Ubuntu Linux 8.04 Desktop Edition product reviews

Having dabbled with various incarnations of Linux in the past and having had never found one that did what I wanted it to do I decided it was time to try another one. This time I decided on Ubuntu 8.04 (or Hardy Heron as it is also known). I had never tried Ubuntu before, so when I saw a magazine article with the headline "The new Vista Killer' I knew I had to give it a try.

Now the installation gave me some headaches with it starting to install and then crashing, so a bit of googling later and I had found the problem, I needed to install it in a safe mode so that it got past the some driver issues.

Once the installation was done and the build was up and running, I got down to the nitty gritty of thrashing this to it's limit and see how it goes, and well it goes very well, it's quick, looks good, relatively easy to use (it has a bit of a learning curve, but then so does Vista if you're coming from Windows XP), and has great support via the Ubuntu online forums.

Another thing I love about this is the Ubuntu equivalent of Add/Remove programs where as well as removing any installed programs, you can also download and install a program from a rather extensive list of free programs, applications, utilities and games.

The next thing to try was the WINE application (WINE is an application that allows some Windows programs to run natively in Linux), using this program I was able to get various applications running including Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 and my favourite bittorrent client uTorrent.

In summary this is a great product and if you don't have any specific reason to need to be running Windows I would suggest changing to Ubuntu.