Free Office Software article discussion

orrery

kingmonkey wrote: »

Ubuntu is said to be user friendly and 'just works'.

I've tried Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu - and, to be honest, they all "just don't".

Even Ubuntu wouldn't play music files out of the box when I tried it.

tronator

orrery wrote: »

I've tried Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu - and, to be honest, they all "just don't".

Even Ubuntu wouldn't play music files out of the box when I tried it.

you didn't try hard enough

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

Bollotom

Linux Mint 14 (maybe 15 by now) does everything you need. It's Ubuntu by another name. Install, run the software package manager and it's a bloody good OS. :cool:

spud17

Bollotom wrote: »

Linux Mint 14 (maybe 15 by now) does everything you need. It's Ubuntu by another name. Install, run the software package manager and it's a bloody good OS. :cool:

16 Petra xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

orrery

tronator wrote: »

you didn't try hard enough

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

That's the whole point - I shouldn't have to try "hard enough".

tronator

orrery wrote: »

That's the whole point - I shouldn't have to try "hard enough".

I wrote it in quotes because it's not hard. And read the link to understand why they do it like this. It's all about free and proprietary formats. One minute of googling and installing the right package would have solved it. If this is too much for you, then you better stay with Windows anyway. And IIRC Ubuntu asks you during the installation whether you want to enable the restricted formats.

Windows also doesn't come with all codecs pre-installed. Some (most?) you need to install by yourself. I don't know how it is nowadays, but I remember that you couldn't play DVDs in Windows out of the box without installing another program which came with the MPEG-2 codec.

orrery

tronator wrote: »

It's all about free and proprietary formats. One minute of googling and installing the right package would have solved it. If this is too much for you, then you better stay with Windows anyway.

Indeed, I understand and can do so perfectly well - but the majority of non-techie users can't. Even the page you linked to has an option of 4 variants and then asks if you want to compile it yourself!

.. which is why I said that I wouldn't be recommending it to the people who usually come here for recommendations.

fenlander_uk

A lot of people don't like the current version of Windows, but imagine the confusion if there were a couple of hundred current versions to choose from. That's linux.

In recent weeks I've tried about a dozen mainstream linux distros on my old Samsung NC20 netbook which is currently (and very happily) running XP. None of them worked.

steve3742

fenlander_uk wrote: »

In recent weeks I've tried about a dozen mainstream linux distros on my old Samsung NC20 netbook which is currently (and very happily) running XP. None of them worked.

Have you tried Linux Mint 16 XFCE? I use it on my Asus Eee, which has around the same specs, and it works fine.

fenlander_uk

Yep. And no. it doesn't. The NC20 is an odd beast with an unusual chipset. I remember once getting an old version of Mint - about v.7 if I remember correctly - to run on it, but modern distros don't seem to work without some serious hacking of the graphics drivers.

My old Sammy is now tasked with being a cut-price NAS server (i.e. it hosts a couple of shared drives on my network). It's ideal for this simple task because of its low power consumption. I've disabled its internet access and am running it on a limited account. I have a number of external drives and don't feel inclined to just dump them in favour of a proper NAS. I seriously doubt that anything's going to trouble the old girl's antiquated OS under the circumstances.