Ubuntu

[without a dream]

I was looking into to getting this as a way of prolonging the usefulness of my increasingly slow laptop which is running on Vista. I've had a quick browse of their site and it looks good but thought I'd get a bit of advice before I go ahead and install it. I use my laptop mainly for the web and office with the odd bit of Footy man thrown in. What are the pros and cons?

 

[Damocles]

I run Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu using a different desktop system.

Pros:

It leaves me alone and doesn't flash popup messages at me every five minutes.
Lack of viruses.
Pretty.
(For me) Better engineered
Free.
Doesn't hog resources.
Apt-get is a great way to install software
Secure

Cons:

Has trouble sometimes with some Windows programs (Linux cannot run Windows programs, but wine does its best to emulate them)
Complicated to troubleshoot something if you've never used Linux before.
May require use of a terminal, which scares some people.

 

[Stato]

never used ubuntu but used linux at uni at its pretty good the only issue is that some programs won't work on it, im not sure if FM will for example.

 

[Esteban de la Sexface]

Using Xubuntu at the moment and I love it, for all the reasons Damocles outlined above.

If you want to just try it out, download suns Virtual box from here
http://www.virtualbox.org/

Install whichever version of Ubunutu you want and you then have a virtual machine running on Windows that you can use/get used to.

The iso's for Ubunutu should be easy get at.

 

[without a dream]

Cheers guys, I'll give it a go this evening.

 

[kippaxwarrior]

going to try Ubuntu 11.4 later which has rave reviews
Although i believe it has trouble running itunes and some games but you can switch between operating systems so i dont think that will be too much of a problem

 

[BulgarianPride]

I run Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu using a different desktop system.

Pros:

It leaves me alone and doesn't flash popup messages at me every five minutes.
Lack of viruses.
Pretty.
(For me) Better engineered
Free.
Doesn't hog resources.
Apt-get is a great way to install software
Secure

Cons:

Has trouble sometimes with some Windows programs (Linux cannot run Windows programs, but wine does its best to emulate them)
Complicated to troubleshoot something if you've never used Linux before.
May require use of a terminal, which scares some people.

If you have a lot of RAM, do what i do. I run my windows programs in Virtual Box. With lots of RAM it shouldn't effect the performance of either.

 

[Damocles]

I've got 8GB of RAM, but I dual boot Win7 and Kubunut, so I'm ok. I use Backtrack in a VM though, and I love it.

 

[kippaxwarrior]

I've got 8GB of RAM, but I dual boot Win7 and Kubunut, so I'm ok. I use Backtrack in a VM though, and I love it.

Is there an easy way of switching between vista and ubuntu without re-starting?
Im crap at stuff like this so an easy guide would be helpful!!

 

[Damocles]

No way at all to be honest, you have to reboot your machine because of the way operating systems load. They need access to a protected bit of memory that is only assigned at startup.