Ubuntu 8.10 Review

Overall Rating

Its free, So is the software that runs on it, It works, It can be customised to suit the user. Online and included documentation and help are excellent.

some use of the command line is still necessary but is mostly just a matter of copy and paste from the help file. Some third party drivers can break your system in not so easy to fix ways. This isn't really Ubuntu's fault since they don't control third party software.

My first installation of Ubuntu 8.10 on a toshiba laptop went off without a hitch. My second installation on an ancient e-machines desktop would have been a disaster had I not backed everything up prior to starting. I got a bad NVIDEA driver that broke the GUI and the easiest thing was to just reload the system. the problem was I didn't know which driver was the bad one because nothing bad happened until I restarted so I didn't pay good enough attention. My Irish luck held and I picked the same (bad) one again and, guess what, had to reload it again, but this time I knew which was the bad one on my machine. The moral of this story is that while the OS itself is rock solid everything else is still a work in progress. At least you get what you pay for ;-). If you're mostly using Firefox, Pidgin and OpenOffice now then you've no reason not to switch. You're over half way there. They all run better in Ubuntu since they're native there, not ported. If you download the wine extension, which is free, you can even run portableapps and other windows applications, although some run better than others. One thing you'll notice after installing Ubuntu is how fast your computer boots. My laptop, which should never have had vista loaded on it, but came that way from the factory, took a solid 10 minutes to become usable from power on. This same computer took a solid 5 minutes to become usable after hibernation with vista. Under Ubuntu my computer is usable in well under two minutes from power off including me typing my user name and password. This is a good thing since Ubuntu really doesn't do sleep or hibernation very gracefully. On my laptop, networking never restarts upon resuming from sleep. Even with these problems, I will never go back to microsoft. Ubuntu runs so much faster. It breathed new life into my ancient e-machines computer which was an obsolete $400 on clearance including monitor, keyboard and speakers when I bought it 5 years ago. My dad got me a new computer for my birthday and my wife rightfully wanted to recycle / freecycle the old one. I thought it would be the perfect no risk way to try Ubuntu for a few days. It works so well now that she won't let me throw it away. Instead she bought a second computer desk and rearranged our living room so it would fit and the new computer sits next to the old one with the printer and networking between them. This from the woman who will recycle or freecycle anything and everything that even thinks of gathering dust in our apartment. I installed Ubuntu on the new computer too and it went very well. Ubuntu is much easier to use than Linux has been heretofore but its still not for the faint of heart. I have an associate's in electronics repair and used to do IC layout design using sun os, solaris, and hp-ux using mostly command line and some x-window until 2003 although I haven't done anything technical since then (wow its been 6 years) I'm not your average user either. When Ubuntu works, which is the vast majority of the time, my non techie 14 year old could install and does use it. When it didn't, I ended up taking the path of least resistance and reinstalling it and taking better notes the next time and restarting after each change of driver so if it broke at least I'd know what broke it. That is my final advice: back up often, take good notes, restart after each system change so you know if it works, Keep a sense of humour, and remember that you're getting a whole lot more than you paid for with Ubuntu.

Members' Comments onbloodgarden's Review

• bloodgarden on 18th Apr 2009

  Avast antivirus now makes a version for Linux it works like ClamAV in that its not active like most windows antivirus programs. You set it to scan a suspicious file or directory or the whole system and let it do it's thing.