For three months now I have used Ubuntu as the operating system of choice replacing windows XP on my home computer.
For the most part the transition was quite easy and it’s clear why people are begining to talk about it being able to replace windows for some users.
But there is of couse always a but – and this is a major one for me. Linux and Ubuntu in particular allows you to easily install programs that are compatible with your particular flavour – e.g. Adept installer, synaptic installer or command line utilities such as apt-get etc…
However one problem I have repeatedly come across is I install a program to find that it doesn’t work – generally due to hardware issues on my aging computer – such as low 3d memory etc.. In windows -t his is not normally a problem, but generally programs will test and warn you they are incompatible, however in ubuntu and Linux in general these progams let you install them and then fail.
The odd thing in the “old” days of using just command line usually programs would fail to compile and therefore install if any problems were encountered – however this robustness seems to have been lost in the drive to give the impression that the system can run more programs than they can.
However all said and done Ubuntu is generally good – I would imagine that given a few more releases it will really be able to take off – especially if more people use it with Dell’s new offerings giving more feedback to the developers.
So please someone just make it so I can’t install something that won’t work!