Just thought I'd drop some notes on my play with the latest Ubuntu offering - which is 7.04. I'm by no way a Linux fanboy but was interested in this OS after coming across it.
One thing that has surprised my is that this OS is actually stable - yea I know it's Linux but really I found it totally stable on my 9400, with 160gig HDD, Nvidia 7900 go & 2gig ram.
The restricted drivers worked like a charm for the Nvidia card, and once I figured out how to get Beryl running for a really nice graphical interface I was really quite impressed. All bits I have so far have worked fine, ie wireless was easier to configure than under XP, SD card reader worked immediately, USB external HDD was 100% plug & play I found no issues with any hardware.
But I must admit its 100% different to XP / Vista and I'm used to .exe files so running a synaptic manager for installing programs. Now bear in mind I have never played with Linux in the past yet after a few frustrating hours I have found it slowing getting better. Mind you there is a lack of software and while I got office installed within wine, I could not get XP installed. The hardest part was figuring out the dual boot and how to install both XP and Ubuntu.
Overall if this is an example of were Linux is going I'm rather impressed - its no walk in the park but their forums are actually very good, questions were being answered in less than 1/2 hour.
As a challenge to Vista, its not their yet but personally if they continue down this track and if a better virtual interface within wine is possible for playing games then you know its really not that far away. In fact many elements reminded me of Vista, Beryl is very similar in visual appeal as Vista, hell it even has 3D cubes for different work spaces which is rather cool and the drop images on the task bar also exist. The real surprise was that this OS, with all the drivers for my laptop already configured during the install and no other external drivers being needed outside of the restricted Nvidia driver was rather surprising.
Overall if you have some time to kill and a spare disk to burn it, give it a try even the live CD had all the features that the install had which was another surprise - I mean there are not that many OS out there that will boot from a disk and easily allow me to configure my wireless card, accept the external HDD & SD card from the disk - mind you the Live CD does not have Beryl so it looks closer to XP on first bootup.
One thing that has surprised my is that this OS is actually stable - yea I know it's Linux but really I found it totally stable on my 9400, with 160gig HDD, Nvidia 7900 go & 2gig ram.
The restricted drivers worked like a charm for the Nvidia card, and once I figured out how to get Beryl running for a really nice graphical interface I was really quite impressed. All bits I have so far have worked fine, ie wireless was easier to configure than under XP, SD card reader worked immediately, USB external HDD was 100% plug & play I found no issues with any hardware.
But I must admit its 100% different to XP / Vista and I'm used to .exe files so running a synaptic manager for installing programs. Now bear in mind I have never played with Linux in the past yet after a few frustrating hours I have found it slowing getting better. Mind you there is a lack of software and while I got office installed within wine, I could not get XP installed. The hardest part was figuring out the dual boot and how to install both XP and Ubuntu.
Overall if this is an example of were Linux is going I'm rather impressed - its no walk in the park but their forums are actually very good, questions were being answered in less than 1/2 hour.
As a challenge to Vista, its not their yet but personally if they continue down this track and if a better virtual interface within wine is possible for playing games then you know its really not that far away. In fact many elements reminded me of Vista, Beryl is very similar in visual appeal as Vista, hell it even has 3D cubes for different work spaces which is rather cool and the drop images on the task bar also exist. The real surprise was that this OS, with all the drivers for my laptop already configured during the install and no other external drivers being needed outside of the restricted Nvidia driver was rather surprising.
Overall if you have some time to kill and a spare disk to burn it, give it a try even the live CD had all the features that the install had which was another surprise - I mean there are not that many OS out there that will boot from a disk and easily allow me to configure my wireless card, accept the external HDD & SD card from the disk - mind you the Live CD does not have Beryl so it looks closer to XP on first bootup.
