Windows 10 or Ubuntu: Which will be the one OS to rule them all?

Yahoo News ^ | 05/07/2015 | Nick Heath

[Calvin Locke]

... with Windows, there is a huge cadre of support people at various levels...

Including the ones that proactively call you up to tell inform you that you have a virus, and they can remove it for you if you get on your pc...

[captain_dave]

Ubuntu works fine for most ordinary daily tasks. I have it on my desktop and laptop. The main problem with it, however, is that it’s not “mainstream” so the big programs aren’t written for it.

[so_real]

I've used Linux Mint since version 14. Loved it. Never thought I'd look elsewhere. Then Debian / Ubuntu decided that RedHat's "systemd" big-brother-kernel-on-top-of-the-kernel strategy was a good one, and Linux Mint was along for the ride. Even Mint 17.1 is showing signs of systemd dependencies. I'd never had a problem with Mint prior to 17.1, and I wasn't going to wait around for systemd to mature. So I moved to PCLinuxOS. And I haven't looked back. It's nearly as polished as Mint, but without the baggage. It didn't take me long at all to replace Mint on my desktop and it's been rock solid thus far. Definitely worth taking it for a spin.

[__rvx86]

In the *nix world, I cut my teeth on the GNOME and KDE desktop, as used in RedHat 6.1.

Unity on the current GNOME desktop is not particularly intuitive...it’s more tablet-oriented, IMO, than even Windows 8 Metro!

At least you can return to Windows Explorer simply by pressing ALT-TAB.

[dayglored]

My central workstation at my dayjob is CentOS 6.6 with Gnome and I wouldn't have it any other way. Been a RedHat fan since 2001.

I put the Xen hypervisor on it so I can run a Win7 VM for Windows tasks.

At one point I brought up a VM with Ubuntu Unity desktop, did the install, booted, and there was no Terminal app on the desktop. No little terminal icon, nothing. And no clear way to put one there from what they did give you.

I was floored, totally flummoxed -- A Linux machine without a shell window. No xterm, no Terminal app. I freaked. I had to google to find out the keyboard shortcut.

CTRL-ALT-T ??? To get a damn shell on a *nix box?

That was the end of my experience with Unity. I couldn't even bring myself to mouse around to find the damn System->Shutdown dropdown menu item.

I typed "shutdown -h now" into that godforsaken terminal window, and 10 seconds later deleted the VM from my system. I have work to do.

[Mr. K]

can Grandma turn it on and go to the interwebs to view pictures of her grandchildren and cats?

Until Linux comes able to do that AND run Windows apps right out of the box, it will stay exactly where it is.

And don’t even tell me I font know anything about it -I write software for both Windows and Linux computers for a living. I know Linux is a superior operating system, but I also know most of the things I need to do for work on a daily basis are on Windows.