The Linux Experiment

I’m going to take a little departure in this post to talk about something particularly geeky but something which I wanted to talk about anyway.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been almost exclusively using Ubuntu as my primary operating system. Actually, I’ve had every intention of casting Windows off entirely as my main operating system and moving to Linux completely. I won’t be. In this post I’m going to talk about the things I think are going very well in Linux (or, more specifically, Ubuntu) and the things which I think still need work before it’s ready for prime time.

Why?

To start this little review off, I should explain why it is that I decided to install Ubuntu as my main OS in the first place. Basically, MS pissed me off. I had 2 Microsoft OSes installed (Vista and Win 7 beta) as well as Wubi-ed Ubuntu. Both of the Windows installations decided to die for no real reason. In the process of dying, the Win 7 boot manager decided to mangle Wubi as well, and I was effectively left with a computer and no OSes. Since the root of all those problems had Microsoft at their root, I decided that it was time to try something completely different and pursue a Microsoft-free future. So effectively it was done out of spite, or anger, or a bit of a mix of the two.

After I made the decision, I installed XP to the first, small, partition in case of something going catastrophically wrong then proceeded to install Ubuntu. What follows is what I thought of the various aspects of Ubuntu I explored over my two weeks, followed by my reasoning for going back to the dark side. For this year, at least.

Installation

Ubuntu’s installation is pretty much flawless, at least in 8.10. It’s easy to use, clear, and offers the tools which Windows has needed for years – I’m still dreading managing to install Windows on c:\ when it comes to installing Windows again after my experiment. Starting the installation from a live CD with a fully operational version of the operating system is even better, and the Ubuntu cd has come in handy in the past to try and rescue Windows when it has its once-in-a-while notworkathon.

The main thing I would perhaps change in the Ubuntu setup is the default way it wants to partition your hard disk. Who in their right mind would want to resize all their existing partitions to make a new partition with all their free space dedicated to Ubuntu. I can see why they set it up that way, but if I was a new user just checking out Linux for the first time and I installed it only to find out my existing partitions had been completely mangled I wouldn’t be at all happy. The advanced partition manager, however, is as I said above what Windows has needed for years (with the addition of a drive letter reassignment tool which is replicated in a mount point selector in the Ubuntu setup anyway).

Oh, and if you’re running more than 4gb of RAM it should flag that you’re actually installing the x86 version, which I did accidentally the first time because I grabbed the wrong CD. Not a big problem for most people, even for me it was a minor thing, but it’d just be helpful to avoid the situation of installing the whole OS then wondering why it says you’ve got 3.2G of ram, not 8G. In theory, the whole OS could be ‘upgradable’ to x64, but that would take a fairly drastic reworking of the installation and update system so I’d be more than happy with a flag.

First Impressions

Ok, there weren’t really too many ‘first impressions’ so to speak, because I’ve had Ubuntu installed for a while via Wubi, and before that I had version 7.10 installed in vmWare. It’s interesting, though, when you take a decision like making Linux your primary operating system how you suddenly think of all the things you haven’t previously done with it, the drivers you never bothered to install because you didn’t need them and all those sorts of things. The things I would have thought about if I wasn’t more or less forced to install some sort of OS immediately.

I also noticed how much more customizable the Gnome window manager is to customise (especially when paired up with Compiz). It’s quite refreshing to be able to edit every facet of the visual interface with such ease, and I am going to miss that in Windows. Visually, Ubuntu just about has it right, which makes it all the more unfortunate that underneath there are still cracks in the usability of the system.

Hardware Support

This is where things start to go a little sour. From the last time I seriously tried to use Linux for anything (which was a good few years back now) the hardware support has improved a lot. And since then, my needs have also changed. In Windows, once I have my video drivers installed, dual monitors works pretty much flawlessly. In Ubuntu, the drivers let you get both monitors working, and they do indeed work pretty well other than that the nVidia drivers have issues with the Compiz window manager which draws the screen. What ensues is problems with vertical sync in everything – the OS, videos, 3D apps. Everything. It’s not pretty and it’s pretty much impossible to solve without diving into the sourcecode of Compiz itself and running the risk of making it unbearably slow even if you get it to work properly.

Other hardware just doesn’t even begin to work in Ubuntu, which is annoying but I could almost have accepted that if my graphics worked properly. I never even attempted to get my Creative X-Fi working, although that’s more from laziness and not needing to use the card rather than being worried about it not working. Not that I necessarily trust any drivers Creative releases for Linux considering how bad a job they do in Windows. Ultimately the graphics were the killer – I didn’t get a new 9800GT the other month to not be able to even have SD videos play without bad vsync errors.

Software Support

Ubuntu’s software support is pretty damned good. Most of the software I use most commonly either works in Ubuntu, has a perfectly functional open source alternative included in the Ubuntu, and the WINE project is finally getting somewhere. As much as WINE took 15 years to get where it is, which is pretty slow considering how fast everything around it has moved, it’s finally getting to a place where it’s useful not just as a passing curiosity but actually runs a lot of software in a mostly usable state.

Foobar2000 works pretty much perfectly in WINE once you fix the configuration (which is important, because nothing else comes close in either Linux or MacOS.) Photoshop CS2 works surprisingly well, which was also important to me, not that I ended up using it extensively while I had the system installed.

Software support, though, is also one of the reasons that I’ve ultiamately decided to give up on my Linux experiment. I need to use MS Office 2007, which runs well enough for me to use in WINE. I also need to use EndNote, which works pretty much flawlessly under WINE. The only use of both of those though, is if I can use the OneNote ‘Cite-As-You-Write’ addon for Word as well, and it’s completely non-functional in Wine (not without a great deal of trying, I can assure you).

I also discovered a wonderful piece of open source software – VirtualBox. I never knew about it before now, and I’ve been using vmWare for all my virtualization needs up until now. VirtualBox is basically an open source alternative to vmWare and it works pretty well – more than well enough for me. It actually works better in Linux than vmWare does in my opinion (due in no small part to the fact that it doesn’t screw up and crash Ubuntu when you put it in full screen mode…)

My Main Problems

My main problems with Ubuntu were pretty simple: I’m doing honours this year, and have to write a pretty sizable thesis. To do that, I need to use MS Word 2007 and Endnote, because I don’t have time to get used to a whole new way of formatting and referencing documents.  I attempted to use and get used to OpenOffice and Bibus, I really did, but they’re just not as user friendly as they could be or should be. I also anticipated having massive problems when I needed to share my documents with other people or for that matter edit them effectively on my laptop (with the current hardware support, and my requirement to dock, I wouldn’t even put Ubuntu close to my laptop.)

Ultimately that’s the problem – the solutions to the problems I had always involved some level of compromise on my part.  As much as I can compromise to a certain level, two weeks worth of constant compromise made me seriously question whether I could bear working with the OS on any long term arrangement. I’ll probably still have Ubuntu installed in a virtual machine (in VirtualBox – so I’m not coming out empty handed!) but for now not as a primary OS. It’s been fun, and I can see that Linux is really moving towards being a viable alternative to Windows and MacOS but for me, this year isn’t the year. Here’s hoping for next year.