The test part 2

Well it's been a while since I installed Ubuntu and decided to see what it can do against Vista and to be honest I haven't really used it all that much. It was pretty easy to drop back into the old Windows habit and dismiss this Linux distro altogether. It's not that I have anything against Ubuntu or anything, I'm just more comfortable with the way things are in Vista.

For instance:

You want to download and try out a piece of software in Windows so you download it and click "install" and everything is done through the Windows installer.

Now try that in Linux. You download a "tarball" then type in several lines of code to get the program to install.

Most regular PC users, like myself, have very limited knowledge of running code to get anything done. I would imagine that if I did a bit more practicing it would seem perfectly natural to me.

I haven't really given Linux a fair shake at convincing me that it's ready for the mainstream Windows users to give it a try so I guess that means it's back to the drawing board on this one. Besides, I do like the idea of open source, free software that is capable of getting the job done.

The test

Thanks to the wonders of Microsoft, I had a catastrophic system failure this weekend that caused me to reformat my hard drive and reinstall my operating system. I've always wanted to try a Linux based system but I have too many Windows only programs and, frankly, I've been using Windows for so long that I was a little nervous trying something different. Since all my data, except the music from another hard drive, was lost I decided to partition my hard drive and install Vista Home Premium on one 90GB partition and Ubuntu 8.04 (the Hardy Heron) on the other 90GB.

It's only been 2 days since I've installed both operating systems, but so far I'm leaning toward the ease and speed of Ubuntu. I already know what Vista can do, so I'll be spending the next few weeks playing with this operating system to see if Linux can really do everything that Windows can.