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My transition and journey from a Windows operating system to Linux (Ubuntu)

Andrew Garcia on November 15, 2020

A Linux 🐧 operating system (OS) can be a perfectly lean and open-source (essentially "free") alternative to Windows. As a matter of fact, this post...
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Juan C. Andreu

I run PopOs (Ubuntu based) exclusively on a daily basis for more than a year, and it's a great dev experience. There are a few things I would like to comment on:

  • Mail clients: Thunderbird is horrible. There are no great alternatives to outlook. So what I do is just to use my phone as my main mail client (ironic?) and then I keep a separate chrome profile for each email account I need and pinned a tab with the web client.
  • Stability: It's really smooth, but time to time I have so re-install (it's good I only use .devcontainers now, so the only thing I need to install is docker)
  • If you work for a company that uses Ms Office, you'll miss the OneDrive desktop client a lot.

Having so may web-based solutions will require a lot of RAM, 16GB for me is not enough, and I'm looking to upgrade to 32 at least.

Good post,
Cheers

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Oskar Pietrucha

Hi guys!

I am loving PopOs and it's the distribution I think I am using for the longest period of time.
I didn't like native mail client, nor the Thunderbird.
Then I've got my hands on Mailspring which is very easy to use and configure, has the modern look and feeling and just suits me well. Check it out by yourself! Cheers

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Juan C. Andreu

I wanted to try it, but I didn't like the fact that I had to open an account in order to use it.
How is it going for you?

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Andrew Garcia • Edited

Thanks Juan!
PopOS is not Ubuntu. It’s a fork of a fork of a fork of a... you get it. Though it has features Ubuntu does, it may lack in others.

  1. To me, Thunderbird Mail outperforms Outlook. Maybe this is because I’ve learned to use it pretty well. I’m also very familiar with Outlook and I don’t like it as much.

  2. Stability: PopOS is not Ubuntu. I wouldn’t install PopOS. I have never had any stability issues with my Ubuntu OS (currently running 20.04 LTS). I make sure to install all dependencies when I want to install a complex program.

  3. I am sure you can find some options to make onedrive work. Worst case scenario, you may need to write a bash script to make it sync fast. I use a Python script to sync/start my Dropbox.

Again, Linux is great if you don’t mind putting some additional effort not usually needed with Windows to make your workflow more streamlined in the long run. Otherwise, it’s better to switch to Windows (or get a Mac)

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Juan C. Andreu

Fair points, specially the Thunderbird part, i agree that's more of a subjective topic :)
Forgot to say that before using PopOs I've been using Ubuntu since, uhm 2007 or so, so I know it pretty well.

I never said PopOs was Ubuntu, i just said it was *based" on it. And it's instabilities are inherited from Ubutnu and Linux itself. Tho, it might be just a hardware compatibility issue as well. I still remember when i coudn't even use WiFi xD

Linux is lacking on the desktop area, but it's the way to go for developers. Android Emulator runs faster, npm runs faster, docker is native!

I just miss some windowsy thingies time to time :P

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Andrew Garcia

Gotcha. About the instability inheritance, that’s the problem with many-forked distributions; if the instability is inherited from the parent distribution, it’s close to impossible to implement a patch for such, because it implies you’d have to make changes to the source-code of the OS itself! If I ever encounter major compatibility or performance issues (which I haven’t yet) with Ubuntu, I’d be ready to make the switch to Debian, which is Ubuntu’s parent dist

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Juan C. Andreu

That's a good approach!!
Have you ever used on a day to day basis any non-Debian distro?
I have but not for long. I think all the ubuntu based distros tend to have better hardware compatibility.

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🦄N B🛡

I've had the same experience, especially with MS Office.

It makes me wonder if there is not some kind of history of anti-competitive practices involved, to lead to a single player with so much of the market share of integrated productivity software.

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Juan C. Andreu

Not anymore, since Office is now available on Mac, but they have the web version as well as Google ones.
Maybe that used to be true and helped get things the way they are now

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Mikey Joel • Edited

My DevOps Linux Box App List(With some creativity tools in it):

Exchange Alternatives:
Evolution Mail(Full Calendar, Contacts, Mailbox, Tasks)
Hiri (Fully featured as well)
Mailspring(Mailbox but packed with features. You can pair it with MineTime calendar)

Music Production: Bitwig

3D Modeling: Blender, Modo, Maya, Houdini.

Image Editing: Gimp, Krita, others.

Productivity: Google Work Suite or Libre Office. (Keep in mind that if you are exporting reports to .csv format, there are libraries like openpyxl for Python and gnuplot for graphs)

Dev Tools: Visual Code, Sublime, Intellij Idea, PyCharm, Vim, docker, Ansible, kubernetes, zabbix, vagrant, kvm, Powershell Core, Dotnet, ASM, others.

Security: Metasploit, Medusa, Nessus, Others.

For gaming there are many kernels like XanMod but they might break if you need VMWare Workstation to manage ESXI servers or use the vmrun CLI, you'll prefer the stock kernel on Ubuntu/Debian distributions. Steam has a community that reports on games compatible for Linux via Protondb and there's also Lutris for non-Steam Games like Blizzards Overwatch or League of Legends.

Make sure you compare versions and compability if using snap vs Deb packages since dependencies on snap are sometimes not bundled (for example some dependencies for connecting via winrm onto a win box.) I rather install Powershell for example via Deb/repo on the host than using snap and sym linking whichever ever dependencies is looking for with different/updated versions.

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Sahil Pabale

What about Photoshop?? How can i use it in Linux??
This is the reason I'm not shifting to Linux from Windows...

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André Taranto

You can use Gimp, which is free, powerful and really stands for a solid Photoshop alternative. If you don't need CMYK related functions, I recommend you to check photopea.com . It's simpler than Gimp, but it's very useful. Its interface and shortcuts are very similar to Photoshop.

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Niels Böhm

I always found Gimp very unintuitive, even though I've known it for many many years now.

So I was very happy when a new alternative showed up in the repositories which is better in this regard in my opinion and that's Krita.

(It's also available on Windows, btw.)
It's still not Photoshop, but oh well, many functions feel really good to use in Krita.

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🦄N B🛡

faux-gasp

Surely you meant Glimpse, rather than that patently offensive other software that shall not be named.

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Andrew Garcia

You got me there. You could use wine, but I understand it’s not ideal

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Md. Shahadat khokhar

nice one dude, I really appreciate the effort you have put in that post this will be really helpful for people switching from windows to ubuntu

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Andrew Garcia

Thanks! :D

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Shone Binu • Edited

Btw, I use Manjaro in my main machine.😅
And I hope you likes ubuntu.
And you can get Spotify app in your machine. No need to use web version.
And finally, the article was great :D

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Rishit Khandelwal

Minecraft had a Linux version in the Ubuntu store?

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Andrew Garcia • Edited

I don't like using the Snap store. I downloaded the one for Debian based distributions on the Minecraft website