Great software guide for Ubuntu 10.04

The beauty of Linux for me comes not only from it’s stability, security and the ability to install countless great software available for free but also from the ability it offers me to customize my desktop to perform tasks the way I want it. Customizing has two parts, one I do immediately after I install the system and the other one that develops in time, as I use it. At some point I manage to have all I need and for some months everything is perfect and work is as usual.

But I have a problem: those guys making Linux come with a new improved version and with eye-candy new applications installed. This blows my internal stability. For a while I don’t even look at the new version because I don’t need it as everything works just fine in mine.

After some days or weeks the thought of trying the new version comes back, and I push it away again with arguments that my system is absolutely perfect, and if I reinstall or upgrade it I might have to restart customizing it. It works, but only for a very few days, but meantime I already have the image of the new system written on an USB stick.

Then one day (or night) I save the bookmarks and other stuff I have, including a list of my applications that i was currently using, just in case (I prefer reinstalling a system from scratch as all my user data is on a different partition that the system), insert the stick in the computer and reboot.

And there is the new system installed, it looks great, more polished than the previous and as a wishful thinking, it seems to even run faster. Sometimes it does, sometimes it runs the same as the previous. But the feeling is great! Customizing and adding software is also fun being accompanied with new discoveries.

I kept packages and disks of almost all previous versions of Linux I used and worked great, just in case I will need them again. And I never needed them. These guys know how to make the new versions so that the user never looks back.

This new version that triggered this post is Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

And here is a great article about software it has or you can easily install for all activities you can imagine.