Ubuntu as my new home
/* This is a non technical article, more of an experience article */

To start my adventure here at Medium I want to give you my first impressions of Ubuntu.
Since I was a kid I’ve used Windows and it felt somewhat intuitive for daily use and never thought of changing my virtual environment. But when I’ve decided to be a computer scientist, Ubuntu found me.
I created a virtual machine with Ubuntu on it and did some baby-steps, using the terminal to check my documents, my processes, to create files or remove them, to change permissions, and so on. I was really happy about that but virtual machines aren’t really performance based.
I started my course with a low budget laptop, so I decided to dual boot it with Windows + Ubuntu. But at that time I was only interested in doing some tasks that my teachers asked me to do in Ubuntu terminal.
But when I did an internship this summer, I’ve noticed that I was lacking a lot when using Windows 10 as my main operating system.

I was an intern for an agency that develops websites and tools to help them make their daily work. I was the only one using Windows 10, the rest of the team was working on OSX and Ubuntu or other Linux distributions.
I started to think that I should try to have a full experience on a Linux distribution to see what advantages would I get for my future as a developer.
Installation

Ubuntu at the moment is pretty easy to install on a dual boot machine.
There are many websites that help to install this distro but I have followed the official installation linked here.
On the Windows side, all that I had to do was clear some space on my HDD by going to the Disk Management feature and empty the space I wanted.
Then, if you checked the official installation, all I had to do was download the distro and created a USB bootable image.
After that, I restarted and the Ubuntu image booted and installed it.
User Experience
As I’ve said earlier, I already had some experience on Ubuntu and that helped me at first with the interface. But I know that for a first-timer it could be a little hard because is a little less intuitive than the Windows UI.
But the best part of Ubuntu is not its graphical interface.
The terminal is a god blessing tool, with unlimited power to do whatever you want on your system, with the ability to do it quickly. I will not talk here about this because it deserves a full article on it (which I’ll write in the future!).
Ubuntu offers a “software store” that has a lot of packages (think of it as an App Store) and helps you install securely all the programs you want.
But, when you start to learn a few commands, you begin to understand that you can do all of this at the terminal. With a single command like
sudo apt-get install spotify
you are installing Spotify, without asking where you want to install (you won’t need this) or giving you GUI to do the “Next Next Next” thing.
This is just a small thing to do on Ubuntu, the list is long and it deserves more praises.
For my perspective, I started to use the terminal and I could see that I was doing more things simultaneously, at a quick pace and with better performance compared to the same tasks I was doing on Windows 10 using only its graphical interface.
Customization
The latest version of Ubuntu brought a new way of customization with the GNOME shell, that allows anyone to tweak their notifications pop-ups, themes, background images, windows, and so on.
With the help of a Chrome extension called Gnome Extensions and the GNOME tweak tool, I could change my Ubuntu as I pleased.
I always liked the MacOS UI and with this tools I could mirror it, using a Mojave theme and changing the dashboard just like the picture below.

As you can see, it really differs from the default theme.
With this customization experience, I was able to work with the terminal and to see how the UI works by using the Tweaks tool.

Compatibility
The most interesting part of my experience was to find how could I use programs that I needed but only worked on Windows.
I was really happy to see a tool that could emulate these programs, it’s called Wine. I could install Microsoft Office and some other basic programs that I really needed for previous works that I’ve done.
An important notice is that Wine as its own limitations, and can’t run all the programs we may want, but there’s a website that gives all the programs that can be executed using Wine, link here.
There’s a scale there that gives you an idea of how well the program will run.
However, I felt that I could easily change to online tools that could give me the same features that I needed to work on a daily basis.
The imperfection
This article is not meant to promote any kind of operating system, so despite being happy with Ubuntu performance and the ability to learn more about this open source system, there are some things that are lacking.
The first one I felt was the battery consumption. Closed systems like Windows or MacOS have background features that are always trying to minimize the processes that are needed and, therefore, giving a great autonomy to our laptop. I have an HP Omen Laptop that can run, in Windows 10, up to 8 hours using Wifi and Bluetooth signals. But when I run Ubuntu, this autonomy decreases to 2 hours, maybe 3. This represents a loss of 60% to the autonomy. It really means a lot because I like to work in outdoor places but with Ubuntu I have to be more careful and always be near to a charger.
The second one was the absence of cloud frameworks. To work as a team, sometimes we need to have a cloud storage and work with it so we can have our projects always updated (not talking about programming projects).
I really liked the Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox features where we could use a synced folder on Windows that was constantly syncing to our cloud account. I know that I can do almost the same thing using the Cloud’s webpage, but it will be a loop between doing downloads of several files, working on them, uploading all of them again. This can make unnecessary mistakes.
Conclusions
Overall I’m happy to install Ubuntu. I am using as a dual boot system so I can have the best of both worlds. The performance is outstanding and using the terminal is bringing me a lot of experience to my work field. I will use Ubuntu as my main OS but always in mind that I have Windows alongside as my backup OS.
I’m writing this article now using Ubuntu and I can say that I really feel that I’m at home.
I will start my semester this month, so when things start to get ugly, it is at that moment that I will see if Ubuntu can give me what I need.
This is my first post so I hope you’ve enjoyed it, give me some feedback and comment. I will update my experience over the next semester so if you’re interested follow me here!
Hey! My name is João and I’m a Computer Science student who wants to write articles that shows some of my experiences, projects and many other themes.
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