My thanks to all who have responded.
I entered this because I saw problems being raised with late editions
of Ubuntu, and became a bit worried. The explan
I am not a newcomer to PCs. I HAVE useD PCs as a work tool startING
with CPM about thirty years ago, then progressed through DR-DOS,
MS-DOS, to ME and XP/Office 2003, all with very little time lost to
OS/Application/Hardware/IT/ problems during upgrading or in use. I
didn't have to re-install OS or Application programs any more
frequently than I re-installed engines in my car, which is never.
Productivity over downtime ratio was excellent.
Vista Business 64 and its rushed-out replacement Win7 and Office 2007
changed all that. I still haven't recovered the terrabytes of lost
folders and files that randomly disappeared, or my own files that I am
NOW denied access to. I am having the files transferred back into XP
to see if I they re-appear again or can be recovered. Time lost to
these problems stopped my main work altogether and I had to take
alternative employment until my data can be recover and have a system
that is safe and reliable enough to use. I had used top-rated
BitDefender anti-virus and also had many company virus checks, so
don't suspect a virus as being responsible.
Productivity dropped to zero, downtime 100%!!!
Fed up with Microsoft, I wanted to change - to LINUX.
I had known of Linux for years and long wanted to try it. All
pre-purchase reviews and articles praised Linux' reliability and
claimed excellent Microsoft Office compatibility. looking good for a
good clean start, I bought a new Aleutia desktop PC with pre-loaded
Ubuntu 11.04 Unity distro which included LibreOffice. Linux-based
Aleutia also offered Ubuntu 10.10, but I wanted to be 'on trend' and
took the latest version.
All went well at first, but problems have been creeping in.
Despite those review assurances, compatibility with Microsoft has not
been good. A lot of time is needed to edit Microsoft-created files to
get them to work properly in Ubuntu/LibreOffice and vice versa,
especially with fonts that are so incompatible that a file created in
Powerpoint, for instance, cannot be presented in Impress, and vice
versa, without extensive changes each way. This also applies to my
Excel-created business forms and carefully layout-crafted Word
documents and literature.
Stability of UNITY 11.04 has also been disappointing, with spurious
defects occurring such as self-replicating of USB icons all along the
top menu each time a USB device is inserted, and frequent refusal to
allow a cut folder from desktop to be pasted into my Home folder.
Productivity; limited by lack of familiarity, but reasonably good.
Downtime rising.
For most of my work I need just a few applications running on a
reliable PC and OS. The Linux applications must be compatible
counterparts to Microsoft's Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Photoshop
Elements.
I need to get immersed in my work to be productive, and not be
continuously distracted by OS/Application/Hardware problems, but
problems are on the rise.
Above all, I believe in what Linux stands for, and I want to stay with Linux.
But which way to go? I feel tempted to backwards to Gnome (10.10?),
which high-stability claims seemed to be based upon, rather than risk
going forward to 11.10 and into unproven territory.
I need help to get my Linux system to run smoothly, and would really
appreciate your advice.
There's no need to reply as I will come to the December 4th meeting.
Best regards to you all. Charles Miller
--
Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2011-12-06 20:00
Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/
New thread on mailing list: mailto:[email protected]
How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
