Ubuntu Linux
I must say that I am becoming increasingly impressed with Ubuntu Linux as a legitimate desktop distribution that anybody could use.
Before we get into that though, I suppose I should elaborate on my recent operating system history. Up until two years ago, like most people I used Windows as my main desktop environment. However, as an undergraduate computer science student at the time, I was becoming increasingly familiar with Unix based systems and I felt that in order to fully realize my geek potential, it was necessary to make a total switch to a Linux environment. At the time I only owned my one original Thinkpad T22 from my freshman year and so I wiped it clean and installed a fresh copy of Mandrake Linux (it has since been renamed to Mandriva). Not only did it run well, but it essentially served as my main system up until just recently. I did buy a desktop system with Windows a few months after making the switch to Linux on my laptop, but I’ve had several problems with it already (mostly hardware related) and my laptop still served as my main system.
Despite the fact that Mandrake ran with virtually no hiccups or problems for two years, the one gripe that I have had is that updating and installing new software was more of a pain then I would have liked it to be. They claim that their Red-Hat like rpm system should make the process easy and sometimes this is true. However I found that Mandrake rpm’s of the software that you wanted weren’t always easy to find and in addition, there was always some additional dependancy that was required but you didn’t have. Thus you need to hunt down 5 pieces of software when all you wanted to do was update Gaim. Additionally, because the installation system was in their own rpm style, if you tried to install software with the traditional tar.gz’s and built them yourself, it didn’t always work and sometimes broke something else.
The result of this problem is that while my Mandrake system served its purpose well, I never felt the desire to update software or attempt to download other interesting programs because it was such a hassle to get things running. So just recently I thought it was time for a change. I looked around and thought about Suse, Fedora, Slackware, and even a non-Linux BSD system. I finally settled on Ubuntu (a Debian based distribution) though as it seemed to provide a rock solid base, a user oriented philosophy, and of course I was always drawn to peoples raves about Debian’s amazingly easy installation process.
And so about a week ago I wiped Mandrake off my system and in a half hour I was up and running with Ubuntu. There was one small installation hiccup but that was only because I kept my /home partition from the Mandrake installation and the user id of my user on the Mandrake system did not match my new user id on the Ubuntu system. Thus the file permissions were screwing things up. Once that was cleared up though I have to say that everything that people say about Ubuntu’s (and also Debian’s) apt-get installation system is true. There’s an incredible number of packages available in its repositories and installing any of them takes just one command or a very intuitive navigation of the Synaptic GUI. Additionally, all dependency problems are handled automatically by pulling them from the necessary repositories and installing them as well.
So Ubuntu is my distribution of choice for now. I should also note that I switched from KDE to GNOME and so far I am liking the move. I think I’ll save that for another post though.
