Ubuntu: The Family Sedan of the Linux World.

No matter what other distro I try to use on a daily basis, and no matter how many little “papercuts” annoy me in Ubuntu, I can’t help but come back to it as my daily driver. The good news is that Ubuntu is aware of all these “papercuts” and are working on them with their One Hundred Papercuts initiative.

If you narrow down the world of Linux Distributions to two, Ubuntu and Fedora, Ubuntu is like the reliable “Family Sedan”, while Fedora is more like the exotic foreign sports car.

There are many cool things about Fedora – in a lot of ways, it’s like using “tomorrow’s” Linux distro today. The bleeding edge technology is what draws me to Fedora, and I am truly amazed at the job that the Fedora team does at getting such leading edge packages as stable as they do – in fact, Fedora 11 *technically* at the distro level, works better on my machine than anything else this distro cycle.

So, what’s the problem then?

Part of it, I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it, but somehow Fedora still feels like the Linux distro’s of old too me – if you can remember way back to the late 90’s or early 00’s when Linux on the desktop was, honestly, pretty RAW. Fedora still has a bit of that character to me – kind of like a bunch of packages just put together and called Fedora.

Ubuntu, some how, and I can’t explain this, feels more like a complete, coherent fluid OS. It feels like it’s supposed to work together, and it feels professional.

The problem, for me was with the current 9.04 release. In fact to me, 6.06 was the best Ubuntu ever, and nothing has come close to topping it yet, but 9.04 is probably the worst (for me, and ONLY because of the Intel Graphics Issue) . It’s the only release where I have had to take drastic measures to get something as simple as video working correctly. The good news is, I was able to do just that, and I found a simple guide that might help those of you who also have Intel Video:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1130582

I’m using the setup referred too as the “Optimal” setup, using the upgraded X drivers and the 2.6.30 Kernel.

All of my X related problems were solved with just a few minutes of tweaking, and I honestly wish I’d just spent the time seeking that info out earlier, but I did want to get some “distro-hopping” in and “out of my system” anyway.

Also, something Ubuntu has (or is getting more of) that other Distro’s simply do not have is mainstream acceptance and recognition. I firmly believe that there are now people in the world that know that ‘Ubuntu’ is another computer system that competes with Windows that has never heard of ‘Linux’ before – that speaks volumes.

Also, I’m able to find little things, like a nice repo with daily builds of Chromium thanks to the PPA repos, and I’m able to get Adobe Air for Linux working (under 64-bit) which I couldn’t under Fedora. The Ubuntu installed base is so big at the desktop level that more and more stuff is going to support Ubuntu that will not support any other distro, and I think folks need to wake up and accept that. Unless you REALLY want to be running a truly niche’ OS like Linux has always been, you should jump on the Ubuntu train and stay there, unless you are only interested in Linux at the server level, and in such case stay w/ Red Hat distro’s such as Fedora and CentOS.

Just some random thoughts from me, and my $0.02

So, the end result of the OS search for my Laptop?

Ubuntu 9.04 (and a half, thanks to the updated X and Kernel)

Next project, updating my Quad-Core Desktop (and subsequently one of the machines my Mom uses) to Windows 7. This should prove interesting since she’s never even SEEN Vista – all she has used for the past 7+ years is XP aside from the few times she’s used a Linux box for surfing the web. I’m curious to see how she takes too it…especially considering she’ll now be switching between the Windows 7 machine and an older Machine in her Bedroom that will continue to run XP.

Anyway – happy computing y’all!