Ubuntu vs. Vista
I started to install Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on my Vista laptop but ended up bugging out. I'm writing this blog entry in Ubuntu having not installed it, but running it off the optical drive on my Dell laptop. The reason I bugged out is that Ubuntu can't tell me what's on the partitions it sees during installation, and can't resize NTFS partitions (or mount them). From what I can tell of Ubuntu, it's very slick, but I do have a number of observations based on what little I've seen so far.
Screen real estate, especially vertical real estate, shouldn't be wasted, especially in these days of wide screen displays. Ubuntu's default Gnome setup wastes quite a bit of vertical real estate:
- First, there's the global Apple-like menu bar. Unlike Apple's menu bar, it's essentially just an app launcher, which means that 99% of the time it's just wasted space. Not only is this a waste of vertical real estate, it's a waste of a screen edge (very valuable -- see Fitt's Law). The Mac's UI remains the only non retarded implementation of a menu bar in a major OS.
- Ubuntu still wastes title bar space even for maximized applications. Windows also commits this sin, but at least it doesn't have the pointless app launcher above it.
- Edit: I forgot to mention Ubuntu wastes space for a "start bar" at the bottom of the screen even though that functionality is actually provided by the space wasted up top for the app launcher.
Installation
- During installation, the time zone requester is extremely annoying. I live in Alabama and finding a "dot" corresponding to the time zone I'm in was quite fiddly.
- During installation, touching the trackpad is treated as a click. This actually led me to accidentally click potentially fatal buttons. Bad. I'd err on the side of not treating random things as clicks in an installer.
- Not strictly an installation issue, but getting onto my wireless network was needlessly painful. I needed to enter my 128-bit WEP password but it's too stupid to (a) recognize the kind of password being entered automatically or (b) try all the obvious options automatically, meaning that the proverbial clueless user will have to know that it's a 64/128-bit hex password and whether or not to use a shared key and so forth. On a Mac you just selected a network and type in a password and your computer, which is good at such things, figures it out. Vista has to be the worst of course, since it makes you confirm the password (like I really wanted to type that damn thing in TWICE).
- The preceding issue is magnified by some pretty dumb behavior in various nooks and crannies. I have two wireless routers at home and log into them separately (but with the same 128-bit code). Ubuntu's Mac-like keychain offered to store the settings but stored them incorrectly, so after waking from sleep I lost my network connection and couldn't restore it without typing the long string in again, which I didn't have handy. A Keychain tool (there are two and only one seems to work) appeared to let me copy the string, but I couldn't paste it into the WEP login (and I had previously pasted stuff into it, so I'm guessing the copy operation silently failed in Keychain). But by then I'd deleted the erroneous keychain entries, so I was screwed. At this point I gave up on Ubuntu.
Digital Media
- When I visited Hulu.com it told me to install Flash and sent me to Adobe's page. Adobe asked me which of three archive formats to download (gz, rpm, or yum???). I downloaded each and none worked. Later, I tried my own video code (which simply tries to display Flash video naively), which caused Firefox to display a missing plugin graphic. Clicking that automagically installed the right stuff (and now Hulu works). Score one for Firefox/Ubuntu and zero for Adobe.
- None of the WMV or MOV videos I tried would play. I got a weird looking player interface and a black screen. All the FLV media worked just dandy. I assume that SOME MOV or WMV video will work, but none of the codecs I use, and I tend to use pretty nice codecs.
- Shockwave stuff doesn't work... I thought the plugin had been ported to *NIX but apparently not.
Aesthetics
In my opinion, Ubuntu 8.04, despite lacking the GPU-fluff of Vista or even OS X's understated elegance, is a very attractive OS. It's tasteful, understated, and tidy in a way that even earlier releases of Ubuntu weren't. I don't care for the heron desktop, it seems desperately trendy (with the bezier swirls that seem so popular these days but not so well executed). Someone has gone to the trouble of trying to make all the included apps look reasonably similar.Final Thoughts
Ubuntu is making Desktop Linux almost credible. I've been around long enough to have been excited by FreeBSD distributions. I remember installing a fairly early RedHat on my old PC (it took three of us to even get it vaguely working). The first Linux distribution that even vaguely tempted me was Knoppix (to which the Linux world owes a huge debt, and which should make Microsoft and even Apple pretty ashamed -- if one guy can make a self-configuring Linux distro that runs on almost anything, why can't Microsoft do the same for Windows?)I'm definitely thinking of quickly rebooting into Vista, backing up any files I really want to keep, and then cheerfully overwriting Vista, but only because I've found Vista so annoying. (My major gripe with Vista right now is probably not purely Microsoft's fault -- somehow the permissions policy on my machine have been set such that I can't install any new software or even updates. It's a work machine which had Vista Business installed on it for me for testing purposes, but I can't really use it and our Office is still mainly XP-based so it's not well-supported.)
All that said, if it weren't for Flash support, I would find Ubuntu pretty intolerable. One of the few things I find this laptop useful for (aside from testing stuff under Vista using whatever versions of stuff it has on it) is watching Bones on Hulu.com (I'm catching up having just decided I like the show, and this saves me buying the DVD box sets or paying $2/episode on iTunes). If Flash didn't run under Ubuntu, then I'd probably be rusted on to some flavor of Windows.
That said, it annoys me that Apple doesn't support Linux with QuickTime. I suppose that QuickTime would make Linux a better alternative platform to the Mac for digital media across the board (and Linux is already very credible in the 3d arena).
Addendum: I just realized that Ubuntu doesn't seem to know how to put my laptop to sleep. Whoops! If this turns out to be the case, then that's a show-stopper.Follow-up: I found the appropriate setting, but it seems that suspend mode is not supported (as I found out later after, apparently, leaving the laptop running all night. That's a bit of a show-stopper.
Final, Final Thoughts
With the problems I ran into, there's no way Ubuntu will replace Vista on my laptop just yet.I haven't explored Ubuntu very deeply, but I've basically looked at three things: the web-browsing experience (fairly crucial, since I'm a web developer), wireless networking, and sleep behavior. In those three areas, respectively, I find:
- a profound lack of polish (although, in part, this was because of Adobe's stupidity -- why not tell me which install to use with Ubuntu or automatically detect which one to give me versus giving me three options that don't work) and serious incompatibilities with common digital media
- usability issues and serious bugs, and
- complete incompatibility with some pretty common hardware.
Microsoft Vista Business: 1, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron": 0.
Truly final aside: I did the final edits to this post on my Mac Pro, since my Ubuntu laptop has lost its internet connection and I don't see the point in getting it going again.