What’s been great so far:

Stability and speed: So far Ubuntu has outperformed Windows and has not slowed down despite installing many different applications (something Windows is notorious for).

I installed Beryl, a 3-D Window manager, that has been raved about and featured many times on YouTube. It is amazing. Finally something visually stunning to work with. The most amazing feature of which is Scale, which allows you to see all open windows at once and then jump to the desired window by clicking on it (image below).

Installing Beryl was fairly straight forward following the step by step instructions on the Beryl Wiki.

I still have two problems with Beryl though: 1) Video playback is intermittent (video area goes blank at times) and 2) It freezes the screen 30s or so on log in. I’m sure I can get those resolved though.

I also tried Looking Glass (the Java-based 3D Desktop)… pretty weak in my opinon.

Some other good things to note: I’m always amazed at the plethora of applications available for Linux. When using Ubuntu they are all available within a few clicks using the Add / Remove link or the Synaptic Package Manager. OpenOffice.org is a suitable replacement for MS Office for what I do at home. I’ve installed the Read/Write NTFS driver to allow writing to my existing NTFS drives and to easily share files between my Ubuntu and Windows systems.

What I, so far, can’t do or miss:

• iTunes – a recent owner of an iPod Nano – I’m really into iTunes and the iTunes Music Store. I do miss this and still boot into Windows to manage my iPod.
• Photoshop – The GIMP is a great open source graphics app. However, it really does not compare to Photoshop in a lot of ways.
• Scanning – I don’t do it much but there is no support for my Canon D660U in Linux
• TV Out – My graphics card (Radeon 9200) has a TV Out card which I’ve not been able to get working yet under Linux. I have my home PC permanently attached to my TV so I use this feature alot. I still have to boot into Windows to do these things.

Hopefully, overtime, I will be able to resolve these things or find suitable alternatives. I’m loving Ubuntu so far and I don’t like having to boot back into Windows for these things.

Installing Ubuntu was a breeze. Simply insert the CD, boot it up and double-click in the Install icon. Very few questions are asked and the important hardware was all autodected successfully. The only tricky part was partitioning the hard drive as I wanted to keep my existing Windows XP installation functioning (still not sure if I can move over completely). It also reads and auto-mounts all the existing NTFS partitions.

Now I begin the process of finding and evaluating all the necessary replacement programs to what I was using in the Windows environment.

I tell you one thing already… after years and years of starting at Windows, it’s nice to have something new to look at.

The other thing I LOVE already is the simple Add / Remove Applications utility. Want an FTP client? Start that utility and it’s a few clicks away. The list of immediately available, free, open source applications is impressive.