E-Dribble

I settled on Ubuntu for my first attempt at linux on the new machine.  To end the suspense, I’ll just say that everything is working as it should and MY GOD, THIS COMPUTER IS FAST!

After getting everything installed, set up and tested, I moved over all the important stuff in my home directory and replaced the old work machine.  Then I got to reflect upon the install.  I can say that I still would never think of handing a linux disk to a Windows user and telling them to try it as their OS.  At the same time, I’m astounded at how far linux has come in regards to the desktop.  Here’s the highs and lows:

Highs:

1) Did I say fast?  Holy crap, I don’t know what happened in the last year, but whatever it was, it seems to have gotten rid of half of the time needed for bootup. From BIOS splash to no disk activity in the desktop, I’m looking at between 15-20 seconds.  A Vista boot on the same machine requires almost a minute to stop disk activity.

2) Friendly install for the ignorant: Finally, I don’t need to know anything about chipsets and partition sizes for my swap space to install.  I had a working install within a half hour of starting the process.

3) Looking pretty snazzy:  Gone of the days are oversized icons, almost-readable fonts and menus that look like they were Windows 3.1 rejects.  The fonts are fantastically crisp, the icons are top notch and the polish is in place in all the right spots.

4) I can rest:  My game computer is such a tiring experience. Malware, antivirus, scans, disabled javascript and more just for some peace of mind.  It’s so refreshing not to give a flying shit if I visit a hijacked web page.

5) Screensavers and power settings are no longer a joke:  Used to be nothing worked.  Then, Gnome sometimes worked.  Then Xscreensaver worked in lieu of Gnome screensaver.  Imagine my surprise when I got a screensaver and power management without messing with startup apps and shutting down native processes.

There’s more, but those are the high points.  Not all of my experience with The latest distro has been rosey though. There were some aspects that made me wonder what I was thinking.

The Lows:

1) Partitioner? More like PartitioNOTer:  I’m serious.  Just stop acting like you can resize partitions for dualbooting.  I’ve never once had a linux distro successfully resize a Windows partition.  I tried for about 30 minutes to resize the Vista partion before breaking down and using the Vista system to resize itself.  The process took under one minute in Vista.

2) But I like Jackelopes better than Koalas:  I started out with 9.04.  Unfortunately the linux kernel used in Ubuntu 9.04 didn’t recognize my soundcard(Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme).  There was a three page tutorial for building a workaround module into the kernel but there were a couple caveats.  One, you lost all but duplex capabilities on the card.  Secondly, you had to follow the three page tutorial every time you upgraded your kernel.   Thirdly, users had a huge amount of problems with the process.  To say they had mixed results would be kind.  Fortunately the latest kernel supports the card, so I decided to upgrade to 9.10(Karmic Koala).  It’s only a couple of weeks prior to the official release and to be honest there was no way I was going to go to all that trouble for mediocre results.  Upgrading to 9.10 led me to my next hiccup, however.

3) We get it, you like absolute control: Another reason I wasn’t hot about running 9.04 was because of the age of the apps available.  If you’re running a major version behind on a browser, you’re doing something wrong.  Sure, we can build apps into the distro, but there might be something behind letting the user deal with the third party apps like OpenOffice, Firefox, Songbird and more.  For instance, my upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 kept failing.  after trying a few times, I began rooting through the logs to find out why.  I eventually did find the problem.  OpenOffice was causing the complete failure of the upgrade.  A word processing app stopped my OS upgrade.  As another example, this thread guides you along the process of installing the latest Firefox 3.5 and getting your menus to accept and use it.  The fact that this thread exists is proof that linux hasn’t figured out how to relinquish control of apps that have nothing to do with their distro.

4) Networked drives… they’ve been around a while you know:  It’s still a process of adding options to your fstab entries until you get a working Win share.  And don’t forget to install smbfs!  Oh, and linux still thinks there’s nothing wrong with shutting down the network prior to disconnecting network drives.  Hello, minute and a half shutdowns!

5) Make the brown stop.

I could nitpick but to be completely honest, I’m happy with the way everything has gone and barring any oddities that impact my productivity, I’m going to end up one of the Ubuntu flock for a while.

If I can get over their brown fetish.