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.