I was interested to read PC Pro Magazine’s experimental day with Ubuntu linux. Essentially what they did was converted their office to Ubuntu instead of Windows/OSX by either dual-booting or installing in virtual machines. I have to say, it was quite a brave exercise. To convert a production environment to running on a different operating system would normally require lots of planning and would undergo much testing to ensure that all the relevant hardware worked properly.
The day wasn’t entirely problem-free, however. The biggest bugbear was Outlook, or lack thereof. My days of using an email client are pretty much over now – I use Gmail all the time now – but Ubuntu includes Evolution. I find it works well with a single email account, but I’ve never tried hooking it up to Exchange. Apparently it doesn’t do this very well. Perhaps this is something that the OpenOffice/LibreOffice teams should be looking at next.
Graphics support was also a bit iffy for one of their users, and even the Canonical engineer was unable to resolve it completely. Again, in an office environment this would have been tested before rolling it out, but it’s liable to put off home users who are trying out the OS for the first time, especially if they’re unfamiliar with the system.
Apart from the issues with Outlook, everyone seemed to get on fairly well with the rest of the software. OpenOffice is fairly straightforward to use for everyday document processing. They discovered Pidgin for instant messaging, and Gwibber for the likes of Twitter and Facebook.
Overall, it seems that the experiment was a success. You’re never going to get 100% success running Ubuntu in an office environment without some tweaking. Given time to find the right applications for the right job, a task made fairly easy by Ubuntu’s software centre, I think they’d have found a happy solution. While the default apps included in the OS allow most standard tasks to be achieved, it took me a long time to get the right setup for my needs. It took me a long time to do the same with Windows too. The beauty of Ubuntu is that it doesn’t cost anything (in monetary terms anyway) to play around with different things.
So, would I persuade the ordinary Windows user to switch? Yes, but do it gradually. Get a feel for the apps first. Install Firefox or Chrome and use that instead of IE. I recently had to use IE on a machine that didn’t have either installed and I found it to be excruciatingly slow in comparison. Instead of Windows Live Messenger, use Pidgin. The same app can be used for Google Talk, Yahoo, ICQ and Facebook chat. Install OpenOffice or LibreOffice to use instead of MS Office, for financial reasons more than anything else – they’re both free. Whatever you do on Windows, there’s usually an open source alternative that will run on Windows. Try out the OS itself to get a feel for the desktop environment. It’s different, but it’s not difficult. Try installing with Wubi, a live CD, or install on a flash drive. If you’re feeling a bit more brave, go for a dual-boot configuration and you can have the best of both worlds.
Linux isn’t going to go away. It underpins Android, and now HP have announced that their WebOS will be available on tablet and desktop machines, so it’ll become much more prevalent in the future. It’s all about choice. I’ve had the choice for a while now, but to the average Joe Bloggs buying a PC on the high street, there has been very little. Hopefully that’s all about to change.
