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

Interview question #1

Since I have been asked to interview experienced PHP programmers, I was preparing few interview questions. I came to know, most of the people ask questions found in the Internet; most of them are like "What is the function used to connect MySQL DB in PHP". Personally, I don't like these types of questions; I'd thought the person must apply ideas what he was taught in colleges--finally I came out with one question: A product vendor has Quantity Vs. Price data like 1 -> Rs. 50 2 -> Rs. 95 3 -> Rs. 140 .... like upto 1 million data. He wants a system, which gives the price when the quantity is provided. For example, if you provide the quantity value as 2, then it should provide Rs. 95. How this system can be designed? As expected, all the people said about using database tables and quering on quantity. I have asked them to find out a system which doesn't use databases--provided the accuracy of the system may not be 100%--it may give at least 90% ac...
7 comments
Read more

Interview question #2

This is related to PHP's array . An array has number of elements. All elements are integers and unique, which means there is no repetitive integers. (e.g.) $foo = array(7, 5, 9, 13, 2, 8); You have to sort the array, provided: You should scan the elements only once. You're not allowed to compare the elements when sorting. (i.e., you're not supposed to use any comparison operators) Sorted resultant array may not be the source array. How will you do that?
6 comments
Read more

Open source PHP frameworks and problems

I was using CakePHP for sometime and proposed CakePlus , another UIMS toolkit on the top of CakePHP but also altering some problematic core of it. The thread should explain the outcome of the post. And, then I noted Akelos framework has most of the things built in. Issues with frameworks esp. CakePHP Scalability not a priority - Developers aren't aware that we can't throw more and more hardware Excessive use of regular expressions Evangelist isn't aware that the framework throws many queries unnecessarily More memory consumption - 100M would never be enough for a simple project Poor coding standards and practices - Prolong use of extract() often leads to more memory consumption Can't use the native approaches or baked codes. The override approach always lead to hard to debug codes Poor architected codes and no clear defined approaches. People belong to the cult drives the direction and often throws unprofiled codes. No native provision to share codes between M-V-C and...
6 comments
Read more