On Ubuntu: Pretty good, still some raw edges

I switched out of the Windows about 2 years ago. I started of with an EEE PC, the first one that ran the Xandros linux distribution while I was backpacking through asia and didn't think it was bad at all. I got internet, could watch videos, listen to music and make skype calls through the little thing. My impressions of the Linux OS system was that it wasn't bad.

So last year, I bought myself a desktop PC because I had enough troubles with my laptops dying on me and the rediculous repair fees and the turn around time to get my computer back. If the laptop dies, then it is going to be chucked. Why spend $400~$500 for repairs if for about double the price you can usually get double the performance (which is about after the warrenty expires!). But spending $1000 for a new laptop is pricey anyways so I have moved onto using netbooks which cost in the $400 range. Completely disposable if something goes wrong. But I am going off on a tangent.

Anyways, about Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is a packaged version of Linux by a commercial group called Canonical. These guys basically put an interface on top of the thing, streamed lined the installation interface and have been working on the thing to make Linux user friendly. They've done a pretty good job of making the system user friendly as the installation process was quite smooth and testing the OS before you install it through the live CD is a nice feature. You can even install it through a USB disk if you like even.

I will note that the distribution is generally based on the same software base but with a different set of selected software installed. When some something doesn't work, it usually a configuration error or incompatibility of some software working with other software. Ubuntu it self isn't entirely to blame if the base software is buggy (the solution, however is a better selection with more stable software). Anyways, let's get started.

A little on hardware

Hardware support is fairly good, for generic pieces of hardware. You won't have problems with the video card which is usually the only piece of hardware that people install on their own. But support for other pieces of hardware is sometimes sketchy (everything else is OK though)

For example, I installed a new TV capture card designed to work on the PCI-e bus but found out after in installing the thing that there weren't any drivers that supported it. And no, it isn't as simple as looking up the part on the internet to see if the thing is supported. I was basically using commands to ID the chips the capture card used to see if there was any support for the thing. It turns out that there isn't for the time being and I would have been better off buying a card that ran on the standard PCI bus.

For "exotic" hardware sometimes things don't work, but it is a work in progress.

On Open Office, the MS office replacement

I am a heavy excel user. I do lots of calculations and usually deal with lots of data. One thing I've noticed about Calc for Open Office is that it is slow. I hate slow software. Interacting with the spreadsheet can start getting jerky when a data set is large and you are flying through the data. It is disorientating, but still usable. The spreadsheet experience on MS office is more pleasant. The Office Office word processor isn't bad, but I don't generally use word processors that much now a these days -- it's mainly simple text editors I use for programming

Sound has some bitchy quirks

If sound doesn't work properly, then it can be a show stopper. Sound didn't work perfectly me right out of the gate when I installed Ubuntu. Sure I could play music but from time to time the music would skip. I used to have skipping mp3s on a 90 MHz computer about 10 years ago, mp3s were just catching on at that time and it was acceptable. This is 10 years later and I am on a 1.6 GHz dual CPU computer having skipping sound out of the box isn't going to be acceptable for people that didn't have problems on a windows platform.

I eventually got the problem fixed after searching on the internet to install some patches and then do some tweaking. The problems seem to be different from computer to computer and not all of them always worked. The whole sound problem is through a sound server system (which in theory is nice, but still need more work in practice) called PulseAudio. For many people pulseaudio is the bane of their sound experience because sometimes it works properly and other times it doesn't.

Pulseaudio is a software layer that handles sound processing and mixing, which some of the older Linux sound drivers were not able to handle. Before you could only have one piece of software using the sound card at a time then software started to get developed to enable mixing.

There is a long story about this here. Read it if you have time, but it explains the development of sound for linux... and sort of why we have problems with sound from time to time.

Slow hard drive transfers (intermittent, but recently fixed)

There are times when I had to move large amounts of data around on the computer that would drive me nuts. Considering that I had bought new hard drives and wanted to redistribute my data, sometimes the transfer rates would be in the order of just a few 4~8 MB/sec. Slow compared to what you should be getting, which is in the 70~80 MB/sec range which you should be getting. The problem turned out to be a problem with the x64 version of ubuntu for AMD CPUs. I eventually downgraded to a 32bit version to get more relyable transfer rates. The 32 bit version, is also more stable than the 64 bit version (flash works properly and doesn't crash as much).

There were people out there that said that the 64 bit version of Ubuntu was stable. It wasn't good enough for me, and the 32 bit version is more mature. Had to learn it the hard way.

So you have a few problems, here's a shovel and dig

When it comes to dealing with software problems with Ubuntu your best resource is the Ubuntu forums, where many people ask questions and post about their problems. From my personal experience, searching through the forum is a pain in the ass. The search isn't good enough and sometimes the solutions I've found were for older versions which may not apply to the version I am using. This needs fixing.

There are people out there that are nice enought to post a link to a main article posted somewhere which my search didn't hit with solution for some strange reason. But still, I consider myself a competent searcher and I shouldn't have to go through a maze of comments to find what I am looking for.

Problems that many people face should be put somewhere more proiminent where people can find them easier. I've killed countless hours searching for a solution to some problem. It shouldn't be a needle in a haystack problem.

Free software is decent

Ubuntu is based on the Debian distribution, which uses a software repository system. Basically people that make software in their free time upload it to the repository and you can search the repository for something that you might need. There is a whole slew of stuff uploaded there, from video, image, sound editing, office applications, games (most amature, but some polished ones out there) and more. I am somewhat fond of the software repository because many of the programs that I would usually have to go out and buy, is there and available for free, legally.

Compared with Xandros and Windows?

I used Xandros for my first EEE-PC and I had a very enjoyable experience with that platform. The software on the computer was stable and I didn't have many bugs to deal with. I never really even have to trouble shoot the software on the system even once which I was pretty happy about.

Software should just work and perform well. I understand that making software and getting all the bugs out is a pain but polish is important. I don't have time to deal with problems. In my experience so far, there are distributions that exist out there where I have never had to debug and I may want to switch over in the future.

In general, the experience in Ubuntu is pretty decent and there are things in the Linux world that would put Windows to shame. The boot time for one is pretty quick. I can have the system up and running in about 30 seconds and I mean responsive. None of this, "let's get the log in screen quickly, but I am still loading" which we see in Windows... after logging in, I still can't use the computer for about 30 more seconds!

Conclusion

I took a leap into the Linux world, it isn't bad and there is some pretty nice cutting edge stuff out here. And if you like desktop eye candy (Compiz Fusion), some of the Linux features can blow the top of windows. See video here. This video is more than 2 years old and there are newer videos out there but I didn't care for the music to them.

Is it useful? Well, not really but it's cool. MS eventually copied some of it's features to Vista. They didn't do too good of a job of it and you got the hog which is known as Vista. Compiz fusion is to desktops as are boobs to women -- they're just sexy. But anyways...

So there you have it. I'm content with Ubuntu for now, but with some of the annoying experiences, I may trade up to something better something comes my way. The 9.10 version will be released at the end of this month and I'll be upgrading. If I get too annoyed, I'll go find another distro to try. But for now, I'm not going back to the world of windows.