60 days with Ubuntu

I have been using Ubuntu for approximately 2 months now.  This has been a fairly monogamous relationship, I think I booted Windows all of twice, mostly because I had to go to a specific site that uses IE7 streaming capabilities.  I know I can install IE7 in Ubuntu, but I am not that devious.

So, how does it feel like?

Well, the initial impression remains: this is one damn fast OS.  It may because of its specific architecture; it may be because developpers are not trying to reinvent the wheel every time they develop a feature that is already implemented somewhere in a library and thus reuse exiting stuff; or it may be because I do not have to run anti-virus software, a desktop-based firewall, defragmentation, anti-spyware software, etc., thus saving computing cycles for the task at hand. I don’t know.  I just know it boots in seconds, shutrs down in seconds and is generally fabulously responsive!

Gnome is not a great looking desktop but it does the job and I find it generally uncluttered and perfectly suited for my needs.  No, I won’t switch to KDE.  One, because speed is very important for me so, if I have to switch, I’d rather go to XFCE.  Also, I tried Amarok and HATED the interface so I believe KDE is just not for me.  I don’t want to configure my third mouse-button, I am no Linus Torvald, so Gnome is great.

Synaptic is fantastic.  I have installed a few apps through .deb packages, but I generally stick to Synaptic, just because it makes updates so headaches free.  This is a fantastic feature and one that is probably only available thanks to FOSS so I believe that is a unique strength of GNU/Linux.  I end up trying many more apps than I did in Windows because they are free, they are generally very different from one another (why redevelop a new me-too product if you are not going to be paid for it?) and I can just install them, test them for a few days and just move on if I don’t like them.  Great.

The best feature of Ubuntu is not software but its social networks: all of the good guys contributing to the forums and helping noobs like me switch.  I did not foresee that, but I do believe it is a key strength of the distribution, the amount of pro bono work being done by an army of volunteers on the web.  The French community is particularly active for some reason and I cannot thank these guys enough for their help.

I don’t miss Outlook, I don’t miss Paint.net, I don’t miss WMP, I don’t miss Word or PowerPoint but I do miss Excel.  OO is okay but a tad slow, ugly and misses a few key features that I liked in Office.  No big deal, though.

I am looking forward to Jamie making progress with MetaTracker as the ability to search my emails is a real killer feature for me.

Now for the negative:

• I can live with the command-based and do see how productive it is (the French Ubuntu community is putting together fantastic how-tos that I just have to copy and paste from to install and parameter stuff like SAMBA, merci les gars) but I generally prefer using GUIs and it is an issue that there are so many things I still have to do “manually”.
• I hate the file-based access rights management that Linux uses.  I hate it.  Remember, in Windows, you don’t care about that stuff and I really haven’t done so since CS classes 15 years ago.  I am thinking of just giving root its own password and using it as my main account, I am so pissed about having to sudo this, sudo that because I can’t write to usr/share/games/whatever.
• It is too bad the Ubuntu team seems a bit shy about adding more stuff to the initial distribution.  Reinstalling means reinstalling tons of small stuff that I like (preload for instance, another one is this small package that allows you to open the terminal in the window through a righ-click, I have even forgotten its name).  Why not just include more of these utilities out-of-the box?
• I am generally uncomfortable with some of the religious debates that even users like me get pulled into on forums.  Why is Automatix bad, again?  Who cares if this driver is free or not?  Unrar is an example: I don’t know if I want the free Unrar or the unfree UnRAR, i just want the one that works.  I understand that on some theoretical level, free is important , but I am just a user and I do not want to have a theological argument every time I open a .pdf.

So this is it: I am staying in Ubuntu/Linux/GNU.  No going back: this is a great  OS and I am spreading the word around me.  The single greatest strength is the social engine of Ubuntu and it does change the way one looks at an OS and at one’s computer.

Patent armageddon

This came in through Slashdot.

It looks like Microsoft is moving closer to using US patent law as the last way to silence competition from FOSS. I do not know enough about US patent law to really understand if they have a legal leg to stand on but it certainly makes sense from a competition point-of-view (people are *really* switching to Ubuntu over here in Europe, particularly in France) and from a historical perspective (what with the Novell deal, Barmer’s threats and so on). Just a few thoughts:

• I saw Eben Moglen at a conference in Boston a few months back and the guy is amazing. I have rarely been held so much in thrall at a conference by any speaker and he was talking about the GPL v3.0, fercrissakes. He does not look like the sort of guy I would try to get into a legal fight with (I know he stepped down, BTW) so good luck to MSFT.
• Europe is starting to look like some sort of FOSS safe haven. Could we end up with a situation where FOSS is free here and “banned” in the US?
• How can Microsoft hope to benefit from this? From a marketing and perception perspective, this is unwinnable. Think Viet-nam.
• Finall, couldn’t the FOSS community just rewrite stuff and work around MSFT’s patents. If they have to, how long would it take? 5 years? More?

Looks like the few next months are going to be a lot of fun!

Ubuntu seen through the eyes of a former senior Microsoft executive

For those of you who can read French, I recommend taking a look at Olivier Ezratty’s blog and specifically at this post (Mise à jour de printemps) and at this post (A la découverte d’Ubuntu).

Olivier used to be a very senior executive with Microsoft France, a very important subsidiary for Microsoft as a whole. He is now an adviser for a number of start-ups so can give us an unbiased look at Ubuntu. His conclusions are very interesting and balanced.  Don’t bother with the comments: some are interesting, most are just the usual French Microsoft-bashing that is so tiresome.

Dell to ship PCs with Ubuntu Feisty

It seems the US blogosphere is abuzz with the news, so you probably have read it somewhere else (/., boing boing or here).  It is obviously great news, signaling as it does just how much Canonical has done to bring Linux to the masses.

Let me be a bit of a contrarian:

• I wonder if people who don’t know how to install Ubuntu on a PC pre-installed with Windows should be getting Ubuntu in the first place.  It is still harder to use than a Mac and comes without the decade or more of experience most people have had with Windows.  Also, I believe it is easier to learn to use than Windows if you are doing it from a fresh start but still fairly unforgivable (wi-fi set-up in Feisty, anyone?).  So I am hoping Dell is not going to promote Ubuntu on their entry-level PCs directed at people with little or no PC knowledge.
• On the same subject of price, clean PCs with Ubuntu are probably going to be more expensive than PCs preloaded with AOL, ShutterFly software… anyway, even without the Windows OEM license, which is very small anyway (around $40, from what I hear).
• Hardware compatibility is a non-issue: none of the PCs I have run LiveCD (many of ‘em Dells) on had hardware that was unsupported in Linux.  None.

So I wonder if this is really going to increase dramatically the number of Ubuntu users.  It is a great PR move, that’s for sure and a sign that this Linux on the desktop is becoming a reality.  But push Linux into the mainstream?  I am not so sure.