Alex’s Journal

I’ve finally given Linux a try. After all that posting and complaining about how much I wanted to try it, I finally have. Now that I’m back from Germany and have access to my Compaq desktop, I went ahead and downloaded and installed Ubuntu 8.04. So far, I have to admit that I really haven’t done much with it, but what I have done (basically just explored the OS and the applications that were bundled with it) it has done incredibly smoothly. After having used Mac OS X for so long, I had taken somethings for granted such as stability and a lack of weird, unknown problems that have no explanation — both of which are common occurrences in Windows and both of which I have already run into despite only having used it for a couple of days since I’ve been back. I even recall having formatted and installed a fresh copy of Windows XP Pro on my PC desktop before leaving for Germany.

I thought at first that it may have been a hardware problem, but that isn’t so. After using Ubuntu now for the past few hours, I haven’t run into any of the problems that I was running into consistently in Windows on the same computer. In Windows, Firefox 3 took literally minutes to open and that was fairly quick compared to some of the other applications I tried to run. In Ubuntu, I’ve had absolutely none of those problems. Everything is very snappy. And with a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 processor and a gig of RAM, it should be snappy (yes, it is a bit out of date, but it is up-to-date enough to run Firefox 3 without any problems… or so I would think).

I’ll keep using it for a while and see what I think. I can’t write about a whole lot at this point as I haven’t installed any other applications or really done anything productive in Ubuntu yet (other than write this post). I can say though that the user-friendliness of Ubuntu knocks the socks off of the last version of Linux I tried, Red Hat Linux 7. That was several years ago though and Linux was much more reliant on the user being able to use the Terminal than it is now. Now there are GUI buttons for pretty much everything that the average user needs as far as I can see.