Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-05-16 03:27 am
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-05-16 03:27 am
Ubuntu: color me impressed
I was not expecting Ubuntu to live up to the hype, but right about now I think my WinXP partition might stay untouched for quite a while. The problem with previous Linux distros I've tried was a complete lack of middle ground between "click on the pretty pictures and enjoy the pre-loaded software we gave you" and "what do you MEAN I need to cross the Mountains of Mystery to retrieve the elven key that can unlock the Seventh Library of Power that I already installed but it's not where I thought it was and it depends on some warlock's dirty undies that he just chucked into /dev/null?"
So Ubuntu is the first Linux distro I've tried where installing software isn't an hours-long slog of misery and file dependency hell--even installing the drivers for the network card, which did not come out-of-the-box and which were a pain to install with no internet access, wasn't really that bad. Lots of reading documentation and online help on the other computer, a bit of command-line fiddling, but nothing really arcane. And once you have internet, most everything you could want is in the repositories. I'm guessing there's no avoiding file dependency hell if you download random shit and try to compile it from source, but AFAICT there's very little need to do that under Ubuntu unless you enjoy that sort of thing.
Doesn't hurt that it's quite a bit faster and smoother around the edges than my poor battered five-year-old WinXP install, and programming really is less of a pain in the ass. Er, not that I've been getting much programming done, I'm too busy playing with the shiny.
So Ubuntu is the first Linux distro I've tried where installing software isn't an hours-long slog of misery and file dependency hell--even installing the drivers for the network card, which did not come out-of-the-box and which were a pain to install with no internet access, wasn't really that bad. Lots of reading documentation and online help on the other computer, a bit of command-line fiddling, but nothing really arcane. And once you have internet, most everything you could want is in the repositories. I'm guessing there's no avoiding file dependency hell if you download random shit and try to compile it from source, but AFAICT there's very little need to do that under Ubuntu unless you enjoy that sort of thing.
Doesn't hurt that it's quite a bit faster and smoother around the edges than my poor battered five-year-old WinXP install, and programming really is less of a pain in the ass. Er, not that I've been getting much programming done, I'm too busy playing with the shiny.