Layers
If you know me at all you’ll know that I like to do yearly Linux installs, just to see how far it’s come. Usually I’m disappointed, there’s always too many things wrong, from the way fonts are rendered to the inability to do simple things like play video from the web. It being October, the second Ubuntu release of the year has just arrived and I was keen to try it out.
Like every Linux installation I’ve done for the past few years, what I get right away is a lot of errors. It really doesn’t like my hard disks. I don’t know what it is, but it seems to think one of them is full of errors, even though checking the drive in Windows doesn’t show any problems and it always passes a fsck once finished. This happens on every boot too, but it seems to be unique to the PC I’m installing on. I also don’t understand why they’re now insisting on the default install being via a live CD. It’s actually worth installing via the alternate text-only download. The live CD is just slow, it takes forever to boot up and is totally useless once you finally get it going. It’s never a good experience because everything just seems to take forever to get anywhere.
Personal hardware and installation woes aside, once I actually got it on the machine, I can actually admit to being quite impressed. Fonts still don’t look right, the anti-aliasing is just wrong somehow. I don’t know what it is, it’s just wrong. Everything else however - very nice. A quick switch to a different theme (who picks brown as their default OS colour?) and everything is shiny and inviting. For the first time in a Linux install it’s also easy to activate Broadcaom wireless and Nvidia graphics card drivers straight from a menu, although you need to be connected to the net by some other means first (which is hard if you’re wireless only). Proper graphics card drivers also means you get to use all the funky animation effects, wobbly windows, transparencies etc, there’s even a nice control panel that lets you decide just how much funkiness you want. Disappointingly, despite this being the first version of Linux that automatically detected my dual monitors, it disabled the funk as soon as I tried to use them. Awww.
Also on the plus side, a nice looking version of Firefox, easy support for Flash and best of all - full video playing of Windows Media, Xvid, and anything else relevant without any real hassle. At last! They’re starting to realise that not everybody cares whether or not every piece of software they have is free (as in speech) or not and making it easy to install the closed source, proprietary stuff - and oh what a difference it makes. I even found a Perl editor that didn’t suck too much.
If all you’re looking for a is a computer to browse the web with, check some email, watch some videos and create some documents (which, let’s be honest, is most people) then we really are at the stage now where you could run Linux and be just fine. It’s taken a while, but the layers of polish are finally being applied, and at quite the rate. I look forward to seeing it again in another year.
