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It is ignorantly immaculate to indicate the incredible indecency that is inevitably involved in innuendo indigenous inside the… just kidding, and that doesn’t make any sense.

So this is flash-in-the-pan review of Ubuntu Linux 8.10, code-named “Intrepid Ibex”.  Flash-in-the-pan meaning just a quick review based on non-serious usage.  I had installed this as a consequence to all the SATA bullshit I was going through.  I had tried Hardy Heron a little bit before, which I had installed on a VM on my old laptop.  I’ll start with this regarding Ubuntu: It’s finally come to the point where anyone can install Linux easily, and then use it for basic stuff.  That you have to give credit for.  I think Ubuntu does have the best installer I’ve ever seen, though I will criticize that it puts your monitor to sleep after a few minutes if you leave it alone.  I don’t think it’s right for this to happen during an installation - it scares the new user and gives the impression/reveals that you didn’t think this out.

In the actual OS, it looks good, I like the way the windows show up, the quick launch icon effects, the various fades look good, alt+tabbing is a great time with the newer effects, and I love the jello windows and all that.  I would call the Ubuntu default theme “Coffee”, I don’t know why it’s not called that.  It actually feels good for me to be in it.  It feels comfy, and I don’t really want to leave, but I have to.  Before I explain why, I’d like to say that it’s still so cool that this thing is free.  It makes you want to use it, like how it got to me many years in the past.  A great contribution of work from thousands of people around the world, all done for love and fun, all given away for free, under such great intentions and honorable ideals.  BUT… it just doesn’t cut it.  I assert that it doesn’t cut it due to GPL/Linux nature, which is explained in my Linux Divorce piece, but I’d like to talk about how Ubuntu 8.10 itself doesn’t cut it, right off the bat.

The problem is that basic shit doesn’t work.  First of all, the aforementioned display-to-sleep during install.  Then you’ve got the font not being set to “Subpixel smoothing (LCDs)” by default - really, you couldn’t detect the type of display on the machine, or don’t wanna bet that most installs are probably going to be on LCDs these days?  This results in having the default font look like orderly chicken scratch.  Then there was the ATI Driver problem.  Ubuntu informed me that I might want to use this ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver, so I said sure.  I got the cool jello window effects after that happened, if I recall correctly.  Cool!  I launched Firefox, cool.  I scrolled down Google News… BAD!  Just teeeerrible webpage scrolling, feels like I’m dragging a dead giant across some rocks.  For some reason it pegs my CPU to scroll a simple webpage.  Couldn’t figure this out.  Even changing the driver back to the initial open source one didn’t seem to resolve it.  So, that’s pretty bad, and pretty much the end right there!  I’m sure I can fix it, but you know what?  I don’t feel like spending potentially hours just to get my webpages to scroll normally, that’s ridiculous.  If something as trivial as that doesn’t work, I can imagine there will be many more complex things that don’t work down the pipeline.

Here’s another eye-roller: You open the GIMP for the first time ever, and the file menus on the two windows are above the GNOME menu, meaning that they are hidden underneath it and inaccessible.  Good one, guys!  I’m thinking “guys” in this case means the GIMP developers.  You know, small stuff like this shows the lack of testing/care associated with much of Linux and its apps.

Switching gears to some other praise on the way out, I thought the package management tool was pretty great.  It’s really simple to install and remove programs, and I think that the star ranking system for the popularity of whatever category of software you’re browsing or whatever you search for is immensely useful.  Ubuntu is also probably the easiest OS out there as far as getting your media to play back.  Just try to open whatever video you have, for example, and it’ll go online (with your permission) find/install the proper codec, and then the video will play, don’t need to restart the player or anything.  And I’d like to say again that the graphics/effects are pretty damn spiffy.  It’s even really cool when an app dies, it fades into this dark gray version of itself.. hehe… eh.  It’s pretty cool in general, I wanna use Ubuntu!!… except that.. I don’t want to spend all the tons of time fixing weird things I run into, and a lot of hardware/software won’t work/exist.  I want life to be easier, not harder.  So, nice to say hello!  Goodbye!

On a general Linux outlook note (kinda funny way to say it huh? hehe): Ubuntu has become the most popular Linux distro, claiming about 30% of desktop Linux installations.  That’s pretty good.  Maybe it’ll get past 50% and effectively take-over completely.  If it could get past 90% of Linux desktop market share, there will be basically no more distro problem, and one major hurdle less for Linux making it!  Cause if Ubuntu can’t solve the Linux distro problem, then I just don’t see any other hope on the horizon, or possibly ever.  “Problem” of course from the perspective of someone wanting Linux to become the dominant OS, or at least a serious competitor with the other two.