Ubuntu is the bomb…
I’m sure I’m late to this party…but what the heck, I just installed Ubuntu 9.10 on an old laptop (Dell Inspiron 700m) and it’s great! The laptop, which was a nifty little machine 4 years ago (12″ screen, 2Gig proc, 1Gig RAM) was so slow it was useless – I mean, it took 30 seconds to open a window. Way too much software installed over the years – not only hulking monsters like Creative Suite, VB Studio and .NET but kids’s games and lots of little 3rd party apps too. Anyway, I wiped the hard drive and re-installed XP. For some reason, some parts didn’t load, and I couldn’t set the proper screen resolution, or connect wirelessly to the Internetz to download the missing pieces. I stopped at that point cause I could sense a 3-hour tech support call with Dell/MS coming up.
Then I decided to install Ubuntu Linux, which I’d heard great things about. Long story short, it rocks! Install took about 30 minutes (as opposed to a couple of hours for XP), went without a hitch. Comes preinstalled with all the most important open-source apps, including Firefox and OpenOffice. Amazingly, took just a few clicks to:
- connect to my wireless network (always a bear on XP)
- connect wirelessly to my printer
- connect wirelessly to my mac for file transfer
In other words, not only was it much easier to use than my PC, setting this stuff up was easier than on a Mac! Not to mention that the speed on this thing is like greased lightening!
The downside: you have to download updates to get the music player to play MP3/AAC files. This entailed going into the command line – but just one line of code was needed:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
That’s not so bad – even I can handle that! This is opposed to the last time I messed with a Linux desktop (KDE), almost five years ago, and gave up in frustration because everything after installation required lots of time spent in the command line and I was unable to install/get up and running with most of the apps I wanted, never mind get a working Internetz connection.
The other caveat is that there’s very little/no support for commercial apps, so I could never use this machine for work purposes. Interestingly, Adobe is working on a Linux version of Flash builder, but I found it very difficult to install (frankly I made it about halfway through the minefield before I gave up – involved running shell scripts, changing file permissions, having just the right version of Eclipse and Java installed in just the right order – the sort of nonsense that reminded me of my last attempts to use Linux).
Anyway, without too much mess or fuss, I’ve got an excellent Netbook! I always liked the form factor of this Dell (it’s very small and light), and I can easily carry it around the house, sit on the couch and surf, as opposed to my main machine, a MacBook Pro which has got all sorts of external monitors/printers/hard drives/etc plugged in. Great for surfing the web, listening to music, getting email. A perfect extra machine, or a first machine for kids or grandma, or anybody who only needs basic tasks on a computer.
If desktop Linux keeps making strides like they’ve made in the last five years, and ever gets proper, easy support for commercial apps (Wine is still nasty), I say watch out MS. You too, Apple…