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May 18, 2006 This article describes my experience and observations during my switch to Ubuntu. It's been over two years since my desktop's Windows XP installation and despite upgrading my Pentium III to 1GHz, defragging, and upping my RAM to 768MB, it's showing signs of "Windows Entropy": disk thrashing and just a general slow down. Despite being a technical user, with patch upon patch upon patch and the proliferation of daemons that squat and steal resources (come one HP, do you really need to run 3 programs to support my printer?), I have a tough time keeping a tight Windows installation. Recently, when I had trouble correctly importing dv from my camcorder that played at the normal speed, I decided I needed to start from scratch. I quickly ran into one hitch: since leaving my previous employer, I actually didn't own a copy of WinXP Pro SP2. With Windows Product Activation fully embedded, I was faced with the prospect of paying $300 for a new copy of my very own. Considering that WinXP was released in late 2001 and is out of control with security holes and patches, I wasn't too excited about going down that route. Plus, with the next Windows generation on the horizon for late 2006/early 2007, paying $300, especially $300 didn't make sense to me. I decided to explore my options. I've never really played with Linux, instead trying out FreeBSD a few years ago and coming away tired. However, I thought I do some reading, starting with distrowatch.com, and see what things looked like today. I narrowed down my options to Xandros, Suse, and ubuntu. Given that ubuntu was fully featured at the "free" price point and had a live CD to allow me to try it out withtout installing, it was an easy choice to make. Installation and Hardware Support I downloaded the ubuntu 6.06 beta flight 7 iso ("Dapper Drake"), created a CD, and then booted my machine from CD-ROM to give it a spin. After playing with it for ten-twenty minutes I was convinced this OS had the muster to be installed on my machine's boot disk. What's really nice is that the Live CD has an icon on the desktop to "install" and can install the OS directly from the Live CD. How about that for ease of use? The ubuntu OS boots pretty fast. While the initial startup to the login prompt is comparable to my Windows XP time of about 50 seconds, the time from login to desktop display in Ubuntu seems much faster. Ubuntu is very easy to install. It was a fast install - I was up and running in about 20-30 minutes. I was doing a clean install on a boot disk, and didn't have to worry about saving data (it was all on a second hard disk). Windows installs usually take at least that much time, especially when you consider the maddening repeated Windows Update sessions to install all of the needed patches. Given that I was running the Dapper Drake beta flight 7 release, the system did check the online ubuntu repositories and notified me that I needed to apply 200+ updates, but after choosing to install the updates this happened in the background as I began to play with the OS and required only one reboot. I did run into one installation issue that 98% of the users out there wouldn't have - it took me a while to figure out how to set up RAID 0 support on my boot drive. The ubuntu installer didn't figure this out, probably due in part to the hybrid hardware/software configuration of the controller. Luckily I found a howto written by Philip Susi (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FakeRaidHowto) and an online forum where a couple developers had posted fixes to the Dapper config files (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/initramfs-tools/+bug/22107). It took a while, but it works well now. The graphical disk manager tool is still a little confused and shows the RAID array as two drives (one with partitions, one without), but now that the device is set up and mounts during startup, I don't need to use that tool. Otherwise, ubuntu recognized all of my hardware right off the bat. This includes a PCI Firewire card, PCI USB 2.0 card, a PCI Sound Blaster Live, a Netgear ethernet card, a DVD+/-RW DL drive, a floppy, and an IDE hard disk drive (for data). However, I did choose to install an ATI display driver (fglrx) for my 9700 Pro to make sure I was using the best driver for my display, instead of the more generic driver that ubuntu used by default (https://wiki.ubuntulinux.org/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI). One other slight hardware config item I had to take care of was to create a mount point for my data hard disk drive and add it to my /etc/fstab file. There's probably a way to do it with the disk manager tool in the GUI, but I was comfortable with mount and fstab, so I did it that way. I was pleasantly surprised when the bundled scanner software (Xsane) was able to detect my older HP scanner and was even be able to use the automatic document feeder! [to me, this is a lot better than running 3 persistent HP daemons in my old windows setup!] I was also delighted to see that ubuntu recognized my APC UPS connected via USB. DVD-ROM (data discs) burning is built-in. Ubuntu also automatically recognized when I plugged in my digital camera to a USB port. It automatically launched an image importing wizard and pulled in some digital pics without a hitch. The only area where the hardware support wasn't perfect was with printer drivers. I don’t have customized printer drivers for my NEC SuperScript 1450N. The generic PCL6 or Postscript driver works, but I wonder if I'm missing some optimizations for the features of my specific printer. The closest thing I can get on my HP OfficeJet 7310 is an OfficeJet 7300. Again, it works no problem. One tiny complaint on the hardware side is that the device manager doesn't seem to have an intelligible organization / listing of the hardware on my machine. Windows Device Manager does seem to be able to figure it all out. User Interface The UI is a very clean desktop, which I really like. The overall look is very clean: appropriately sized icons, soft edges, and smooth fonts. No desktop icons, unless I put them there. Any temporarily mounted media (floppies, USB flash drives, USB disks) get an icon on the desktop when the device is plugged in. Those types of devices are automatically mounted, which makes it easy for non-Unix types. The desktop display itself is framed with a top band and a bottom band. In the top band, from the left are the desktop menus. Instead of a single "start" menu, ubuntu divides the system's menu into three: Applications, Places, and System. I like this organization. The only thing I'd ask for is a command prompt icon, but I easily added one from the panel properties/preferences menu. The top band also includes space for quick launch icons (Firefox and Evolution (e-mail)) by default), and a tray in the upper right that includes the time, any system notifications, and a logout/shutdown icon. The bottom band is a taskbar, with each running program having a rectangle. It also has a "show desktop" icon in the bottom left and a set of workspace icons on the right. Like nearly all *nix GUIs, there's support for multiple (in this case, 4) workspaces for windows. You can rapidly switch workspaces, which is handy if you open a variety of programs and want to switch between various activities (e.g., a spreadsheet in one workspace, an e-mail and browser workspace, an mp3 player and file browser workspace) A nice set of desktop applets are included: a Spotlight-like search tool, dictionary, stock ticker, system performance monitor, weather, etc. In my opinion, about 90% as fully developed as OS X. I will say that Microsoft's window manager/GUI feels a littler crisper than Ubuntu's Gnome/X11 GUI. This is because when Gnome is creating and rendering a window, it appears that you can see each major component of the window being drawn separately (a window outline/scroll bars, menu bar, toolbars). In Windows, this happens very fast and in only one maybe two steps. In Gnome the window rendering does happen pretty fast and doesn't cause a problem, but you can see it come together, which to me, causes a little visual dissonance. Software OpenOffice 2.0 is included and installed in the OS install (that's right in the initial 20-30 minute installation). No separate CDs, no separate install/update/update/update… cycles. OpenOffice includes everything you'd need: spreadsheet, word processor, presentation editor, as well as a database and math equation editor. There are a few minor behavioral quirks (e.g., when entering data into a spreadsheet cell, the right arrow key adds the cursor's cell address to the field you're editing instead of moving one cell to the right), but after playing with it for an hour, the applications behave very much like Linux ports of Microsoft Office. I'm sure there might be some advanced features in Microsoft Office that might not be supported, but who uses them anyway? [For a more in depth comparison, see this 3/28/2006 article: http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articles/software/page4382.cfm] I will say that I was able to open, edit, and save all of my Microsoft Office documents and then bring them up in MS Office without a problem. Multimedia support. There are bundled video and audio players, but due to copyright and licensing restrictions the bundled players only support a few open source formats. So wmv, Quicktime, MP3, Xvid, DivX, and MPEG files don't play out of the box. However, it takes just a few copy+pastes of a command to automatically download & install the needed codecs. This is pretty straightforward and is documented on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RestrictedFormats. Macromedia Flash version 8 doesn't seem to be supported. I tried "remote desktop" to my ubuntu computer from my work Windows laptop (http://ubuntuguide.org/#remotedesktop). This worked, no problem. I just had to download the free VNC viewer from www.realvnc.com. One thing to note is that file transfer isn't a part of the VNC standard - you have to use PuTTY (pscp/psftp) or ftp (yikes!) for that. Additional software can be installed over the internet with an "add/remove programs" equivalent called "Synaptic". I used that to download gftp, a simple yet powerful graphical ftp client, Xmms, a winamp like mp3 player, ethereal, and ... I could access Windows file shares natively (I think) from the Places > Connect to Server… menu. I just needed a user account on the Windows computer to access the shares. The other way, creating shares for Windows clients, I installed Samba (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SettingUpSamba). This involved running two command lines to download and install the package and then some configuration steps. The configuration steps were 1) create a user, 2) define a shared directory in the /etc/samba/smb.conf file. That wasn't too bad, but the user step should have been either a guest account, or any valid user account on the system, not a separate user db. I discovered later that the smb.conf editing could be done from the menu System > Administration > Shared Folders. I'm missing a few apps from my Windows days:
I'm sure there are Linux equivalents to all of these (except Kinoma & TiVo), but I'll need to find them, pick from a number of choices, determine which ones are intended for use under the ubuntu distribution, and then get/install them. I really don't want to go the dual boot route, but at some point I'll probably play with virtualization to run WinXP inside Ubuntu (https://wiki.ubuntu.com//WindowsXPUnderQemuHowTo). That might just do the trick.
Performance I didn't time many operations in my Windows installation to compare to my new ubuntu implementation. Besides, given "Windows Entropy", I really would have had to do three sets of timings: 2 yr WinXP performance, fresh WinXP install, and fresh ubuntu. The other complication is that I changed my hard disk setup when I abondoned my WinXP installation, so that wouldn't be a fair comparison. Without timing numbers on the exact same hardware, it's hard to say with certainty which OS performs better. I can say that my impression is that the applications and OS perform faster. That is, the OS seems to be very crisp and little disk thrashing. The performance monitor only show about 160MB in use and with a "normal complement" of applications running (Calc, Thunderbird e-mail, Firefox, terminal, XMMS mp3 player), my memory usage was still under 256MB. I can recall windows creeping up to 360MB or so with this kind of load. The boot time up until the login prompt is about the same (50 seconds), however, my Windows installation had a lot of extraneous services turned off, and I have yet to do that in ubuntu (e.g., disable Bluetooth & WiFi support). So, perhaps ubuntu is a hair faster. After you log in, ubuntu is definitely faster to get the desktop up, which in part, I attribute to the number of helper applications/daemons Windows loads from my startup folder: HP printer monitors, a Quicktime helper, an APC UPS daemon, Windows/MSN messenger, Office startup, and maybe a couple others. Windows gets the nod when it comes to the apparent speed as demonstrated by the OS's ability to display and render display windows quickly. One test that seems to do better in Ubuntu is playing an H.264 encoded QuickTime file (the GeekBrief TV Adam Curry interview from April 1, 2006). In Windows, my 1GHz Pentium III is just a step too slow to run the video smoothly. Under Ubuntu it has just enough speed to keep up. Conclusions I'm completely sold. And pleased. The UI is clean, the OS is crisp and responsive, it supports my hardware, and let's me surf, e-mail, listen to music, and work on documents. I also feel like it's a more stable and secure environment than what I had with Windows. I'm excited to play and learn with my computer again. I definitely recommend ubuntu as a desktop Windows replacement. Really, the only folks I wouldn't recommend it for would be those who either didn't have the patience to learn Windows in the first place, need to have a support person closeby to help with any walkthroughs/questions (my Mom and Dad are a plane ride away), or if you have a lot of must-have Windows software. If you're not solidly in those categories, you should download the Live CD and test it out! Besides, one compelling item is that the cost of the entire package is ZERO. Everything is included. Everything is free. It's the founder's, Mark Shuttlesworth's, way of giving back after making a ton of money with OpenSource software. Mark, a sincere thank you. I personally would easily pay $20-50 for this if I thought there were any risk of the project folding. It's easily worth twice that. I just hope ubuntu can stay true to their mission - clean, reasonably small & lightweight, fast, good all around software bundle. From what I've seen it's pretty complete, so I hope that the developers don't get bored and bloat the thing with a million features & options. Certainly some incremental improvements can be made, but if they really run out of things to do, I'd suggest propogating their distribution, creating broader hardware support (printer drivers), games, or even attacking another software category. Myself, I still need to:
Since then, I've tried the MEPIS live CD and looked at the Xandros and Mandriva screen shots (http://shots.osdir.com/index_thumbs.php). MEPIS (6.0 beta 3) was not appealing visually - too much desktop clutter, bloated/clumsy tooltips; after trying ubuntu I couldn't go any further with the MEPIS desktop. I quickly came to the same conclusion after looking at Xandros' screenshots as well. Xandros looks almost exactly like Windows. I didn't get started on Mandriva. Probably the only other distro I'd like to try on my desktop would be SUSE. SUSE 10.1 just came out and promises to be a great release. One initial knock on SUSE - no Live CD. For another Linux desktop opinion (using Xandros): http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114727136610348924-Et3a0yO82d_xJdMWN_y8xKXLl7c_20060521.html?mod=mktw
If you'd like to send me some feedback, you can e-mail me
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| All content copyright © 2006, Matt Carpenter |
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