Ubuntu - Preliminary Thoughts

So I've just finished tinkering around with the most recent incarnation of Ubuntu Linux (version 9.04, or "Jaunty Jackalope" as it was referred to in development), and being both a relative newcomer to Linux* and a complete newcomer to Ubuntu specifically, I've got a few things that I'd like to get down before they leave my head.

First off, the Live CD that I ran the operating system from was relatively easy to assemble from scratch, and I appreciated that.  All I had to do was download the ISO disk image, burn the image to a CD, and that was that.  Then I shut the computer down, started it back up, and told it to boot from the CD in its drive.  All very simple, if a bit nerve-wracking for someone who doesn't do this sort of thing very often (like me).

I tend to avoid screwing with operating systems in general.  I think of tinkering with OSes as the digital equivalent of attempting neurosurgery with a rusty screwdriver and a copy of The Human Brain for Dummies.  I just don't think of myself as someone capable of wielding that sort of expertise.  But here I am trying anyway, because I've gotten so bloody sick of Windows.  The boot from CD was very smooth, in any case.

Now, the actual desktop environment of Ubuntu, once it started up?  Lovely.  As compared to the way my cluttered Windows desktop looks (which is, admittedly, partly my fault), the wide open, empty spaces of Ubuntu's working environment are incredibly Zen.  Just take a look at the screenshot (borrowed from the ever-helpful Wikipedia) above.  As in the various incarnations of the Macintosh operating system, application shortcuts are not automatically relegated to the desktop.  Applications are instead clustered rather appropriately in the "Applications" menu at the top of the screen, and are further divided into submenus such as "Internet", "Office", and "Games".  I don't know how well the menu would hold up after I added the approximately eight million other programs that I would invariably download, but it shows promise.

The "Places" menu contains shortcuts to various sections of the hard drive--"Documents", "Music", and so on--making it fairly self-explanatory.  The "System" menu is rather a lot like the Windows Control Panel--again, pretty obvious.

Now for something that may not be immediately evident from the screenshot above: Ubuntu 9.04 moves fast.  It may just be that I'm used to the plod of my five-year-old Windows XP installation, but shit.  Firefox started up considerably faster than I've ever seen it manage on Windows, and that was just the first session with it.  Subsequent reopenings of the application came up in a flash.  The image and PDF viewers also opened up very quickly, and the whole experience just felt smooth.

Ubuntu didn't seem to have any complaints about my hardware, either.  Sound and display both worked, and it even responded to the volume controls built into my laptop.  All I had to do to connect to my apartment's wireless network was choose said network in a drop-down menu and enter the key--Ubuntu had already recognized my wireless card and put it to work.  And on top of all this, I'm pretty sure it causes less heat buildup in my laptop than XP does.

Now for the things that I'm less than satisfied with.

First off, I tried to play some .mp3s and .flvs, among others, and found that I couldn't.  Out of the box, Ubuntu's media player doesn't support those formats.  I understood when it refused to let me play a .wmv--that's proprietary Windows shit right there--but it seemed especially odd that it would deny me the pleasure of listening to an .mp3, considering both .mp3's incredible popularity and the fact that the .mp3 format is not proprietary.  The program helpfully offered to search for codec packages that contained the above formats, but since I was running the whole shebang from a CD I couldn't very well install plugins.  So I had to pass.

On a related note, Ubuntu can't run iTunes--not even in an emulator like** WINE--and there is no suitable substitute for it at this time.  There are some applications that work similarly, and some that can even manage my iPod, but none do everything that iTunes ever-so-tidily does.

One of the big hangups I had was that, while Ubuntu immediately recognized my HP Laserjet 1012 printer and allowed me to print to it, the margins came out consistently wrong.  It seemed to assume that the actual physical pages in the printer were of a longer format than the 8.5 x 11 size that I had specified, and so the margins were all off.  After a bit of investigation, I couldn't find a way to fix it, so I moved along.  It was a sticking point, for sure.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on Ubuntu, having tinkered with it for a few hours.  Overall, I had a good experience with it, I think.  The big selling point for me was the elegance of the interface and the overall speed of it.  Wikipedia warns that running Ubuntu from a Live CD can cause performance loss because the computer has to load applications from the disc, but if there was any performance loss, I certainly didn't notice it.  I can only imagine how it would run without the CD.

I'll probably be working in Ubuntu on and off over the next few days, just to get more of a feel for it.  It's a honeymoon period right now, for sure.  If all goes well, I may deign to clear out enough of my laptop's hard drive that I can do a real installation, and dual-boot my PC like a true geek.

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* I've never used any of the graphical, Windows-style incarnations of Linux, only the bare-bones networked command line version furnished by my computer science classes at university.

** Silly me.  I did some research, and turns out that Wine Is Not an Emulator.  It's a translation layer.