When I built my new system, I put Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) on it because I didn't want to pay for Vista. I tried to avoid doing things the way I already knew (i.e. in the terminal) and do things the "easy" way. Here are a few thoughts from using it so far:
Good things:
1. Beryl is incredible. I'm using an integrated GPU, and it's still fast and looks good.
2. My digital camera Just Works, and it works perfectly.
3. TVTime (tv tuner app) is cool.
4. Installing was really simple.
5. Other than needing to download the nvidia binary driver, everything Just Works.
6. Metacity sucks much less than I remember.
7. Software updates are pretty painless. I'll probably actually keep PHP & apache up to date, whereas on Windows I only updated them occasionally.
8. The GUI prompting when I need to use root privileges is pretty cool.
Bad things:
1. The "Restricted Drivers Manager" wouldn't let me enable the nvidia binary driver, and didn't give me any error messages. It turns out that I didn't have the driver yet, but it should have warned me rather than failing silently.
2. If I "switch users", log in as somebody else, "switch users", and then log in as either of the two already-logged in users, I have to enter the password twice.
3. The kernel is 2 minor revisions too old to support the thermal sensors with my motherboard. On Windows, I'd be able to download a driver and be done; I see no "right way" to get support without compiling my own kernel.
4. Rythmbox uses 9% of my CPU (when it's Cool'n'Quiet'd down to 1GHz) to play MP3s. xmms, mpg123 use well under 1% average. Rhythmbox also can't be controlled by hotkeys (e.g. on Windows, I have winamp set up to respond to ctrl+shift+[zxcvbj]. It also can't stop after the current song (unless you open the main window and search in the playlist for the current song, which is pretty complicated for something simple like that). I'm using beep now (xmms GTK2 fork).
5. Samba (client) and a graphical front-end should have been installed by default (I may have overlooked something here, but I ended up installing the packages from a terminal and running "mount" manually).
6. Apache was set up to sort folders old unix-style (alphabetically mixing files and folders, upper-case first) rather than modern human-friendly style (IndexOptions FoldersFirst IgnoreCase).
7. The mouse preferences control panel is way too simplified. I have a "7 button" (5 + wheel) mouse, and had to edit xorg.conf to get the side buttons to be useful.
8. No good equivalent of MS Paint. If you're thinking "The GIMP", you're an idiot (there's no kind way to accurately describe your intellect). GNU Paint looks close at first glance, but it lacks any undo functionality I could find and the toolbars at the top are kinda clunky-looking.
9. The volume slider has a really bad slider position -> perceived loudness relation. The bottom 2/3rds are too quiet, and the very upper range is too loud, so I end up using only a narrow range on the slider. I assume right now it's exponential or linear or logarithmic; whichever one it is is the wrong one.
10. The default VNC client works poorly (particularly when full-screened). I had to install the vnc4* packages to get decent VNC.
11. SuperTux only has 2 stars popularity, but that game is freaking awesome! 🙂
Over all, I'm pleasantly surprised and will probably not put Windows on here unless I buy a real GPU and there's a game I want to play that my older system can't handle.
Good things:
1. Beryl is incredible. I'm using an integrated GPU, and it's still fast and looks good.
2. My digital camera Just Works, and it works perfectly.
3. TVTime (tv tuner app) is cool.
4. Installing was really simple.
5. Other than needing to download the nvidia binary driver, everything Just Works.
6. Metacity sucks much less than I remember.
7. Software updates are pretty painless. I'll probably actually keep PHP & apache up to date, whereas on Windows I only updated them occasionally.
8. The GUI prompting when I need to use root privileges is pretty cool.
Bad things:
1. The "Restricted Drivers Manager" wouldn't let me enable the nvidia binary driver, and didn't give me any error messages. It turns out that I didn't have the driver yet, but it should have warned me rather than failing silently.
2. If I "switch users", log in as somebody else, "switch users", and then log in as either of the two already-logged in users, I have to enter the password twice.
3. The kernel is 2 minor revisions too old to support the thermal sensors with my motherboard. On Windows, I'd be able to download a driver and be done; I see no "right way" to get support without compiling my own kernel.
4. Rythmbox uses 9% of my CPU (when it's Cool'n'Quiet'd down to 1GHz) to play MP3s. xmms, mpg123 use well under 1% average. Rhythmbox also can't be controlled by hotkeys (e.g. on Windows, I have winamp set up to respond to ctrl+shift+[zxcvbj]. It also can't stop after the current song (unless you open the main window and search in the playlist for the current song, which is pretty complicated for something simple like that). I'm using beep now (xmms GTK2 fork).
5. Samba (client) and a graphical front-end should have been installed by default (I may have overlooked something here, but I ended up installing the packages from a terminal and running "mount" manually).
6. Apache was set up to sort folders old unix-style (alphabetically mixing files and folders, upper-case first) rather than modern human-friendly style (IndexOptions FoldersFirst IgnoreCase).
7. The mouse preferences control panel is way too simplified. I have a "7 button" (5 + wheel) mouse, and had to edit xorg.conf to get the side buttons to be useful.
8. No good equivalent of MS Paint. If you're thinking "The GIMP", you're an idiot (there's no kind way to accurately describe your intellect). GNU Paint looks close at first glance, but it lacks any undo functionality I could find and the toolbars at the top are kinda clunky-looking.
9. The volume slider has a really bad slider position -> perceived loudness relation. The bottom 2/3rds are too quiet, and the very upper range is too loud, so I end up using only a narrow range on the slider. I assume right now it's exponential or linear or logarithmic; whichever one it is is the wrong one.
10. The default VNC client works poorly (particularly when full-screened). I had to install the vnc4* packages to get decent VNC.
11. SuperTux only has 2 stars popularity, but that game is freaking awesome! 🙂
Over all, I'm pleasantly surprised and will probably not put Windows on here unless I buy a real GPU and there's a game I want to play that my older system can't handle.
