September 15th, 2008
How I Became A Happy Ubuntu User
If you are following me on twitter, you will have noticed that I have recently switched from Vista to Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron 1525. I started off doing a dual boot with Vista but after playing around with Ubuntu for the past few days and customizing it to my liking, I am confident that I can format my Vista partition and switch to Ubuntu completely.
Pictured Above: My current Ubuntu desktop 
It must be said that I have tried switched to Linux a few times in the past, only to get frustrated after about a month of using it and then eventually I would switch back to windows. I loved the idea of a free, open source operating system but there were a few things that bothered me when I used linux.
Switching over this time however, I persisted and decided to go find solutions to my linux annoyances and I am now enjoying Ubuntu more than I could ever enjoy a windows operating system. Once you have Ubuntu setup the way you want, it is an awesome operating system.
In this post, I am going to run through the things that annoyed me and how I fixed them. Then in another post later this week I am going to show you some of the things I added to my install that makes it pretty darn cool.
(A big thanks goes to Denham Coote for the tips he sent over twitter)
Annoyance Number 1: No Photoshop
Photoshop is hands down the best image editor available. Unfortunately there isn’t a version compatible with Linux. This used to frustrate me to no end. GIMP (as awesome as it is) just doesn’t do it for me. I love it for basic editing, but when it comes to designing graphics for website, Photoshop wins. (This annoyance actually applies to other Windows software you know and love as well)
How I got around it? I installed XP on VirtualBox and run photoshop on there! I also have other applications such as delphi that I am running on my virtual machine. Check out the screenshots below of windows running side by side Ubuntu on my machine.
Another solution is WINE. You can install Windows software and run it on Linux using WINE. However, when I tried using WINE in the past a lot of software didn’t work nicely and was glitchy. One such example was Delphi. I also want to be able to test websites in IE6, IE7 and IE8 and thus Virtual Box and XP are the perfect solution!
A handy tip is to use DropBox to sync files on your Ubuntu machine to your virtual XP machine and vice versa.
Pictured above: Two of my Ubuntu workspaces, second workspace is running Windows XP full screen under VirtualBox. I’m using Compiz to get the cool desktop cube effect.
Annoyance Number 2: Fonts
While some people love the default fonts that come with Ubuntu I find them big, bulky and ugly looking. I found that websites would display horribly with the default fonts and the software (especially firefox) looked bulky. I suppose this is just a personal preference.
The way to solve this problem is to install the core Microsoft fonts and then change your default fonts under (System >> Preferences >> Appearance >> Fonts). See screenshots below of software looking awesome with nice clean fonts.
Install the microsoft fonts with the following command in a terminal window:
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
Once that is done, all the Microsoft fonts except Tahoma will be installed! It makes such a big difference for me. With MS fonts I find my computer is much more aesthetically pleasing.
Pictured Above: My font settings. You can use any fonts you like, check out DaFont for more cool fonts.
Pictured Above: Firefox looking really awesome with the Trebuchet MS font.
Annoyance Number 3: It’s So Different To Windows
There is a heck of a lot to learn when it comes to Linux especially if you are coming from a windows background. Installing software isn’t as easy as a double click (although it is getting pretty easy with software such as synaptic package manager and GDebi Package Installer). It takes a while to learn the terminal commands and when browsing forums like ubuntuforums.org a lot of the members assume you know what you doing (although they are always more than willing to give you a hand if you ask futher questions or let them know you are stuck).
This annoyance is just something you have to grin and bear. After a while however you will find that you start picking up all the terminal commands, understanding the file structures etc etc. I am finding now that I have gotten to know the ins and outs a bit better that I am really starting to enjoy the Linux experience. It just takes a little time. Stick it out, its worth it.
Annoyance 4: Hardware Support
Another one of the most frustrating things at first for me was trying to get my wireless card to work. I have an infamous Broadcom wireless card. A lot (if not all?) Broadcom cards don’t work right away. You might also find that your video card is not working properly.
Thanks to some really awesome documentation from the ubuntu community, this time around I had wireless working in less than 5 minutes using ndiswrapper.
What you need to do if you cant get your hardware to work is post on the ubuntuforums.org and you will usually have a response within 30 minutes. Be prepared to do a little of the dirty work to get your hardware working.
Annoyance 5: Uhhhh…
Hey, there isn’t an annoyance 5. Those were the only things that annoyed me! Since I don’t play games or anything I don’t have to worry about getting them to run, but I hear that they run pretty well under WINE.
So, in short – Ubuntu FTW!
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Welcome to Ubuntu!
I had similar issues and posted a similar list on my blog.
Installed it on an XPS1210 a while back, and then installed the 64bit version on my XPS1540, never looked back.
Good post and nice theme too.
Well welcome aboard, and I have been using Ubuntu for the past 4 years and have used other Linux distributions before. I love how Ubuntu does things works well on all my machines and it’s great. Been Windows free completely (100%) for the past 6 months and I love it.
Thats great. I’m happy for you. I was in your shoes a few years back. You definitely picked the right flavor of Linux to start with.
I wasn’t as smart. I started with a LiveCD (Slax) and then moved to Slackware. But this path taught me a lot about do-it-yourself configurations.
Welcome to the community. Drop me an email if you have a pressing question about Ubuntu that you can’t get answered in the forums. Its nice to meet like-minded people.
Thanks all! That’s what I love about the linux community, everyone is willing to lend a hand and they are all so welcoming.
Don’t forget (or maybe you don’t know) there is a handy “Add/Remove Programs” option for even easier software installs uninstalls. Categorized, described, and rates – install/uninstall multiple programs with just a few clicks…
And if you absolutely must have the cutting edge version you can enable “backports” under the Software Sources utility.
Way to go! We got a new laptop, and it has Vista. While Vista is OK (yeah – on a 3GB RAM and 2 GHz Dual-core its actually fast enough), I find myself still gravitating to my Ubuntu on the desktop.
I don’t do PC games, but I know a big reason why most people don’t do this is they like gaming on PC’s (or work-related). If Ubuntu can make WINE easier and better it will dominate.
Hey Great Post!
I found a great way to get your video card drivers right.
Envy is awesome for detecting the right display drivers.
I have a similar experience. My annoyance #1: file manager. I find Vistas Explorer quite handy. I tried Konqueror but I’m stuck on getting it to show unmounted filesystems by default (I’m not automounting everything). Would be nice to hear other people’s experience on file managers. Great useful page, thank you.