What you should know thinking about the transition to Ubuntu
An acquaintance who had never seen Linux, but who became interested in open source, after Ubuntu 10.10 came out asked to write to him, “what's good, what's bad, what kind of complications, what subtleties, how to improve relations with Win7” so that he can decide whether he needs this happiness . At first, I thought, “Why would I write the text, when for sure a hundred people had already written it - I’ll quickly google, send a link, and then I’ll answer specific questions.” But then I discovered that on requests like “migration to ubuntu” giant manuals with the subtleties of compiz settings fall out, and the short text for the “undecided” cannot be found quickly either on the Internet or on ubuntu.com and ubuntu.ru (i.e. as he wrote in the previous post), not on Habré - so I thought that now let it be at least on Habré. The participants of Ubuntarium are unlikely to learn something new from the text, but they can supplement it in the comments (I do not claim the title of ubuntugur, so I probably missed a lot of important things), and then people who later introduce something like “ transition to ubuntu ", will find happiness here.
Immediately I warn you that much is given in the text in a somewhat simplified version, so that the essence is immediately clear; if someone after this post decides to go on, he will still read more detailed texts, so he will know the correct wording. I also want to say that I don’t persuade everyone to switch to Ubuntu at all; The system has shortcomings, for someone they may well be critical, and in the text I tried to state everything impartially.
')
What is it all for (main advantages):
1. A practical plus: the system is free (like most programs for it). Windows, of course, can also be obtained for free in a known way - but it can suddenly find out about it, or (when installed in the workplace), those who came to check can find out about it, or, finally, your conscience can know about it. In addition, under Windows, you also have to fool around, extracting each program in a known way - with some it can be difficult.
2. A practical plus: no viruses. You can safely stick any flash drives brought by friends and go to any (including those you thought about) sites. Update: in the comments indicated that the theoretical possibility of infecting a computer exists, but in practice it is still extremely rare.
3. A practical plus: it is more convenient to do some things (more detailed below) than in Windows.
4. A practical plus for geeks: flexible configuration. If you are ready to “work with a file,” you can almost get the system of your dreams.
5. Plus for the curious: the horizons become wider. And not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively: when you see two different approaches to one thing, you begin to look at these things differently.
6. Aesthetic plus: the interface of programs, alerts and other things designed in the same style. In addition, many people adore the “add-on system” of Compiz Fusion for both external effects and functionality (there is no full-fledged analogue of Compiz in Windows).
7. Ideological advantage: you are helping to create a Microsoft competition :) I don’t have anything important against Microsoft, Windows 7 is a good OS, but the very fact of competition would make both parties work more actively, and in the end everyone would be better off.
8. Ideological plus: bright ideals of open source. True, if it tells you something, then you are a programmer, and if you are a programmer, then you already know enough about Linux yourself. But even if it doesn’t say, know that you are supporting a good cause by the very fact of using Linux.
What you need to know if "interesting, but scary":
1. You can not install Ubuntu immediately "fully", there are three options that allow you to first look at it and understand, like it or not. One is installation using the Wubi installer, in which Ubuntu is installed inside Windows: then you don’t have to bother with partitioning the hard drive (which eliminates the danger of accidentally taking it all away) and can be easily removed. The second is to install the system on a flash drive (any volume from a gigabyte will do): you can boot from the flash drive and look at Ubuntu without making any changes to the hard drive of your computer. Moreover, if the system is pleasant, after that it can be installed on a computer from the same flash drive. Some even make the system on a flash drive their main one, so that, having come somewhere and sticking my flash drive into someone else's computer, I work at home, but I did not know it myself, I don’t know the details. The third way is to run inside Windows in a virtual machine (Ubuntu in this case runs as one of the Windows programs in the window).
2. With a “full-fledged” installation, Ubuntu perfectly stands up “side by side” with Windows, and you can use them alternately, choosing each time you turn on the computer which system to boot. On lifehacker.com there is a good English-language instruction for dual Ubuntu and Windows 7. If you really need someone, I will translate it into Russian.
What the Windows user will have during the transition are the main issues:
1. Installing applications: in Ubuntu, they are usually installed not from distribution files, but from server repositories. At first it is unusual, but then most of this approach begins to be liked much more than Windows; programs are put literally “in one click” without ten clicks on “next” and entering the serial numberfrom keygen . The vast majority of programs are free, but paid ones also exist.
2. The file system structure is noticeably different from Windows, there are no “C and D disks”; it takes time to get used to it, but then to many the structure seems more logical. At first, the most important thing to know is that NTFS partitions and external connected devices like mp3 players can be found by going from the root to the / media folder, and each user's “personal” folder is located in / home / username. (Here lies another plus: it is possible to save the “personal folder” when the system is completely reinstalled, and then the settings of all the programs will be saved.)
3. Compatible with Windows standards. Here everything is different. It is quite possible to communicate with Windows users via ICQ and Skype (although the Skype client is crooked now). With doc and xls at the household level, it works quite well in OpenOffice, but the big documents with complex formatting in it may not look quite like in Microsoft Office - it's better to write a diploma not in Linux, if you do not want Windows to see the skewed tables. There are problems with encodings in various situations (for example, Cyrillic in the names of files placed in a zip-archive and Cyrillic in the tags of mp3 files). There is almost always a way to cope with this, in some cases it is quite convenient, in part - a “crutch”. If this psychologically comforts the transitions, then know that it is Unicode that is used in Ubuntu, which is designed to solve all problems with encodings, and problems arise from the fact that Windows has not completely switched to it. There is also Wine, with which Windows applications are started under Linux - in the case of “heavy” programs, this can be difficult or impossible, but with a trifle, everything is much better (for example, you can run the Windows archiver in Wine and unpack the zip without problems with Cyrillic names files).
4. Support iron. Let's be honest - not all iron manufacturers think about Linux users, so it can get up to problems with some hardware, and for some peripherals there may not be official drivers. You can check in advance whether the system works properly on your hardware using the above flash drive, and for a part of the officially unsupported peripherals (for example, Yota modems), the drivers are written by the Linuxoids themselves. If you definitely need the support of a certain piece of hardware, but you don’t have it at hand, to test it in practice - google, you have already written about all popular iron Linuxokids on the Internet whether it is supported. No iTunes - some alternative solutions for iPods and iPhones exist, but, of course, this is not at all the same. Update: in the comments they say that sometimes even during normal operation of the system from a flash drive, problems arise after a full installation, I have not come across this myself.
5. Support for some popular things, including mp3, is not included in the system by default due to the fact that they are limited to patents and do not comply with the rules of open source. This is solved by installing one ubuntu-restricted-extras package.
6. This is an internet-based system; you can live without it in the Internet, but it is much worse. Therefore, if there is no normal access, this is an argument against the transition.
7. There are several (choose the exact value yourself) desktops, they look the same (the wallpaper icons are the same), and open windows can be scattered between them. At first it is not clear why this is, but then many people work out for themselves such an algorithm for placing windows, at which they become much more comfortable than with a single table.
8. When switching layouts by Ctrl + Shift, hotkeys of the form Ctrl + Shift + X do not work. In Linux, hotkeys work when you press a key and not release it, and it takes the start of Ctrl + Shift + X for the command to change the layout. There are workarounds, but at first it is easier to switch to Alt + Shift (but generally I recommend to put CapsLock on one layout and Shift + CapsLock on another, I don’t have to check which one is on now).
9. Partitioning the disk during installation: I cannot describe it in detail within this text, but it’s not hard to google the manual (for example). I can only say that if you want to alternately load Ubuntu and Windows and use the same files in them, you should allocate a place for the breakdown, assuming that Linux partitions are not visible from under Windows, so the “common” files should be stored in NTFS partitions. Update: in the comments suggest that there is a way to see the Linux partitions under Windows.
10. New major versions of Ubuntu are released every six months, in April and October, numbered by year and month of release ("April 9" - April 2009). Every fourth of them is called the LTS version (from “long-term support”: they have a longer period of official support), they are trying to make them as reliable as possible, and those who value stability are encouraged to use them only and update them every two days. of the year. The currently latest LTS version is 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”, non-LTS is 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat”.
Additional item. In practice, you will certainly encounter problems that are not mentioned here (in the comments you have already written that it is unusual to configure the wired Internet after Windows - I always connected only to Wi-Fi, so I can’t say anything). But there are practically no catastrophic for the average user. With most of them, you can either completely or partially cope by googling and reading the forums. It is possible that at first it will be necessary to google pretty, but you should not think that this is for life so - if you perform the tasks at the computer about the same each day, it will be settled. And another significant point: sitting under Ubuntu, it is desirable to realize that this is not “a different looking Windows”, but another system with a different logic - then some problems will become easier to solve.
The main myths about Ubuntu and Linux in general:
1. Linux is complex, it is for system administrators, not normal people.
Basic tasks (surfing, music videos, etc.) are performed in Ubuntu no more difficult than in Windows, and sometimes easier (see the above installation of programs). Yes, there is a console, but most of the basic tasks can be performed via a graphical interface: for example, to install a VLC video player, you can enter “sudo apt-get install vlc” in the console, or you can go to the “Ubuntu App Center”, enter “ vlc ”, select it and click on“ install ”. Console and hotkeys are often used by Linux users not because they are very uncomfortable in the system, but because it becomes very convenient with them (if you spend time and learn). Without a GUI, with one console, you can stay if you want to do something atypical - but when you google the task name you want to accomplish, you can often find ready-made commands in the forums that you can only copy to the console if you don't understand what they mean. (Well, to be fair, atypical tasks in Windows are often even more difficult to accomplish.)
2. Linux is ugly, it is for system administrators, not girls with a burden to the beautiful.
First, Ubuntu does not look like an angular console monster from the 90s; many even believe that it mimics MacOS in part. Secondly, in Ubuntu there is much more uniformity of the system than in Windows: applications follow the same design rules, display alerts in the same way, and so on. There are exceptions to the uniform appearance (usually these are cross-platform applications that look the same as under other systems), but you can also stretch skins on some of them. Thirdly, if you put appearance at the forefront, then with the help of Compiz Fusion, you can make Ubuntu look more impressive than Windows and customize its appearance (there is, for example, such a movie - not the most revealing, but you can understand the essence).
3. Under Linux there are no programs / games I need.
It depends on what needs. Programs to perform all the basic tasks there. Specific - depends on the specific situation. AutoCAD, let's say, plainly isn’t (although they say that alternatives are getting better and more compatible with it), and most of AutoCAD, even with the love of Linux, leaves the second Windows system to work. There are games, including good ones, but there are no fresh blockbusters. (However, blockbusters are now less and less on Windows, they are mostly on consoles.)
If after this text someone decides to try Ubuntu and needs more detailed information, you can find it, for example, at ubuntologia.ru or help.ubuntu.ru/manual , and here at forum.ubuntu.ru (well, here in the comments ) you can ask the question.
Immediately I warn you that much is given in the text in a somewhat simplified version, so that the essence is immediately clear; if someone after this post decides to go on, he will still read more detailed texts, so he will know the correct wording. I also want to say that I don’t persuade everyone to switch to Ubuntu at all; The system has shortcomings, for someone they may well be critical, and in the text I tried to state everything impartially.
')
What is it all for (main advantages):
1. A practical plus: the system is free (like most programs for it). Windows, of course, can also be obtained for free in a known way - but it can suddenly find out about it, or (when installed in the workplace), those who came to check can find out about it, or, finally, your conscience can know about it. In addition, under Windows, you also have to fool around, extracting each program in a known way - with some it can be difficult.
2. A practical plus: no viruses. You can safely stick any flash drives brought by friends and go to any (including those you thought about) sites. Update: in the comments indicated that the theoretical possibility of infecting a computer exists, but in practice it is still extremely rare.
3. A practical plus: it is more convenient to do some things (more detailed below) than in Windows.
4. A practical plus for geeks: flexible configuration. If you are ready to “work with a file,” you can almost get the system of your dreams.
5. Plus for the curious: the horizons become wider. And not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively: when you see two different approaches to one thing, you begin to look at these things differently.
6. Aesthetic plus: the interface of programs, alerts and other things designed in the same style. In addition, many people adore the “add-on system” of Compiz Fusion for both external effects and functionality (there is no full-fledged analogue of Compiz in Windows).
7. Ideological advantage: you are helping to create a Microsoft competition :) I don’t have anything important against Microsoft, Windows 7 is a good OS, but the very fact of competition would make both parties work more actively, and in the end everyone would be better off.
8. Ideological plus: bright ideals of open source. True, if it tells you something, then you are a programmer, and if you are a programmer, then you already know enough about Linux yourself. But even if it doesn’t say, know that you are supporting a good cause by the very fact of using Linux.
What you need to know if "interesting, but scary":
1. You can not install Ubuntu immediately "fully", there are three options that allow you to first look at it and understand, like it or not. One is installation using the Wubi installer, in which Ubuntu is installed inside Windows: then you don’t have to bother with partitioning the hard drive (which eliminates the danger of accidentally taking it all away) and can be easily removed. The second is to install the system on a flash drive (any volume from a gigabyte will do): you can boot from the flash drive and look at Ubuntu without making any changes to the hard drive of your computer. Moreover, if the system is pleasant, after that it can be installed on a computer from the same flash drive. Some even make the system on a flash drive their main one, so that, having come somewhere and sticking my flash drive into someone else's computer, I work at home, but I did not know it myself, I don’t know the details. The third way is to run inside Windows in a virtual machine (Ubuntu in this case runs as one of the Windows programs in the window).
2. With a “full-fledged” installation, Ubuntu perfectly stands up “side by side” with Windows, and you can use them alternately, choosing each time you turn on the computer which system to boot. On lifehacker.com there is a good English-language instruction for dual Ubuntu and Windows 7. If you really need someone, I will translate it into Russian.
What the Windows user will have during the transition are the main issues:
1. Installing applications: in Ubuntu, they are usually installed not from distribution files, but from server repositories. At first it is unusual, but then most of this approach begins to be liked much more than Windows; programs are put literally “in one click” without ten clicks on “next” and entering the serial number
2. The file system structure is noticeably different from Windows, there are no “C and D disks”; it takes time to get used to it, but then to many the structure seems more logical. At first, the most important thing to know is that NTFS partitions and external connected devices like mp3 players can be found by going from the root to the / media folder, and each user's “personal” folder is located in / home / username. (Here lies another plus: it is possible to save the “personal folder” when the system is completely reinstalled, and then the settings of all the programs will be saved.)
3. Compatible with Windows standards. Here everything is different. It is quite possible to communicate with Windows users via ICQ and Skype (although the Skype client is crooked now). With doc and xls at the household level, it works quite well in OpenOffice, but the big documents with complex formatting in it may not look quite like in Microsoft Office - it's better to write a diploma not in Linux, if you do not want Windows to see the skewed tables. There are problems with encodings in various situations (for example, Cyrillic in the names of files placed in a zip-archive and Cyrillic in the tags of mp3 files). There is almost always a way to cope with this, in some cases it is quite convenient, in part - a “crutch”. If this psychologically comforts the transitions, then know that it is Unicode that is used in Ubuntu, which is designed to solve all problems with encodings, and problems arise from the fact that Windows has not completely switched to it. There is also Wine, with which Windows applications are started under Linux - in the case of “heavy” programs, this can be difficult or impossible, but with a trifle, everything is much better (for example, you can run the Windows archiver in Wine and unpack the zip without problems with Cyrillic names files).
4. Support iron. Let's be honest - not all iron manufacturers think about Linux users, so it can get up to problems with some hardware, and for some peripherals there may not be official drivers. You can check in advance whether the system works properly on your hardware using the above flash drive, and for a part of the officially unsupported peripherals (for example, Yota modems), the drivers are written by the Linuxoids themselves. If you definitely need the support of a certain piece of hardware, but you don’t have it at hand, to test it in practice - google, you have already written about all popular iron Linuxokids on the Internet whether it is supported. No iTunes - some alternative solutions for iPods and iPhones exist, but, of course, this is not at all the same. Update: in the comments they say that sometimes even during normal operation of the system from a flash drive, problems arise after a full installation, I have not come across this myself.
5. Support for some popular things, including mp3, is not included in the system by default due to the fact that they are limited to patents and do not comply with the rules of open source. This is solved by installing one ubuntu-restricted-extras package.
6. This is an internet-based system; you can live without it in the Internet, but it is much worse. Therefore, if there is no normal access, this is an argument against the transition.
7. There are several (choose the exact value yourself) desktops, they look the same (the wallpaper icons are the same), and open windows can be scattered between them. At first it is not clear why this is, but then many people work out for themselves such an algorithm for placing windows, at which they become much more comfortable than with a single table.
8. When switching layouts by Ctrl + Shift, hotkeys of the form Ctrl + Shift + X do not work. In Linux, hotkeys work when you press a key and not release it, and it takes the start of Ctrl + Shift + X for the command to change the layout. There are workarounds, but at first it is easier to switch to Alt + Shift (but generally I recommend to put CapsLock on one layout and Shift + CapsLock on another, I don’t have to check which one is on now).
9. Partitioning the disk during installation: I cannot describe it in detail within this text, but it’s not hard to google the manual (for example). I can only say that if you want to alternately load Ubuntu and Windows and use the same files in them, you should allocate a place for the breakdown, assuming that Linux partitions are not visible from under Windows, so the “common” files should be stored in NTFS partitions. Update: in the comments suggest that there is a way to see the Linux partitions under Windows.
10. New major versions of Ubuntu are released every six months, in April and October, numbered by year and month of release ("April 9" - April 2009). Every fourth of them is called the LTS version (from “long-term support”: they have a longer period of official support), they are trying to make them as reliable as possible, and those who value stability are encouraged to use them only and update them every two days. of the year. The currently latest LTS version is 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”, non-LTS is 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat”.
Additional item. In practice, you will certainly encounter problems that are not mentioned here (in the comments you have already written that it is unusual to configure the wired Internet after Windows - I always connected only to Wi-Fi, so I can’t say anything). But there are practically no catastrophic for the average user. With most of them, you can either completely or partially cope by googling and reading the forums. It is possible that at first it will be necessary to google pretty, but you should not think that this is for life so - if you perform the tasks at the computer about the same each day, it will be settled. And another significant point: sitting under Ubuntu, it is desirable to realize that this is not “a different looking Windows”, but another system with a different logic - then some problems will become easier to solve.
The main myths about Ubuntu and Linux in general:
1. Linux is complex, it is for system administrators, not normal people.
Basic tasks (surfing, music videos, etc.) are performed in Ubuntu no more difficult than in Windows, and sometimes easier (see the above installation of programs). Yes, there is a console, but most of the basic tasks can be performed via a graphical interface: for example, to install a VLC video player, you can enter “sudo apt-get install vlc” in the console, or you can go to the “Ubuntu App Center”, enter “ vlc ”, select it and click on“ install ”. Console and hotkeys are often used by Linux users not because they are very uncomfortable in the system, but because it becomes very convenient with them (if you spend time and learn). Without a GUI, with one console, you can stay if you want to do something atypical - but when you google the task name you want to accomplish, you can often find ready-made commands in the forums that you can only copy to the console if you don't understand what they mean. (Well, to be fair, atypical tasks in Windows are often even more difficult to accomplish.)
2. Linux is ugly, it is for system administrators, not girls with a burden to the beautiful.
First, Ubuntu does not look like an angular console monster from the 90s; many even believe that it mimics MacOS in part. Secondly, in Ubuntu there is much more uniformity of the system than in Windows: applications follow the same design rules, display alerts in the same way, and so on. There are exceptions to the uniform appearance (usually these are cross-platform applications that look the same as under other systems), but you can also stretch skins on some of them. Thirdly, if you put appearance at the forefront, then with the help of Compiz Fusion, you can make Ubuntu look more impressive than Windows and customize its appearance (there is, for example, such a movie - not the most revealing, but you can understand the essence).
3. Under Linux there are no programs / games I need.
It depends on what needs. Programs to perform all the basic tasks there. Specific - depends on the specific situation. AutoCAD, let's say, plainly isn’t (although they say that alternatives are getting better and more compatible with it), and most of AutoCAD, even with the love of Linux, leaves the second Windows system to work. There are games, including good ones, but there are no fresh blockbusters. (However, blockbusters are now less and less on Windows, they are mostly on consoles.)
If after this text someone decides to try Ubuntu and needs more detailed information, you can find it, for example, at ubuntologia.ru or help.ubuntu.ru/manual , and here at forum.ubuntu.ru (well, here in the comments ) you can ask the question.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/106165/
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