Fitting the battle of life

I’m using Ubuntu for nearly everything I do, and I think it is the perfect desktop for most computer users. Why? It does everything you need from a home PC, and an office one as well. The Ubuntu (7.04, Feisty Fawn) installer is simple – much simpler, apparently, than installing Linux used to be. This being my first foray into an open-source OS, I can’t comment, but from my experience of setting up a dual boot, I needed only a little help from the online community, and that was about setting up partitions. For someone who doesn’t need to dual-boot, this won’t be a problem.

As for usability, gnome is very simple when you’re about five minutes in and have had a look at the menus – the first thing I would do. Having cd/dvd creator under ‘Places’ isn’t immediately intuitive, but when you consider that a cd is a place to put things, it does almost make perfect sense.

The standard programmes in Ubuntu are fine for what the average home user needs – firefox is a very good browser, in my opinion far better than IE (even IE7, which saw many improvements).  Openoffice.org isn’t the same as MS Office, but does the basic jobs a home user might need to do very well: writing letters, for instance. Having an in-built pdf export function is great for those who need it The best part is: it’s free, unlike MS Office or commercial pdf-creation tools. For a student, that’s a big bonus. Even the student edition of MS Office costs £90, which is more than 50 pints at the Union. Oh, and there are plenty of solitaire-type card games bundled with it, more than with Windows.

There are problems – I haven’t sorted my printer out yet because a) it’s the holidays and I don’t need it, and b) it’s a dell-branded lexmark that doesn’t have brilliant driver support in Linux. There is a driver out there, and I’ll sort that when I come to it.

I’ve not used Evolution as I use Gmail online anyway to collect about three different email accounts (personal, uni and so on), but I’ll experiment at some point I’m sure. I was using Outlook under XP and it was as slow as anything, even if it was slicker-looking than Thunderbird, which I have also used.

Rhythmbox just works, even reading files and playlists from my iPod (it doesn’t, of course, play protected content, but I only have a smattering of that anyway).

There are very few things I need to do that Ubuntu and its bundled software can’t do – and for most other things, there are alternatives in the repos. I know of only one application I will be using that I need Windows for, and that’s a very niche product (running debating competitions, if you must know). The only problems I’ve had with Ubuntu concern my ATI graphics card, Beryl and a kernel update, but sticking to a kernel version and Beryl release that work for me isn’t a high price to pay. I’ll get a well-supported card when I get a new desktop, and play with Compiz-Fusion.

The next step for me is persuading my mother to switch her laptop to Ubuntu – it runs XP slowly, has been infested with spyware and I’ve had to install various bits to keep it clean. I’ve had no such problems with Ubuntu. It’s perfect for everyday tasks, and, with the right software, perfect for all sorts of other things as well.