With my laptop out of action, I scraped together my old PC only to find the primary hard drive containing Windows and my root Debian partition had developed a sufficiently bad twitch that I had to junk it. Replacing it with a spare drive, I decided to give Ubuntu a try. Its Debian with sugar on top.
I LOVES THIS DISTRO! Why?
* It came on a single CD. Fedora needs THREE (or is it four?)
* It automagically discovered all my hardware and drives (the only exception was my Linksys wireless card, there's no Linux drivers for it. But as ndiswrapper is already in the kernel, adapting the Windows drivers was easy)
* It automagically configured X and sound flawlessly.
* Its still Debian under the hood which means excellent inter-program integration and smooth upgrades. For example, install a new graphical program and it instantly appears in your menus.
* Once the Ubuntu universe and multiverse repos are included there's 17,000 (!) packages available.
* The Ubuntu Wiki has answered my questions easily.
* It looks good, it makes me not hate the GUI. For the first time I'm actually using a graphical file browser on Linux.
* Setting up the network connection was trivial with a little GUI.
What really makes me UNF Ubuntu is this: I downloaded the Ubuntu LiveCD ISO so I'd have something to use in case I screw up the bootloader. Now I'm faced with the horror of burning a CD under Linux. I brace myself for the worst and look up the instructions on the wiki: 1) Find the ISO in the file browser. 2) Right-click and select "Write to Disk". That's it. Hell, that's easier than on my Mac.
Here's the minor bumps I've encountered so far.
* As mentioned, the wireless card gave me some trouble but its not really their fault as there's no Linux drivers. But as the kernel is precomipled with ndiswrapper I could use the Windows drivers.
* The included movie player, Totem, came with no useful codecs. It couldn't even play an mp3 or an mpeg even though it was the default player for them. Finding the codecs was not straightforward as they are not "totem" packages but "gsplayer". Both mplayer and vlc were available as packages and installed fine. Changing the default player was easy.
* There's hot buttons in the toolbar for Web, Mail and Help but not one for a terminal. Strikes me a little weird.
* I had to add the security, universe and multiverse repositories to the package manager. It wasn't a manual process, but its odd they were turned off by default.
This is possibly the smoothest Linux install yet. No fighting with the X configuration or sound drivers. The default GUI is pleasant and usable. The underlying distribution (Debian) is very robust. Support is well organized in the form of a wiki.
While I agree with you that it's a tad irritating that some things are missing by default, I can see why they'd be missing:
The terminal button is missing presumably because Ubuntu is aimed at being friendly towards people who don't have a history of using Unix, and such users tend not to want a terminal. Indeed, there seems to've been much effort put into providing gui tools for many tasks that I'd expect to use a terminal for.
Personally I don't use the gui tools much, and I always have lots of terminal windows open. I'd prefer that there was a terminal button by default — but I guess that anybody capable of using a terminal is also capable of working out how to add a button themselves.
And overall, I'm really liking Ubuntu!
Smylers
Re:Things Missing by Default
schwern on 2005-11-08T18:03:13
Yeah, that's what I figured, too. The fact that the problems were so minor is a compliment. But I like to look at UI issues with a very selfish eye. Particularly things associated with licensing issues, in an ideal world it should not impact on my end user experience. Alas.
And to further compliment, I tried the most obvious thing to put a terminal button into the menu bar... I opened the applications menu and dragged the terminal icon into the menu. It worked!
