Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is a great operating system for people to do stuff like browse the internet, check e-mail, type out a document, spreadsheets, watch videos and listen to music.
Starting up the liveCD and installling Ubuntu is pretty quick. Ubuntu also does not use a lot of system resources. Ubuntu is also a very stable Operating System it rarely crashes in my experience.
If you want to run Ubuntu from a flash drive or external hard drive you can use the “Start up disc creator” found in Ubuntu in Administrator menu.
I have to say my favourite program on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is Gwibber Social Chat since it lets me twett on Twitter on my desktop. I no longer have to go to Twitter’s Homepage with Firefox web browser, login, and twett. I can just twett from the confort of my desktop on Ubuntu with Gwibber Social Chat.
Empathy is also a good Instant Messenger for talking to friends on Aim, MSN, and other IM networks.
The default wallpaper which comes with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is alright if you like purple 3Dish wallpapers. However, Ubuntu also comes with some pretty nice photo wallpapers. If you do not like the default wallpapers. It is very easy to change the default wallpapers in Ubuntu appearance preferences. You can also use Firefox to go to your favourite wallpaper website and search for a nice wallpaper to add to Ubuntu desktop background.
The new darkgrey theme looks very slick, but having the close minimize/maximize, and close buttons on the top right is something I need to get used to since I’m used to Window behavior buttons on the top right. It is also very easy to change your animation, themes, and text type in Ubuntu. The animations and shortcut keys are very cool. I also like how Ubuntu use workspaces so your desktop is not too clutterd. I notice Ubuntu’s live CD has problems detecting my default LCD resolution of 1024 x1048 pixels. I could only set my resolution up to 1024 X 768 pixels.
The free games which come with Ubuntu LTS 10.04 are pretty good for people who like Mah jung, solitaire, memory games, mine sweeprer, tetris, or Soduku.
I’m kind of sad that Gimp image editor is no longer bundled with Ubuntu since Gimp is a pretty good image editing program for Ubuntu and other Linux distro. This is not a big deal for me since I can download and install Gimp from the internet very easily.
I also noticed there is no FTP program for using to upload files to a FTP server. I wished that Ubuntu included FileZilla FTP client. It is great that Ubuntu included a Bittorrent client called Transmission since a lot of Linux Distros, open source software, free music, and videos use Bittorrent as a way to share software with people.
Ubuntu included a Word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail, calender, and dictionary program. But, Ubuntu did not include a Database program.
Ubuntu also comes with Media players for playing music and videos files, but they do not look as great as players made for Windows like Winamp, or Foobar.
If you mainly watch most of your videos online, it is very easy to install Flash in Ubuntu Software Centre. Flash is used to play video on popular video sharing sites like Youtube and Dailymotion. However, I notice that playing HD videos on Youtube might lag in Ubuntu depending on your video card.
The video editing program called Pitivi did not work very well for me compared to Windows Movie Maker or other video editing tools I tried.
Ubuntu live CD did not have any problems recognizing any of my drives which include my system drives, external USB drive, and USB flash drives. It is also very east to mount, unmount, and eject drives in Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS also comes with a cloud application which gives you freespace on the UbuntuOne cloud storage server. You can also buy music from the Cloud store.
The Live CD did not detect the right time, and changing the time was somewhat awkward, but not hard to do.
Ubuntu also included an application called Gparted for resizing or making a new partition to install Ubuntu on a dual boot computer.
Ubuntu is great for file recovery when your Operating System won’t boot unless your drives are encrypted. Ubuntu is also good to use to test to see if your Soundcard, video card, keyboard, mouse, printer, speakers, and other devices still work on your computer if your main OS can not play sound or do other things.
Ubuntu 10.04 is also great for file recovery with the LiveCD. However, the live CD copy stuff kind of slow in my experience it took 3 minutes to copy a 100MB file.
With only Gwibber Social chat running, Ubuntu only uses 10% of my Intel Core2Dou 1.8 Ghz CPU resources and uses only 285MB of my 1000MB of RAM on my computer.
Suspend/Sleep also works on my HP a1720n computer. Though, it takes a while to wake up. During sleep only the on/off button, RAM and a few other things are on, but the system fans, CPU, keyboard, and mouse are all off. I need to press the power button on my PC to turn everything back on.
Shutdown speeds are also very quick in Ubuntu 10.04.
My Canon MP130 all in one printer could not be set up to print or scan. But, I can set up my HP Laserjet 1000 to print text, but it can’t print images for some reason.
The bottum margins are also very short like a few millimetres for text documents I print out with OpenOffice.
I like the network testing tools that come with Ubuntu like Ping, trace route, etc. They have an easy to use User interface design.
System Monitor also works very well and looks good, but it shows a lot of running programs by default, so it is hard to find specific programs like firefox in system monitor.
I notice also in the Live CD if you changed the sound profiles in Sound preferences you can’t get your sound back. You need to change the sound back to “Analog stereo default” and log off and back on.
An another annoyance of the logoff in Ubuntu 10.04 is not knowing the login password for the Ubuntu live CD, so I can’t log back in. I need to restart the Live CD.
I also find it annoying that Ubuntu did not code in auto close CD drive when I remove the LiveCD and press enter. This caused my computer CD tray to be open, but my PC is off.
In Summary Ubuntu can be a great operating system for most people’s needs like E-mail, instant messaging, web browsing, playing linux based games, web designing, coding in non-windows languages, doing homework, cloud computing, and many other tasks. But, if you need it to do something very specific, you need to manually install software for doing a specific task like Video editing. The minor things like driver problems make Ubuntu somewhat of a hassle to use. Ubuntu is good because it is not as vulnerable to Windows viruses, spyware, and malware compared to Windows. Plus, your kids are less likely to mess it up by installing tons of programs on your PC if they are using a non-admin account or do not have much knowledge of Linux.
Download Ubuntu 10.04 LTS at ubuntu.com