September 2004

ExtremeTech has a small preview of Ubuntu today, and it made for some overall positive thoughts. But here’s what gets to me, is this quote from the “Problems” section of the article:

Finally, we were disappointed (but not surprised) that Ubuntu did not detect or configure the wireless card in our laptop. We’ve come to expect this, unfortunately. But it would sure be nice at some point if we could connect wirelessly right after installing a Linux distro, with no extra effort required.

What? Ubuntu picked up my Netgear MA401 802.11b card with no problems, configured the network using DHCP, and did the required netinstall features without even asking me a single configuration question.

So I think the problem is lousy equipment on ExtremeTech’s part. Don’t hate the distro, hate the card.

So I’m playing some more with Ubuntu Linux, and I’m quite pleased with what I’m seeing. I had initially installed it on my laptop, but being older, the performance is a bit lackluster. So I installed it on a spare test platform (P4 1.8Ghz, etc) and it’s quite nice. I’ve heard good things about this Project Utopia noise, so I decided to plug in my USB card reader and see what happened.

It turns out, cool things happen. The system recognized the fact that I had plugged a USB CompactFlash card reader into the appropriate port and offered to copy my files into a photo gallery for me, which it did, flawlessly.

This is the kind of thing that I’ve been waiting for. I’m not a huge Linux genius, I don’t code my own kernel modules or lead the charge extolling the virtues of freedom. I’m a home user who likes getting away from Microsoft, and this is how things should be done from now on.

Let’s be real - there are serious hurdles for a home user that Linux has to overcome before it becomes a truly viable alternative. There are things that I as a gamer need that keep me from completely abandoning Microsoft products. I can’t seem to play Homeworld2 through Wine (very well, at least) and some driver support is positively atrocious, but we can largely blame the vendors for this. Hell, I’m practical, I’ll even settle for closed-source binary drivers. I just want shit to work.

I’m sure a lot of that will get me some flak from the more zealous of my penguinista friends, but what it comes down to is an experience I can use. The wife is using Fedora Core 2 half the time now on her system, and she can navigate through it well enough. But she won’t make the fulltime switch until it supports her iPod and a few other major applications, so there are still day-to-day usability hurdles for someone like me, who I contend is on the level of a home enthusiast.

At the end of the day, though, Ubuntu seems to have a good head-start on many of the hardware headaches that have been annoying me over the last 2 years or so. Here’s to hoping that the future is bright, and other distributions learn from the example being set by Ubuntu.

Debian is like your wife of 20 years. She’s beautiful, mature, and you’ve spent enough time with this person to understand how she works, and build a comfortable and trusting relationship. But she just can’t compete with Ubuntu, the 22-year old nympho who just moved in down the hall in your building, and clearly has her goods on display just for you.