Today we have finalised for ourselves that Windows 7 is definitely a “better” operating system than Ubuntu 12.04 when it comes to desktop environments.
Now, I say “better” in quotes because the word is quite hard to use as is and “convince” everybody while doing so.
We started our journey on Windows 7 and after desperately needing a reinstall we decided to go for the latest version (at the time) of Ubuntu, which happened to be the brand spanking new Ubuntu 12.04.
We went to the ubuntu site, found the ISO we needed, then started the download, for some reason the download was extremely slow so we found the torrent version of it instead and went for that, much better idea and it maxed out our internet connection until it was done a few moments later.
We then burnt the ISO to a disc so we could boot from it and have it accessible whenever we needed it.
This was the point where we were about to kiss the good old Windows 7 partition goodbye for good and move onto the apparent newer much “cooler” Ubuntu version.
The installation of Ubuntu 12.04 was really quick and simple and quite a pleasure really.
Finally we were booted up and ready to get our day-to-day software installed as well so we could do some work – boy was this a “wonderful experience” (I can hear you moaning about how if you know Linux then it’s quite easy and all round a lovely thing, and we don’t disagree, in fact we have Ubuntu Server Edition installed on most of our web servers and love it to bits, but as far as the desktop side of things is concerned..)
Things were alright for a few days, but not great as we all run multiple screens each in the office and this means getting the proper graphics card drivers installed on the systems. Not a massive problem, but not as easy as it’s meant to be, the support is somewhat limited.
We tried out a few 3d games to test the graphics performance differences between the operating systems and I must say, that was not a great experience either.
The overall feel of things was of a less quality and a much more “mission packed” than one would like and unless you are doing things like, well, who-knows really, then I’d say rather go the main-stream Windows route.
What was really nice to use was the built in command line and all the great things that come with Linux’s side of the fence, like SSH support off the bat for example, very nice!
We decided to remove the Ubuntu desktop partitions and replace them with fresh new copies of Windows 7 today and so far we feel like we’ve died and gone to heaven as there’s so much more that “just works” from the get go!
With all that said, I’m really looking forward to seeing where the next versions of Ubuntu go as there are some really nice things being implemented at the moment, for example the Unity navigational system which is a pleasure to use in it’s entirety.