A Complete Beginner’s Manual for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)
The Ubuntu community just release a new guide designed to be user friendly and easy to follow with many screenshots. Ubuntu has been one of the fastest growing Linux distributions to date. Linux is an Open Source operating system that allows you to use software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source code evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies. The Ubuntu project is entirely committed to the principles of open source software development; people are encouraged to use open source software, improve it, and pass it on. This means that Ubuntu is and will always be free of charge. You will no doubt notice many similarities to both Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX, as well as some things that work very differently. Users coming from Mac OSX are more likely to notice similarities due to the fact that both Mac OSX and Ubuntu originated from Unix. Before you decide whether or not Ubuntu is right for you, I suggest to use Ubuntu as a live cd. One of the feature of Linux is that you can run the operating system from the cd without making changes to your computer, the key to that is you need to boot from the cd. Ubuntu is for everyone from programmers, developers to the home user. With the mass catalog of free programs, security, ease of use it is a win situation.
Author Info: Shaun Mallette
What most people don’t realize is that it is very easy to switch over to using Linux for most people. Other then gaming and things like Photoshop (sorry Gimp is complete shit, doesn’t compare) everything else is taken care of. But people don’t want to accept small changes like the name of a program they run that does the same thing. I’ve got my wife using Ubunutu on her old laptop now and whenever possible I’m going to try to convince others to use it.
Ubuntu itself is great, installed on 3 different laptops recently without a hitch and everything working out of the box. That really helps instead of the past where you were searching for drivers for everything and trying a million different tweaks you find online for each device to finally get it working. While I can’t game on it, I do everything else on it and I feel it’s smoother and faster then it’s counterparts and so customizable to make it fit your any need.
I second that, sorry GIMP just not their yet for the pros but me rock on.
I couldn’t say it any better. Sometimes we have to look at the other side of life to get the most out of it.
I hate to be a stickler about this stuff (okay I don’t, but I still feel awkward about it), but there are just as many differences between Mac and Ubuntu as there are Windows and Ubuntu. Mac is Unix-like, but got there by a completely different route. Linux was started as it’s own thing from scratch, and Mac went a more BSD route using the Mach kernel as its base. Their similarities are in the command line (they both use bash… sometimes) and that they are both POSIX-compliant (everything but Windows is POSIX-compliant these days).
As for GIMP. Yep, I third the motion that it’s missing some things to be as useful as Photoshop. In its defense though, the developers have no intentions of it being a complete alternative to Photoshop. They just wanted to give regular users a better image editor than something like MS Paint.
Ubuntu is really awesome though. And it’s been trying new things in it’s UI recently. I’m all for trying new things! And for slower machines, you should try Xubuntu. It’s like Ubuntu, but instead chooses XFCE and other low memory programs for better performance on slower machines.
I’m a jack-ass so I have Ubuntu running on my iMac. Of which, I skinned it to act vaguely Mac-ish.
You are exactly right as I know the story I hear it everyday from the Free Software supporters for years now. This post was more intended as a general rule and wasn’t meant to look under the hood of the system. But now if somebody was wondering you got that part covered for me.