Moving to Ubuntu - Part 1
What am I thinking? No that's very unfair. I've used Ubuntu on and off (more off than on) since it was first released. I've liked most of it apart from Gnome (always have prefered KDE) but over the weekend I decided, considering the way Ubuntu is consistently improving itself over its rivals, it's
What am I thinking? No that's very unfair. I've used Ubuntu on and off (more off than on) since it was first released. I've liked most of it apart from Gnome (always have prefered KDE) but over the weekend I decided, considering the way Ubuntu is consistently improving itself over its rivals, it's the right way to move.
There are several reasons I'm doing this and I'm writing them down here as much to show you as to convince myself of them:
- It's free.
- It's visually very pleasing.
- It's much easier to batch operations up with Sh than writing a batch (which is a decrepit programming language) and try and add them as a process.
- Windows slowdown sucks. I'm finding my very good hardware starting to pay for years of software abuse. I could reinstall Windows (AGAIN!!) and be slowed down over the coming months but I don't want to do that all over again. I don't like that mix.
- I believe I can be a better computer programmer if I start looking in on the Linux side of the tracks. I'm about as MS as I can get with all my .net development and I'd really like to start doing some true cross-platform applications. Maybe with mono. Maybe with Qt.
As ever, there are going to be some pretty massive thing to get my head around and I'm no doubt going to be bothering a lot of people that have been using Ubuntu for longer than I for support.
One big drawback is I'm still going to be using Windows for .net development and maybe some gaming. I'm going to try running this through VMWare from inside Ubuntu and that's probably where things are going to start to get messy.
Some people have said in response to my "Linux needs golden applications" article that there is no such thing as a required application. Anyone that has used something and become really good at using one platform-locked application knows how hard it is to move away from that platform. I'll, no doubt, be able to Wine some things and Cedega other things but there are some like the .net dev that I'm going to need Windows there for.
I've got 2 cores so the processing might be OK but I'm a little wary over the performance of 3D. My history of installing the ATI drivers in any version of Linux is not a settle one. That said, it wen't no better with Fedora and my GF5200. Then getting VMWare to pass this 3d support through to Windows will be the next epic battle. God knows how that's going to go.
My knowledge of where stuff actually goes is still a but muddy. If I compile something up or download a tarbull instead of using an installer, where should that go? I don't like shoving everything in my home dir.
Still an hour before the CD has actually downloaded but I'm going to go and clear out some space for this on my RAID0. Wish me luck.
I'll post a follow-up and more content when I'm in a stable enough position but even if everything fails, I've still got Windows to fall back on. I hate my addiction[s].
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