Bart~Blog

At the beginning of last week, I decided that it was finally the time for me to depart from Windows and permanently enter the Linux world by the Ubuntu door. The reason is simple: although I really like Windows XP, I cannot understand how a thing like Windows Vista was created after so much development effort and time. It is an insult to the software engineering profession to come up with such operating system and as Microsoft is pushing hard to put Windows Vista on new computers, it will eventually drop its support for Windows XP. I prefer to prevent this situation and start converting everything to a free platform than to be in reaction mode at potentially the worst time (maybe during my PhD?).

In the past year, I have been occasionally working with various Ubuntu installations (Kubuntu on my laptop and Ubuntu server edition on my server) and I was pleased with the overall system. However, there is a difference between pushing the OS to its limit and just browsing the web. So, here are a few observations on my experience with Kubuntu Feisty Fawn.

The Good:

• It is so easy and fast to install compared to Windows.
• I like the general look. The icons are beautiful, windows are clean, etc.
• Before Google and Ubuntu, I had a hard time finding information about various Linux issues (yes, I “played” with Red Hat before Fedora). MSDN library and Microsoft Knowledge Base were hard to beat. I am happy to say that finding information on Linux is now pretty easy. Without this, I would have switched back to XP in a matter of hours.
• I can’t help feeling a general sense of power when I open the Aptitude client and see how many packages and programs are available for me to download.
• Kontact is THE application I’ve been looking for for years! Thanks to its simple but efficient todo management and the integration with the calendar. I might even switch my email from Thunderbird to Kmail eventually… And to think I was bothering with Sunbird on Windows…
• Java is easy to install, Eclipse works relatively well: this was necessary as I program most of the time…
• Kile (LaTeX frontend) is wonderful. I am certainly not a command line/emacs/vi guy (although I sometimes use emacs when I edit files remotely) and I feared I would miss TeXnicCenter…

The Bad:

• My soundcard (Soundblaster X-Fi), is not yet supported. This is a BIG BIG BIG minus as I always listen to music while working and this soundcard wasn’t cheap!
• DNS resolution and networking is slower than on Windows XP. I get good transfer rate, but connecting to a machine or a domain is just too slow for me. I read some articles on the problem and will need to fix this.
• The fonts are horrible. I always try to convince myself that the fonts are nice, but when I look at my Windows XP laptop side by side with my Linux screen, it’s just plain obvious that there is something wrong. I read a lot of articles and posts on the topic and even after trying some tricks, downloading fonts and adjusting ClearType, there is not much improvement. This is especially painful when coding.
• Although the general look is good, I find that all icons and all fonts are just too big. Maybe that’s a good thing and I won’t break my eyes, but sometimes, I have the feeling that I can look at more text on my 14 inches laptop screen than on my 24 inches flat panel wide screen. Do you see a problem here? For example, the TreeView in Eclipse is just awful: space between items is too big and the font is also inadequately big (I changed the font, but can’t do anything obvious with the space).
• Installing the video driver and configuring the settings was not too hard, but it would have been too hard for my friends and family. I understand the issue with proprietary driver, but there should be a button on which you can click, accept the license or whatever is required, and install/configure the whole shebang. Having to play with command line and “restart the x server” is not something I want to guide my friends through!

Mixed Feelings:

• Kopete is an ok replacement to Messenger, but I still miss MSN’s chat GUI. Sure, it was less configurable, but it just worked well!
• Performance is ok, but I expected better than that. Starting programs seem slower than on windows, startup is not noticeably faster, Eclipse seems a bit sluggish at time, but I did not empirically measure it :-). It will come though.
• Firefox is still good, but some sites refused to download completely (while they were working perfectly well on Windows).
• Thunderbird interface, on the other hand, is a bit uglier than the one on Windows. I also miss the email notification in the taskbar.
• I find myself often opening a terminal. Is this a good thing?
• The printer was easy to setup… once the correct package had been downloaded (my printer needed the foomatic package…).

Overall, I’m happy with my system. I will continue to work on it and improve it, but there are no showstoppers for now (thanks to my iPod, I can still listen to music while working). Ubuntu is IMHO really one of the best things that could happen to Linux. I’m not sure I would recommend Ubuntu to my friends and family yet, but I think in maybe a year or two, that will be a perfectly acceptable alternative to Windows (and Mac… but don’t get me started on Mac).

As a side node, I chose Kubuntu a while ago as I feel I have more options and it is easier to configure, but I would probably recommend Ubuntu (Gnome) to my family and friends as it is a bit simpler to use. Anyway, both are great desktops and I’m just sad that some applications are not available in both environment (yes, you can run almost any applications on both, but native support is still preferable in some cases).

Update: I disabled the ZeroConfig network browsing and added the OpenDNS server in my DNS servers list:  network is running a bit faster now!