After the last uphpu meeting a few of us went to Applebees like always. We were talking about a lot of stuff and one of the big subjects was Linux Desktop. Kevin Carter, the presenter, was sporting off Kubuntu with the new KDE 4.2. This year I’ve made a goal to improve my Linux skills and I thought if I switched to using Linux as my main work enviroment. So Sunday night I started to try to install Kubuntu 8.10. I’m sorry to say, but after 24 hours, I wasn’t able to stick with it.
I was actually really impressed with Kubuntu. Many of the distros have made huge improvements over the last 5 years. The problem was configuring it to work was too much. I ran into problems with my xorg.conf and two graphics cards. Took me several hours to figure out that was problem. Then my sound wan’t working, couldn’t get my USB Headset to work, and I hadn’t even started to get my work stuff setup. The problem was I didn’t have enough time to spend configuring everything. Once it was time for work to start, I had to just give up and boot into Vista.
I also realized there were several programs that I use every day that I couldn’t use. Ventrilo, Jing, Rhapsody, and OneNote were just a few I noticed I missed in just the first few hours. The sad thing is I honestly wanted to make the converstion to a Linux Desktop for my daily work (I’d still dual boot for my ocassional gaming). However, I haven’t given up completely, just that I’ll probably spend the next few months playing around with Linux on a old machine. I just can’t afford to spend the large amount of time to make the switch that quickly (and I’m sure my employeer, and ex-CEO of a Linux Distro, would rather I spent my time getting my work done than trying to get Linux to work for me).
I’ll keep everyone posted over time as I work on getting Linux to work for me, just that the cold-turkey method won’t be working for me. Thanks for everyone in uphpu who helped me figure out my dual graphics card problem.
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You may want to just try the regular Ubuntu. I used KDE for seven years, but then finally decided to give Gnome a try with Ubuntu and I was surprised to find I preferred it over KDE. I guess it’s because I used Windows before I started running Linux on my desktop, and KDE seemed the most “Windows” like, but I’ve been running Mac the last year, and Gnome feels more mac-like I suppose.
Justin, keep with it man. It’s worth it. I use Fedora 10 as my primary OS and have used Linux as my primary OS for 10 years now. Get a geek (geekier) friend to help you through what’s holding you up.
On the GNOME vs KDE thing, I was really happy with KDE3 and I’m just patiently waiting for KDE4 to catch up. I disagree with the idea that KDE is more Windows-like. It provides you with so much more configurability than Windows (or GNOME). Distributions just ship with Windows-like themes to lower the barrier to entry.
Thanks for the encouragement. I’m still going to playing with Linux, its just going to take a lot longer to setup a work environment.
thats nice.thank you