First REAL cup of Ubuntu ★
After using Ubuntu for 24 hours, I’m a little shocked to see how slow applications can be. The desktop effects are great, but if I’d call them smooth, it would be criminal. This, more so because I have an 8600M GT to help those desktop effects fly.
If I open an Application on Mac OS X, it may take 5-10 dock bounces at most but when it’s started up fully, it’s really snappy. On Linux while I am downloading email, sending two and reading a news feed at the same time Thunderbird seems to become really unstable and stops responding for a few seconds. OpenOffice. Nothing to say about it.
Drivers don’t work out of the box, even though they do support them. It’s all this fuss about installing only stuff that’s open source. Restricted drivers are installed only manually. Why are they committing suicide when they’ve only just started living properly.
No other operating system depends so much on the terminal. I would like the GUI to do all the work, but somehow you just need that full text command window on Linux. Ubuntu needs more polishing, the applications that are bundled with it have better and sometimes even faster alternatives. I don’t feel like uninstalling Ubuntu now but I don’t see myself spending all my time with it somehow.
I’d have agreed with the specific hardware optimization part that you say about Linux if the same applies to all OSes. Windows as you see runs just as fast on theoretically equal performance systems example - A lower Core 2 Duo and some mid-range AMD 64 X2 or perhaps Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and AMD Athlon 64…
The same applies to most Linux users as well. For my PC atleast, Linux runs just as fast as Windows XP x64. OpenOffice is something that runs slow on every platform. Firefox is the same whereas file transfer and other system related tasks such as partitioning is faster on Linux.
The basic problem for Linux adoption is not slow performance as that is something that I see is mostly Abhishek.N-endemic, but availability of quality proprietary software targeted for it. If companies like Adobe can make distro-independent Linux versions of their Creative Suites et all, Linux adoption would soar miles high. GIMP, even with all the features it might rob from PS would never become the industry standard even if GIMP starts paying its users for using it! It might seem strange, but that is how things are… I guess its about time that big IT corporations stopped ignoring Linux as a platform. :D
Agree about the proprietary software part.