My sister just bought a Dell Inspiron n15, which is well under $400 (it's a full-size laptop, mind, with specs about equal to or better than those of my old laptop, for which I paid >$2k half-a-decade ago). It comes with
Ubuntu installed and configured. This brings the number of people I've convinced to (at least attempt to) switch to Linux full-time to one (two if you count myself).
With the last few releases, I finally feel that my favorite distro is ready for primetime.
1 It's possible to do all your usual internet, media, and productivity stuff without wandering into the alien territory of the command-line (although the command-line functionality is most excellent should you choose to take advantage of it). The Add/Remove dialog in the applications menu provides direct and easy access to a vast library of software (unlike the somewhat mislabeled Windows dialog of the same name, which is really just /Remove). Commercially-produced games aside, the space of programs with no Linux alternative is
small and shrinking, especially if you include the fact that some Windows programs (especially older ones) run fine under
Wine.
2 You can
install Ubuntu as a program under Windows if you want to give the full-featured version a try without doing anything technical to your system. Replacing your operating system with Ubuntu is trivial. Setting your computer up to dual-boot takes a minimum of technical knowledge. Pretty much every desktop machine will cooperate right out of the box, ditto for almost all laptops.
3 If you don't want to download and burn a CD, you can get one
mailed to you for free. Software patches are more regular and painless than under Windows. Version upgrades are, in my experience, more frequent and easier than for Windows. People (like myself) with those new-fangled 64-bit processors (which let you have more RAM than you can shake a stick at) are also covered. It's great.
4 And did I mention it's free?
1 Many other members of the Linux family (from close siblings to distant cousins) may be ready to fulfill a similar role, Ubuntu is just the one I'm friendly with. Some flavors of Linux focus more exclusively on the needs of "power users", which makes them less suitable for this purpose but no less good. This abundance of variety is one of the advantages of Linux; even within the Ubuntu family there are distributions that come preadjusted to best fit the needs of teachers or artists. That's not something you can say about Windows, where the different "flavors" are pretty much just about paying more to have more features turned on.
2 My earlier objections about music players, mind, was not because there's a lack of good music players under Linux, just that transitioning from iTunes to anything else can be a bit tricky.
3 Laptop wireless drivers used to be the usual hardware-related weakness of Ubuntu, but out-of-the-box support for those has been much improved for recent versions, and I have yet to run into a particular instance of that problem I couldn't fix after plugging in an ethernet cable and consulting the Goog.
4 Especially compared to Windows Vista, which I found painfully awful. I'm not an anti-Microsoft partisan (although perhaps I should be), I have an XBox, I used XP almost every day for a great number of years, and XP was a fine operating system (as Windows 7 may yet be). Now, there are a lot of subtle and/or technical reasons why Linux is better, in terms of package management and free software and security and so on, but pre-Vista, the best layperson-directed argument was price. So thanks to Microsoft for producing the worst operating system since Windows ME, making it clear why alternatives to paying for Microsoft's latest every time you buy a new system are so welcome.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
