A month after installing Ubuntu and my series of slightly boring ‘do this then do that’ articles, I thought it was time to give some feedback on using Ubuntu now that the dust has had time to settle.

For me there are four crucial elements to any operating system, there are performance, support, stability and but not least the element that is often neglected in other Linux distro’s; simplicity. In my humble opinion Ubuntu excels in all four areas and I will address each one individually.

Performance
We all know that XP is a dog when in comes to performance, although I hear the new Vista is a lot quicker out of the blocks than its younger brother we’ll cross that bridge in a year or two when it’s proven to be stable (once bitten, twice shy). Ubuntu like most Linux distro’s is quick, even with various services set to load on boot, I can get to the password screen in less than 30 seconds. Comparing that to XP where I press the power button then pop off to make a coffee, there is no comparison. Once up and running there is no notable difference in running speed between XP and Ubuntu except in heavy Java applications such as Eclipse or Limewire where Ubuntu seems to use far less resources (I’m using Sun Java not GIJ).

Support
I have only one complaint of the level of support in terms of forums, mailing lists and wiki’s for Ubuntu and that is simply that there are so many it makes it difficult to decide which one to choose when looking at hundreds of relevant results being returned in Google. After a while though you soon realize that all the best info is on the Ubuntu website and nine times out of ten you need look no further.

Stability
I have been really putting Ubuntu through its paces, installing multiple virtual machines via VM-Ware, loading complex applications in Wine, running multiple heavy apps at the same time etc, and Ubuntu hasn’t even so much as blinked. The only thing that even comes close to a bug that I’ve noticed (although I think this is more likely bad design), is the wireless roaming feature. Sometimes when you roam from one setup wireless network to another, you sometimes need to reboot to connect to the second network as it’s quicker than remembering and typing in the WPA key, which is already stored but for some reason stalls.

Simplicity
This for me is where Ubuntu comes into its own, Ubuntu can be matched in some or all of the areas above by other distro’s but none have all of the above as well as the simplicity of Ubuntu. From the moment you put the CD in to the first time you install a new package it is plain sailing all the way, all updates are automatic and all packages dependencies are located and installed automatically when installing software from the Ubuntu repository. These kinds of features aren’t revolutionary but they are the best implementation of such features to date.

For basic workstation usage and the kind of programs that most home computer users are likely to desire everything can be done from within the GUI, which is great. In my opinion any operating system that requires the command line to install basic packages or adjust common settings will never take off in the mainstream. In this respect Ubuntu’s slogan: ‘Linux For Human Beings’ rains true.

So overall as you can probably tell, I’ve been very impressed by Ubuntu and believe that the latest version of Ubuntu in more step towards the dream of having an open source operating system that can start taking some ground back from Microsoft. I now use Ubuntu as my primary operating system for my laptop which is mainly used as a family computer at home.

As you might remember from my previous article my main ambition was to be able to use Ubuntu as my primary work operating system for which I needed some quite fringe programs. In this regard Ubuntu didn’t quite make the grade, although it was a very close run thing. What broke the deal was Eclipse, although Eclipse has native support for Linux and worked without a problem, some of the plug-ins which I use didn’t work as they were supposed to. The bugs were only minor but were the kind of thing that would soon start to get old over time. This I might add is no fault of Ubuntu’s, if the blame lays anywhere then it’s with the plug-in developers, but this just highlights where the priority still is for most developers even in the open source community; make it work for Windows, then worry about everything else later. I’m going to give it another bash in six months, so watch this space.