I have tried various flavours of Linux in the past including some previous Ubuntu release. However, I have never been honestly ready to ditch Windows.
This has now changed with Ubuntu 10.10 netbook remix. It is still not perfect by any means. Fox example, setting up the brightness controls was a bit of a pain, but with a bit of jiggery pokery got it working OK.
There was no problem with the wifi drivers, which I expected to go wrong.
I plugged in my 3G (Huawei E160e) broadband dongle from Orange and it worked 'straight out of the box'.
The next thing I did was think about which programs I use mostly on Windows and decided to see if I can find Linux versions of them. The following is a list of my findings:
Google Chrome: Available on Ubuntu, appears to be more or less the same as the Windows version.
Tweet Deck: Again, no real problems getting it to run
Microsoft Office: - I decided to go with OpenOffice.Org (which comes as a default anyway). I have used OpenOffice.Org on Windows before many times - and frankly is easier to use than the Office 2007 I was using with the bizarre lack of menus.
Thunderbird: I just used the installer application to install Thunderbird for my email, and again it is very similiar to the Windows version.
Next I need to try and find myself some decent web editing software. I currently use Microsoft Expression as I get it free as part of the DreamSpark student deals. I think Kompozer currently looks like the best bet - unless someone can advise me otherwise?
