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Without Windows: Day 2

Pros:

• No show-stopping driver issues! Unlike with Windows 7, my network adapter worked just fine out of the box as well as the sound card, and video worked well enough. (There are some performance issues using the generic VGA driver it set up, but after looking briefly over instructions for setting up a SiS driver, I decided not to invest the time as of yet.)
• Familiar UI and process. Like I said, Ubuntu carries over some OS X overtones and mixes it with a nice set of Windows-like features. The menus and apps seem fairly intuitive, and I have not had an issue where I was completely lost yet.
• Easily expandable. I like apt-get and the Synaptic Package Manager. They both provide very easy and painless ways to get more software onto the system. It’s an interesting experience never visiting a developer’s site to download an app, and kind of refreshing. It’s not as simple as dragging AppXYZ.app into the Applications folder like on a Mac, but better than running an installer on Windows.

Cons:

• Slower than XP or 7. Interestingly, Ubuntu runs slower than either Windows XP or Windows 7 did. This may be caused by driver issues, but moving things around on the screen produces a fair amount of lag and redrawing, IO operations aren’t as speedy as I’d expect, and all of this comes as a surprise to me. I’m sure there are speed tweaks here and there that I could learn about and apply, but I thought minimalism out-of-the-box was a touted feature. Perhaps not with generic distros like Ubunutu.
• Confusing ownership management. I went to create a network share of a folder on an external drive for my local network, and honestly couldn’t figure it out for 15 minutes. Why? Ubuntu said I couldn’t because I didn’t own the files. What do you mean I didn’t own the files? Of course I understand that a new installation wouldn’t know what I’ve created previously, but this seemed a little draconian. While trying to somehow change the owner, I came across another very odd and surprising discovery…
• …there’s no root user! I thought, “Well if I’m not root, I’ll just su over to root and do it. Wait, what is the root password?” This one really confused me for a bit. It turns out that by default, Ubuntu doesn’t necessarily create a separate “root user” with its own password and such. Coming from Mac and Windows backgrounds, and thinking I understood somewhat basic *nix environments, I couldn’t figure out how I was to get something done as root. It took some Googling, and I finally found some helpful documentation, but this choice seemed very incongruous with the rest of Linux setups.

That’ll do for now. It’s only the first working day, so I will see how we do trying to implement a web design set up on my new Ubuntu machine! Wish me luck!

If anyone has any pointers, good resources, or other tips for me, I’d love to hear them as well! I’m just in a giant learning experience.

Update: Well, I didn’t exactly last a week. After four days, I realized that while yes, I could potentially do everything that I’d normally do in Windows on an Ubuntu install, I wasn’t receiving any added benefits, and was just having to do more troubleshooting than even Windows was needing. But then I bought a new MacBook Pro. One with an Intel chip, an upgrade from my Powerbook with a PPC chip. And so I just run Windows in VirtualBox. O, and the computer in this post? It’s now a Fedora Core 11 server box, I found that it runs much more stable than Ubuntu did.

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