One Month of Linux - my experience

A couple of weeks ago, I installed Ubuntu 16.04 into my 2013 HP laptop alongside Windows 7. I installed it because I like to program some stuff and also try something fresh since I’m a Windows user and performance of 7 got worse in this PC. Here’s my experience and views when I used Linux.

1. Tons of great programs but few are rock solid. - I expect the software from the open source community to be very stable and powerful like the proprietary programs from Adobe. GIMP is very confusing. LibreOffice is more great than ever. Krita is a very awesome painting app though. But the rest I’ve seen such as the Non-linear video editors are weird and not yet confident to compete with Premiere nor Vegas Pro. In the other side, I’m happy that the progress of these programs are very fast and have significant improvements so these are gonna be expected to be great hopefully few years from now.
2. Pick the right DE for best performance. - When I first used Ubuntu with Unity out of the box, it’s great and beautiful but what I disliked about is that it uses half the RAM and gets easily crashed while browsing with 5 tabs in Firefox. Unity is based on GNOME so I assume that GNOME shell also performs worse. I was correct. Windows on the other hand has done a significant job in their user interface while not having sacrifice the performance. This is what I should expect in these DE’s. Focus first in performance than design. That is why I stick to LXDE w/ Openbox after numerous DE testings (MATE, Cinnamon, Enlightenment) because it handled my PC’s performance great and it’s lightweight.
3. Package Management and Updates are great. - These are the things I liked about Linux. It’s fast and easy in just a command away. System updates do not worry you as well. You can just select what’s not needed and you’re ready to go. Also, you can choose different mirrors if you’re having trouble downloading the packages. Sweet.
4. Great for software programming. - I’m not gonna explain this because it shares the same benefits with OS X such as language implementations, shell, and, etc.
5. Paved the way for open source. - I just thought that without Linux, we cannot have an open alternative to Windows, open-source software would not be as great and contributions to the software industry would not be improved as fast as today as it was dominated by Microsoft.

Yeah, that’s kind of it. However this isn’t still my main system yet. There are different uses in different systems but the only problem in Linux right now is the lack of rock solid productivity apps and the rest is great.