Feeling Feisty
April 23, 2007
Ubuntu 7.04 (“Feisty Fawn”) was released last week, and somehow the news of this was enough to push me over the edge. A couple friends (one from real life and one from a forum I frequent) have been beating the drum at me for some time now, so I decided to march to it for a while and see what I think.
So far, I am very impressed. I had stayed away from Linux for years, primarily because I didn’t have nor want to spend the time it would take to tweak everything into submission enough to actually have a complete system for daily use. But I see now that things have definitely improved since the “early days.”
There’s still a fair amount of tweaking to be done, mostly in the realm of simply finding the right applications for my daily tasks, plus the learning curve of getting used to a new system. But the big stuff worked right out of the box: I didn’t have to do a thing to use my wireless network or video card. It only took a few clicks to get Beryl installing and running (though several hours were spent figuring out just what I was doing first). The installation program even let me shrink my Windows partition by 20 gigs without destroying anything. Getting DVDs to play took a little more work, but I blame that more on our country’s ridiculous laws than any fault of Ubuntu — they cannot include the codecs in the distribution for legal/financial reasons, but they are available for free download.
I’m still not sure what this will do to my development workflow, since I still need Windows for Adobe CS, and the font set doesn’t match the rest of the world (though it is more comprehensive than I would have guessed). I suppose I’ll know soon enough.
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