Ubuntu Advocate | Part 1

Ubuntu 6.06 ‘Drapper Drake’ is a vastly superior operating system to Windows XP.

Usually people give their conclusions once they’ve established the question first and then gone through the process of explaining and proving why. I’m going to make my conclusions and therefore raise your expectations (or utter disbelief or even contempt and arrogance) and try and win you back.

To discard some initial thoughts, first off, do I think Ubuntu is perfect? Hardly. In fact a lot of it is out of my comfort zone to be honest, however I am COMPLETELY willing to jump in with both feet to try and swim. The real reason is because it’s seriously opened up the sheer amount of possibilities to me and I honestly do feel completely free with my operating system. Free as in freedom. I’m no longer constrained in so many ways that I was before and I have no doubt many other users will feel the exact same way as well.

Part of that reason is the library of open source software and ideas that are constantly being moved forward by people around the world. It’s an incredibly powerful concept that won’t become completely normal practice and accepted around the world for a few more years to come. The mainstream still fears open source. Still has doubts as to it’s power, it’s reasoning, after all we all live in a Capitalist world, where nothing is done for free, right? Wrong. Hopefully in the list of programmes that I will cover throughout this series of posts it’ll become clear that there is more ways to skin a cat. There is not one but several programmes that will enable you to do your job. The greatest part of it all, is that they are constantly being updated. I honestly can’t count how many times I’ve updated my system since I installed Ubuntu. I’ve set my timer for once a week for it to check on new updates to keep all my system fresh and up to date.

So before I made the jump to Ubuntu, I speculated as to which programmes I would be using the most to get on with the business of design and development. Some of those options have actually panned out while others haven’t really been as predicted. Within this series of posts I am intending on dispelling a lot of these thoughts that are predominant in the world at large today. In addition to that I will be reviewing and talking about software applications that I am using at the moment. Hopefully it’ll be useful to others around there to learn about software applications that are readily available for download and use. I’ll start with the nice and simple applications, that being the Internet and email client.

Firefox

Well I wouldn’t have moved anywhere if I couldn’t take the little browser that could. I’m too attached to it and it’s far too cool an application to not have on your system. In fact it should be the standard browser on the system. Good thing it kind of is on Ubuntu. It doesn’t have the Firefox logo (and getting them is a bit of a pain in the ass) but it does seem as though Mozilla are going to get their way one way or another.

Evolution

Never tried this little programme while on Windowz. It’s pretty cool as it looks SHAMELESSLY like Outlook, in just about every way. It’s got a couple of weird things going on in it, and it doesn’t seem to have the same flexibility in terms of plugins that Thunderbird seems to have which is a shame, but still it’s a pretty solid little email application. The nice thing is that it imports all of my contacts from Gaim, so all my online contacts are there for me to use for emails as well. THe contacts area does need some help, however it’s nice to see that this particular application is getting some more love come the latest Ubuntu release.

Come back next time as I review some graphical applications, music, video and cataloguing applications.