Why I Didn’t Install Ubuntu
July 28, 2013 1 Comment
Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution. It’s the most user friendly and a very heavily supported open source operating system. It’s what Linux newbies (like myself) install.
I definitely liked it when I worked with it in school, but the OS is terrible for laptops. Here’s why:
- It’s a battery hog. It’ll eat all of the battery power it can take. Jupiter, the famous power management application, is no longer supported and so it was taken off the Ubuntu market.
- It overheats my laptop. Like I said, Jupiter is no longer supported, so that’s never going to get fixed.
- For some reason, my settings don’t stay the same. Each time I reboot my laptop, everything is there: my account, background and customization, but my power settings, brightness settings and other things such as my Unity Tweak settings do not stay the same.
- It looks a lot like the Mac OS X user interface. I just don’t like it. Period.
I am hoping for some more apps similar to Jupiter that can help my battery life. Get this: when I had Ubuntu on my laptop, it only ran approximately one (1) hour on a 96% battery percentage. Usually, on my Windows 7, I’d be using my laptop for at least five to six hours.
At some point, when Hannah Patricia doesn’t perform her abilities (I’d say that would be five years from now), I’ll be getting a System 76 or something like Lenovo or ASUS.
If you have any suggestions for a battery friendly distro, comment below!
Keep Chewing!
If you want to stay with Ubuntu but want something better for your battery (and something that doesn’t look so OSX-ish), you can go for another desktop environment (DE). Many Linux newbies do not know that they can actually significantly chage the interface. Xfce and LXDE are the two most popular lightweight interfaces, and they come preinstalled as the primary DE on Xubuntu and Lubuntu respectively. Stay away from KDE and GNOME: they’re too bloated.
I for one don’t like Ubuntu; I think it’s overrated. I’d go for Arch Linux, but that might be a little too advanced for you.
If you want to get a new laptop, my bias is the Lenovo ThinkPad.
By the way, for those of you reading this, I gave him the base for his Win7 theme!