Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Continuing with the topic of productivity tools, I have recently installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on an old computer I was considering trashing soon (not anymore). In case you are not familiar, Ubuntu is a free and the most popular distribution of the Linux operating system (a Microsoft Windows replacement essentially). However, if you ask them they will tell you that Ubuntu is much more than this, because on top of that, they have community.

I actually used to work a little in Ubuntu back in the day when I worked as a web designer, and although I liked it, I wouldn't have considered switching over entirely. I recall pdfs would sometimes look very different (font and transparency issues?), flash on webpages did not usually work properly and things like mp3s would not work without some sort of guru Linux expertise in using their obscure Terminal (which used to be also needed to set up your internet).

But the software has come a long ways since then. I was extremely surprised to find how easy it was to install, although I did have to do a few work arounds to get it going. All the issues I had previously mentioned from my past experiences were no longer existent. Ubuntu fulfills pretty much 95% of my needs. This leads me to believe that this latest release and perhaps the following (scheduled for 10/10/2010) are pretty much the tipping point to have a growing mass of Ubuntu users.

• Free!
• Super fast (note that this is an old computer that took like five minutes to boot up Windows XP)
  
• Stable! (Ok, it does rarely crash, but hey it boots up so fast it's not an issue)
  
• You can update ALL your software in one click!
• No antiviruses/malware scanners!
  

The only thing that is in my opinion an absolute requirement is that the computer you are planning to use has an internet connection. This is how I downloaded things like Dropbox and drivers to use my Lexmark all in one printer/scanner.

From an academic engineering perspective, there are a number of things that are still missing. There are a couple of FEA programs, but other than that very little. The engineering software repository doesn't have much for the Engineering category. Below I list some software that I thinkI have found useful and hope you will comment if you know of other software.

• Scilab - The Mathwork's Matlab open-source equivalent developed in Europe. Commands and certain tools are different, but essentially you can still perform a ton of operations on large matrices, programming. Other useful things like programming and reading csv or xls files are also supported. The fancy interface and report generation from Matlab is unfortunately not available, yet.
  
• Wine - The gateway program will let you install and run software meant for Windows. I have yet to experiment with this one since most of the Building Information Modeling software, LCA software (Athena, Simapro), Autodesk Revit, AutoCAD, Robot, RISA, eTabs and the list goes on.

So to summarize, I think in a couple of years there is likely to be a mass transition of users that use primarily Ubuntu. As this happens, more and more software will be available until Wine is no longer needed, and at last we won't have to waste time, energy and resources on "protecting" our computers from viruses, malware and whatnot. If you know programmers, tell them to start writing in stuff like Qt, because the future is full of operating system options, and those most successful will let their software flourish in multiple platforms or online (like Google).