Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr)

Ubuntu? What's that?

Ubuntu is the most popular distribution in the Linux family of Operating Systems. It serves as a viable alternative to Windows users who are looking for a change and are willing to explore new ways of computing. Ubuntu differentiates itself from the multitude of Linux distributions available today by being the most user friendly of all. It has features that may seem new to even Windows 8 users. The best thing is that it's free for all and so is most of the software available for it. 

On top of all this, Ubuntu is one of the only Linux Distributions that is built to defend against unauthorized access of your files out of the box and hence it is very very secure and competent in defending against any kind of malware. All software updates are filtered in the update manager according to priority making it very easy for users to update everything from one place. And fear not, Ubuntu provides alternatives to all major Windows and OS X applications.

LibreOffice Impress - For Presentations

LibreOffice is the Office Suite of choice and gives an experience that is similar to using Word, PowerPoint and Excel

Thunderbird

The default email app is Thunderbird and works similar to outlook. 

The notification bar is also a joy to use and is much more functional out of the box as compared to Windows.

14.04 LTS

The Version we're talking about is 14.04 which is also the latest. Canonical (The developer of Ubuntu) follows a rather strange naming system for its releases. The version number consists of the year of release before the decimal and the month number of release after the decimal. Also new versions come out once every April and Later in October every year. The naming also follows an alphabetical order and is named after animals starting from that letter. This naming method has led to rather quirky names names such as Raring Ringtail, Saucy Salamander, Quantal Quetzal etc... 

LTS means Long Term Support. This essentially guarantees complete support in terms of updates and security from Canonical for the next 5 years. LTS is special and comes bundles with new releases only once every two years. 

For people who multitask a lot, Ubuntu provides workspaces that can be switched. Each workspace can contain multiple windows. The terminal is also a very powerful tool to navigate and control your machine in ways you would have never thought of.

Ubuntu is much lighter than Windows or OS X and can revive even slow and old machines.

But if you have a powerful machine at your disposal, I would not recommend installing Ubuntu as a first choice because the issue of not optimizing its software for the hardware still remains and does not allow your machine to perform to its potential. If you still want to try it though, the best option is to install it on Virtual Machine like VMware Fusion.

Fortunately Steam was released for Ubuntu a few months back making gaming also possible. Each new version on Ubuntu also comes with an amazing set of wallpapers that never cease to amaze.
Ubuntu 14.04 also brings in touch support for use on touch enabled machines but what remains to be seen is that if there is adequate driver support for multi touch to be used seamlessly.

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