to take a look."
It was a (relatively outdated, but still useful) pentium 4 with 2gb of ram and a radeon 9800 video card. Only thing missing was a working hard drive. Now, I already have a decent desktop computer for gaming and at-home entertainment (including queuing up streaming films from netflix for the '360). And I already have a laptop for mobile computing. But a laptop screen is kind of small, and I'd been wishing for a desktop system to use at work.
Behold, Ubuntu. I bought a cheap (and relatively small -- it's a work computer, what do I need 200gb for?) hard drive and proceeded to install linux. Cough! Gasp!
I've been using linux off and on for about a decade, now. I haven't really found a solid place for it in my home life, and previously I was beholden to my employer to decide what kind of workstation I use. Installing was a breeze (I'm apt to blame the article author's issues on a duality of his external hard drive and perhaps a graphics card). Usage is a breeze: netbeans offers the best I've found for JavaScript development (Eclipse just crashed continuously). RapidSVN has a nice linux flavor. Firefox - well -- firefox on linux still has my old standby, firebug. Being that the company I work for exclusively uses google documents and mail, the only thing lacking was photoshop.
Wait, Wine delivers! Photoshop works like a dream. Not as well as it does on my up-to-date home computer, but definitely well enough for web graphics.
So yeah. Linux for work, Windows for home, and a hybrid (dual booting) laptop for on-the-go. I didn't necessarily switch. I'm just using the (best * cost) available operating system for the duties of the machine.
The photographers and artists who catch a glimpse of my desktop out of the corner of their eye exclaim, "Wow! That tower doesn't look like OSX! How'd you change it to look like that?"
The rest of folks ask, "Wow! That's not windows, what is that?"
And me? Well, I say, "oh. It's linux with a few user interface mods. Makes it easier to use..." and continue on with my work. Which I accomplish with aplomb. My only complaint so far is that Netbeans isn't quite as nice as Visual Studio to develop JS in (code completion could use some work. I wish I knew more lower-level programming than I do; JS and C# development skills don't lend easily to Java projects. I could learn the ins and outs of the application, but it would take precious time away from developing business-related code for work. Unfortunately I'm not the type who can code for fun: I enjoy it, but it's not what I want to do to unwind at the end of the work day). - DeathfireD, on 01/02/2009, -0/+6That's what you call an average user now a days.
- svivian, on 01/03/2009, -0/+6I installed Ubuntu 18 months ago. Apart from having to hook up an old monitor due to it displaying "out of range", it was fairly smooth.
However, these articles miss one key point: in a "Linux for the masses" situation, most users wouldn't be installing Ubuntu, it would come pre-installed on the computer they buy. - brownr21, on 01/03/2009, -3/+9Irony (your name).
- Krissam, on 01/02/2009, -0/+6Not every place has a lug :/
Going to my nearest lug meeting will cost me a €100 train ticket :/
@Article, i can't really figure out what kind of user we're dealing with, he's smart enough to figure he should install on a seperate external harddrive to completely avoid making changes to his windows partition, he's smart enough to go to support forums. yet he doesn't have any idea how booting a pc works... suprises me a bit. - Clbull, on 01/03/2009, -2/+8I switched to Ubuntu for about 2 to 3 months and I actually did miss using XP.
- Myrth, on 01/03/2009, -0/+5Looks to me like you're confusing smart and informed.
You can be as smart as Einstein, but if you don't know linux boot stages or even don't know that you should know about them, then you.... won't know about them!
It's not about "smart" it's about having different interests in life. Some people enjoy dedicating their lives to learning about linux, some people like to write novels.
In our world time is sparse, in case you haven't noticed, and you have to choose what to do with your live, as you can't do and/or know everything.
So yeah, he's smart enough to know the role of harddrive and that there's external ones, but he hasn't have enough time to be informed about master boot record, grub configuration and linux boot stages. - Spr0k3t, on 01/03/2009, -0/+5Well damn! I ran out of soundcard drivers to compile. I guess it's back to windows for me.
- schoate09, on 01/03/2009, -1/+6I wish people would stop having low resolutions. Every computer I work on for family, etc, never runs on the recommended resolution. My mother complained when I upgraded her from 2000 to Xp that she could no longer have 640x480, and she was forced to use 800x600, on a 19" monitor no less.
- Killer_Manbeast, on 01/03/2009, -2/+7Yes, yes we did. Or should I put it YES, YES WE ***** DID! Keep submitting :)
- armo, on 01/03/2009, -1/+6"Create a button with slightly rounded edges, and a background that starts darkish, fades to light, then abruptly begins fading back to dark."
Try using inkscape for things like this, it's a brilliant little vector graphics application and will produce something like this in seconds. - peestandingup, on 01/03/2009, -4/+9No, and neither will any other year.
- sparrowkc, on 01/03/2009, -1/+6He was trying to install to an external drive, which isn't exactly a normal setup. The installer puts grub on your main drive unless you tell it otherwise, which is probably what happened here. If you install grub on the correct drive, then you can have a really nice setup where your computer goes back to normal when you unplug the drive.
- muffinmonk, on 01/03/2009, -6/+11Yes you will, all Linux users miss Windows eventually.
- Psychoboy, on 01/03/2009, -0/+5I honestly did try linux for a week. I use linux every day at work for servers and such. But for development we use visual studios. I Tried every possible solution using vmware under linux and such. I also have tried a few distro's. Suse 11.1 Fedora 10 Ubuntu 8.1 Kubuntu 8.10. I ended up back in windows XP. Personally I think it comes down to user preference. If you are an experienced and knowledgeable computer user then the OS doesn't really matter. Just use the OS that meets your needs the best.
- Mockylock, on 01/03/2009, -3/+8Because there's no other combination of words that can describe a pretentious *****.
- jamesmcm, on 01/03/2009, -3/+8Thr point is most users would never need to touch the terminal in GNU/Linux much line Windows.
- Baronvontito1, on 01/03/2009, -9/+13I switched to Ubuntu for a month, I kind of liked it, but honestly it didn't seem worth the effort. Every single thing I wanted to do required me to enter tons of commands. It's just way too wonky to get things done in. The sound wouldn't work no matter what I tried. I had constant screen tearing because it wouldn't let me install graphics drivers. There are really no advantages I see in linux as an average user. Maybe running on a server or a rendering farm, but not for my day to day computing.
Use whatever you like, but to me, Linux was just a big waste of my time. -
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