Ubuntu Part Deux
May 29th, 2007 by GoldFalcon
I see the Beth at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is considering Ubuntu, so I thought I’d post some thoughts. I’ve been using Linux since about 1999 but up until this year I have never found a Linux distro that I felt had any chance of gaining any appreciable share of the desktop market. They were simply too technical for even advanced users. Lots of command line, lots of restrictions on what worked out of the box due to the Open Source philosophy that kept Linux ideologically pure but impractical. 3D accelerated video was a pain to get working correctly; mp3 and DVD support was not enabled out of the box; streaming web media couldn’t be played without additional configuration.
The resounding response to all of these complaints from the Linux community was that it wasn’t that hard to get working if you wanted it, and if it was too hard you didn’t deserve to run Linux (or one of the BSD’s). They never seemed to get that users shouldn’t have to configure these things and if given a choice between something that works out of the box or something that requires a couple of hours at the command line implementing arcane instructions to implement, users will invariably choose the path of least resistance.
Sadly, even with Ubuntu (which eschews much of this “ONLY OPEN SOURCE” fanaticism and allows easy and relatively painless access to closed source commercial –yet still free– drivers) much of the things computer users take for granted are not enabled out of the box. Though, compared to five or six years ago they are relatively painless to enable. It takes about half an hour to get everything one is used to having in Windows (as far as multimedia support and playback) working in Ubuntu.
That said, I just switched my main desktop to Ubuntu about a month ago (an act of rebellion against Windows Vista) and I am more than happy with the switch. If one includes the Beryl component then I believe it is far superior to Vista and is the best environment I have worked in for what I do. Mostly that includes remote support, networking, design, graphics, research, and a lot of writing.
Here’s a video, both linked and embedded are the same things, just offerred in case I can’t remove the password from my download directory (damn memory).
Holy crap, that is AWESOME!
Of course, now you’ve spooked me from switching, but DAMN! Maybe I’ll do it. I’m all about the eye candy (although Scarlett Johansen isn’t MY idea of eye candy).