Technophile

I was one of the first people I know of to part with my hard earned cash for a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate and in all my years as a Windows user I have never felt quite so let down. I’ve been trying to think what I got over the last couple of years in the way of “Ultimate Extras”, I recall a couple of games maybe some themes but really nothing of note and the original bundled additional features didn’t really impress. Maybe I should have just bought “Home Premium” and been done with it, but I guess like any good gadgeteer or technophile I’m never really going to be satisfied with the “light” version of anything (except my Pepsi where I am very much a man who likes to take it to the Max).

So here comes Windows 7 and I find myself for the first time asking why exactly would I bother upgrading? Do I really want to part with £165 or more for a new version, (or c. £150 for an upgrade)? The biggest sales point seems to be increased performance and stability, but should I be paying more for “stability” and lets face it we all know that the patches and service packs will flow thick and fast as the initially shipped bugware becomes worth having. So no, I have decided that I am not going to bother and the real reason isn’t the credit crunch or because I’ve suddenly lost my marbles and become cravat wearing, tofu eating, style over substance, arty-farty Mac user. No. It is because I genuinely believe that there now real alternatives. Don’t get me wrong I’m still a big fan of Bill Gates, my career and enthusiasm for IT would be a lot poorer without him and his visionary impact, he still gets to sit next to Stephen Fry and Alan Turing at my ultimate dinner party, but alas he doesn’t get my money for Windows 7.

For quite a few years I’ve been tinkering with Linux in one guise or another, when we started using Red Hat on servers at work, when commercially viable distributions began to appear I decided that I needed to get involved and ever since then there have always been a couple of Linux installs in and around my study. I built a simple fileserver to stream my movies and music; I’ve installed old half dead laptops to use OpenOffice on the move, built a firewall and more recently I wiped the preinstalled Windows XP from my netbook and installed Ubuntu. I take my netbook everywhere, it’s an Advent 4213 has a nice crisp 10 inch screen and a built in HSDPA as well as a capacious hard disk. I use it to watch movies and listen to music on the move, connect to my email and browse the web, create documents, read e-books and like all good commuters play the odd game of solitaire, poker or minesweeper. I’ve never had a virus, the little Intel Atom processor performs exceptionally well and the machine starts up and shuts down a lot quicker than the Windows machines of my fellow commuters. I’m very close to the point where I could happily abandon my Windows desktop at home in favour of a Linux distribution, Windows 7 with its hefty price tag probably pushed me one step closer and the latest version of Ubuntu takes me a little further still.

See Technophiles brief review of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala here.

For me the biggest drawback of any Linux distribution historically was that you needed to be an enthusiast to use it and in most cases even to install it.  Grandma Pat was never going to be able to pop into PC World, pick up a CD take it home and install it on her old desktop.  But that is finally changing.  We have been steadily getting nearer that point where the software truly is more end-user friendly and you don’t need a degree in computer science to use it. The Ubuntu installer is a great example of this evolution. Functionally the latest installer is much the same as in 8.10 and up, but has a couple of nice touches; the inclusion of a graphically pleasing map when choosing your time zone and a graphical representation of the drives and partitions which makes the partitioning process easier to follow and understand. More significantly though, what they have done with the installer is smarten it up.  The installer window is now smaller and fits a 10” netbook screen. Also, as you go through the install they have added a series of pictures that show you key features and applications. Fair enough, Windows has been doing this for ages but this is evidence that they are aiming, correctly, at a non technical consumer, one who will not intuitively know that you can use “F-Spot” to manage photos or “Rhythmbox” to manage your music.

Amongst other improvements in 9.10 are;

• General improvements to the artwork making it crisper and cleaner.

• The inclusion and integration of “Empathy” as the IM client of choice. – Hardcore “Pidgin” users don’t have to panic its still there but “Empathy” offers better integration and would seem to have moved on more than “Pidgin” in recent times.

• To make basic admin easier there is now a “Computer Janitor” to help clean up old and unwanted files.

• Introduction of the “Ubuntu Software Centre”, replacing the previous add and remove software. “Ubuntu Software Centre” sets the foundations for the inclusion of commercial software in the future – yes there are commercially available Linux applications.

• Integration of Ubuntu One, a cloud storage service with free signup giving access to 2Gb of storage or 50Gb for a flat £10/month.

• Faster perceived boot times. Usage of the Upstart process to replace the now elderly init daemon. Quite simply Upstart is a multitasking system, allowing the various start-up processes to run in parallel. The old init daemon, is synchronous, queuing start-up tasks one after the other. Upstart gives the impression of a faster boot time to the desktop – even if the system has not truly finished booting, it certainly feels quick.

Ok so that is all good stuff, so is there anything that I thought was bad? Well in truth no, not really. Sure I would like to see some video editing out of the box, even Windows has its DVD creator and Movie Maker, and under OSX the tools are fairly powerful. Of course it is there if you want to find it and install it yourself, (“PiTiVi” for example).

I have read reports that Ubuntu seems to have lost support for some legacy graphics devices which surprises me as the claims from Canonical were that “major [graphics] performance problems” in 9.04 had been solved and that general performance with Intel graphics devices had also been improved. I personally have had no issues with support for graphics in any of the installs that I have performed.

In conclusion.

The greatest problem facing Ubuntu as a Windows competitor is the fact that Windows still ships with a massive proportion of all new computers and so people have an investment not only in terms of software but in practical knowledge. Ubuntu Karmic Koala clearly does address what has been levelled as a major criticism in the past, the products sense of coherence, but there is still some way to go to presenting a single product feeling that users find reassuring.

I will not be throwing out my Vista PC yet, but I won’t be upgrading to Windows 7 so I guess I am edging closer to that tipping point and if Ubuntu continues to evolve along its current path I can now admit that there will be a day when I wipe my Windows install once and forever.

You can learn more about Ubuntu on their website at http://www.ubuntu.com or you could join the Ubuntu Users group on Facebook by clicking on the picture or here.