May 28, 2006 Archives

I run a partition of Linux/Ubuntu, and of Windows XP at home. Depending of how I'm feeling, I'd use one or the other. More than anything, if I feel "lazy" I go for the latter. :P But in fact, little advanced computer skills are required to use a typical modern graphical Linux install, especially Ubuntu.

In any case, I don't know for Windows Vista, but as far as WinXP is concerned, it is totally replaceable in a work context (edit: erm, what am I saying?). The multimedia support is the only point against Ubuntu, as far as I'm concerned. I can't play Flash stuff (but the developer's blog states that a plugin of 9.0 for Linux 64-bit is being developed), and have lots of inconsistent trouble with multimedia streams... I suspect that it is the predominance of non-free formats in the digital world, more than some sort of negligence. I am using mplayer as my browser multimedia plugin, and officially, Ubuntu supports gstreamer. It's not that I haven't tried gstreamer, but it just wouldn't run half the things I try to play on it (with all possible non-bad plugin sets installed).

(Edit: for the Vista bit, what I mean is that there's nothing fancy to the WinXP interface that can't already be found in Linux/Ubuntu... To replace Mac OS X's interface is still unnatainable, by all means, and Vista is apparently going to be gorgeous by today's WinXP standards, so I don't know. But if you need a computer that "works" and does the now-standard user interface stuff, then Linux/Ubuntu with Gnome is good-enough.)