Rage9 - You're asking someone that already knows XP to learn Unix, why? I'd rather be learning how to do media buys, or how to set up tracking better, or anything else that has direct contribution to my net worth.
I was *nix user for about 8 months, trying hard to like it, and trying hard to see the merits of it. The biggest advantages were ease of use when doing web programming apache/python/mysql. Command line also rocked. Updates were easy.
Everything else basically sucked ass.
-Install was a bitch. Mad driver issues on my laptop. Spent over 3 hrs setting up my graphics stuff correctly.
-Power hibernation/sleep problems with Wubi. When I accidentally left my laptop on battery overnight, everything died. That's when I swore against Ubuntu and switched to XP. Maybe it was user error, but I found that a lot of people got fucked by this.
-Slow start up time: 15 seconds (XP) vs 45 seconds (Ubuntu full install).
-OpenOffice blows. hard. Write is an unintuitive serious piece of shit, and is the retarded stepchild of Word. btw, you can look at Word documents ok, but exporting them and keeping everything in format are mutually exclusive. PowerPoint is light years ahead of Present. If you're making documents for anything professional, why would you bother using OpenOffice's second rate tools?
-Gaming, XP beats *nix hands down.
Until I see some software or feature set on Unix that I can't live without, I'm sticking to ole faithful, XP.
Yeah heaven forbid you learn something new. That's a shocker, right? As Microsoft showed us [time and time again] with Vista, 2000, NT, and early XP, among others [if you remember], there needs to be alternatives.
I'm confident that I could show people the ropes to Ubuntu and they would love it, and throw that piece of shit Windows [well, vista anyways] away. I have grown up dissecting Microsoft operating systems since the days of DOS. That may give me an edge.
Anyways I want to reply to some the things you said in order you posted them:
- I have installed Ubuntu on a few different configurations ranging from very old [my ghetto laptop that's 6 years old] to very new [my recently new desktop 2.4 mhz quad core intel with an ATI HD 4850 graphics card] and not ever had one problem with graphics. Shocking to me to say the least. Ubuntu even downloaded my ati drivers and installed Catalyst.
-I have tried the hibernation stuff, worked for me personally, got not much to say about it. Never had a problem personally, can't say I worked with it a ton though. Kind of set and forget.
-Can't comment so much about the boot time vs XP, I duel boot Vista [because of DX10 for games] but Ubuntu boots equally as quick as Vista, again if your bitching about your os loading in less than a minute somethings fucked up. Your just looking for a shitty reason there.
-I haven't used Present personally, but that's a small part of OpenOffice. Frankly there is nothing wrong with the word processing capabilities, or the "excel" like spread sheets, works like a charm. Nothing second rate about them, they work incredibly well IMHO. Please elaborate, give me a real example. Considering all microsoft products are normally bloated and broken, I can't logically think that MS office is awesome. Why should you pay for that shit anyways?
-Again I'm not disputing the fact that Windows is better for gaming, the api's and all that shit are developed for WINDOWS. Your beating a dead horse. We know this, if any games work under linux because of wine, that's just an extra win. Games are developed in windows #1 because that the largest consumer base #2 Direct X. Not hard to figure out. Because some other operating system can't play games from another operating system [when they where developed for another OS] that just must mean it's a piece of shit right? Wow, really?!
I can't constitute how many endless hours, and it's in the high hundreds at least [over several years], that I have spend on problems with windows over the years. And hell XP had it's problems too early on, but you don't remember that, you don't make fun of a blue screen of death for a reason. XP was released in what, 2001? It's about 8 fucking years old, better work by now, it had plenty of problems when released - but you don't remember because that was 8 years ago. Up until SP2 there where still some major errors - and still are [like how windows can never get right how long it takes to copy or delete large amounts of files, just an example].
I'm trying to bring an opinion to the table fom a very long time Window user [I started using Ubuntu about 5 months ago], and to let you know that this OS has some balls, and can do pretty much everything [except gaming] just as well, if not better than Windows.
There are some that will never see that, and I understand that, but I would want you to use it for like a month and tell me which one you like better, once you know how to handle Linux. There is a small learning curve for some stuff, but I have never - EVER - been not able to find an answer to my problem using google. Ubuntu has so much documentation it's crazy.
