Ubuntu

You know, I’ve said it before, but Ubuntu is in my opinion the future of Linux on the Desktop. I’m not trying to be a fanboy, but no matter what other distro’s I try, none other seems to work as seamlessly as Ubuntu. I’ve also come to the conclusion that GNOME is going to be the de-facto standard for Linux desktop environments. I believe any other will always be an “alternate” choice for most major distributions.

For years and years I was a die-hard KDE fan, and the last week or so of playing with KDE 4.1 has taught me that GNOME is the new KDE, and KDE 4 is the new GNOME. KDE 4 simply is not the configurable beast that previous versions of KDE were (at least not yet). Although I never thought I would, I’ve just become a GNOME user anyway - I’ve grown accustom to many of the applications, and I have actually grown to prefer them over many of the KDE counterparts (plus everything doesn’t start with “K” )

For those who are interested, I’ve simply loaded up Ubuntu 8.04.1, I’m going to enjoy the fact that Canonical (unlike any other “free” as in “no cost” Linux Distribution) gives away LTS to it’s users. I did check out Ubuntu 8.10 last night, and although still pre-release, I can tell it will not be a smooth ride for me due to the fact that I have ATI video, among a few other things. There simply isn’t anything new and exciting that I must have in 8.10. I’ve never had good luck with *.10 Ubuntu releases anyway - remember it was 7.10 that started me “distro-hopping” like mad last year.

Hardy (8.04) is an awesome release, it feels solid, everything “just-works” and I see no reason to change. Contrary to what you might think, I did enjoy my experiment with Mandriva, however we just weren’t a good fit for one one another. I’ve invested many years into learning how to administer a Debian based system, and Ubuntu gives me a nice, polished Debian based desktop that’s a little smoother around the edges than pure Debian.

Funny side-note: Although this post is quite old, and he’s probably running OpenSolaris now, I stumbled across an old blog-post on Ian Murdock’s blog where he posted a screenshot of his laptop, and he was running Ubuntu. For those who do not know, although he is now “Vice President of Developer and Community Marketing”  (basically in charge of OpenSolaris) at Sun Ian Murdock was the founder of Debian (and the ian in Debian - the name was a combination of his name Ian and that of his (now) ex-wife Debra). Yes someone did give him a little flack in the comments.

Also, I want to thank Adam Williamson for being so helpful and friendly even though I did snip at him a little in a blog-post. He is a great guy, and he does a lot of great work for Mandriva, and always has a positive attitude.

And now, I want to thank my readers for keeping up with this blog as I’ve tried practically every distro under the sun - Although I won’t be switching distro’s for a while, or doing anything else particularly interesting, I will try to find some “tips n tricks” and stuff to post for you.

I’m not sure yet if I will stay on 8.04 until the next LTS release but I will definitely stay here until 9.04.