Harry Pears

At the weekend, I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 8.04 freely and legally.

OK, so there are a few driver issues with most Linux distros, however in Ubuntu 8.04, there is a new ‘Hardware Drivers’ installer. It found my wireless card, found the drives, downloaded them, installed them. All I had to do was give my administrator password to be safe and click on a couple of things. Done =)

Many people say that no programs work with Linux. They’re kind of right, but in most cases, there is usually an open source alternative that is just as good. Such as Rhythmbox Music Player, a great alternative to Windows Media Player which comes pre-installed with Ubuntu. Then there is Pidgin or aMSN or numerous other IM clients which work with just MSN or with all popular IM networks including YIM, AIM, GTalk and ICQ. There is also a feature rich Microsoft Office alternative; OpenOffice.Org which is pre-installed with Ubuntu.

With Ubuntu, I have found that startup and shutdown times are an awful lot faster than those of Vista. One reason maybe because Ubuntu doesn’t have AVG to load when it boots, the reason for this being Linux doesn’t get viruses!

I decided to use Vista earlier, but when it booted up, and all of the startup crap had loaded, I opened up FF… this took ages, as usual. When this eventually loaded, I tried to listen to Josh’s show on jamiehdFM, so I clicked the link, FF froze, finally cleared and then opened in Media Player… to freeze that also. Then FF again. I opened up My Computer, then Windows Explorer froze. This is a very regular occurrence with my laptop. I had been logged onto Vista for about 5 minutes, and straight away rebooted back into Ubuntu.

tl;dr? Get Ubuntu!