Ubuntu conquers the world

Screenshots

Let me start you off with some screenshots of what Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) looks like on my laptop. Just to give you a small taste.

a nice and simple bootsplash and my colorful GDM login

two desktop pics

First contact

I installed Ubuntu when it was still version 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) and I have to say my first contact was not a good one. When I booted up the Install-CD and pressed ENTER on the bootscreen to begin the standard installation all I got was a blank screen. To make it work I had to manually set an option for the debian installer to disable the framebuffer mode. After I had done that the installation went down like honey. All the hardware in my Toshiba Satallite M30X worked perfectly without having to take any further action.

One of the best things about the installation is that you don't have to go through the painful process of picking packages to be installed (as in other distributions). You get a clean, uncluttered base system. Later you can decide what you need to add.

First impression

Being a KDE user Gnome was quite different for me at first. I don't know if it's Ubuntu's improvements or just Gnome, but it was very straight-forward from the beginning. No searching for options or configuration stuff. Everything was right there and I could use Ubuntu right away. Oh! And the package management is a mercy! It is almost impossible to break you installation. Also almost everything you want is there. For the rest you just add some of the community repositories. The apt GUI Synaptic makes it real easy for beginners to search those repositories. Everyone else can stick with the command line.

The only drop of bitterness was that the Intel Pro Wireless WiFi drivers shipping with Ubuntu were really old. This made it impossible to connect to a WPA protected network if you didn't compile and install recent drivers. Fortunately this was fixed in the new version.

The upgrade

One of the most beautiful things about Ubuntu (in this case it's Debian) is how easy it is to keep it up-to-date or even upgrade to a new version of the distro. As long as you have an internet connection around Ubuntu notifies you if any of the installed packages have been updated.

It is almost as easy to upgrade Ubuntu to a new version. The only thing I had to do was replacing the word hoary with the word breezy in the list of repositories (sources.list). After that I only had to use apt to do a dist-upgrade and wait for half an hour. Now I had a perfectly new Ubuntu. This was really impressive for me as upgrading rpm-based distros was always a real pain...

Working with it

A lot of people writing about Ubuntu just tell you how great it is and how they like it. Some people actually have to do work with their computer. So let me tell you that there was no task I couldn't get done with Ubuntu except one. I still need Windows for VS.NET projects. For everything else it works perfectly. I can do all my office stuff with OpenOffice, I still do image processing with Photoshop (using Wine) and there's no better programming environment than a Debian-based Linux. A lot of current games (i.e. Quake4) can be played on Linux and there are tools for everything else you might want/need (azureus, gaim, opera, ...). Alltogether this is the most usable OSs I have seen so far. And it is free. They even ship it to you for free

The future

After a decade of trying/using different GNU/Linux distros I am sure Ubuntu is heading the right way. They aim for usability and keep the professionality (of Debian). The user decides how deep he wants to involve him/herself with the OS but can decide to use it as is. Of course there are alot of usability issues still present. Mathew Thomas put together a great list of them when he wrote about his first 48 hours enduring Ubuntu 5.04. But two things are good to know. Firstly he works for Mark Shuttleworth (so we can be sure the Ubuntu guys know what he thinks) and secondly the Gnome developers are aware of the issues he listed and are going to fix them.

Now what can we expect in the future? I'm sure the Ubuntu folks will continue their great development effords. It is amazing to see how far they got in just one year. But if we want to get a real glimpse of the future desktop we should look at Mezzo the window manager of SymphonyOS. In it's current state (Beta 1) it is not very usable but the concept images look very promising. If everything in these concept images gets real we might be looking at the desktop of the future here. And if it will be as good as I hope this easily could be the future window manager of choice for Ubuntu. But that's just a wild guess.

Getting started

If you think about trying Ubuntu here are a few places to get started.
Download Ubuntu
Ubuntu Wiki
Ubuntu Forums
Unoffical Ubuntu Guide (outdated but still good)

German users should definately have a look at the big German community site ubuntuusers.de which has a Wiki, a Forum and lots of other resources.

Cheers,
Matthias