Last night I installed Ubuntu on my brother's old PC (Friday nights don't get more exciting than that).
Well what do I think of Ubuntu - all I have to say is WTF mate!!!
All I had to do was put in the cd which booted up as a full install which figured out the optimal settings for my monitor and recognized my USB mouse and had a desktop icon called install which when you double clicked on it it installed. Only inputs it required were location, time, and user info (and looks like they copied apple or whoever apple copied by using sudo only rather than creating a root account). Then within a Family Guy episode it was done.
But where do I fill in horizontal and vertical monitor refresh rates? Where's the struggle to get USB working? Where's the 3 days of waiting while it bootstraps and recompiles everything based on my favorite optimization level (-os for those wondering)? What about configuring all of the network options by hand? No designing my partition table - how do I know that the swap drive is optimal according to some rule of thumb I picked up somewhere? And then once it was installed it wanted me to install programs using its nice, easily searchable graphical interface rather than running scripts or wearing out the enter key using dselect! What was I supposed to do with the rest of my Friday night?
Well luckily I did hit one obstacle - Ubuntu does not come with sshd (it has the client but not the server - probably not a bad choice for a default install) and it's graphical installer doesn't have it. Of course it turned out the solution was: sudo apt-get install ssh.
I haven't used it for long but I think they may have hit the point where anyone can easily perform the install.
Next week I'll have to switch back to Gentoo so I can feel like I accomplished something and get that extra millisecond of optimization.
3 comments:
Just wait until you want to play an mp3 using their Rhythmbox (or whatever default player comes with the install) and it proceeds to blow up in your face. 'Cause, you know, installing an mp3 codec by default is silly - who uses those anyway? Everyone using Linux has their music encoded in ogg! (in case you're wondering - installing gstreamer-mp3 will solve the problem).
Overall, I've been fairly happy with using Ubuntu (started with Breezy Badger and upgraded to Dapper Drake). I imagine using it on a desktop is very easy, but you'll remember some of the Gentoo joy if you ever have to use the beast on a ThinkPad with an ATI graphics card. Let's just say there's a whole wiki dedicated to it :).
I have no clue what Ubuntu is... And all of Mike Z's comments left me going, whuh?
:) hope you're well!
I do suppose I forgot to enclose my comment in <cs-geek-rant></cs-geek-rant>. My apologies.
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