It’s been nearly half a year since I installed Ubuntu, and my experience with it thus far has been interesting. There are some things I don’t like about, and there are some that I love. I’m going to go over a few of the highlights of my post-install experience.

Gripes

I really despise kernel updates. There are two reasons. The first is that every time I install a kernel update, GRUB gets overwritten and I have to remake my menu.lst to be able to boot to Windows XP. I’ve since gotten wise and backed it up, but still an annoyance. The other thing is that ALSA does not yet officially support my sound card, so I have to use the nightly builds of ALSA for my sound to work. When I install an update, I have to rebuild the drivers and install them again. It’s a bit of a pain.

For some reason, Ubuntu wants to run a disk check on one of my partitions every other time I start the computer. Not a big deal, but it’s annoying.

Sometimes Ubuntu seems to get stuck when I boot because it’s waiting for the wireless connection to establish. I believe what happens is that occasionally the access point doesn’t want to give my laptop an IP and it just takes forever to boot.

For some reason that I have not been able to figure out, Firefox freezes up after I watch a flash movie.  A bit of googling shows that this is a common problem that MIGHT have something to do with Nvidia’s video drivers.  Also, Firefox seems to stall/freeze for no reason sometimes.

Sometimes the Screenlets program decides that it wants to keep all of its windows on top of everything else, despite being set to be kept below. I have to go through and uncheck/recheck the keep below option on each open Screenlet.

Occasionally my machine will not power down completely. It acts like it’s turned off, but the power light stays on. It didn’t do that when I had Vista on it.

For some reason, when I try to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10, my machine won’t boot unless I disable ACPI in GRUB. When I do that, the function keys on my keyboard cease to function. The funny thing then is that my brightness keys DO work in 7.10 with ACPI off, but they don’t in 7.04. Can’t have everything I guess. (I switched back to 7.04)

My brightness keys still don’t work.

The Nvidia control panel is confusing.

Evolution and Thunderbird look like crap compared to MS Outlook.

And my last complaint: a lack of good games. Maybe I’m just picky, but I’d like some good arcade style games…like the kind of stuff Ambrosia Software puts out. Something with decent graphics that also doesn’t need a lot of CPU to run. A Bejeweled clone would be great, too. (I couldn’t get it to run under Wine.)

Glee

Compiz-Fusion RULES! My computing experience feels incomplete without my beloved wobbly, elastic windows. I can’t count the number of times during the day when I’m at work using XP and I try to pull down the corner of the browser window to see the weather screenlet and nothing happens…because Windows XP has no Compiz. It makes me sad.

Bash kicks the crap out of the Windows command line. Then it goes, takes a rest, and comes back and kicks the crap out of the Windows command line some more. It’s actually a lot faster to type “sudo rm -r [protected directory]” in Ubuntu than deleting a protected directory in Vista and having to deal with the UAC prompts. I’ve noticed that I barely use the GUI to browse directories anymore in Ubuntu. The command line is just so much faster.

Speaking of the command line, I love Aptitude. Especially after I found out that you can tab-complete package names. Very handy. Also, it’s SO MUCH FASTER (seems to be a trend when comparing Ubuntu to Windows) at installing and removing programs than the Windows Installer. Sure Apt is text based, but once you get the hang of it you realize how great of a tool it is.

gEdit is a wondrous text editor compared to Notepad.

I have yet to have gotten a virus or piece of ad-ware in Ubuntu. No need for anti-virus software to slow things down.

When I’m using Windows XP on this laptop, the screen goes crazy if I let the machine go into powersaving mode. This does not happen in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has a great driver for the Synaptics touchpad. It offers a lot more control than the Windows drivers, such as the ability to use two-finger and three-finger clicks. This was something that the MacBooks touted as a feature, but I’m pretty sure that it has more to do with the drivers than some special Apple hardware…since my laptop is able to do the same thing.

It is stable. I’ve had nowhere near the problems with Ubuntu that I had with Vista.

It’s FAST.

Conclusion

Ubuntu has it’s problems, but overall it’s a great operating system for the computer enthusiast who’s looking for something new and fun. I like it, and I look forward to the next release (hopefully it will run on my laptop). And if anyone who reads this has any ideas about any of the problems I mentioned, please leave a comment.