Go the Ubuntu Way!

Although the world is going gaga over the free to home OS delivery service provided by Cannonical to market its Linux OS Ubuntu, many people I have met still are unaware about it.So I suggest strongly that you order your copy of Ubuntu today!

Visit http://www.ubuntu.org

Here is my review of Ubuntu

The Good
Here are a few things I really like in Ubuntu / Linux:

The Gnome Epiphany Web Browser: my favorite browser. See my blog entry on the subject.

Edutainment + kids games: On linux, one can download a number of games for children that are of high quality from the point of view of the material they cover. Sure, some games like supertux, are just plain fun 'mario brothers' style games. But many can be powerful tools that can hone the brain power of children. Here are some of them:

kturtle (logo programming)
gcompris
tuxmath / tuxtyping

Quality open source desktop applications. Who said that open source can't produce desktop apps of higher quality than their commercial counterparts. If you thought the adobe had the best vector graphics editing application, take a look a inkscape. For pictures, check out the beauty of f-spot. For spreadsheets, I think gnumeric is terrific.

I particularly appreciate lyx, a wonderful wysiwym editor that does all the heavy lifting for you. If you're about to write a book and don't have in-depth knowledge of docbook or latex, then I believe lyx is the right choice.

Strong pdf support. One can easily produce a pdf version of a document, translate a postscript file to PDF. I recently printed a web page to a postscript file and then translated it to PDF.

Editors galores. Lots of editors to choose from. gedit, kedit, kate, jedit, and many more besides.

Strong device support in general: plugged in my camera and automatically started downloaded photos, without even having to download anything.

Amazing endless suite of kde apps. from kontact to koffice, kde is simply an amazing source of seemingly boundless energy.

Java:

Unlike the last OS i worked on, there are no issues regarding obtaining the latest java udpates on time all the java ides work with it: intellij, eclipse, and netbeans
have the option of building java applications that use the gtk toolkit
latest firefox

No viruses, no Symantec, no McAfee

The Bad

Projector support is not really there like it is on a mac

Sleep does not conserve battery well

Had some hickups with hibernate after a kernel update

Have some weird totem/video problems at the moment, though there's no lack of video players for gnome or kde, this one happens to be the default and for some reason hangs when attempting video playback

Summary
The main reason I switched to ubuntu is that I can now compile and launch my java apps in 1/2 to 1/3 the time it used to take me on my last OS.

Finally, contrary the general perception, I don't compile my gnome apps or kernel. I download and install precompiled binary distributions of all my apps.

I'm very satisfied with Ubuntu and I give it a 8 out of 10