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I am 79, retired, basically an electronics-oriented person. I had my first computer in 1985, a Commodore Plus/4, with an external floppy drive and a 9-needle dot-matrix printer - that were usable with C+/4 and the IBM type computers as well. It is obvious that a monochrome monitor was used, or it could be used with a normal TV set. Being a Hungarian, I had to use accented characters, and the first thing to do was to replace the built-in character set with a matching Hungarian font set - both for the printer and the monitor. Thanks to the Peter Norton books and the built in assembler program, as well as the corresponding literature of the Commodore Machine, I achieved the necessary knowledge to do the job. It was necessary as I worked after office-hours as a technical translator into and from English and Spanish languages, and the built-in word processing program was a great help for me.
Later, I got my first IBM 286 machine (16 MHz processor, 2 MB RAM) and DOS 3.3. The same happened, as I had to use the Hungarian accented font set, and it was my job to provide it both for the keyboard and the monitor. Programming in various BASIC languages was a common task for me (being also a radio amateur), in helping to home-build my own receivers and transmitters required for my hobby. When the first Windows operating systems became available, I ceased programming, since it was a too complicated and time-consuming job. However, from time to time I made some BASIC programs - and converted them into .com and .exe forms. At the beginning, I used the Internet through a dial-up phone line, and only e-mail sending and receiving was available (using Win 3.1). The opening of the window to the world happened when I got a broadband cable connection and changed the operating system to Win 98, and afterwards to Windows XP. For curiosity, I test the new beta Microsoft operating systems (Win 7, Win 8), but I hardly believe that I will like the Metro graphic environment due to the reasons detailed below.
In 2002, I met first with a Linux operating system, Lindows, later Linspire and, afterwards, I tried various Linux distributions (e.g: UHU, Knoppix, Suse, Fedora, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.). Finally, I selected the one that was the best, the most user friendly, the easiest to use and install, and the fastest. It was Ubuntu.
I started with Ubuntu 6.04, then all the following ones were tried and installed, including later the previous distributions also (4.10, 5.04). The best was 8.04.4, and finally I stopped at 10.10.
The highest score was given by me to the 8.04 LTS due to its ease of installation (with Windows) with using the “wubi.exe”.
Any newcomer could easily install it without the risk of harming any existing operating system(s). The later distributions abandoned this installation mode (in reality it happened at the introduction of the 10.04 distribution).
The second highest score was given by me to the 10.04 LTS / 10.10 that still used the Classic Look Gnome environment.
The later distributions abandoned the Classic Look Gnome environment, and introduced Unity - without an option to choose the Classic Look. This facility would mean that users would remain faithful to Ubuntu, while, without this facility, a lot of people would choose another Linux version and abandon Ubuntu.
The reasons for my decision are: From the first encounter with Ubuntu, I have recruited a lot of Ubuntu fans, spreading free-of-charge a large number of Live CDs, and teaching them how to use it. There are also among them a lot of first-time computer users, including people over 80 years of age. Even these old people (male and female), on their own, could use Ubuntu for sending/receiving e-mails, browsing the Internet, watching videos, listening to music, using video or written only chat, even downloading and uploading files, after 2 to 3 months of active use!!!! Thanks to Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04, 10.04.
These people claimed the user friendliness after updating the distribution and seeing the Unity environment - in the crowded, big-size icon mass, it is laborious to find the required program, or a utility to adjust and/or set some parameter, even if the names are in ABC order and written in lower-case. The selection of the categories are well hidden, and it is very slow to locate them. To change from one workplace to another also takes a lot of time - until a window opens in the actual workplace to show the selection icons. In a desktop machine, with or without a touch-screen, all these facilities are hard to use, or useless, and slow down the user’s experience. This theme is not practical at all in a productive business environment. Even if some people temporarily like this appearance, the serious computer user will quickly lose his/her interest in this laborious and difficult approach.
The inexperienced users are afraid to install the newer Ubuntu distributions (to avoid risk to their actual running systems). They will not upgrade if they have an old windows already installed and they do not have the necessary money/background to buy a new operating system. ”Partitioning” is hard to use by unskilled people.
In Full Circle Magazine, issue 56. I have seen an article describing how to re-establish the Classic Gnome Look. That is fine, but it is very difficult to visit every unskilled user and do the job for them, one by one! Why can it not be done only once, as part of the development steps?
In sum, these business politics do not help to spread Ubuntu among prospective users.
Finally, I have to say, I am happy to have discovered the wonders of the Ubuntu operating system, and now I understand why some people cry if somebody takes his/her toy!
I should like to express my congratulations and gratitude to the people involved in the development of Ubuntu, and wish that their concept is compatible with the majority of the users, both the skilled and the unskilled ones. To my greatest sorrow, it is a little late for me to learn programming so deeply that permits me to participate with the Ubuntu developers. I guess, I am helping more if I continue to recruit and teach new Ubuntu users.