Has Ubuntu Replaced Windows on Your Box?

[Derek Broughton]

Charles E "RIck" Taylor IV wrote:

> On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 00:18 +0800, Michael Richter wrote:
>>         Most solutions seem cryptic, unintuitive and hard to find to
>>         the uninitiated.
> 
>> This is problem #1 for Linux (any distro).  When things work they work
>> well.  When they fall down, however, they fall down hard.  Trying to
>> pick up the pieces afterwards is nightmarish.  Even gurus often throw
>> up their hands and say "I hope you backed up /home".
> 
> Whenever I read about this, I think - "You know, I have these same
> problems - with Windows XP."  A *lot* of this just boils down to things
> just working differently under unixlike OSes than they do under Windows.

I believe in learning by tweaking till it's broke, and I can't say anything
I've ever done has ever lost me /home.  I don't think _Linux_ has ever been
responsible for any significant problems.  There was the time I missed an
important slash in a pathname: "sudo rm -r /etc something"; and the time I
removed the libc6 package over any number of objections from the system. 
In both cases the system was significantly b0rked, but I've managed to
accomplish the same sorts of things with Windows, with fewer attempts from
the OS to stop me.

> I think Ubuntu's weak points are networking and printing, myself.
> Networking's much easier to configure for my home and work networks on
> my laptop under Fedora than it is here in Ubuntu.

It just works for me...  but networking is always highly dependent on your
topography.

> Printing was just ... 
> broken ... on my Samsung ML-1430 (graphics were garbled).  

I confess I've never got printing working well - I tend to print to pdf and
print the PDF off a windows box (but then, I do so little printing that the
last time my ink cartridges dried up, I refused to replace them) and just
print the odd page when I'm at work.

> And Windows?  XP Pro's fine as long as I don't want to suspend the
> machine.  It crashed on resume every other time, and didn't seem
> fixable.
 
Which just highlights the similarities - other people have no end of trouble
with hibernate in various linux distros, and I otoh have both my XP pro and
my Ubuntu systems hibernating perfectly.
-- 
derek