Ubuntu feedback from a Windows user

Bryn · Apr 26, 2013

I've been running the latest Ubuntu today in the hope of being able to switch to it permanently, and here's my feedback and queries:

- The responsiveness of the OS and lack of clutter are its greatest strengths imo.
- Libreoffice seems decent
- Thunderbird sucks. Vertical view is crippled by the view layout of the list of messages. Compare to Outlook or Live Mail to see what I'm talking about. Two lines per message header is much, much more practical, as the subject and sender fields gets loads more space.
- Every app isn't zoomed in quite right. I didn't find a way to fix this. Very annoying being slightly too zoomed out and needing to manually correct it all the time.
- My wireless Microsoft keyboard doesn't play nicely with Ubuntu. Every time I use caps, it sticks for a fraction of a second and the second letter gets capitalised too when I type quickly. Massively annoying.
- My cursor moves too quickly. The mouse settings only seem to set click rates. What the hell...
- I can't seem to minimise apps by clicking the icon in the launcher. Very annoying, not sure what I'm doing wrong. I run everything full screen.
- The music players are pretty bad if I'm honest. The new iTunes sucks too, but at least it meticulously manages my files and folders. What do you guys use? Automatic file organisation is a must.
- I can't get file sharing to work over the network. Family members were not pleased with me.
- Evernote isn't available on Linux! Nevernote is manageable, but just not as nice.
- I'd forgotten that most of my Steam games wouldn't be supported. What an inconvenience. At least Civ 5 and Witcher 2 work. If only Tropico 4 did too.
- Scrolling is too fast. Not sure how to slow it down.
- No Photoshop. Wine sounds like it can sort this out though. I wonder if iTunes would work with it?

I think that's it. If I didn't have most of the above issues I would happily switch, and run the occasional problem app in Wine. I couldn't test as extensively as I'd have liked to because the family was getting annoyed with my shared stuff being unavailable. All feedback for my feedback most welcome.

Blackout · Apr 26, 2013

Hey man, the caps sticking problem happens on all keyboards as far as I know.
Using ubuntu on my laptop and desktop and both have the same problem.

Also if you want to run windows apps within linux download "playonlinux": http://www.playonlinux.com/en/download.html
Uses wine to install windows applications.
They have a list of applications that are supported with many many games.
If an app isnt "supported" you can still install it and it will generally work with minimum bugs.

At the moment I am running microsoft office, paint and some other applications on my ubuntu

I'm not quite sure about iTunes as I havent tried it, but get play on linux and try it out

Fudzy · Apr 26, 2013

Nice post OP. I enjoy dabbling in Linux but I can't ever see it replacing Windows.

d0b33 · Apr 26, 2013

Gaming is my only issue, I do everything else on my macbook. If all my steam games are supported I will switch

Bryn · Apr 26, 2013

ZMel said:
Hey man, the caps sticking problem happens on all keyboards as far as I know.
Using ubuntu on my laptop and desktop and both have the same problem.

Also if you want to run windows apps within linux download "playonlinux": http://www.playonlinux.com/en/download.html
Uses wine to install windows applications.
They have a list of applications that are supported with many many games.
If an app isnt "supported" you can still install it and it will generally work with minimum bugs.

At the moment I am running microsoft office, paint and some other applications on my ubuntu
I'm not quite sure about iTunes as I havent tried it, but get play on linux and try it out

Thanks! The keyboard issue is very troubling. Surely this is a major problem? I'd have thought it would have been addressed by now. It was present in Ubuntu 10.1 or whatever version I last checked out.

Fudzy said:
Nice post OP. I enjoy dabbling in Linux but I can't ever see it replacing Windows.

Honestly, it felt great booting up to Windows again. Some of those issues I mentioned are really taxing. I do miss the quickness though - my system isn't laggy but Ubuntu is faster.

Blackout · Apr 26, 2013

I've found the keyboard issue especially annoying whilst developing, I find myself misnaming things very often without realising :/

I currently use it on my laptop for developing purely but I'm starting to enjoy it the more I get used to it.
Maybe try a dual boot? Play around with it a bit more for some simple things for a while and see how it goes

Fudzy · Apr 26, 2013

Bryn26 said:
Honestly, it felt great booting up to Windows again. Some of those issues I mentioned are really taxing. I do miss the quickness though - my system isn't laggy but Ubuntu is faster.

Are you using a SSD drive? I've found the performance remarkable.

Bryn · Apr 26, 2013

Fudzy said:
Are you using a SSD drive? I've found the performance remarkable.

Nope. I'm sure SSD's are fast, although I can't express a qualified opinion. I'm not talking about boot up times just to be clear - the actual Ubuntu OS is really fast.

Fudzy · Apr 26, 2013

It's more to do with moving between apps. I can comfortably pause a game to Skype, go back in without the hard-drive going into a flat spin and delaying the process.

DrJohnZoidberg · Apr 26, 2013

Bryn26 said:
I've been running the latest Ubuntu today in the hope of being able to switch to it permanently, and here's my feedback and queries:

- The responsiveness of the OS and lack of clutter are its greatest strengths imo.

Glad to hear, last Ubuntu was very slow for me but I hear they focused on this a lot with this release.

- Libreoffice seems decent

It does the job but I still always install MS Office with wine, nothing works as well as MS Excel for me.

- Thunderbird sucks. Vertical view is crippled by the view layout of the list of messages. Compare to Outlook or Live Mail to see what I'm talking about. Two lines per message header is much, much more practical, as the subject and sender fields gets loads more space.

I love Thunderbird. It is very customizable and I love the multiple account support so all my mailboxes are centralised in to one app. I struggle a little with our MS Exchange calendar but there are addons for TB that work okay but they're not perfect.

- Every app isn't zoomed in quite right. I didn't find a way to fix this. Very annoying being slightly too zoomed out and needing to manually correct it all the time.

Don't quite know what you mean here. Sounds more like a badly written app then and not with the OS itself.

- My wireless Microsoft keyboard doesn't play nicely with Ubuntu. Every time I use caps, it sticks for a fraction of a second and the second letter gets capitalised too when I type quickly. Massively annoying.

Never noticed this with any of my keyboards. I'm currently using a Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse combo and I have no issues, it is very responsive (except when my batteries die

)

- My cursor moves too quickly. The mouse settings only seem to set click rates. What the hell...

Umm, last time I checked it was called mouse sensitivity in the Mouse and Touchpad settings option. Doubt they would remove such an important config.

- I can't seem to minimise apps by clicking the icon in the launcher. Very annoying, not sure what I'm doing wrong. I run everything full screen.

I gave up on the Unity interface, didn't work for me so I'm trying cinnamon now. I also really enjoyed working with Gnome shell as its very snappy and well laid out.

- The music players are pretty bad if I'm honest. The new iTunes sucks too, but at least it meticulously manages my files and folders. What do you guys use? Automatic file organisation is a must.

Banshee does this. I just use Plex for all my media needs though.

- I can't get file sharing to work over the network. Family members were not pleased with me.

You'll have to install Samba, look for guides on the interwebz. It's pretty straight forward though and once installed you can just share folders like on a Windows machine.

- Evernote isn't available on Linux! Nevernote is manageable, but just not as nice.

Sorry, never used it.

- I'd forgotten that most of my Steam games wouldn't be supported. What an inconvenience. At least Civ 5 and Witcher 2 work. If only Tropico 4 did too.

Still in the very early stages, more games will be added as time goes on but you'll have to be patient.

- Scrolling is too fast. Not sure how to slow it down.

Never noticed any issues with this before, but then what scrolling?

- No Photoshop. Wine sounds like it can sort this out though. I wonder if iTunes would work with it?

Older versions of Photoshop will work with wine okay (CS3, CS4). iTunes is an abomination on wine, don't waste your time.

Unless you do serious graphical work though and require certain Photoshop functionality or plugins I would much rather use Gimp. It's native and actually a very powerful application.

I think that's it. If I didn't have most of the above issues I would happily switch, and run the occasional problem app in Wine. I couldn't test as extensively as I'd have liked to because the family was getting annoyed with my shared stuff being unavailable. All feedback for my feedback most welcome.

I would recommend you try out Linux Mint. It's based on Ubuntu so apps are all compatible but has all the small things already sorted for you like network file sharing, media codecs, etc. Never thought I would recommend it to anybody but after using it for a while now I find it pretty solid.

Good luck with your Linux quest! If you have any questions feel free to ask here.

Bryn · Apr 26, 2013

DrJohnZoidberg said:
Glad to hear, last Ubuntu was very slow for me but I hear they focused on this a lot with this release.

It does the job but I still always install MS Office with wine, nothing works as well as MS Excel for me.

I love Thunderbird. It is very customizable and I love the multiple account support so all my mailboxes are centralised in to one app. I struggle a little with our MS Exchange calendar but there are addons for TB that work okay but they're not perfect.

Thanks for the detailed responses! Thunderbird has had some minor visual changes since I last used it that make it much more professional, but the layout is still an issue for me. Do you use the default view? Outlook, Live Mail, Gmail, Yahoo, mobile clients etc. all have a similar design for message headers. It is so frustrating that Thunderbird won't get with the times.

DrJohnZoidberg said:
Don't quite know what you mean here. Sounds more like a badly written app then and not with the OS itself.

It could be app specific. Mozilla makes Firefox and Thunderbird, and those are the apps getting on my nerves. My resolution settings are 1920x1080, and I'm using a 27" monitor.

DrJohnZoidberg said:
Never noticed this with any of my keyboards. I'm currently using a Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse combo and I have no issues, it is very responsive (except when my batteries die )

How weird that some of us have issues but not others with such vital functionality. I wouldn't mind getting the Logitech MK710 wireless desktop, maybe that will fix the problems. My current Microsoft desktop also has no toggle lights, and provides a small pop-up on-screen in Windows. Not having it in Linux is killing me.

DrJohnZoidberg said:
Umm, last time I checked it was called mouse sensitivity in the Mouse and Touchpad settings option. Doubt they would remove such an important config.

Hmm. Maybe I suffered temporary blindness. Will look when I'm running Ubuntu again.

DrJohnZoidberg said:
I gave up on the Unity interface, didn't work for me so I'm trying cinnamon now. I also really enjoyed working with Gnome shell as its very snappy and well laid out.

How does Cinnamon differ in appearance? I actually quite like Unity, I would just prefer that it was able to minimise and maximise apps. That's like 50% of what I need it for.

DrJohnZoidberg said:
Banshee does this. I just use Plex for all my media needs though.

You'll have to install Samba, look for guides on the interwebz. It's pretty straight forward though and once installed you can just share folders like on a Windows machine.

Will check these out.

DrJohnZoidberg said:
Still in the very early stages, more games will be added as time goes on but you'll have to be patient.

Never noticed any issues with this before, but then what scrolling?

DirectX will always be an issue I think. I mostly play games on Playstation and Android, so maybe I'll just finish up with my Windows only games and stick to Linux compatible games moving forward. Civilization is my favourite PC game by far, and that's not Windows exclusive.

I'm talking about normal every day scrolling, like in a web browser or office document. I find Ubuntu too fast. Might be my mouse though.

DrJohnZoidberg said:
Older versions of Photoshop will work with wine okay (CS3, CS4). iTunes is an abomination on wine, don't waste your time.

Unless you do serious graphical work though and require certain Photoshop functionality or plugins I would much rather use Gimp. It's native and actually a very powerful application.

I particularly like CS6 because of content aware. Is there any other app capable of something similar? It's an absolute godsend when touching up images.

DrJohnZoidberg said:
I would recommend you try out Linux Mint. It's based on Ubuntu so apps are all compatible but has all the small things already sorted for you like network file sharing, media codecs, etc. Never thought I would recommend it to anybody but after using it for a while now I find it pretty solid.

Good luck with your Linux quest! If you have any questions feel free to ask here.

Thanks again! I will investigate Mint.

SauRoNZA · Apr 26, 2013

Bryn26 said:
- Thunderbird sucks. Vertical view is crippled by the view layout of the list of messages. Compare to Outlook or Live Mail to see what I'm talking about. Two lines per message header is much, much more practical, as the subject and sender fields gets loads more space.

Might want to have a look at Geary.

- Every app isn't zoomed in quite right. I didn't find a way to fix this. Very annoying being slightly too zoomed out and needing to manually correct it all the time.

No clue what you are referring to here.

- I can't seem to minimise apps by clicking the icon in the launcher. Very annoying, not sure what I'm doing wrong. I run everything full screen.

Not sure if it can do that even, but it sounds to me like you want Ubuntu to work exactly like Windows...because that's how you are trying to use it.

Why obsess about minimising? Leave everything open and just switch windows. Clicking the icon should show you all open windows and therefore make it quite easy to switch.

- The music players are pretty bad if I'm honest. The new iTunes sucks too, but at least it meticulously manages my files and folders. What do you guys use? Automatic file organisation is a must.

I don't really do music on my Linux machine, bit are you sure this isn't just a feature that is off by default and needs to be switched on?

- I can't get file sharing to work over the network. Family members were not pleased with me.

Odd, this should work out of the box. A
What are you trying to do? Maybe you are just going about it wrong.

- Evernote isn't available on Linux! Nevernote is manageable, but just not as nice.

Try Everpad.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/use-evernote-in-ubuntu-with-everpad

- Scrolling is too fast. Not sure how to slow it down.

Something is most certainly wrong with your mouse/keyboard and you maybe just need to install the proprietary driver.

You have way too many mouse and keyboard related issues that certainly aren't normal. I find scrolling too slow most of the time.

- No Photoshop. Wine sounds like it can sort this out though. I wonder if iTunes would work with it?

There are a number of Linux alternatives but they come with a learning curve so all depends how hardcore you are in Photoshop.

I've never had success with ITunes under wine.

Bryn · Apr 26, 2013

SauRoNZA said:
Might want to have a look at Geary.

No clue what you are referring to here.

Not sure if it can do that even, but it sounds to me like you want Ubuntu to work exactly like Windows...because that's how you are trying to use it.

Why obsess about minimising? Leave everything open and just switch windows. Clicking the icon should show you all open windows and therefore make it quite easy to switch.

I don't really do music on my Linux machine, bit are you sure this isn't just a feature that is off by default and needs to be switched on?

Odd, this should work out of the box. A
What are you trying to do? Maybe you are just going about it wrong.

Try Everpad.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/use-evernote-in-ubuntu-with-everpad

Something is most certainly wrong with your mouse/keyboard and you maybe just need to install the proprietary driver.

You have way too many mouse and keyboard related issues that certainly aren't normal. I find scrolling too slow most of the time.

There are a number of Linux alternatives but they come with a learning curve so all depends how hardcore you are in Photoshop.

I've never had success with ITunes under wine.

Will check out Geary. I don't think Everpad will help, unless it syncs with Evernote.

I was talking about the size of text in Firefox and Thunderbird. The text isn't disproportionate to image sizes, so it just looks zoomed out. I'm forever resizing webpages to a more comfortable size for reading. It's something I've ever had to think about on Windows.

With file sharing, I just want to access the shared folders on my home network, and have others access my shared folders.

It's clear now that a different wireless desktop will solve my typing and scrolling issues.

I'm not that much of a Photoshop expert, but I rely heavily on content aware. In CS6 you can remove artefacts, entire objects and people, fill in gaps etc. in less than a minute. That stuff is a colossal headache to achieve by conventional means.

Forgive my lack of specific replies. Took ages on Tapatalk with my previous post.

SauRoNZA · Apr 26, 2013

Everpad syncs with Evernote, which is why I recommended it.

Also you shouldn't need to change hardware to make software work, you change software to make hardware work.

Chances are you just need to install proprietary drivers, remember Ubuntu being open source doesn't do this by default.

I can't recall now exactly where to find it but if you open the software centre and select preferences or sources from the menu it should be on the very last tab.

Your graphics drivers probably aren't installed either which might be why the text isn't rendering correctly.

DrJohnZoidberg · Apr 26, 2013

Bryn26 said:
Will check out Geary. I don't think Everpad will help, unless it syncs with Evernote.

I was talking about the size of text in Firefox and Thunderbird. The text isn't disproportionate to image sizes, so it just looks zoomed out. I'm forever resizing webpages to a more comfortable size for reading. It's something I've ever had to think about on Windows.

With file sharing, I just want to access the shared folders on my home network, and have others access my shared folders.

It's clear now that a different wireless desktop will solve my typing and scrolling issues.

I'm not that much of a Photoshop expert, but I rely heavily on content aware. In CS6 you can remove artefacts, entire objects and people, fill in gaps etc. in less than a minute. That stuff is a colossal headache to achieve by conventional means.

Forgive my lack of specific replies. Took ages on Tapatalk with my previous post.

Maybe your fonts are just too large? I always take my global font size down one notch.

Regarding CS6, looks like it may work (http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=25607) but not going to be ideal. Apps in wine are never the same really.

Bryn · Apr 27, 2013

SauRoNZA said:
Everpad syncs with Evernote, which is why I recommended it.

Also you shouldn't need to change hardware to make software work, you change software to make hardware work.

Chances are you just need to install proprietary drivers, remember Ubuntu being open source doesn't do this by default.

I can't recall now exactly where to find it but if you open the software centre and select preferences or sources from the menu it should be on the very last tab.

Your graphics drivers probably aren't installed either which might be why the text isn't rendering correctly.

Ah, sweet. Will follow up all of that tomorrow.

DrJohnZoidberg said:
Maybe your fonts are just too large? I always take my global font size down one notch.

Regarding CS6, looks like it may work (http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=25607) but not going to be ideal. Apps in wine are never the same really.

Too small maybe, not too large. I'm forever zooming in slightly. I'll check out my global font settings.

MyWorld · Apr 27, 2013

First off, I'm not a Ubuntu fan and also not a Unity or Gnome 3 fan since many of your complaints stem from the fact that they removed a lot of customization from their DE's and you have to hunt do on the internet what extra stuff to install to have an acceptable experience.
I'm heavily biased on this, and a lot of other people will disagree with this.

I would suggest you also try a KDE based distro, like OpenSUSE and see how you find that.

Bryn26 said:
- Libreoffice seems decent

It is all I use, so I would not know what to compare it to. The handful of times I had to work on Office 2010 I was pulling out my hair. Nothing was structured, menus all over the place and it took me longer to format the document than actually writing it!

- Thunderbird sucks. Vertical view is crippled by the view layout of the list of messages. Compare to Outlook or Live Mail to see what I'm talking about. Two lines per message header is much, much more practical, as the subject and sender fields gets loads more space.

I love Thunderbird since I do not need the advanced features like calander and whatnot Outlook provides. I find it very customizable and it just works for me, it does the job, a email client fullstop. There are other more elaborate clients in Linux but I'm not able to comment on them since it has been years since I last tried Evolution, Kmail and the likes.

- Every app isn't zoomed in quite right. I didn't find a way to fix this. Very annoying being slightly too zoomed out and needing to manually correct it all the time.

I have no idea what you mean by this, sorry.

- My wireless Microsoft keyboard doesn't play nicely with Ubuntu. Every time I use caps, it sticks for a fraction of a second and the second letter gets capitalised too when I type quickly. Massively annoying.

In KDE you can choose your keyboard make and version, mine for example is a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000, with almost full functionality. I do not have CAPS lock enabled on my keyboard. I also mapped the key to act like a shift key since I always used to hit it by accident while typing of playing games. I do not know of an easy way of doing this in Unity. I also have no problems with lag on my keyboard. I would have checked the Xorg logs (/var/log/Xorg.0.log) to see if something was not loading properly.

- My cursor moves too quickly. The mouse settings only seem to set click rates. What the hell...

There should be a setting to set the sensitivity, cursor speed, etc. You may have just missed it.

- I can't seem to minimise apps by clicking the icon in the launcher. Very annoying, not sure what I'm doing wrong. I run everything full screen.

Again, not sure what you mean by this. To minimize I just click one of the three icons, minimize, maximize, close, like any other operating system I would guess? To make the window smaller, shrink it a bit, just double click on the title bar.

- The music players are pretty bad if I'm honest. The new iTunes sucks too, but at least it meticulously manages my files and folders. What do you guys use? Automatic file organisation is a must.

I'm not big on music, but what I have used in 2013 is Banshee, Xnoise and Clementine with Clementine winning out for me personally, love it!

- I can't get file sharing to work over the network. Family members were not pleased with me.

Yes, this is a pain, and even I have given up on many occasions trying to get SAMBA/CIFS working. It would work from release to release. When I get stuck I just switch to ssh and sftp. In a filemanager, in the address bar -> sftp://[email protected]
Much faster and no need to set up shares, users, passwords and heaven knows what else.

- Evernote isn't available on Linux! Nevernote is manageable, but just not as nice.

Can't comment, don't use it or something similar.

- I'd forgotten that most of my Steam games wouldn't be supported. What an inconvenience. At least Civ 5 and Witcher 2 work. If only Tropico 4 did too.

Yes, Linux is slow on the gaming uptake, but then again it was never intended for this. We are making headway, slowly but surely.

- Scrolling is too fast. Not sure how to slow it down.

Again you should be able to set this in the mouse section of the configuration tools?

- No Photoshop. Wine sounds like it can sort this out though. I wonder if iTunes would work with it?

I use GIMP and after following a few online tutorials (I have no graphics designing background) I find it very, very powerful. There are other apps as well, but I keep going back to GIMP. I know it is not PhotoShop, but last time I checked you can use PhotoShop filters in GIMP?

Try and stay away from WINE and only use it for the most essential programs that you MUST have. It will save you time and effort to rather find a native solution that works for you. A couple of minutes on Google will give you a lot of alternatives to try and something is bound to strike your fancy if you give the suggestions a try. That is how I came across Clementine "best linux media players 2013" in Google does the trick every time!

AlphaJohn · Apr 27, 2013

Short one:

Outlook runs in wine, so does Photoshop 5(playonlinux helps with this). But I do find it better to install Windows in a VirtualBox and run it in seamless mode if I want to use dedicated windows, some games even work as Virtualbox has some 3D acceleration now.

There is not a single Mail application that can come close to Outlook.

InvisibleJim · Apr 27, 2013

AlphaJohn said:
Short one:

Outlook runs in wine, so does Photoshop 5(playonlinux helps with this). But I do find it better to install Windows in a VirtualBox and run it in seamless mode if I want to use dedicated windows, some games even work as Virtualbox has some 3D acceleration now.

There is not a single Mail application that can come close to Outlook.

Virtualbox is an awesome program. I have been using lately it to try Mint Cinnamon 64-bit which runs really well on 2GB RAM. Was hoping to try Ubuntu 13.04 this weekend but haven't been able to downoad it yet. Want to give it another go and see if I can learn to love Unity.

ginggs · Apr 27, 2013

InvisibleJim said:
Virtualbox is an awesome program. I have been using lately it to try Mint Cinnamon 64-bit which runs really well on 2GB RAM. Was hoping to try Ubuntu 13.04 this weekend but haven't been able to downoad it yet. Want to give it another go and see if I can learn to love Unity.

ClassicMenu Indicator (now in the Raring repositories) made Unity usable for me.

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