When using Mac or Linux, I often find myself stumbling upon features which I just find ‘nice’.

I love the built-in support for VNC. On Mac, it is as simple as waiting for the remote computer, providing it’s on a local Bonjour one, to appear in Finder. And enabling it is a checking a box in the Sharing preference pane. (connecting to a non-local machine is done through going to Connect to Server in Finder and prefixing the computer’s location with vnc://). Support varies by distro for Linux, but generally the service is pre-installed.

I love how I can mount SFTP and FTP shares in Nautilus under Ubuntu and in Finder on OS X. Unfortunately, support on OS X is read only. Whilst Windows has limited support for FTP and WebDAV etc, I personally find it very cumbersome and not nice to play with at all. I’d happily use Nautilus to put files onto my website; but on Windows I’d have to use Filezilla!

Faces in iLife 09 is great. Whilst there are better commercial (and probably free) options, it is just nice that is there. But it doesn’t intrude, whilst in Windows it no doubt would somehow majestically stand out to make it obvious that such a nice gimmick is included!

Desktop search is nice. I don’t think Windows Search can compare with Spotlight or Beagle. On Windows, I’d probably download Google Desktop Search. But no need on Mac or Ubuntu, as they’re already there.

I also love the simplicity of Linux commands like dd. On Windows, you’d need something like Acronis to do the same job, just much worse!

So, bringing on the flame war. What do you like in your operating system which isn’t in others?

I’ve just reinstalled Ubuntu. I messed up my x64 install and with all the problems I encountered by using a x64 operating system I decided to swap back to a nice x86 installation. I chose to install a development build of Gutsy.

I’ve had to spend a great deal of time installing libraries you’d think would be installed by default, such as various codecs, DVD libraries and even libraries which are called build-essential for C development. You’d have thought an essential library would be packaged with Ubuntu because even though it’s fairly easy to grab off the repos it’s still an inconvenience… especially to a C and Linux n00b such as myself.

As for DVDs, it’s a massive inconvenience. I understand that DVD and proprietary codecs such as MP3 aren’t provided in order to keep the ‘free’ spirit of Ubuntu but whilst one can pretty much download music codecs through one click in Totem when they try to play a MP3, finding the correct DVD library is much harder. There isn’t just a nice button you can click… which would be really useful!

Even if Ubuntu can’t legally include things such as a DVD decoder, it would be great if it was easily installable. I guess one solution would be installing the unofficial Ubuntu Ultimate which comes with more essential packages (such as VLC) than standard Ubuntu.

You have to understand why Linux is infamous for its complexity!

Tags: ubuntu, linux