You've got to ubun tu? Lol
Wow this is longer than I Though it would be...but anyway it’s my 1st post so consider it catch up! And READDDDDD! LOL
(Cracks knuckles, twists head from left to right, takes a deep breath and .......................)
Come on PC boy and John 3347, Linux isn’t that bad? I see it as the future, the way they manage cpu /ram resources, the fact that you can’t just trash your system by your own carelessness from stock install unless of course you enable root user, which most people wouldn’t even know it exists and hence i call it my semi-indestructable OS, the stability of their builds, even beta's and the sheer ease of use (yes I said it! ;-) Take me for instance, I started out with Linux in 2007 and granted I am not a script writing or software compiling guy yet, (actually this tends to come from me being too lazy. Half the time I do stuff manually, even though I know it would take just seconds in the terminal to do the same thing) but I don’t think I can, or anyone for that matter consider me a noob anymore.
You have to give them credit though they have a fantastic online help community where the actual developers respond to your problem specifically. Anyway back to the topic at hand.
Having been using Ubuntu since gusty gibbon (7.10) dual booting it with vista on my laptop, there were times I just wanted to blow up my vista installation due to its insistent slowdowns. I even had my vista install die on me at a stage on the verge of submitting a major assignment on International Business strategy, but luckily sine I was trying to embrace Linux in all its facets I finished it off on my PS3 which I partitioned and installed yellow dog Linux with open office. Only problem I had with Ubuntu was on the 8.XX builds my wireless card kept loosing connections.
I have tried quite a no. of Linux distros too, open suse, slack ware, gos, xandros, eeebuntu, debian, all ranging from being slightly varied to totally different experiences so imagine using terminal in all of these cuz they all have different initiations e.g. su apt, yum, bash etc... Crazy eh! (Now you see why I stick to manual) I still use windows extensively though; I'm not a fan of open office being a replacement to MS Office package, which I basically live upon. Even though I still save everything in 97-2003ver that open office supports.
I currently run Ubuntu 9.04 with the ext4 file system and PC boy George; I really don’t have an idea why you think it’s slow. I maintain staggering speeds on my laptop set up, which is really not that high tech (I sport an advent 8115 laptop with 2g of ram, an Intel Pentium dual-core T2080 1.73GHz processor and a swapped in 320g hard disc). I actually only dedicated 10g of hard disc to my Ubuntu but I have a 500mb swap file partition. The installation is not the same as a windows one but because its different, I wouldnt say its difficult at all once you know where to install, just let the preconfigured setups options do the work for you..
It’s actually on par or would I say a tad bit faster than OSX (did I mention I run this too on my ol' reliable laptop?) only clear disparity is on start-up where osx obliterates all my other OS's on my triple boot set up. But even though windows is king in terms of software, I think Linux Ubuntu/debian are not too far away, I could find a semi-replacement for basically anything serious I run on windows (doesn’t mean its better but in some cases it is ).
The main thing to me that creates the chasm that windows and Mac have not come close to crossing yet is the breath of desktop customizations available from stock. Darn! Compiz is a blessing to any OS. Now now now..I am generally a no clutter on the desktop kind of guy having gotten bored with the whole bump top & its look alikes but I still love my eye candy, It gives you a differentiation from the norm. The subtle things like transparency, explosions, windows breaking-apart, dodge animations, grouped windows, cubed desktops, and the other kazillion things the OS is capable of just blows any competition out of the water in that department.
Sure the others have relatively similar software to some, but especially in windows, you can almost taste the drain on your system resources when you attempt to run these software.
Now consuming a staggering 250gb of my hard disc space is Windows 7( build 7100, upgraded from a vista home premium fresh install dont ask me why!).It’s not just because I like windows so much that I wanted to give it the bulk of my hd, I happen to be a big digital comic book fan and use a programme called "comicrack" (the best in the world but windows only for now) to view my collection of ... .......wait for it......................, over 80g, good part is how I got it all set up, I have access to my windows files from either of my other 2 OS's running, so no duplication on comics or music (and both still growing) Now no denying I am loving this baby, The super bar is just like they tagged it, super! but there are some times, ok many a times when the system slows down to a crawl I just have to wait for it to snap out of it or out of frustration end all running programmes with task manager. Don’t get me wrong I know it’s not yet fully ready especially considering I'm on 7.100 and not 7.2XX, but knowing you don’t get these problems elsewhere is enough to piss you off some.
And Finally Mac, I first encountered this on a power book back when I was doing an mba last year, prior to this, the best I had come to a Mac was messing around with my Ubuntu install to make it look like a Mac (& a very good Mac indeed) it was a very pretty French girl who owned this, & I was more captivated in her eyes than the silly OS and..........opppsss! Sorry I’m going off point. Anyway I got my real hands on of Mac OSX on a friends Mac book air, maybe it was the Mac book air itself and not the actual OS that got me wired, I just wanted to spend much more time with it, but alas a couple of months ago I got my hands and my head round how to get it on pc.
So fair enough on a 30g allocation, I installed iatkos 10.5i which is basically OSX for PC. I set aside another 10g for Time machine (just to get the whole apple Mac experience) and whala! After about an hr of spinning, I got my iatkos running fine.ok bar the wireless card, and the multi touch track pad (greedy aren’t I? lol) everything worked. It just took me 4days to realise that apple was not for me as a main, fine it is stable and fast, looks sleekish and I can cover flow every single thing I think of. I do all my video encoding and conversions for my media player there too. But maybe I am just too finicky about stuff, why would I want to drop programmes into the applications folder to install it? it just feels like I have not done it right (granted I have dropped quite a lot of non-installable things there that place is like department store now loll!), I still can’t get my head round the task bar switch to any highlighted windows menu system, some time I strain my eyes for a good 30secs before I realize its right on top loll!
I don’t think it’s possible to customize the look of a Mac at all. I find the finder confusing & have often had windows close & change instead of just opening two windows like windows or Linux especially when I am trying to drag and drop item from one folder to another on the same partition. But the things that really gets under my skin is the fact that the maximize window button is never really a maximize, you still have to drag the edges every time. When you want to close a programme you have to do that command thing or quit it from the dock as the red window button is just a minimize button and finally my word documents particularly always turn out having more pages than they have on both Linux and windows.
The funny thing is, everyone says they love the Mac for its simplicity and all, but I think there is a point especially for an avid windows user like myself, that the supposed simplicity actually becomes difficult.
So in my own ranking, Linux, Windows, Mac...