Has Ubuntu Replaced Windows on Your Box?

[Shu Hung (Koala)]

I have 1 desktop and 1 laptop.

On my Celeron 2.6GHz desktop, it is WinXP only. This is mainly because my
brother needs to do HKALE examination about M$ office, M$ foxpro and other
M$ softwares in the silly syllabus. My father is using Thunderbird for
email. My mother is not familiar to IE just like firefox. I think after the
examination, I might change this family machine into ubuntu ... or at least
dual boot for my family to get use to it.

My PIII 850MHz VAIO laptop is already a dual boot machine. I work with
ubuntu most of the time. I especially loves gnome-vfs although I feel it
needs to improve in some ways. However I need WinXP is for many things:

   - *Windows Game
   *I am not familiar with WINE. And I use to play some Japanese games on
   my Chinese Windows. These games need some patches and hacks on Windows and I
   just have no idea how to do them on WINE / Ubuntu.
   - *Skype
   *My Skype used to work before I installed gstreamer0.8-plugins. Seems
   there are some conflict between gstreamer and oos that fails me on any
   sound recording software included the Gnome Recorder. I've reported my
   problem and I hope I can work out all my things on the next Ubuntu release.
   - *FTP with Chinese characters
   *I have a linux server sorely used as server. I also have a Filezilla
   server installed on my Windows XP. Both these servers serve some folders and
   files with Chinese filename. In Windows FTP clients such as Filezilla and
   Explorer (yes, Windows Explorer), I can access these folders and files
   normally. In Ubuntu, all clients crash with them. I tried gnome-vfs, gftp,
   Filezilla 3 (nightly-build) and none of them works.
   - *Music and Movies
   *I can play some VCDs on Ubuntu but some of them crash the
   Totem-gstreamer. I experienced an error last Saturday with my "Man in Black
   II" and I don't even know why.

   All Chinese (Traditional) MP3 tags become unreadable on Rhythmbox and
   I found no easy way to fix them. I tried create some Chinese MP3 tags on
   Ubuntu but none of these are readable to any reader (e.g. ) afterward.
   I knows this problem come along with the standard encoding method of MP3
   tags.

   The best thing I hope is rhythmbox identify the tags' encoding
   according to the standard language of my installation. But I know most
   programmer won't like it. At least I think I need an easy way to convert all
   my MP3 tags to correct encoding (say Unicode) so I might read them correctly
   on Rhythmbox. I, however, don't think that will happen even on the next
   release. I was depressed by this for long.

If I only want to browse internet then Firefox is more than fine. If I want
office suite, OpenOffice.org is better than enough. If I want instant
messaging then GAIM is acceptable. If I need Chinese input method then SCIM
is great to use (although a little bit bothering on setup). Most of all, I
love ubuntu's view on humanity and freedom.

But back to what it is, Ubuntu is not enough for my daily use. I'm sure most
ordinary Chinese computer user will agree with me. It is more than enough
for ordinary office but still lack some daily usage. I always tell people to
try it but don't expect everything will work. For me, I'll still use Ubuntu
on my laptop. But I'll still wait until it fits the needs of me so I can
speak loudly to all others, "let's go to Ubuntu".


Koala Yeung

2006/1/10, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca>:
>
> Charles E "RIck" Taylor IV wrote:
>
>
> > My main reason for switching to Ubuntu was laptop support, though.
> > Unless you're willing to patch/recompile your kernel, you miss a lot of
> > the laptop stuff with Fedora - especially if your notebook has an Intel
> > video chipset.  I've had to patch/recompile a couple of packages for
> > Breezy (ffmpeg, for instance, to make it generate video files compatible
> > with my Sony PSP), but I haven't had to rebuild the kernel and X just to
> > get hibernate working.
>
> I agree that Ubuntu's Intel video support is great - I'm not sure if
> that's
> not just a matter of getting whatever distro is the newest at the time,
> though.  Debian's Stable or even Testing never seemed to have recent
> enough
> video support for any of my computers.  You're very right though about
> Ubuntu's general laptop support.
> --
> derek
>
>
> --
> ubuntu-users mailing list
> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
>
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