Ubuntu; why it's amazing and why you should use it

Ubuntu

I love the ideology behind Linux. It seems logical that the best things in life are free. When people come together to donate their time towards creating something to improve humanity rather than make money, magical things can happen. With that said I was always lax to adopt using Linux. Sure it's a great idea on paper, but it never seemed to work quite right for me. My previous attempts have left me in the dark with hardware incompatibility, unavailable drivers, an awkward user experience, and generally just a sour taste in my mouth. I understand that technology can take time to setup and customize, but when I spent over an hour trying to setup a driver that would support Wifi I threw in the towel and went back to Windows. I have to say that Ubuntu 12.04 has changed all of my assumptions about Linux. I find the Unity interface a snap to use. In my opinion it's better than Windows 7's user interface and I consider that to be a good one! I no longer have to worry about Linux not running on my machine. It seems like Canonical and Ubuntu have become mainstream enough to 'just work'. Not to mention the plethora of apps that are available to run on Linux. Here are few that I'm currently using:

• Chromium web browser - I've become addicted to Google Chrome on Windows and this is the Linux alternative. Chrome is actually a derivative of Chromium.
• TrueCrypt - this creates an encrypted file container that you can use to encrypt and protect sensitive data. I used this on Windows and was happy to see it available for Linux.
• Dropbox - how could I go without?! It runs on Linux too.
• LibreOffice - so far I haven't run into any compatibility problems working with Microsoft Office documents and that was my biggest concern. I'm not too worried about the extra gadgets and gizmo's you get from Microsoft Office. I'm a home productivity suite user at best.
• FileZilla - free FTP client! Oh and it's on Linux.
• Skype - yep. Skype.
• VLC Media Player - This play just about every audio/video format you can think of.

Basically I haven't found anything that I can't do on Linux that I used to do on Windows. I'm primarily using it now because I understand what open source stands for. However, over time I'm sure I'll learn to appreciate the incredibly powerful command line and OS flexibility. Head to the link below to download Ubuntu!

http://www.ubuntu.com/