Earlier this year I purchased a Gateway laptop (Gateway MT3418) with Windows Vista on it. It was not long before I realized that my laptop was just not powerful enough to run an OS as bloated as Vista. Everything opened slow and ran slow, and the glitzy Aero window decorator simply was more than the laptop could handle. Aside from performance, Vista also was extremely buggy. Coming out of Hibernation and Sleep would cause my laptop to bluescreen. Copying files over the network from my desktop computer took forever, and the speed seemed to max out at 600Kb/s (over a 54mb connection). File operations like Copy and Move also took forever, and Vista often got stuck on “Calculating” during the process. It wasn’t long before I decided to do away with Vista.

Rather than purchase a copy of Windows XP, I decided to remove Vista and put a Linux distribution on my laptop (you can’t argue with the price…free!). I had tried several before, and I had the best experience with Ubuntu Linux. So I went and got the latest ISO, burned it to a CD, put it in my laptop, and booted up. The first thing I liked was that the install process was much better than anything I had experienced with Windows. When you boot from a Ubuntu install disk, it takes you straight to the desktop as though you had booted from a fresh installed of Ubuntu. From there, you can install Ubuntu to your hard drive. You can also, if you’re network card is detected correctly, surf the internet with Firefox WHILE the system is installing. That concept just about blew my mind. As for the installation process itself, it went very smoothly, and unlike Windows, there was no annoying license key to type in.

The install took about 10 minutes, after which I took the cd out and rebooted. After a fairly quick boot-up sequence, I was on my desktop. Everything looked pretty good. Ubuntu had chosen the correct video driver and screen resolution, which can occasionally be a problem with Linux distributions. The default installation had just about everything I would need to get going. There was a full office suite (OpenOffice), the Firefox web browser, Evolution email (similar to MS Outlook), and quite a few other applications that you would expect to find in a desktop operating system.

There were two major problems, however, that I noticed right away. First off, I had no sound. It took a little bit of research to discover that the sound chipset that my laptop used was not supported yet. However, after about three days of searching on Google, I found a patch for ALSA that had been posted on a bug report that fixed the issue.  (EDIT:  The card is now supported in the current release of ALSA.) Second, my wireless connection was not working. Ubuntu did not have drivers for the wireless card, which was a “RealTek 8185 Extensible Wireless Device”. I had heard about a program called NdisWrapper that would allow one to use Windows XP drivers for Linux. In my case, all I had was Windows Vista drivers, which supposedly were not supported yet. I figured I had nothing to lose by trying, so I installed NdisWrapper and used the RealTek drivers from Vista. Wondrously, it worked! So, after a few days of tinkering around, I had a fully functional laptop running Ubuntu Linux. (Well, there is one more problem, but it’s rather minor. More on that later.)

Given the fact that it took me three days to actually get some of the more important devices on my laptop to work, I could easily see how a more novice computer user could get frustrated rather quickly with a Linux installation, especially on a machine with newer hardware. A lot of the older and more popular hardware works well, but the support for newer and less widespread hardware is not. This isn’t necessarily a problem with Ubuntu or the open source community that codes for it, so much as it is a problem that hardware vendors do not (yet) see the need to make drivers for an operating system that has a limited user base. Of course, this creates a catch 22 of sorts. Hardware manufactures don’t create drivers for Ubuntu/Linux due to the small number of users, and Ubuntu has difficulty drawing new users due to lack of hardware support.

Back to my Ubuntu experience. After getting everything working properly, I turned to one of the more unique aspects of Ubuntu: user interface customization. When it comes to being able to customize the look and feel of your computer, Ubuntu (and Linux and general) is king. The Mac OS and Microsoft Windows simply cannot compare. Quite literally, any aspect of your desktop can be modified and customized in Ubuntu. Also, the look and feel of windows, buttons and menus can be changed as well. Also, there have been some advances with “3D Desktops” and Desktop Effects in Ubuntu, mainly through programs called “Compiz” and “Beryl”. For a sample of what these two programs can do, see this video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=_ImW0-MgR8I

I was blow away the first time I tried Beryl on my laptop. It was simply amazing the amount of animation and effects that my machine was rendering without any sort or slowdown or lag. It was even more amazing, because the Aero effects in Windows Vista had brought my laptop to it’s knees. Which was rather sad, because all that Aero did was add transparency to title bars and drop shadows behind windows and menus…nothing that should have taken a lot of processing power. Ubuntu with Beryl accomplished this and much more.

If I get the time later, I may post some screen shots.