As a telecommunications analyst for a major utility company for the past 15 years, I have grown a custom to many changes. Changes in technology are the only constant in my world and keeping up with them is, at times, difficult. With a family, job, friends and mutliple hobbies, neither gets the attention that it deserves or requires.
For the last 10 years or so as Microsoft has migrated from Windows version to windows version, I have fallen both in and out of love with it. I was introduced to Apple products via an iPhone and had a brief romance with iOS and OS X but it seemed to be more of a headache than it was worth. Not that it wasn't easy to learn or was confusing or anything. Some of the layouts and things it did for you were really annoying. This generally caused me to spend more time undoing what apple thought was a great process. But, I never had to worry about a virus, it ran like a Mac truck through any program, audio file, video file or picture transformation I through at it. I guess the lack of ability to upgrade and change parts (at least at a decent price) was really annoying.
The conclusion I have come to is this, Apple, while extremely locked down and really designed for the graphics, music and arts fanatics, has its place in our world. Microsoft (the greatest love affair) can wear many hats and be productive in virtually any environment, is not with out it's issues, and most of the time, major issues as well as being a horrible process hog.
These glitches in the top 2 OS's caused me to look in other areas, mainly linux. No this is not a praise Linux format or Ubuntu to make it sound like it is superior to all OS's. The reason for this blog is to help the newbie understand what linux (mainly Ubuntu) can do for them.
Ubuntu is a distro of linux that has a somewhat combined look and feel of Windows and OS X while still remaining extremely customizeable as well as not being a process hog. Ubuntu can work spectacularly on that 5-7 year old Windows PC that seems to take 3 days to boot up. It comes in 32-bit and 64-bit and best of all........ it's FREE!!!!!
That's right, free and regularly released every 6 months (April and October). The Ubuntu version release is the year and month when it was released. For example, the most current release as of today is 12.10 which was released in 2012 (12) in the month of October (10). The next scheduled release as of this writing is 13.04 due out at the end of April 2013.
For starters, Ubuntu can handle the all the web based items you can throw at it. Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo!, anything and everything, just like a macbook pro or a PC. It can also do pretty much any audio and video related items, except itunes. If you are an iPhone user, jailbreak would have to be in your near future.
Ubuntu has an app store with many apps the work just as good as the ones you would find in the apple app store or Google play store. Games as well. While not as mainstream, at least most of them, there are many games that you can play on Ubuntu.
Office based applications are where it starts to separate from Mac and even more so, Windows. Ubuntu and Linux in general will support all open source formats of office applications, it simply will not support Microsoft Office.
