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Ubuntu and Unity just work for me...

After about six years of using Ubuntu, or Linux Mint, on my personal laptop I simply don't see myself coming back to Windows. All of my needs are covered my Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and both OSes are FLOSS software which is important for me.

At work I use Windows 7, and when I compare it to Ubuntu or Linux Mint it just doesn't hold for long. There is nothing I can't do at least as well on Windows as I can do on either Ubuntu or Linux Mint. While all three OSes are quite good, Ubuntu just takes the cake in my case.

To be honest, if I could use Ubuntu at work I would have asked the IT department to set me up with an Ubuntu machine. The only thing that prevents me to do so, is that we use SAP and it only runs on Windows. For a year now they have been testing running SAP on Windows 10, and so far the only thing preventing us to make the jump is budget concerns.

Ubuntu is far from perfect, but its the Linux distro that fits my computing needs. Linux Mint is a close second, mainly because the Cinnamon desktop doesn't really covers my aesthetic tastes as well Unity does.

When Unity came out Ubuntu 11.04, I had my reservations about it. At the same time Linux Mint Launched Cinnamon, and since GNOME 3 didn't feel right, I tried Cinnamon. At the time, I liked Cinnamon but I felt it lacking compared to GNOME 2. While using Ubuntu, I came to love GNOME 2, so any desktop environment that hoped to replace it had quite a high bar to surpass.

Cinnamon didn't really made the cut at the time, and I decided to give Unity a chance. So, I made the jump to Ubuntu 11.10 and I feel in love with Unity.

So far, I've used Linux Mint 17 for a couple of months to see what all the fuss was about Cinnamon 2. While it got better, Cinnamon still isn't for me even though its a solid desktop environment, specially for those user coming from Windows and want something that just works out of the box.

Ubuntu is a solid distro for beginners and intermediate users that want a solid OS that works well out of the box, while giving some solid extra features for users with more technical knowhow.

Personally, I'm an intermediate user that isn't afraid to get his hands dirty while fixing problems or adding functionalities to his OS of choice. Ubuntu fills the bill while being an aesthetically pleasing OS at the same time. There are people who say that Ubuntu isn't as flexible as other distros, yet I think they miss the point of what Ubuntu is about and the fact that there are some other distros that cover that area.

The truth is that most user would be quite happy with Ubuntu as is comes, while some other would do some minor tweaking. Advance users have Arch Linux or Debian, which is good.

At the end of the day, that's what makes Linux great. There is a distro for every need, and not everyone needs to agree on what's best.

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