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leonardo - February 1st, 2009
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| After using Windows for many years (and some other operating systems before Windows) I have spent the last two weeks using Ubuntu 8.10. The PC is quite old, it has a CPU Pentium III at 500 MHz with 256 MB RAM, so the GUI is sometimes quite slow. In the Ubuntu site there an alternative CD image with a desktop for older machines, that I haven't used, but it may be a better choice.
Overall I am quite happy of this test of mine, the Ubuntu desktop is quite usable and I have generally appreciated the software installed by default.
I have nothing to say about depeer things, like the kernel, or even about the file system, etc. (that I don't understand much still), In this blog post I comment only about the programs with GUI and the general interaction with the desktop.
Note that probably some of the disadvantages/faults I talk about are bad things only if you are used to Windows. But Ubuntu is probably geared toward some Windows refugee too, so such comments of mine aren't useless. What I mean is that it's positive for Ubuntu to make life easy to people used to Windows. So if you are used to Linux you may see as "good things" some of the faults I list below, but I am sure lot of ex-Windows users don't care.
The desktop GUI and most operations feel much slower than ones of Windows2000 on the same machine.
I have appreciated the gedit program, I use it all the time, but I don't see a GUI to change the syntax colors. With the preferences I have had to add many pluging before having a good enough editor. It feels a bit slower and quite less powerful than the editor I use on Windows, but it's good enough, and surely way better than the built-in editors you can find in WindowsXP.
Looking for a better editor to write programs I have found Kate, it feels good enough, a good balance between the excessive limitations of gedit and the complexity of some famous IDEs.
I have installed a surprisingly small amount of programs, on Windows I am used to need MANY utilities and small programs. Here a quite large amount of possibilities is offered by the built-in programs. Of such programs I like that generally there is only 1 program for each functionality (an exception is the add/remove tool that does something similar to Synaptic. In theory they may be merged).
Few of the programs I have installed (I like to program):
- pyRenamer, to mass rename files.
- Flash player
- Wma codec
- basic Windows fonts
- JavaVM
- Inconsolata font
- Wine to install MUSHclient
- LDC, G++, Genie, Delight, LLVM compilers.
- Kate editor.
- Rar
- Active Python 2.6.
- many plugins for Firefox, like FireFTP, ChatZilla, Deepest Sender, /Find Bar/, FlashBlock, PDF download, Tree Style Tab, British English Dictionary.
The usual way to install programs on Ubuntu is much more comfy, faster, safer, and so on. I like it much more than the usual need to look for installers, download them, etc. But there are few downsides too:
- There's no simple way to install Python 2.6, the default one is 2.5.1 and that's all. I have had to install (badly) an Active Python 2.6 (and I don't see the nice GUI that I have on Windows with Active Python, I don't know why, I don't even see an Icon or a link to the docs in the menu of the upper bar).
- Sometimes all you find is a tar.gz file, later you have to compile and install it manually. In such cases I prefer the automatic installers common on Windows.
Installing new fonts isn't easy and nice at all (I have installed Inconsolata, that looks better for me), I have to look on the web, give commands on the shell and wait some minutes. On windows you can just copy a font in a directory, or even faster if you click on it the contextual menu offers you the option to install it.
I have not found a MOO/MUD client good enough on Ubuntu, so I have had to install Wine and then instll on it MUSHclient for Windows. It works well enough, so I am happy enough. I have installed ChatZilla for IRC, it's not very good but it does the basics (later in the list of the available supported programs I have seen another IRC client, but I have not tried it).
I have had no problems at all with the drivers for my hardware, the flash RAM pens are recognized well, and so on with the ADSL modem, etc. I have installed zero drivers!
The installation of Ubuntu itself was painless (I have installed it in the basic way, I have not created three partitions as some people have suggested me). After the install I have had to update 219 files, it has required about one hour, that's a lot of time. The Add/remove programs tool is quite slow, it also reads the DB at the beginning and at the end, and this makes it almost a pain to use. But its GUI is nice and works well.
A program has installed me Zero Install (maybe half-broken), but I don't know how to remove it now. Both Synaptics and the Add/remove programs tool don't show it.
When I insert an audio CD a small player starts and I have seen that if I open the disk directory, the traks are shown as Wav files. In theory this is wonderful, in practice such playing of CDs just Doesn't Work [TM] on my system, and it doesn't give any error message at all.
I'd like the system monitor to come up when I press ctrl-alt-canc, it may be handy for Windows people. I presume the other ex-Windows user may share my desire.
I'd like to have a way to input special chars (like tilde, that is absent from my keyboard but common the programs I write) I have not found a handy way to insert such chars yet (the usual Windows way doesn't work). I accept suggestions.
The freezing and standby work well enough. The standby is quite special, the computer looks and sounds dead. It's cool, I have never seen such feature on this computer with Windows. The freezing feature in the meantime has partially broken, because it now shows a noisy screen during the freezing. And at the end it used to give a strange error (but it works still).
I have had to re-configure the shell to use the Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V keys to copy and paste as the whole system, I don't know why it works differently. Some programs use Ctrl-Z for the undo and other ones Shift-Ctrl-Z, this is bad.
I have set the desktop to use a single click to open files, but some programs, like GIMP do what they like anyway in such regard.
Once activated this single-click feature it becomes very unhandy to select more than one file (you have to click the right key on the mouse, but this also opens the contextual menu) this is done better on Windows.
If you do a Copy or Cut on some file, and then you go into another directory, you must click on free space to perform a Paste otherwise such option doesn't appear in the contextual menu, this is very bad.
The Shell is too much slow to load and open up, about 11-12 seconds.
If I have a normal txt file and I want to create a link to it (as a shortcut icon on desktop or on the upper bar), I can create a jump, but it doesn't work, and the options are too many and confusing. This is bad.
I have had to configure Nautilus to open such text files by itself, otherwise it always ask what to do with them, and this isn't handy.
Nautilus has an options to show large thumbnails too of images, this is handy and avoids me to install other software to do it (something similar is present in Windows XP too, but it's less flexible and handy). But I have seen that all icons are stored into a directory and there's no simple (GUI-based) way to clean such directory. It can grow and grow and grow. This is bad. And upper bound can be set and a command to clean it can be added (as the Firefox cache).
Once I have de-installed a program in Wine (another MOO client I have not appreciated) its directory keeps showing up in the Wine menu, in the Applications/Wine menu.
I have increased the size of the default fonts managed by Wine, and they look ugly and quite blocky.
I have seen that the installer of the PaintShopPro7 doesn't work in Wine, but this isn't too much bad, I have found GIMP acceptable for my small purposes.
I have copied a TXT (8-bit ASCII, with encoding common in my nation) file that I edit on Windows on Ubuntu and opened it with gedit (it has asked me to convert the file to a unicode format, probably UTF-8), then re-opening it on Windows with a *very good* editor it's not able to recognize the Unicode nature of the file, and accented letters are all wrong. I also have had silly newlines problems too with gedit. I don't know if Kate shares the same faults. This needs more work, because moving txt files around is a common thing for me. I'll have to re-convert manually all accented letters when I re-load that text file in Windows, this isnt' good.
The opening of a HD directory with many (300) images is very slow (on Nautilus), probably in part because it creates or loads lot of icons. This is bad. On Windows on the same PC I normally open directories with 1000 images in a moment, and with 5000 images in few moments/seconds.
Renaming files (through the Nautilus GUI) is a very common operation, so I don't like to open a new window to do it (also because opening such window takes 2-4 seconds on my PC). I'd like to rename the file through just the contextual menu, as on Windows.
In the shell I have seen there is the 'dir' command too (maybe it's just an alias of ls), but I'd like it by default to show file sizes too, as on Windows. The ls command doesn't need to show file sizes by default, because it's not a Windows command.
The default time before the freezing is probably too much short, it looks like being 3-5 minutes on my PC. On the other hand it seems to not go in standby if I have gedit open (even with an already saved file), this is curious.
Going to the bottom of a 100 KB txt file is sometimes very slow with gedit, this is silly.
gedit refuses to load files, for example binary ones. This is stupid. It can just load them in read-only, HEX, etc.
gedit lacks the option to show tabs and spaces. This is a very common need.
Kate seems to have problems with tabs, I have set it to 4 spaces and to convert tabs to spaces, but when I press tab it inserts just 2 spaces. I'd also like it to not convert tab to spaces if a file uses tabs everywhere to indent, but only if I insert a new tab in a file that uses spaces to indent (as a Python programmer I am quite sensitive to such issues). The simple not-Python-specific editor I use on Windows is able to do such simple things.
I have seen Kate has a very handy interface to change colors, that gedit lacks. In gedit I have also not seen a handy way to load or change the list of keywords for a syntax of a language.
The automatic creation of backup files is handy, but they tend to accumulate... And by default Nautilus doesn't show them, increasing this problem.
I also don't like much the way the trashcan is managed on Flash memories, it becomes bearable only if you switch on the option to see hidden files too. I have also seen that the "empty trashcan" sometimes fails to clean such directories of the trash on the flash memories.
I like the plug-in nature of gedit, like in Firefox.
I think the same Ubuntu installed on a faster PC switches on some eye candy, so during the installation it's able to tell slow from fast PCs, this is good.
If you have some experience of Linux and Ubuntu you surely know ways to solve or reduce some of my problems. I am willing to learn. | comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment   |
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leonardo - February 1st, 2009
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