Long story short, year after next I'm backpacking across Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. I want to take a little "disposable" netbook with me but I'm not a fan of Windows. Ubuntu sells itself as cleanly simple, answering to an aesthetic of less is more. I dig this and the interface looks very elegant and polished. Anyone able to tell me more about this OS?
I can tell you when I had problems with my windows laptop, the engineer could get nothing to work on it - just the blue screen of death, until he installed Ubuntu, fixed what was playing up and then put windows back - he swears by it! Like you say, nothing fancy, does what it says on the tin
Interesting. I just remembered I have an old HP in the closet with a dead fan. Maybe I can sit it front of my desk fan and play with Ubuntu on it.
Ubuntu is fine, though I'm not a big fan of Unity. I prefer Linux Mint 15 with the Cinnamon DE as opposed to Unity. It works very well and runs a bit better than Ubuntu on the same hardware. Anything that will work on Ubuntu will work on Mint. Either of them are good choices, though. Also, you can get a free beta version of Scrivener that will run on either one, so long as you have 32-bit libraries installed (if you have 64-bit Ubuntu or Mint, do "sudo apt-get install ia32-libs" before installing Scrivener).
The Scrivener Beta Version is actually what put the whole thought process in motion! To be able to write about my trip during the trip itself. But frankly, everything else you said completely flew over my head. :redface: I now need to look up Unity, Linux Mint 15 and 32 bit v 64 bit libraries. As beautifully elegant as my Macs are, they do lend to a lack of knowledge of their innards since they aren't something the average Joe ever needs to access.
Unity v. Cinnamon is the desktop environment. What it looks like on your screen and how it navigates. Like Windows 8 v. Windows 7. Cinnamon is a more classic style of desktop environment, though a very nice looking one. Read some reviews for Linux Mint 15. It is doing well right now (surpassing Ubuntu by some measures). When Ubuntu release their phone, that could all change, and if the phone is nice I might even switch over from Mint. A great linux distribution to use if you have old hardware is Crunchbang, because it is so fast and responsive, and the hardware requirements are minimal. But unless you know your way around Linux a bit it's probably more of a headache than its worth (it uses a desktop environment called OpenBox that is heavily customizable, but doesn't come with much out of the box so you have to work from the terminal/command line while you're trying to get it set up the way you want). If you're going to have decent cloud connectivity, Peppermint OS is a great, very light and fast distribution. You might also look at Lubuntu. It uses a classic desktop environment (LXDE) that is probably more reminiscent of Windows Xp than anything, and runs very nicely on older hardware. It will also run Scrivener or other software that runs on Ubuntu or Mint.
[MENTION=18889]Steerpike[/MENTION]: A question concerning crashiness... (meaning needing to reboot the whole computer, not just a particular app) On a scale of 1 to 10, from never to chuck it out the window without opening the window, I would give my Macs perhaps a 1.5. On the OSs you have tried that you have mentioned, what would be your personal rating of them on the crashy scale?
I've used Mint and Peppermint both for extending periods of time, leaving a computer running for weeks, and haven't experienced many crashes. I've never experienced crashes that caused me to have to restart the computer (if an aspect of the DE crashes, for example, you may get a dialog box that says the computer is going to restart just that process). No problems with either of them, and I know people who have older computers and run Lubuntu will equal success. In fact, the more I think about it, if you have an older computer and you aren't going to be online all the time, Lubuntu may be a place to start (http://lubuntu.net/). If you were always connected, I'd say Peppermint. I had more crashes with Crunchbang than the others, but I don't think that's any knock against the OS. In fact, when I just let it run out of the box it seemed as reliable as the others, but I was always trying to do weird things with Crunchbang and I screwed it up a few times, to the point that it started crashing. Ubuntu is nice, don't get me wrong. But it lags a bit even on my first generation i3 laptop. Mint with Cinnamon runs better, and Lubuntu runs even better. That's why I suggest starting with Lubuntu. You can burn any of these to a CD and run it from RAM to see how you like the OS. So I'd say the Linux distributions I mentioned are probably 1 to 1.5, depending on how much you mess with them.
I'm going to give those a look, definitely. I'm noticing that one of other apps of which I make heavy use, GIMP, appears to play on all of these platforms. Is there and MS Word for these, do you know? The only thing that was really drawing me to Ubuntu is that is seems (and I could be utterly wrong) to be an easier platform to get running, needing less tech-savvy from me. That, and one of the more common UI's I am seeing as I try to wrap my l'il noggin' around all this answers to a very Mac aesthetic. It just seems like it would be an easy transition from one platform to another, were I to keep a non-Mac machine around.
Mint is easier to get going and use, in my view. It is considered by many to be the best distribution for people new to Linux. MSWord won't run in any of these, unless you try to do it in WINE, which I don't recommend. That said, LibreOffice runs in all of them, and comes with most of them. You'll probably find that to be a good replacement. If you like the Mac look, you could also install "docky" with any of these and create a Mac-like dock along the bottom of your screen to launch your favorite apps. You'll like any of these distros, I expect. If you're using an old computer, just expect Ubuntu to be a bit sluggish. Unity requires more graphics resources than the others.
Also, Pear linux, which I believe is based on Ubuntu, is made to look like MacOS - http://pearlinux.fr/ It is from France, and last time I used it they still had a few bits of French here and there in the English version, but nothing major.
Good to know. I don't use MS word for writing. Scrivener gets my money there, but I do use it for work because of it's ability to create fairly decent forms. You and I are actually paradigmatically coworkers. I'm a legal translator for the fed court in San Juan. So, unless LibreOffice will pull .doc files without trashing the heavy amount of formatting I do, that's a no go. But it is in no way a deal breaker. It wouldn't be a work machine, but I was hoping that maybe these platforms would run the Windows native version of MS Word since the 2011 port to Mac is appalling.
LibreOffice is great, but I can't use it for work either. The heavy formatting gets screwed up. You could always subscribe to the online version of MSOffice for $9.99 a month. Presumably, that will open the files just as reliably as MSOffice.
