Moving From Windows 7 to Ubuntu 11.10 – Day 30 – The Verdict

Day 30 using Ubuntu 11.10 has arrived. It has been a fairly pleasant experience thus far and a wealth of knowledge has been soaked up. Over the course of the past weeks I have been able to really put this release through its paces and found both things I absolutely adore along with a number of challenges.

The Upside

Ubuntu 11.10 offers a significant improvement to the Unity experience when compared to the previous release. The improved Dash is much more useful combined with the built-in filters and additional lenses that are available. I found that I usually just hit the “Windows” key to pull up the launcher and then started typing the application name and then hit enter. I figure this was easily 80% of my typical usage rather than navigating the various menus and such.

My experience with Gnome 3 shell has been even better than Unity. This is indeed my preferred shell on Ubuntu 11.10. A number of features made this a smoother was to work for myself. First, Gnome 3 honored my settings in the Nvidia driver settings of a primary display in a multi-monitor setup. This was a key for me as when at the office I wanted my large Samsung to be my primary as it is eye level for my standing position during the day. Unity failed to honor the primary display setting relegating my laptop screen down on my desk as the primary. This was inconvenient at best. Gnome 3 won the primary display settings battle.

Gnome 3 also does not make you define the number of virtual desktops. Instead the way that desktops are added as needed is spectacular in my opinion. This flexibility is ideal for someone like me who works on a many different types of projects on a given day.

As always, the memory footprint, responsiveness and use of system resources is far better than any Windows operating systems. This has allowed me to run my primary Ubuntu OS plus more virtual machines at the same time. This has certainly been refreshing to see and monitor.

The Downside

The compatibility of LibreOffice with Microsoft Office formats is still somewhat lacking. LibreOffice works great for standard spreadsheets, document and presentations. Unfortunately, I receive a few highly formatted Microsoft Word documents each week that when opened in LibreOffice fail to render properly. In fact, other than a few blocks of text visible on page 1, the rest of the pages just show empty. This is just about a deal killer as I need to be able to read and review these documents. We even attempted to convert those to PDF documents, however they still rendered oddly.

Another difficulty is the lack of a GoTo Meeting / GoTo Webinar client for Linux. We use Goto Meeting for many of our calls that are more than 2 or 3 people. To my complete surprise, there is no client for Linux. In my attempt to keep Ubuntu as my operating system, I created a Windows 7 virtual machine in VirtualBox (with the extension pack) and figured I’d pass through the audio input/output and camera. The audio and video pass-through worked fairly well, but the camera support work only sporadically and was very poor to unusable. I finally had to power on an old Dell Laptop with Windows 7 on it and an external camera to do the GoTo Meeting appointments while I looked for a work around.

Finally, managing Windows servers from Ubuntu requires a lot of Terminal Services / vSphere console sessions. Again, it seemed weird but there is no Linux client for vSphere. I figured that I would just use the web client. This worked well up until the point I wanted to view and use the VM console. I could never get the console for the web client to work in Chrome, Chromium nor Firefox. This forced me to enable and use Terminal Services to connect and manage the servers. Not too bad but the native terminal client frankly, kinda such as it lacks many basic options. I’d been using Remmina Desktop to be able to save sessions and settings and leverage screen and console advanced options. Again, I was let down as the Remmina Desktop would lock up and run-away with RAM/CPU periodically if a session was left to timeout. I still have not found a good solution here.

The Bottom Line

Now we are the decision point and I must clear my conscience and confess. The downsides are but three of the most prominent issues I ran into. They are not the only issues. However, I see those issues as mostly being issues only because of working in a Windows shop. Even so, they have proved to be disruptive and have blocked some of my productivity and ability to interact with others efficiently. (You can only ask your remote colleagues “can you see me now?” so many times at the beginning of a call before *you* become what is holding the meeting back.)

So, I’ve had no choice but to format and move back to Windows 7 as my daily driver. Oh how this pains me! The first time I logged back into Windows 7, MS Outlook and Chrome on Windows, I felt defeated. Things were so sluggish and lacking in effective control compared to my extended run with Ubuntu. Alas, it is what had to be done.

Does this mean I’m done with Linux? No, not by any means. I know that I can find ways to work around the previously mentioned issues so I can be productive while not negatively impacting the effectiveness of others. So, I’ll be keeping Ubuntu (or other distros) in a virtual machine and testing as time permits. Now that I’ve had an extended taste of Ubuntu, I really see the appeal beyond just a great platform for us geeks, but as a real alternative to the Microsoft operating system monopoly.

Now….if only MacOS would turn open-source or be able to be installed easily on commodity Intel hardware.

As always, share your thoughts and experience. Got a solution for me, let me know by posting a comment below.

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