Jumping To Ubuntu At Work For Non-Linux Geeks

twigles writes "I'm a network engineer, meaning I spend my days dealing with things like selective route advertisements, peering, and traffic engineering; I'm not a Linux admin or developer. About 6 months ago I finally got fed up enough with my experience on Windows XP to jump ship to Ubuntu 8.04, despite not having much Linux experience, particularly on the desktop. Read my ramblings for an engineer's take on taking what can be a pretty intimidating plunge for us Linux noobcakes."

Comments

Re:Not again

[PrescriptionWarning]

I think the guy's main point was "give it a try, you might just like it". It didn't sound in any way like he was trying to make you a convert, it was more for someone like him who as come to not exactly enjoy their windows experience due to all the bloat of modern day security apps business tend to require.

Re:Linux will not "get there" until this happens

[kerashi]

There are a few reasons I don't use Linux on my main box right now, and this hits the biggest of them.

Anyone who has ever tried to install a program not in the repository will know what a pain it can be. Getting stuck in dependency hell is still a very real problem, and while repositories help they are no substitute to fixing the problem.

In Windows, if you get an installer you have a reasonable expectation of being able to run it. Sometimes you hit dependencies, but not often, and they're generally the same for most programs.

Another big thing is having different package managers. What to do when a developer distributes a .rpm but not a .deb, or the other way around?

And I won't even start bitching about the 3D Graphics support...

Still, Windows isn't perfect, and Linux is far better in many ways. Having a software repository is awesome, and saves a lot of time searching for programs. However, until these problems are addressed, many developers will continue to develop only for Windows.

(I do use Linux on a regular basis, and find it does an awesome job for many things. Just not everything)

What about Linux users moving to Windows?

[Jim Hall]

I've been a Linux user since 1993, when I was a student at university. Until 1998, I ran Linux as my primary OS, but kept a Windows partition on my home system to run some games. And since 2002 I've been fortunate enough to run Linux full-time at work. It has been a great experience so far. I didn't have any issues exchanging documents with others at work, and certainly my previous bosses didn't mind. But times change, I suppose.

I've been asked to move back to Windows, at least for work. The difference between Windows (XP) and Linux (Fedora 9) has been shocking, to say the least. Since you often see blogs or tech articles (like the parent post) when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time, I thought it might be equally interesting for this long-time Linux user to blog about my first experience running Windows in over 6 or 7 years:

Linux in Exile

The short list of things I have run into in my first week of running Windows:

• hardware support is definitely not plug-and-play (had troubles getting a simple laptop mini-dock to get recognized, same with the external display.)
• programs look and act differently from each other (no common themes, inconsistent behavior, etc.)
• MS Office (2007) makes it hard for me to write the documents I need to create for work.
• Font rendering is poor.

I haven't written yet about program look-and-feel; I'll do that soon. But I have noticed that MS Office acts differently from Notepad, from Media Player, and from the Windows local file browser.

Also, ctrl-backspace is implemented differently just about everywhere - in some cases, it backspaces to the start of the word or field (what I expect) and elsewhere it only backspaces once, and in other cases it inserts a ctrl-backspace character!

Re:What about Linux users moving to Windows?

[Mspangler]

"MS Office (2007) makes it hard for me to write the documents I need to create for work."

Office 2007 makes it hard for EVERYONE to write the documents they need to create for work. It's very egalitarian in that way.

Everything except 'paste values' in Excel is one extra click away from where-ever you are than was the case in Excel 2003, because you have to click on the menu to get the correct ribbon, then drill down into the tiny little arrow to get the dialog that has what you want.

I actually do most of my word processing in Wordpad, as it lets me write without helpfully formatting everything the Ballmer Way. Then paste the text into the official company memo template, resave, and done.

Fortunately I have no need to use Powerpoint. For this boon I hold my employer in great regard.

alien does not work

[sentientbrendan]

I've never heard of anyone ever getting it to work with a real world program.

The problem is that different linux distros are *not* binary compatible with each other. Some of the core libraries like glibc are compatible, but most binaries link a ton of other stuff. You might as well try installing windows programs or osx programs.

Alien cannot fix ABI incompatibilities.

>What to do when a developer distributes a
>.rpm but not a .deb, or the other way around?

Install from source.

On the other hand proprietary developers have a different system for installing their software. They use a minimal set of shared libraries like glibc and the x libraries that don't change their ABI often, then they statically compile everything else.

They also typically provide a shell script based installer instead of an rpm. Those that provide rpm's typically also provide a fairly generic deb.

It's a bitch getting inter distro compatible binaries on linux, so unless the developer put the initial work in, don't expect to be able to force it to run on your distro.