It’s the little things, ya know? Just right-clicked on my Ubuntu menu bar and unlocked it, moved it where I wanted it and set it to autohide. Did the same for my taskbar.
Just like on all my Windows boxes.
“Aunt Tilly” would probably be just as happy with the Dapper Drake (6.06.x) release of Ubuntu Linux as with Windows or just about any other GUI-oriented OS. It’s remarkably simple to navigate around the Ubuntu GUI, invoke apps, etc. Connecting to the internet was as easy as running the connect wizard. The default browser(Firefox) is just so-so, but at least it beats the heck out of Windows’ default browser (although IE7 is almost caught up to last-generation modern browsers in most areas, and is caught up in a very few).
By default, an Ubuntu install already has all the office type apps most people need right out of the box. Open Office 2.x is a very, very capable office suite. My Wonder Woman is still stuck using M$ Office 2003 for some classes (required software), and it sometimes surprises me how it sometimes seems to lack usable features (like generating pdfs from within the app, natively–a very useful feature for me) compared to Open Office. Yeh, Microsoft is adding soe of those real world features to M$Office now, too…
Evolution Email/calendaring? I’ve looked at it and it seems quite capable, though I still use Opera for my email client and am still stuck on a Windows machine for my calendaring cos I’ve not found a good (enough) replacement under Linux for my Palm Desktop software, though I will probably give KPilot a tryout this weekend. Confessrion: What I really need is a good linux app to convert plain text to Palm eBook format. Yeh, yeh, I know I can keep on doing that on the Windows machine I now manage my Palm from, but if I can get it all on an Ubuntu box…
Graphics, music, video: it’s all there, although that is one area where maybe “Aunt Tilly” might need help getting started with Ubuntu (although I do a lot of comp ed client calls to folks more comp literate than “Aunt Tilly” helping out in those areas, anyway).
It’s fun, but I’m still missing a Windows emulator that is close enough to allow me to run the ONE program I cannot run without a genuine Windows install (and no, it won’t work well under a Virtual Machine, either). So, no matter how much of my computing I switch to Linux boxes, I’m still shackled to Windows, probably for life, until someone makes a Linux program that will do?-and do as well–everything that Encore (music transcription software) does… and read and write Encore files.
But for most folks, highlyspecialized software barriers simply won’t matter. Plain beige boxes (or, what the heck, paint ’em any colrs you want!) without any MessySoft software at all would do ’em as well (or better) in their emailing, web surfing and other common computing tasks, as long as it’s running software as well done as Dapper Drake.