Monday April 30, 2007
Monday April 30, 2007
Further Cool Discoveries in the Land of Ubuntu 7.04
24 hours, give or take, since installing Linux for the first time. Am I a deeply embittered man, gnashing his teeth in regret, beating his chest in agony, rueing the hour of his folly? Nay. Especially not "nay" since discovering that my favorite mail client, "Thunderbird", is available from the Synaptic Package Manager. So I set that up and removed "Evolution", which is the standard mail client that Ubuntu gives you. Wonderfully, I also have "The Gimp", the world's best graphics program (one of the four! graphics programs that comes with Ubuntu). Or, at least, one I can use for screen grabs, which is all I use graphics programs for.
Next, I discovered that while the procrastination options given by Windows consist of a paltry two games, Ubuntu is much more generous, and even has a very authoritative-looking tooltip, giving one a plausible excuse for playing many different solitaire games:
That is a big and not to be underestimated win. I also like how you can use the "Add to Panel" menu item on the toolbar to add a very wide range of features to it:
By the way, yesterday, when I mentioned that I didn't think that NetBeans IDE 6 looks so good under JDK 6 and JDK 7, I was referring to this:
So, the bottom of the tabs in the explorer windows does not have a clear line. And there's a weird purple separator between items in the right-click pop-up menus.
In addition, I still don't have the double-click thing worked out under Linux. Double-clicking seems harder here than on Windows. Plus, the icons for cursors seem different. Probably both these can be fixed somewhere. One massive improvement is the Search functionality. Under Windows, I always had a really frustrating time. I haven't explored this part of Ubuntu yet, but it can only be better than under Windows.
In general, my biggest surprise is how user-friendly everything is. I had expected that I'd need an advanced degree in computer science to get anywhere with Linux, while all I have is a beginner's degree in law. That's kind of the vibe it seems to exude. Seriously, despite the apparent bareness of the Ubuntu distribution (a statement which I base on some of the comments in my blog entry from yesterday), I have everything I need already, within 24 hours of setting up Linux. I reckon the only thing Windows has going for it is that people don't really understand what an operating system is, so that they don't realize that they have real and, even, better alternatives. That's why Linux and OpenSolaris are confined to programming communities. Firstly, because non-programmers don't realize there are alternatives; secondly, because non-programmers don't see the benefits of at least trying an alternative; thirdly, because non-programmers assume that they will risk destroying their data if they try one of the alternatives. Maybe Linux could make some serious headway in the non-programming world if they'd simply say: "We provide far more games than Windows, out of the box and for free!" But then they'd better include Hearts. Without Hearts, they can't compete with Windows, even though Windows has only two games.
Apr 30 2007, 05:10:20 AM PDT Permalink
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