Why Linux is ready for the desktop today

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I guess I'm lucky then..

...because all I ever did was pop the Ubuntu CD into my drive, boot it
up, and play Mahjong and Freecell while the system was installing.

The installation finished. It connected automatically to my router,
and I had internet access form the start. I added the music to
Rhythmbox, and it played just fine. I installed Flash and Java (just
like you'd have to on a new Windows install), and it works perfectly
fine, as it should. I watched DVDs, as well as videos in Xvid, H264
other formats. Guess what? Gnome's Movie Player (which comes pre-
installed) even has a function to play YouTube videos without the
browser! Also, multiple sounds play at once: I could listen to music,
but still hear notifications. Or watch a DVD and play music, if I
wanted to.
I opened PDFs with the pre-supplied PDF reader. I opened Office
documents with OpenOffice, including complex Excel sheets with graphs
and functions, and they showed up just like they did in Office XP. I
edit photos on the pre-installed photo editing software just fine.
I have since installed additional software I needed, such as wxMaxima
(which exists for Windows too) without a problem. Systems ->
Administration -> Synaptic, pick the right program, and voila. In case
you don't trust a package manager, I also downloaded .deb files (the
equivalent of your beloved .exe files) of the RTS game Globulation,
and installed them, guess what, without a problem. From a CD, I
installed MATLAB, and it runs perfectly fine, too. And I have yet to
see a command-line. And if you're that desperate to run the Windows
application, many of them run on Wine: Like, for example, uTorrent,
which runs 24/7 on my machine. Linux has alternative, equal torrent
clients, but it's a matter of preference: A matter of CHOICE.

I've been running Windows-less for the past 6 months, and frankly, I
get along just fine. I had just as many troubles getting stuff to work
on XP as I had to get it to work on Linux.

Posted by: MetzM   Posted on: 06/05/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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