Ubuntu - Initial impressions from a grumpy Linux skeptic

You'd think being a fan of free stuff I'd be all about open source and Linux. Well... not really. I've toyed with Linux over the last 10 or so years in various capacities. Generally, each of these flirtations is short lived and more of a passing curiosity or a desire to at least have some working knowledge of alternate systems.

Obviously, from a usability and compatibility standpoint, any operating system will evolve over the course of a decade. The same holds true for Linux, and specific builds of Linux such as Mepis and Ubuntu pop into mind when it comes to ease of use. In my mind, Linux's biggest problem is also what makes it great: the rich diversity of features and customizability of the system.

The fact is there's groups of people going in many different directions at once. Since there's no central company like Apple or Microsoft to direct the vision of armies of developers, things tend to scatter in many different directions. There are endless options of distros, applications, features, and even a fairly big schism in the actual main GUI of the OS (KDE and Gnome being the two big camps). In the desktop world, where end users, AKA consumers, live, this diversity is a detriment to wide adoption as it causes massive levels of consumer confusion.

Indeed, the Linux community itself is even divided over whether or not it cares about average end users. Some groups like the ones behind Ubuntu care deeply about making an easy to use version that anyone can use, while others believe that Linux should remain a mostly hobbyist/IT platform reserved for people who are true believers.

I personally tend to want the ease of use camp to win. While I love technology in general, I'm sort of over the hobbyist thing. I stopped building my own computers years ago, and I want my OS experience to be simple. After a prolonged absence, I've come back into the Mac user flock because I like the integrated hardware and software design, it just feels to me like a sold, flowing unit.

I think the hardware and software combo really is what makes the Mac a Mac. I've played with running OS X on my decrepit Dell E1505 laptop. While I got most of the pieces running, the experience just lacked something.

That Dell has seen a lot of different operating systems, and is the basis for my impressions of the latest build of Ubuntu. When I began this little adventure, I was running Windows 7 on the machine. 7 was working pretty well until recently where it just suddenly started thrashing wildly and generally misbehaving. Rather than go through the trouble of actually trying to figure out what's wrong, or consider the possibility that I got myself stuck in a botnet, I decided maybe it was yet again time to change operating systems.

I've pretty much been through the range of systems, and was kind of bored. I already had Windows 7, so didn't see much of a point there. I use XP at work all the time, and it's not really interesting. Vista? Yeah right. I didn't want to go through the OS X headache when I had real Macs at my disposal. That left Linux.

I knew I wanted to actually use this machine for general purpose browsing, so I didn't want anything over complicated. I like Mepis, so that was an option, but I wanted to be a little different. I briefly ran a couple of incarnations of Ubuntu on the machine, and version 9 (Jaunty Jackalope) had been available for a while, and was starting to gain even more buzz as the most likely winner of the desktop distro wars.

Based on my previous experience with Ubuntu, I knew there were some hiccups getting a fully working version on my particular machine. I went ahead and Googled all of the info I figured I'd need ahead of time (particularly the howto for getting wireless up and running). Interestingly enough, there were no specifics of that wireless card and version 9.04 of Ubuntu.

With the relevant information bookmarked on another machine, I downloaded and burned the boot CD (yes a CD, it still fits on a CD!). I booted from the CD on the trusty old Dell and went straight to the install mode from the boot menu. Testing on the live CD first is for wimps! The installer for Ubuntu has always been a pretty simple affair and fairly straight forward if you take the default options. I told it to feel free to destroy my hard drive and let it do its thing.

20 minutes or so later I was booted into the trademark ugly, ugly brown and orange desktop. Step 1 after any new OS install is to get networking up and running so you can consult with the wise sage, Google for next steps. Just as I figured I would need to get the Windows driver for the wireless card onto the machine, a window popped saying that I need a wireless driver that isn't open source, if I wanted to enable it, click here.

Wait, what? There's no way that would actually work. I remember you have to do all this stuff to blacklist the built-in driver and download and setup stuff like NDIS wrapper, light the black candles and sacrifice a rubber chicken. Well why not, let's just click it. A minute later, the little wifi light on the machine lit up. I still didn't believe it. I hit the menu bar icon for the wireless, and there right in front of me was a list of available networks, including my own.

I watched in amazement as it connected to the network and put me back in touch with my dear friend, Google. I wondered to myself how long it would actually stay connected to the wifi network as older versions of Ubuntu often disconnected me several times an hour. The network has only dropped me once in about a week of usage.

As for the rest of the system? Everything worked. Sound, track pad, video resolution, everything was good to go. I even found myself absentmindedly using two finger scrolling to page through a website (as I'm used to doing on Macbooks), only to realize that I was using two finger scrolling without having to do anything to turn it on or make it work!

I am just blown away with how well hardware recognition and configuration works in this version of Ubuntu. I think this alone is a huge leap in the potential adoption of Linux by more typical users. The appeal in Ubuntu also comes in its pre-packaged software offerings. Out of the box it comes with key things like Open Office, FireFox and Pidgin, and has a nice graphical front-end for downloading even more packages.

While the initial offerings are limited, additional stuff due to a number of reasons such as licensing and possible legality do prevent Ubuntu from having all of the features like DVD playback of a closed source system. A number of third party repositories by default are disabled as well which further limits software options for the uninitiated.

The good news is there are a ton of blog articles and how-to's to help a newcomer get up and running. It may be a little off putting for some as a lot of the steps involve modifying text files and running commands in the terminal window. Through the magic of copy and paste, the steps are easy to follow and will get a new system to pretty much be feature equal to any other system in short order.

Another tutorial covered how to get more eye pleasing themes in place. Going a little more advanced, I was able to turn on the Emerald theme manager and make some tweaks to the general appearance so I have at least some of the eye candy that I enjoy in the other systems such as transparency and window minimize effects.

After spending that first evening setting everything up, I actually found myself at a loss over what to do. For some reason I wanted to go do "Linux stuff" instead of just actually using the machine to surf the web. It was basically too functional, it already did everything it was supposed to without me having to mess with it as I was accustomed.

The OS had faded to the background of my computing experience, which really is what it's supposed to do. I don't think I'm quite ready to join the neckbeard crowd and cast away the evils of closed software, but I'm actually content using a Linux distro. I imagine modified versions of Ubuntu designed for specific manufacturers' hardware (like netbooks) could be even more seamless. Adoption of Linux has been mixed at best because of consumer choices. I certainly understand that, but then again I'd love to have the option to pay 100 bucks less for a new piece of hardware.

I do think that it should be an option since there still is a bit of a culture shock and learning curve going to Linux. I wouldn't really recommend it to someone like my mother-in-law or anything, but it may be a way to go if you have at least a middling level of computer experience, and for some reason don't want a Mac that is ;-)