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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.
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