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

Save American College, Madurai

This post was written in 2008 and outdated now. For update, please check Save American College, Madurai (Update 2011) Update (2011-01-16) : Save American College, Madurai (Update 2011) I'm highly privileged to have 3 degrees (B.Sc. (Spl. Physics), PGDCA and MCA) from The American College, Madurai, South India . Unlike other "commercial" colleges, American College has given room for poor students and uplifted them. And unlike other "elite" colleges who'd give seat only for "intellectuals", American College has produced geniuses. In the recent months, the saddening thing is that the college is under divide (Principal Vs. Bishop). Here is the email I sent to alumnae lately informing about the informations that I received about the developments: Update (2011-01-16) : Save American College, Madurai (Update 2011) All: I was thinking that the " Save American College " campaign was a FUD . But, when I tried to understand the problem through my
11 comments
Read more

Magic: T.K.Vadivel Pillai is above Cyril Takayama

Recently, I have been watching Cyril Takayama 's magic show in AXN channel. That reminded me of T.K.Vadivel Pillai 's magic show in Jaya TV. I have searched Vadivel's name in Wikipedia's Indian magicians article and to my surprise, his name was not present. In my opinion, T.K.Vadivel Pillai's magic is superior than Cyril's--especially, in one show, he could tell the name of the person whom the girl was thinking. Not really sure, why T.K.Vadivel Pillai could not be as popular as Cyril. Sidenote: I'm yet to see David Blaine 's magic and I still have a gut feeling that Vadivel's would be better.
1 comment
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