Bogdan Stroe wrote over at tuxgeek.me about his experience using Ubuntu 8.10 for a couple of days. Now, I’m a huge Linux fan. I have two computers at work, a laptop and a PC. My laptop dual boots between XP and Ubuntu. XP is for work, and Ubuntu is for anything else I ever use the laptop for. My work PC has only Ubuntu on it. My PC at home has Ubuntu running on it, but I have an XP virtual machine on it as well because VMware’s ESXi management client only runs on Windows. All of my Ubuntu installations are 8.10.
I said all that to say that I like reviews like this. Bogdan gave an honest review based on what he was used to. He appeared to give Ubuntu a real chance, but there were a couple of areas that it didn’t behave as he expected it to. It wasn’t that Ubuntu couldn’t necessarily handle the task, he just didn’t expect it to handle it the way that it did, or wasn’t ready to give up a specific application for a close equivalent in Ubuntu.
In this review, Bogdan takes several specific apps that he likes to use and compares them to their Ubuntu counterparts. Some of them stack up nicely, others aren’t quite there yet according to him. This is why I like these reviews, because they get into pretty good detail in several areas. The great thing about Linux and open source is that the developers can take opinions like this and make their apps even better.
In the end, the Mac comes out on top. What I’m finding in reviews like this, however, is that as time goes on, Ubuntu is closing the gap faster and faster.
