In an effort to speed up my poor, obsolete laptop a little bit more and to become slightly more computer illiterate, I loaded up Ubuntu and have been giving it a twirl for a little less than two hours now.
My first impressions are good. It's clean, it's very user friendly and easy to use. There are a few slight visual changes that is taking a while to get used to, but overall, it's been a good experience.
Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is definitely a working person's computer, as practically all of the popular computer games will not work on Linux (so I'm told by anti-Linux soothsayers). That's fine by me, since I've been meaning to turn my laptop into a more professional school computer for quite some time. As nice as Vista is (yes, I just said Vista was nice) it eats memory like no other, and so I've been meaning to use a less memory intensive OS. I've had many urgings from Mac fanboys (and girls, lest I discriminate) to switch to a sleek Macbook, but unfortunately for me, I don't like spending $1000+ on a laptop. I like spending my money on other pursuits, such as buying groceries for sustenance.
Like any kind of change, it was a bit scary at first, but I was slightly surprised by how easy it was to switch. You can download and burn onto a CD a trial version of Ubuntu to kick around to see if you like it, and being a little familiar with something before it invades your computer in every possible way is a little comforting.
I'm still really new at this; I saw a book at the bookstore once, a behemoth of a book detailing everything you can do with Ubuntu - I was tempted to purchase it. If anyone has any tips for Ubuntu, I'd like to know. For the time being, I'm still trying to revert my desktop picture into my previous desktop picture - Nagato in a witch's costume playing a guitar.
Edit: Does anybody know if Winamp or RealOne media players work on Ubuntu?
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2 comments:
One of us! One of us!
You can install realmedia players but it's generally a better idea to install gnome-mplayer or somesuch. I've got a load of links at home I can hand you for information on all that stuff.
If you like winamp you might like the Beep media player. It's a similar sort of thing. Another option would be Banshee which is a popular music player more similar to iTunes.
I'm glad it's been working well for you so far!
In general if you want to find some program, launch System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Basically every program that will run on Ubuntu will be available for searching from there and is then one click away to install. Anything which you need which is not available there can be added to it as another package source - thats how you can get some proprietary codecs and other legally-risky materials like mp3 decoders.
Feel free to ask me anything :)
(I'm not sure if I should even tell you this...)
WoW runs perfectly on Ubuntu. Maybe even better than on Windows or OSX.
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