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Jumping To Ubuntu At Work For Non-Linux Geeks

Posted by timothy on from the there's-no-ubuntu-topic dept.

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."

3 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not again by PrescriptionWarning · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. What about Linux users moving to Windows? by Jim+Hall · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:What about Linux users moving to Windows? by Mspangler · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "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.