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Users of Internet Explorer or Maxthon These are the most useless browsers know to man on the internet. Download a GOOD one NOW!
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Why am I disappointed with Ubuntu?
I started using Ubuntu, or rather Kubuntu in fact, around 6.10 (Edgy) and didn’t reckon much to it in all honesty, I went back to using Gentoo and Debian 4.0 (Etch). When 7.04 (Feisty) was released, so intregued was I by Canonical’s marketing of Ubuntu and the media hype surrounding it, that I tried it out on an old Toshiba Sat Pro laptop (I forget the exact model number) and was reasonably impressed. 7.04 stayed on that laptop until 7.10 (Gutsy) was released and was immediately upgraded, again with an impressive result. I had to relinquish that laptop to another engineer in the company when I moved back to New Zealand, but by this time I had installed 7.10 on my desktop machine and was happy with it. Upon the 8.04 (Hardy) release I immediately upgraded my desktop without fear as the 7.04 to 7.10 upgrade had gone so well previously I figured I had nothing to fear right? Wrong! I had endless problems with the upgrade, eventually resulting in a complete reload of the system. I put the problems down to the upgrade itself and installed 8.04 from scratch on a fresh hard drive, and I must admit it went well, I was rather disappointed at the number of updates which were immediately required but I had become accustomed to this with other distributions so shrugged it off, and since that day my machine has run 8.04 happily.
Intrepid was released
When Intrepid was released I had been counting down the days until it’s release eagerly and was excited at the prospect of yet another release of this easy to use, friendly distribution. I wasn’t keen on the idea of KDE4.1 being used as I had tried KDE4.x a few times during it’s development and just didn’t get on with it, I was also weary of the problems I had upgrading from 7.10 to 8.04, so instead of just hitting that upgrade distribution button, I installed 8.04 in a VM and upgraded to 8.10 within the VM. This did not go well at all and resulted in an unusable system, once again I decided this must be the upgrade that was the problem, so I did a fresh install of 8.10 in the VM instead, hoping it would produce better results, it did not. After install things were flakey to say the least, once I had installed the VirtualBox drivers I could no longer get an X Server at all. Numerous other problems seemed to plague this release so I decided I would wait until bugs had been fixed with it and I might install it then, only to remember I still wasn’t keen on KDE4.1 and just had a general feeling of not wanting this upgrade, so I have decided to skip it.
The IRC Chatrooms
I spend a fair bit of time in the Kubuntu and Ubuntu IRC chat rooms, I don’t use it for help but I offer what help I can to the users who frequent it and maybe don’t have the knowledge that I do. In the week that followed the release of 8.10 I spent most of my time in that chat room, trying to refer back to a VM install of 8.10 to help people that were having numerous problems after upgrade and/or fresh installs of the release. The problems were so abundent that I can honestly say it didn’t seem like a release of Ubuntu/Kubuntu at all, but more like a release of Fedora Core with people new to Linux trying to feel their way through in the dark. People were complaining their X server no longer worked, or they couldn’t install Nvidia drivers, or what happened to KDE3? Now don’t get me wrong “Cutting Edge” is good, but cutting edge to me is brand new stuff, that works. That’s why we also these days have “Bleeding Edge”, which is basically what distributions like Sidux, Fedora Core and the current bleeding edge version of Debian (Sid) are for, they introduce these new features that don’t quite work yet and they have a good following of dedicated users, who will test this software for them and report bugs. Installing things like an X.org server that doesn’t support Nvidia drivers yet just seems more like Bleeding Edge than Cutting Edge, or is it just me?
My love for ubuntu still holds
Never have I liked a distribution more than Ubuntu, for ease of use, friendlyness to new users and popularity in general, and that still holds true for former releases of the distribution, but 8.10 has yet to earn that love. I would still highly recommend that any new user install Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu on their system, so long as they use 8.04 and not 8.10. It seems a crying shame that the so dubbed “darling of Linux” seems to have fallen so short with this release, but I am confident that 9.04 (Jaunty) will redeem itself.
Conclusions
So in conclusion I feel I should coin the words of Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) when he said people should skip Vista, and suggest that most people skip the 8.10 release of Ubuntu and use 8.04 until 9.04 is released. The difference being, the users of Ubuntu only have 5 months to wait instead of a year or more, and more to the point it probably hasn’t cost anyone using Ubuntu a single cent to do so and it won’t cost them anything to upgrade either. I am hopeful that X.org will have fixed any issues with the current release of the X server by then, Nvidia drivers will work properly, KDE4.1 may have become KDE4.2 or even just KDE4.1.something.that.works.better and with any luck the next release will be much better put together, thought out and more stable.
Linux itself is very much on the rise now, the desktop market is being blown wide open by MS cock ups, awareness is being raised by companies like Canonical, Dell, HP, IBM, ASUS etc and the world economy crash couldn’t have come at a better time for Linux to really thrust itself out there and say, “Hey I work perfectly on 99% (Figure I made up but it can’t be far off these days) of hardware and I won’t cost you a penny”, which is exactly what it’s doing. Symsys Ltd as a company is doing it’s part, trying to push the use of Linux and increase it’s awareness, but other companies are joining the fold too, Adobe is releasing more and more software for Linux and talks of open sourcing some of it, IBM are now evangelising Linux more than ever, HP have decided to start OEMing it, Splashtop has become all the rage in new formats like “Fast Boot” and with the trend of things like Googles Android phone and the general concessus, even that admitted by MS themselves, that Windows has turned to turd (Face it XP WAS a good release eventually), all we need to do now is make the people who have no technical interest in Linux and don’t care about the freedoms of it, aware that it exists, it’s a LOT better than it ever was before, it STILL doesn’t cost anything, oh and it works on everything from your toaster to your server, whilst being able to talk to anything MS you might still have in your network as well.
To close then, I urge Canonical to make the 9.04 release more stable than 8.10 was/is, I urge X.org to make things like the Nvidia drivers work so I can maintain my dual screens and other features that require them and I’ll simply coin another phrase which comes from the opening credits of my favorite TV show while growing up in the U.K. and demonstrates effectively my feelings on Linux today, “Power to the People!”
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…. Microsoft Exchange!!!!!!!!
Well after years of wishing someone could actually create a mail client that could get rid of outlook, yet still work with Microsoft software on the network, I’m, well, disappointed.
Why am I disappointed that a mail client finally stepped up to be a viable replacement for Outlook? Because it’s not cross platform (Only works in Linux and is specifically designed for Gnome, although it does work in KDE and no doubt other desktops on Linux), it ISN’T as good as Thunderbird in a lot of different ways and in general it isn’t the best mail client out there, in my opinion.
Evolution now also sports quite a nifty backup tool that it didn’t previously have, which is good, except all it does is backup your mail files to a tar file, which you could do yourself by going to the folder the data is stored in and, well, tarring it. Now don’t get me wrong, that’s great for less technical people out there who just want to backup their mail but it still doesn’t provide a method to move that mail to another mail client and a tar file isn’t exactly something really secure like a PST file.
Ok so I’m being a little hard on Evolution here I suppose, but it kinda deserves it. Where Thunderbird really does feel like a mail client that’s been thought out, well written and in general developed for ease of use and as a geniune alternative to outlook, without feeling too far away from it, Evolution just doesn’t.
There’s a lot to analyze here when it comes to comparing mail clients, Evolution comes with a calendar built in and Thunderbird has one that you have to install as a plugin, Evolution now supports exchange and Thunderbird doesn’t, Evolution has a backup utility in it’s file menu and Thunderbird just doesn’t have one. But these minimal facts print a rather unfair picture of Thunderbird in comparison. Thunderbird actually feels like outlook, it is more responsive and more customizable, now that the MAPI protocol is Open Source I’m hoping it won’t be long before Thunderbird becomes exchange capable.
Some of you may be asking “Why does he keep saying outlook so much”, well the thing is, as much as I hate anything not open source on principal I’m also a realist and the thing is Outlook IS the best mail client out there, by far. It may not be the most compliant with other technologies and it may not be free or Open Source but it’s the easiest to use, the most reliable and it has so many features you couldn’t list them all on an A4 piece of paper without doing it in columns and using both sides.
Since I found out that Evolution had released an update and now supported Exchange (Wednesday was when I found out) I have been testing Evolution alongside Thunderbird and I have to say, I’m going back to Thunderbird. If someone asked me if this breakthrough was going to change the way people work in a Windows environment I’d have to say, no, I don’t think it will. The reality is that it can’t be used on Windows and there are very few companies or organisations out there who have an exchange server and let their client PCs use Linux, it just isn’t done. Do I think if this breakthrough had happened on Thunderbird it would change the way people work? Then yes, I do. There are a lot of people out there on Windows who already use Thunderbird at home and Outlook at work.
So come on Mozilla Devs, get the MAPI protocol compliance implemented in Thunderbird for us, give those of us who need to use a Windows PC something other than outlook. I tend to use Open Office wherever I can anyway, whether I’m on Windows or Linux or Mac but I still have to use Outlook if I need to connect to an exchange server.
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