Don’t you just love pangolins? They’re so cute and furry, and… oh wait–are those scales?
If you’re like me, you’ve never seen a pangolin before. In fact, I just had a foggy notion that they were some sort of exotic creature when I found out that the latest version of the Ubuntu operating system was named Precise Pangolin. But be that as it may, I would like to give a brief overview of the OS and tell what I like about it so far. If you were hoping to find out more about pangolins, well, too bad–you go do the research yourself and then come back and tell me all about it.
Since I got a MacBook four years ago I’ve only used Ubuntu every now and then, and I was pretty behind. I forget which version I had installed on my Dell laptop, but it was rather old and no longer supported, and when I found out that Ubuntu 12.04 was to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) edition, I figured now was the time to upgrade. After all, this one will be supported with updates five years hence.
I got it installed with no problems, except that it was slow. I guessed that was to be expected–this was a brand new OS, in the body of a dinosaur computer with 1 GB of RAM. I did a bit of research and found out that I could double that RAM for a decent price, so I went ahead and ordered me some memory. That did the trick, and now my pangolin is more playful than ever.
I must say, I really like version 12.04. Windows is perhaps my least favourite OS, yet Windows 7 has some features I really like, and Mac OS X has some nice features as well. And with Ubuntu 12.04, it’s almost as if someone took my favourite features from both of them and put them together in Ubuntu! That’s pretty nifty, if you ask me.
First, a Windows 7 feature. I like how in Windows 7 you can bump a window against the top of the screen and have it fill the whole screen. Also, bumping it against one of the sides will make it fill half the screen. On my Mac I’ve been known to carefully resize windows to have them side-by-side, but now Ubuntu has this same nifty feature!
You might say that Ubuntu is copying off of Apple, but I say they’re learning from the masters. For a while now Ubuntu has had the close, minimise, and maximise buttons on the left side of windows, and now it also has a cool dock on the side. It’s only coincidence, but I keep the dock on my MacBook on the left side of the screen, which is the default for Ubuntu now. So now everything is right there where I expect it to be! Ubuntu also now has something called “Da艥hejmo” on the top of the dock (sorry anglophones, my Ubuntu is in Esperanto), which serves the same function as the spotlight in OS X. Cool beans, eh?
So if you’ve been thinking about jumping on the Ubuntu bandwagon, now is a great time to do it. Not only do you get all these great features and long-term support, you also get a cool pangolin wallpaper. What more could you want?