My troubles with Linux Ubuntu 8.04

[shiv]

Actually, Scid is more than enough for all players. There is no feature in chessbase that I miss in Scid. GM Matthew Sadler gave it a positive review in new in chess. I have shown Scid to many GMs and they were surprised that it was so fast at searches and could do trees so quickly on the fly. Of course, there was a learning curve.

However, a GM told me that if he used Scid on a regular basis he might well gain around 25-50 elo points as pre-round preparation will be faster. He said the same about chess assistant though! He was comparing all programs to chessbase.

Scid has less bells and whistles than chessbase. However, it is very fast on searches, trees etc. If someone wants bells and whistles, play a video game instead

That being said, jose-chess.sourceforge.net is a bells and whistles free program similar to the fritz GUI.

[M ANSARI]

If you think that Linux is bad and geekish today ... you should have tried it a few years ago. Personally I think Linux is super easy to install and use today, and really if you google a bit you can find all the information you need. Remember that you are starting a new OS where you have spent almost no time learning it. Think of how much time it took you to figure out how to configure and use Windows OS ... I think that if you invested as much time on Linux today as you did on Windows you will find the learning curve as quite similar.

Linux is probably the future ... it is nice efficient code ... and most important of all it is free. Any major application you can think of is available for free ... from photo editing to word processing etc... including chess. Linux is a little more geekish (not much more I will say) ... but that is why it is also so efficient and takes such a little footprint. I do find myself using Windows much more often than Linux though by a factor of 10 to 1 ... but if I was forced to ... I could probably live with Linux alone.