Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04
by Ryan Smith on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Applications: Communication - Email & Instant Messaging
Windows Default: Windows Mail/Outlook
What I Use: Outlook
Ubuntu Default: Evolution
Separate communication suites are a bit of a dying breed these days, largely due to the aforementioned rise of the web browser. Thanks to services like Gmail, web based email has taken a massive dent out of the need to use an email client, and new services are popping up that are starting to do the same for instant messaging. But they’re not dead yet, and more importantly I’m too old fashioned to give up my dedicated email and instant messaging clients, so this is a matter I consider important.
The default email client on Ubuntu is Evolution, a clone of Outlook. As Outlook is my default email client under Windows anyhow, this worked out quite well for me. Because Evolution is an Outlook clone, it features not just email, but contact lists and calendaring too, supplanting the need for separate applications for those under Ubuntu.
At the same time, because Evolution is an Ubuntu clone, there’s not a lot I can say about it – it’s a clone, there’s not much unique to it. What it is however is a good clone when it comes to my needs. Credit is due where deserved in cloning the monster that is Outlook, because Evolution did email, contacts, and calendaring for me just as well as Outlook does.
The only notable issue I had with Evolution is that it does not have a way to import Outlook PST files. It’s possible to do it, but it involves using Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client as an import/export mechanism. To be clear I’m not faulting Evolution here since PST is a closed Microsoft format.
Users coming from Windows Mail will be a bit less at home, but at the same time Evolution is likely an improvement for them for all the same reasons that Outlook is a better client than (and the de-facto Windows email client in place of) Windows Mail. Perhaps a more direct benefit is that since Evolution is pre-installed with the base OS installation, you don’t need to go hunt down a real email application after the OS installation. Never underestimate the annoyance of having to install more software.
If this description seems short, it’s not for the lack of effort or a dislike of Evolution. In fact I’m plenty happy with it, but as I use it it’s just Outlook with a different GUI. So far as I’m concerned this is a good - if unexciting – thing when coming from Windows and Microsoft Office.
Final Verdict: Meets My Needs
Windows Default: None/Windows Live Messenger
What I use: Trillian
Ubuntu Default: Pidgin
Somewhere along the way to Vista, Microsoft decided to decouple some applications from the OS, MSN Messenger was one of them. As a result Vista does not come with an instant messaging client of any kind, rather it comes with a link to go download the latest version of Windows Live Messenger. Not that it would necessarily be of much use, the last time I saw any statistics for instant messaging network usage, the vast majority of North American users were on AOL’s AIM network. In this case Windows may as well not have an official instant messaging client, because unless you use the MSN network (or Yahoo network) there’s no practical difference.
So it’s a nice change of pace when we note that Ubuntu comes with a multi-protocol instant messaging client as part of the base OS install. Pidgin (née GAIM) supports AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, and a boatload of smaller networks, thoroughly eliminating any possible problem of not being able to connect to your network of choice. Like Firefox, Pidgin is another significant multi-platform application, and is found on Windows and Mac OS X too.
Moving on to features, Pidgin hits all of the checkboxes as far as requisite features are concerned. Buddy lists, chat logging, file transfers, emoticons, end-to-end encryption, etc are all supported. What helps to set Pidgin apart from other clients, and this one again drawing a parallel to Firefox, is its support for plugins. Plugins aren’t new as far as instant messaging clients are concerned, but many clients don’t support them.
Pidgin comes with 30 such plugins, ranging from tools to integrate Pidgin with Evolution, to adding support for mouse gestures. Some of these are standard features in other IM clients, so clearly not all 30 plugins are by any means unique. I’m also going to throw built-in spell-checking in this category – not new, but sorely missed from a lot of clients.
Coming from Trillian, Pidgin is effectively a drop-in replacement. The two don’t have feature parity (Trillian has more features, specifically audio/visual chatting) but as far as I use either client, I don’t use anything that makes the two notably different once a few plugins are installed. Much like Evolution there’s undoubtedly some missing features once you get deeper that would be of concern to the hardcore users, but it’s nothing that rears its head for me.
Final Verdict: Meets My Needs
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viciki123 - Monday, February 22, 2010 - link
I have a new website!wedding dresses uk:http://www.weddingdressonlineshop.co.uk">http://www.weddingdressonlineshop.co.ukJillian - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
YOu are spamer .For this, you could pick up some popular open source and proprietary (or their free equivalents) application that can run both Linux and W7. and compare the price, time and power consumption for retrieving, saving, processing, compiling, encrypting,decrypting compacting, extracting, encoding, decoding, backup, restore, nº of frames,etc, with machines in a range of different CPU and memory capacities. http://www.idresses.co.ukzerobug - Monday, February 1, 2010 - link
Regarding benchmarks and Linux-focused hardware roundups, one thing worth of consideration is that while Microsoft places strong resources on O/S development to create features that will require the end users the need to get the latest and greatest powerful hardware, Linux places their efforts in order that the end user will still be able to use their old hardware and get the best user experience while running the latest and greatest software.So,the benchmarks could compare the user experience when running popular software on Microsoft and Linux O/S's, with different powerful machines.
For this, you could pick up some popular open source and proprietary (or their free equivalents) application that can run both Linux and W7. and compare the price, time and power consumption for retrieving, saving, processing, compiling, encrypting,decrypting compacting, extracting, encoding, decoding, backup, restore, nº of frames,etc, with machines in a range of different CPU and memory capacities.
MarcusAsleep - Thursday, December 17, 2009 - link
Quick Startup: OK, Windows is fast - at first, well let's say that is if you install it yourself without all the bloatware that come standard on Windows store-bought PS's (we bought a Toshiba laptop for work with Vista that took 12 minutes after boot-up for it to respond to a click on the start menu - even on the third time booting.)Windows startup is often burdened by auto-updates from Microsoft, anti-virus, Sun-Java, Acrobat Reader, etc. etc. that slow down the computer on boot-up to where your original idea of "hey I just want to start my computer and check my email for a minute before work" can take at least 5. I can do this reliably on Linux in 1. Yes, if you know a lot about Windows, you can stop all the auto-updates and maintain them yourself but 99% of Windows users don't have time/or know how to do this.
Trouble-free: E.G. I installed Linux on a computer for my wife's parents (Mepis Linux) 7 years ago for email, pictures, games, web, letter use and haven't had to touch it since then. This is typical.
For Windows, often I have done fresh installs on trojan/virus infected computers - installed working antivirus and all Windows Updates (not to mention this process takes about 2-4 hours of updates upon updates + downloads of the proper drives from the manufacturers websites vs about 1 hour for an Ubuntu install with all updates done including any extra work for codecs and graphic drivers) - only to have to come back a couple months later to a slow again computer from users installing adware, infected games, etc.
Free: Nearly every Windows reinstall I've had to do starts with a computer loaded with MS Office, games, etc. but upon reinstall nobody has the disks for these. There is a lot of "sharing" of computer programs in the Windows world that is not very honest
With Linux, you can have the operating system plus pretty much anything else you would need, without having to cheat.
Adaptable Performance: You can get a well-performing Linux installation (LXDE Desktop) on a PIII computer with 256MB of ram. The only thing that will seem slow to an average mom/pop user would be surfing on flash loaded web pages, but with adblock on Firefox, it's not too bad. With Vista loaded on this computer, it would be annoyingly slow. You can often continue to use/re-use computer hardware with Linux for years after it would be unsuitable for Windows.
I think these features are of high value to the average user -- maybe not the average Anandtech computer user -- but the average surf/email/do homework/look at photos/play solitaire/balance my checkbook user.
Cheers!
Mark.
SwedishPenguin - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
Using SMB for network performance is extremely biased. It's a proprietary Microsoft protocol, of course Microsoft is going to win that one. Use NFS, HTTP, FTP, SSH or some other open protocol for network performance benchmarking. Alot of NASes do support these, as they are Linux-based.Furthermore, using a Windows server with SMB with the argument that most consumer NAS use SMB is pretty ridiculous, these NASes are most likely going to use Samba, not native SMB, the Samba which is implemented in GNU/Linux distributions and Mac OS X, not to mention that most of the NASes that I've seen offer at least one of these protocols as an alternative.
SwedishPenguin - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
The ISO thing is pretty ridiculous, creating a simple GUI in both GTK and Qt and integrating them into Gnome and KDE should be pretty damn easy, though I suppose integration with the respective virtual file systems would be in order, in which case it might get slightly more complex for those (like me) not familiar with the code. There's even a FUSE (userspace filesystem) module now, so you wouldn't even need to be root to mount it.About the command-line support, IMO that's a good thing. It's a lot easier both for the person helping and the guy needing help to write/copy-paste a few commands than it is to tell the person to click that button, then that one then another one, etc. It's also alot easier for the guy needing help to simply paste the result if it didn't help, and it makes it much easier to diagnose the problem than if the user would attempt to describe the output. And you usually get much more useful information from the command-line utilities than you do from GUIs, the GUI simplifies the information so anyone can understand it, but at the price of making debugging a hell of a lot more difficult.
nillbug - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
It must be said that Ubuntu and the major Linux distributors all have 64bit O/S versions since a long time. The reason behind is to allow users to benefit from memory (+4MB) and 64bit CPUs (almost all today) gaining a better computing experience.If this article was a private work of the author to provide him an answer on whether he may or may not move to Linux, people should advise him the above mentioned. As for an article intended to be read by thousands it must be pointed out that it's conclusion is a miss lead.
In face of today's reality (and not the author reality) why did he never mentioned the 64bit Ubuntu systems? I guess he's final thoughts then would've been much more in favor of Linux.
nillbug - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
It must be said that Ubuntu and the major Linux distributors all have 64bit O/S versions since a long time. The reason behind is to allow users to benefit from memory (+4MB) and 64bit CPUs (almost all today) gaining a better computing experience.If this article was a private work of the author to provide him an answer on whether he may or may not move to Linux, people should advise him the above mentioned. As for an article intended to be read by thousands it must be pointed out that it's conclusion is a miss lead.
In face of today's reality (and not the author reality) why did he never mentioned the 64bit Ubuntu systems? I guess he's final thoughts then would've been much more in favor of Linux.
seanlee - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
I have read all 17 pages of comments…a lot of Linux lovers out there… and they all purposely ignore few important things that make Windows successful, which in term, makes most Linux distribution marking failures, I have used Linux on my net book and my ps3, and I absolutely hate it.1. User friendly. No, CLI is not user friendly no matter what you say; no matter what excuse you use; no matter how blind you are. NOT ONE COMPANY dare to provide their mainstream products to be CLI only, from things as simply as ATM, ipod, to things as complicate as cellphone, cars, airplane. That ought to tell you something--- CLI is not intuitive, not intuitive=sucks, so CLI = sucks. You command line fan boys are more than welcome to program punched cards, expect no one use punched cards and machine language anymore because they are counter-intuitive. Having to do CLI is a pain for average user, and having to do CLI every time to install a new program/driver is a nightmare. GUI is a big selling point, and a gapless computer-human user experience is what every software company looking to achieve.
2. There is NOTHING a Linux can do that windows cannot. On the contrary, there are a lot of things windows can do that Linux cannot. I’d like to challenge any Linux user to find engineering software alternatives on Linux, like matlab, simulink, xilinx, orcad, labview, CAD… you cannot. For people who actually user their computer for productive means (not saying typing documents are not productive, but you can type document using type writer with no CPU required whatsoever), there is nothing, again, I repeat, NOTHING that Linux can offer me.
3. Security issues. I disagree with the security issues that windows has. I can set up a vista machines, turn it on, luck it into a cage, and it will be as security as any Linux machine out there. Hell. If I bought a piece of rock, pretend it was a computer and stare it all day, it would be the most secure system known to the man-kind. Linux’s security is largely due to one of the two reasons: 1. Not popular, not enough software to support and to play with. 2. Not popular, un user-friendly. Either of them is not a good title to have. It is like you are free from the increase of the tax not because you have your business set up to write off all your expense, but because you don’t make any money thus you don’t have to pay tax.
4. There is nothing revolutionary about Linux for an average user, other than it is free. If free is your biggest selling point, you are in serious trouble. Most people, if not all, would pay for quality product than a free stuff, unless it is just as good. Obviously Ubuntu is never going to be as good as windows because they don’t have the money that MS has. So what does Ubuntu have that really makes me want to switch and take few weeks of class to understand those commands?
Be honest, people. If you only have ONE O/S to use, most of you guys will chose windows.
kensolar - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I hope you realize that your hated is showing so strongly that absolutely no one cares what you say.
That said, I don't know how to use a cli and have been successfully using Linux for 3 years. I found the article to be a fairly fair one even though the author is so unfamiliar with Linux/Ubuntu. As he does not use the default app's in windows, linux users don't use the defaults only in linux. K3B is far superior to Brassaro and so on. In addition, I don't think he let on very well as to the extent of the software available in the repositories (with addition repositories easy to add). Several hundred app's, 20,000 programs, even security app's and programs ranging from easy as pie to complicated. (for those of us how have a computer that is more than a rock) I personally do audio mixing, video transcoding, advanced printing....all with graphic interfaces.
BTW, I learned how to turn on a computer for the 1st time 3 1/2 years ago, I stopped using windows a little over 3 years ago and have no reason to go back. I find it too hard, limiting and frustrating to use. Plus, I can't live w/o multiple desktops, the author didn't get it yet, but once you get used to them you can't go back.
Well, I've said enough for now, can't wait for your next article.