A few days ago, I was planning on posting that I had migrated my laptop to Ubuntu 6.06 [Dapper Drake], away from Debian Etch (testing/unstable) which had been the primary OS. A copy of XP still resides on there for certain things, but it rarely gets used. I had been very happy with Debian’s performance as a desktop distro – my laptop had happily run icewm, and everything was peachy. Everyone knows that I like Debian.
Ubuntu is even better. I was so impressed by it that I decided to use it for my desktop machine – an AMD X2 4400+. Now, this machine required some manual handing in Debian. Don’t get me wrong, Gnome set up fine, installing a chroot for 32 bit applications wasn’t too painful, and getting sound working with ALSA was alright. But it was still work. And I could never get the SMP kernel to stop panicking (so had to use a non-SMP kernel).
However, with Ubuntu everything ‘just worked’ (something that has apparently kept the other sometime-poster to this blog, Kenny, away from Linux). Even using the install disc as a livecd had a nicely working X and sound system. So now Ubuntu is my primary desktop and laptop distro. Future posts will inform of how to do certain things in Ubuntu. Also, this makes Linux the OS with the majority, in my household at least.
I’d do a more thorough review, but it can really be summed up in two statements: it ‘just works’; and is a pleasure to use.
If I could only get rid of that legacy Win2K server…