Ubuntu!

So, the other day I downloaded Ubuntu 8.10 Beta. I tried it out on the computer at work, without a whole lot of success. Everything worked, except for networking. Which, these days, makes it kind of useless. Essentially, after a lot of reading (you think they’d put this in big flashing writing on the website), apparently they disabled the network driver in that build, because it kills network cards. It’s the network driver for nearly all modern motherboards with Intel chipsets. My network card wasn’t actually one of the ones being killed by the driver, but I would have had to rebuild the kernel to get it going. And that was about where I gave up.

So I took the disk home and tried it on my older laptop. Success! The wireless stuff worked (not on the live CD though, I think it had to save my WPA password somewhere, but it couldn’t), the wired networking worked, and the graphics worked. These are usually the things that suck. Even the Bluetooth seems to work (not that I have much to test it with). I’m quite impressed. It all just works.

So, much to my surprise (I’d tried various version of Xubuntu and Kubuntu 8.04), I actually quite like it. I guess my impressions of Linux from nearly 10 years ago have become rather out-of-date. I reckon I may actually stick with it. There’s something nice about a decent OS that still has 15Gb free on a 20Gb partition, even with a bunch of stuff installed. If I can set up a nice text editor, I can probably do most of the stuff I need to do, and Wine seems to run some stuff well, although Google Earth sort of killed the computer.

I know it isn’t exactly news to most people that Linux can actually be good. I guess I’ve basically just become lazy — Windows XP was familiar, and worked for me. And I still had those memories of tedious tweaking from years ago. In fact, tedious tweaking is one of the things that I hate. I like stuff that just works. I hate options, that’s why I kind of liked my iBook G4 (if only it weren’t so heavy). I think it’s also why I disliked KDE, GNOME seems to provide much less scope for fiddling.

It was an article on PowerTOP that really got me thinking though. Linux has made some pretty decent advances in recent times — it really is pretty damn good. (I guess all the setting up of SliceHost slices I’ve been doing for work, and getting the Pandora probably also helped push me in this direction.)