Ubuntu!

Using Edgey and I like it. In fact I REALLY like it. Once Vista was released, I decided to start looking around and plan for the day I need to abandon XP. I believe Ubuntu may be the answer, at least at this point in time.

My son has been a Linux person for years now but he gave up on it a few years ago. I showed him Ubuntu and he said it's the cleanest version of Linux he's ever seen.

I had to jump through several hoops to get my Belkin wireless card going. My son had fits with his Netgear wireless card, which is one of the harder cards to configure in Ubuntu but he got it working.

In fact, I'm now wondering just how many features Vista has ripped off from not only Ubuntu, but Linux in general. It's very obvious that IE 7 is a blatant ripoff of Firefox that tries too hard. But from asking for passwords for admin tasks to beryl, Vista looks a lot like Gnome.

with just enough changes to make Linux incompatable....

Vista is nice. It's also nice and slow. The Genuine Windows Advantage is so intrusive that it ought to be illegal. It still complains about my legal copy of XP and I have to go through the half-hour phone ritual to reactivate it every time I upgrade a motherboard.

I went to the Vista Launch event. They gave me free copies of the OS and Office and a t-shirt (What, no XXL sizes for a community of programmers? Is Gates losing it?) and HP gave me a blinking necklace. There are some nice touches in the box. But that's all they are -- touches. There is no new real technology that I can tell. DotNet is still their Killer App du Jour, and it follows a lot of Linux library and repository models.

Right now, Microsoft has only one point in its favor -- aesthetics. MS has always had an edge in "user factors engineering". They paid for the best-designed fonts that money could buy, hired the best engineering help, and paid for artists who might otherwise have been employed silkscreening concert t-shirts for a living.

But even that edge isn't quite by as much as it used to be. XP is painfully slow on my PIII-1GHz box. Ubuntu running Gnome is fast, and Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE) is amazing.

It took me a long time, but I'm nearly at 100% Linux now (Ubuntu Edgy). And I was a MS-shop developer with eight years of exclusively Windows experience. So I know, in detail, where all the weaknesses are. And they aren't any more than skin-deep at this point.

Oh, Linux crashes more often. It also recovers with less data loss -- by far. (Keep in mind, I'm a desktop developer, and I abuse the hell out of my OSes, knowing the public will be even harder on them!)

For example, you can't move most file browser columns around, and there are no services/daemons to calculate how much is in a folder. The fonts are just a tad less polished. It's tougher to capture WMA/ASF streams due to the aversion to all things Microsoft. And Windows still requires less of the newbie user at the cost of wresting control from the user.

Overall, Linux is now the better choice for even moderately sophisticated users. A few more shell-integration apps for the newbies and a bout of recession, and Linux will kick some serious ass in the marketplace.

Then, as soon as the kernel is modularized, Solaris/BSD/Linux will duke it out. But that's a different fight ...

--p!

One that is desperately needed.

Good post.

Dupe

Dupe

It just works. I can thoroughly recommend it. I have to admit to having had a few issues with dual-booting (XP Pro) but that could just have been my incompetence. It has a very busy help community and so far I have yet to find a piece of peripheral hardware that Ubuntu won't get along with. And the philosophy behind it and its various incarnations (Edubuntu, Xubuntu) is heartening.

"Feisty Fawn" is now ready as the latest release, suceeding "Edgy Eft", "Dapper Drake", "Breezy Badger", et al.

Hate to admit it, but cutesy names like those put me off trying Ubuntu for the longest time. :puke:

I plan to install U7.04 on this small hard drive I've got lying around here someplace & see what it's like. If it's good enough, I'll take FC3 off my good drive and replace it with Ubuntu.

Funny thing: back when I was using Windows, I never really evaluated my operating system at all, or seriously considered upgrading or replacing with something I might possibly like better.

Until my ancient hard drive finally died, taking with it the pre-installed limited version of Windows98. So then I needed a new OS fast, and Linux was only thing available that I could afford... ;)

But I would love to try the latest Ubuntu on it. Thanks for the tip!

It's pretty nice so far. Edgy worked pretty well, but wi-fi and suspend/hibernate was a wee bit flaky. They're much better behaved with Feisty. It also has the new Nvidia drivers, so getting eye candy like Beryl working is much easier.

I also took the liberty to install a 3rd party version of Freetype (done by someone who's willing to give the middle-finger to Microsoft's ClearType patent nazis,) so now I've got very nicely rendered text.

With all of that, I have pretty much all of the desktop eye candy available with Vista or Mac OSX. Beryl even comes with an Expose-like window picker feature, which is very cool.

The one gripe I have is that the media player I use, Amarok, no longer correctly plays the stream from am760.net (my local Air America affiliate) :( I did double-check to make sure I have all the codecs installed, including w32codecs and libdvdcss (more middle fingers to codec patent nazis) and indeed most of that sort of thing works correctly. But I can't stream my local Air America station - I suspect I've encountered a bug in libxine (which Amarok uses for most of its codec work).

The people who do libxine have been doing *a lot* of work on it lately, and some version of it have had weird bugs ... truly weird, like someone dropped in a code snippet that basically says, "Hey, play everything *except* this, and with this, make sure the colors are reversed."

Okay, I'm exaggerating.

Might try using a different engine? I switch engines for different things.

I'm suspecting that it was a corrupt stream, or the server was down or overloaded. It's working fine now. Amarok's a little finicky when it comes to streams, and it will complain and act up if things are a little off.

and they've fixed two of my big peeves with Dapper, suspend and font rendering. No matter what I did, I just couldn't get suspension to work, which was a showstopper for me. Now it appears to behave just fine, yay (this is on a desktop, I don't know if they've gotten the kinks worked out for laptops). Similarly, with fonts, the defaults work right out of the box, I haven't seen any smears or bunched kerning yet. They've also added third party and proprietary repositories to the package manager as default. Looks like I'll be spared a lot of nitpicky tweaking this time around, very, very cool.

Now if only Linux developers would learn that the common sense answer to a yes or now question is NOT "DISCARD"!

Or that confirmation on a selection dialog should be OK and not CLOSE.

Well, suspension is boogered again, I can't resume and have to quit. Since it worked faultlessly for a couple of days, (something it never did in prior releases) I'll assume it's something I installed or modified. Now I'll have to decide which I'm more arsed to do, backtrack or reinstall. Rats.

I'm still chuffed about the fonts, though. It was always a jarring first impression to see webpages look like ransom note collages.

Not just for Ubuntu. I have a problem with it no matter what distro I'm using it, and it exhibits similar behaviors. Works for awhile and then just doesn't.

It's a level of hardware interaction for which I have no comfort zone, so I have no clue what the issue is.

Maybe if someone could goad Ballmer into sneering about "can't even get suspend/hibernate to work" the propellerheads will at long last swarm on it. More than once I fruitlessly roasted my eyeballs on ACPI arcana before punting. I'm a dilettante, not a maven, but the clock's running, I am definitely NOT staying with Windows past XP.

If DRM were added to the suspend function at the hardware level, it'd be perfected in a week on every OSS system out there. :-)

I learned to live with it ... just adjusted behaviors. It's annoying, but I deal with it. I'm more concerned with a wider array of printer support at the moment. Haven't found a printer I couldn't get to work ... getting one to work *properly* is another issue.

So true. Surest way to get a Slashdot geek to do something it to tell him he's not allowed to do it. Ballmer could be done with his Linux trouble if he'd stuff them all in a truck full of explosives and tell them, "whatever you do, don't push that button." The only problem would be getting away fast enough.

And this sub-thread just inspired me to change my sig. Wonder how long it'll take my posts to start being randomly deleted as a result ... even though I offer no explanation and, as far as I know, even hex numbers aren't subject to copyright/patent restrictions.

Let's see just how "underground" we are here. :-)

I've got dibs on the bottom bunk when we land in Gitmo.