Skip to main content

3-years of Ubuntu MATE - Good and the bad

Many people are getting shocked to know that I'm using Ubuntu in my workplace. Linux/Ubuntu is more of an alien here as Windows 10 and Mac OSX is having good market here.



First of all, I'm a very happy Windows XP user. In XP, I used to do most of my JavaScript and PHP in Devl, the editor that our team has developed.

Reason for switching to Ubuntu MATE

Primary reason for switching to Ubuntu was, at one point of time PHP team stopped supporting Windows XP. So, we're left with few options: 1. Upgrade to Windows Vista, 2. Switch to Ubuntu.

We chose the second option to experiment it. One of the major challenges was choosing the right code editor and we chose VS Code.

Ubuntu MATE - Pros

Linux comes with lots of command line tools. I have started to do many tasks using these shell scripts and found very productive.

We switched from Google Chrome to Chromium for good.

Ubuntu MATE - Cons

We started with GNOME for desktop, but it was memory hungry and was not suitable for our old machines and so had to switch to MATE. MATE is great for memory and good when we compare with other desktops. But, the speed is still not good as compared to Windows XP--if we don't add at least 2-GB RAM.

Though we switched to Chromium and happy, few things like translate options won't work out of the box; will need manual steps to enable it.

But, the major challenge is the editor. VS Code is good, but being an Electron app, it is more of a memory hog. In my experiment, the only editor that is somewhat reasonable in performance is Pluma.

In Ubuntu, we have LibreOffice (previously, OpenOffice) and WPS Office as two alternatives for MS Office. But, neither of them are real alternatives for MS Office. If your work is heavily based on MS Office, unfortunately Ubuntu/Linux is not yet ready for that.

Of late, we're feeling the heat from 64-bit push. As we're in 32-bit, we can't use tools like docker that are only 64-bit.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm Zend (PHP 5) Certified Engineer:-)

As of January 13, 2007, I'm ZCE/ Zend Certified Engineer (PHP 5)
2 comments
Read more

Work avoiders on the rise

roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes --  80–20 rule / Pareto principle One popular store (that is known for its less selling price, 6-storied air-conditioned showroom) is situated to close to our home. But, Heleena is allergic to it. Reason? Even though there are at least 50 sales people per floor, only 1 or 2 people will be working and responding to the customers' queries. In another shop, I even noticed that the owner was serving customer when many staffs were cleverly avoiding the show! I'm finding the same problem everywhere. Who're affected here? Obviously the people who're actually working--they will have to handle more work that the clever people have avoided. Two common gestures/characteristics I have noted in these clever people: 1. They'll pretend to be absolute ignorant (These people's agenda are merely to avoid works, but not to take credits.), 2. They'll create politics on anything (These people's agenda ar...
Post a Comment
Read more

Stampede and the "Dirty" "Dark" Crowd

Actor Ajith Kumar’s recent interview has sparked quite a few conversations on social media. The part that caught my attention, was his take on crowds. About 30 years ago, when I first joined a college in Madurai after growing up in other places, I experienced a few cultural shocks. Perhaps these weren’t unique to Madurai, but that’s where I first noticed them. One major thing that stood out was the behavior of crowds. For instance, if you suddenly see people rushing to board a bus, chances are there’s a pickpocket in action. During one of Madurai's annual festivals, I noticed some young men carrying water bags — not to distribute water, but to spill it on women, often on their chests. Shockingly, this was almost normalized; parents would quietly tolerate it to avoid public embarrassment, walking a little farther behind the crowd. When some women happened to witness this, they would just shoo the boys away instead of confronting them. The crowd, in such cases, became a kind of...
Post a Comment
Read more