[NBLUG/talk] Ubuntu

[A'fish'ionado]

I got my free Ubuntu 5.10 CDs yesterday. :-)

To be honest, after hearing all the hype about Ubuntu, I was a little bit
disappointed when I finally got to try it.

My biggest gripe is the live CD. It is S-L-O-W. It takes forever to boot,
and even once you get to the desktop, it pauses and spins the CD with every
other click. On top of that, you're faced with a curses interface that asks
you probing questions at the begining of each boot. I don't know what the
Ubuntu guys are doing, but they need to have a talk with the Knoppix people.
Knoppix is much faster, and doesn't have the frightening startup sequence.

Ubuntu does get hight points from me, though, for the touchy-feely
"everything's so pretty" default interface (once you get past the curses,
the startup screen is pretty, the default desktop is pretty, the default
sound scheme is pretty...) and for "everything just works"-ness. When I
plugged in my USB memory stick, after a moment of drive grinding, an icon
magically appeared on the desktop. That's more than I can say for almost any
other distro I've tried.

After I got the hard drive install finished, the user experience was
significantly nicer. Once you get past the installer, you leave behind
curses for good, and the desktop is as fast as I usually expect for Gnome.
The installer is a curses interface (I kind of expected more, but it works),
not much of an improvement beyond what Debian offers. I do give it brownie
points for not only recognizing an existing Debian install, but recognizing
that I had two different kernels on that partition, and adding both a normal
and rescue boot entry for both. Again, more that I can say for most distros
I've tried.

Maybe I'm just used to multi-CD distributions, but it felt like there
weren't very many applications included. It's certainly much more that comes
with, say, WinXP, but even Knoppix seems to include more (but then Knoppix
has its own magic compressed file system).

So, in short, Ubuntu seems like a good distro for someone who's never tried
Linux before. I'm a little worred that the second-rate live CD might scare
some people away. I probably wouldn't ask a newbie/non techie to install it
though--I'd point them at an installfest instead. If you already are
running, say, Debian, I honestly don't see a compelling reason to switch.

Either way, I now have a cardboard box full of Ubuntu CDs to bombard my
hapless classmates at school with next week... Muahahahaha!!!

William
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