For people who switch to Linux, they may find themselves missing select features. Not features that experienced Linux users consider groundbreaking, rather options that are considered ‘nice to have’ by those from the Windows side of the fence. In this article, I’ll look at some of these missing items, and offer comparable alternatives.

As the One Laptop Per Child initiative goes from strength to strength around the world, there are signs that Pakistan may be getting the message too, after the Punjab government began handing out 125,000 free Ubuntu-based laptops to college and university freshers.

For no particular reason, I decided to migrate my Windows development server to a Ubuntu Server install. Not wanting to just wipe the drive and deny myself a safety net, I went the Wubi route.

Over the years there have been no shortage of articles where people try switching to Ubuntu (or other distro) for some period of time, to see if they can use it as a replacement for Windows. Some are happy with the results, but many have a hard time with the move.

Five of Iceland’s 32 secondary schools have moved from Microsoft Windows to Ubuntu Linux, The Wall Street Journal says. Some schools in the country have switched from Microsoft Word and to open source Moodle course management software. A number of fringe publicly funded institutions have also made the move.

If you installed Ubuntu using the Wubi installer you’ll have avoided having to partition your hard disk but you may not be able to see the files from Windows.

Today is my last day with the test machine loaded with Ubuntu 11.10 that Canonical sent me. My conclusion is: Unity is too buggy. I don’t want to do my job, 8-10 hours a day, with it. This even though I like its look and feel and there are things about Unity I will miss [...]

It finally happened. At the end of my first week of using Ubuntu 11.10 with Unity, full-time, 8-10 hours a day for work, the system crashed. I fumbled a few keystrokes, hit some combination of keys and froze LibreOffice Writer.

In a bold move two months back, The Supreme Court of India decided that it should start using Ubuntu Linux as the primary Operating System across all courthouse-offices.

Well, it finally happened. Windows XP is no longer the primary OS on any of my day-to-day machines. The last holdout was my laptop, a gray-haired but solid HP nc8230 rocking a single-core 1.86GHz Pentium M, 2GB of RAM, and a Mobility Radeon X600 graphics chip. The low-brow specs ruled out my modern OS of [...]

The German city of Munich’s migration to a vendor independent IT infrastructure is “in time, in budget and on track”, says one of the external consultants involved in the project. The city aims to migrate about 80 percent of all the city’s fifteen thousand desktop PCs to Ubuntu Linux.

With the inaugural “30 Days With” project–Google Docs–behind me, it’s time to start a new journey. Today is June 1, so starting today I will spend the next 30 days immersing myself in Ubuntu Linux.

It was with some excitement that I accepted an offer from Canonical, the corporate driving force behind Ubuntu Linux, to send me a laptop running the most recent version of the OS to play with for a few weeks. Following some time with a Samsung Series 9 running Windows 7 Ultimate, it seemed only fair [...]

Continuing our series of articles on the benefits of open source software and how computing for free is a very real possibility that many users are engaging in right now around the world, it’s time to take on board the full implications of migrating from Windows to Linux, in this case the Ubuntu platform.

Canonical has taken the wraps off a morale-boosting deal that has seen German insurance giant LVM Versicherungen convert 10,000 PCs to use Ubuntu Linux across the company’s operations.

I decided I was just going to wipe the hard disk one more time and throw my lot in with Ubuntu, I’d figure out how to manage without the few Windows only applications I needed somehow, it’d be better than gritting my teeth at my unresponsive desktop every morning.

I’ve been a long-time Windows fan like the vast majority of computer users, having been introduced to the world of computers through the Microsoft marvel. But with the growing popularity of Linux flavors, aren’t open source operating systems worth giving a try?

Most lawyers are managing most processes online or in standard office applications. In fact, when you get on a different operating system like Mac OS X or Ubuntu, you will find FireFox and suddenly experience a feeling of familiarity.

Several of my followers on Twitter suggested installing Ubuntu Linux. My first thought was they must be drunk or incredibly geeky. Given that Kim is the primary user of the laptop, installing any version of Linux sounded like a recipe for marital problems.

France’s Gendarmerie Nationale recently decided to review its IT infrastructure policies. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, now reports the police force has upgraded its 85,000 PCs to Ubuntu Desktop Edition, removing its reliance on the Microsoft operating system completely

If you want to switch to Ubuntu, the worst reaction you can have is to delete your hard disk drive and install Ubuntu. This is likely to lead to a bad experience. The easiest way is always to execute a steady proceed to a whole new operating system like Ubuntu.

How married are you to your favorite operating system, whether it is Linux, the Mac OS, a version of Windows or another OS? The answer to that is more complicated than many people immediately realize, and the answer may also hold substantial promise for Linux, because the operating system market is competitive in ways that [...]

Ecolo, a green political party in Belgium, is planning to complete its move to a complete open source desktop system by the end of 2011. On the 220 workstations in its main office, it will gradually replace the underlying operating system to Ubuntu Linux, says Sebastien Bollingh, the party’s ICT manager.

For those who have visited ZDNet over the last week, you may well have noticed that there seems to be a bit of an anti-Ubuntu vibe at the moment. Our new Tech Broiler blogger loves it but claims that Ubuntu itself hates him, while TechRepublic editor-in-chief has been singing its praises to even out the [...]

How and why does someone go about switching to a version of Linux? Many different reasons, but most of them are based on opinion, so lets take a look at Ubuntu and discus some of the reasons that people world wide are switching from Microsoft Windows to another operating system, Ubuntu.

I made a second foray onto Ubuntu’s shores a week ago, and so far, I like it quite a bit. The OS has progressed a great deal since I last checked in (in 2008 I installed version 8.04; now I’m running version 10.04). I found Ubuntu quick to install, speedy to do pretty much everything, [...]

I recently installed Ubuntu alongside Windows 7 Ultimate, which allows me to choose which operating system I want at Boot, and I haven’t been on the Internet since in Windows. Windows however, remains important to me since so many of my offline applications are Windows specific.

I’ve done this a couple of times now on different computers and have learned a few things along the way. I’m certainly not an expert but here are some steps to make it happen

There are many valid reasons to switch from Microsoft Windows to Ubuntu Linux. Both the average computer user and corporations can benefit from the switch to Ubuntu.

Have you switched to Ubuntu 9.10 from Windows, and want to move or transfer Google Chrome browser profile and settings like History, Bookmarks, Passwords, Cookies, Cache to your Ubuntu OS?