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I am migrating my workflow to ubuntu from windows. I have a macbook pro at home and I really enjoy being able to use the workspaces feature on ubuntu to increase my productivity. As myself being someone that isn't very familiar with doing command line things and hasn't worked with linux a whole lot other than doing basic commands like cd, ls, rm, screen, and sudo. I was wondering what you think would be the best choice for a ubuntu version. I am looking for ease of use as well as stability. I spend most of my time working with eclipse, as well as writing documents.

On a side note, right now I have a pretty high end workstation, but I am using a crappy notebook 2.5 inch 1TB hard drive for my system. Would it be worth it to switch to a top of the line SSD, or would the difference not really be noticeable? How difficult would it be for a newcommer to setup the system with the os and important folders running on a SSD and then other folders for storage running on a HD.

Shaun
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If you want stability and support you can use 12.04 LTS as it stands for Long Term Support and it'll be supported untill April 2017 nevertheless Ubuntu 13.10 not, but if you want to experience newer features and possibilities of Ubuntu then you can use 13.10 version but again you may experience some troubles with this version in work as it's not the LTS version and being improved from time to time, the next LTS stable version of Ubuntu is Upcoming in Spring 2014. How to install Ubuntu you can read over here and what partitions you'll be needed to work with over here

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Regarding the best choice for your ubuntu version, that depends on your processor. Anything after 12.04 is much more resource intensive, but you shouldn't notice on a newer machine. That difference caused problems for me though on a five year old laptop. If your computer can handle it, get 13.10.

With a newer machine, the difference will not be huge with an SSD. SSDs do get better boot time however. Whether or not it is worth it depends on how much money you like to put into your computers (I prefer none, and will always opt for software solutions). Traditionally, no linux distro is very heavy on processing power. Personally, I would not think it worth a hardware upgrade.

It would not be too difficult, though I would do it using Mac's partition editor. NTFS support in linux is still not the best.

Kremer
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  • The difference with SSDs is huge, you will notice every time you open a program. In reference to the question, you don't need a top of the line one any SSD will be a vast improvement, something like Kingston SSDnow is very cheap and will have several times improved performance over mechanical disks – Anake Jan 24 '14 at 14:25
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I am a power user. As a commercial artist and designer I have worked on Mac, Windows and many flavors of Linux. Currently I work with Ubuntu 12.04 and am divorcing the others. Ubu is 1000% better at working with Mac an Windows than they are at working with Linux.

Non-technical background is not a problem. The current versions of Ubu are as user friendly as any OS. It is more flexible, more beautiful, and faster than the others. If you want to do just about anything on your computer just google it and find software suggestions and installation instructions. Power-user software is free except for donating what you feel it is worth.

Problems are easier to resolve because of the communities behind them. Since it is not proprietary there are no secrets that hide solutions from the public and experts. I am considering upgrading from 12.04 to 13.10 because I have upgraded to 64-bit. It is new so 12.04 and Windows 8 are a little quirky on it. Since Ubuntu and other Linux flavors are currently ahead of MS to the point where MS has returned to "borrowing" I totally expect 13.10 to do better.

If it weren't for 64-bit I would stick with 12.04 LTS because adapting to change does slow down production. I am still keeping 12.04 on all my other machines. I hope that answers everyone's questions on upgrading professionally.

user221196
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