Update: A Month With Ubuntu To Commence

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• malrost - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link

  I've been anticipating your review since this announcement. How goes the progress?
  
  As someone else pointed out, you for some reason have a Linux tag... on which the "Dual Core with Linux" review, the most recent, is dated July 1, 2005.
  
  I hope your month with Ubuntu has long since commenced, has been a good one, and even if not I am anxious to hear your thoughts.

• Electro - Wednesday, March 26, 2008 - link

  Ubuntu is over rated and not reliable as people once thought. I suggest pick a different distribution. For me to recommend a Linux distribution to people is hard because a lot of distribution fall short and just painfully hard to install and start using the desire distribution. I normally suggest Knoppix to people to try Linux because it has never let me down after many years of using it on several computers. The distributions that I try to force people to use is Gentoo as their final choice for any application such as server, desktop, and notebook. Yes it is tedious, but easy. It takes a day to a week depending and computer resources to install it. I recommend install Gentoo on a computer that is from a good power supply brand such as Seasonic or Enermax and the memory is ECC type. These two components makes installing Gentoo easier because data corruption will not become an issue. Sure Sabayon Linux could be a Gentoo alternative, but it failed my tests. I stamp Sabayon Linux poor.
  
  The amount of years that I used Linux as a Desktop OS of choice is more than four years. I have used several Linux distributions and Gentoo became my flavor that I have settled for more than two years.
  
  Please no more Ubuntu reviews. There are plenty of reviews of Ubuntu and one more review is going to make me sick. I will like to see Gentoo reviews, so people can see what is Gentoo is all about.

• jayguy10000 - Saturday, March 22, 2008 - link

  I honestly tried to like Ubuntu. I really did.
  
  But in the end, I felt like I would rather stick needles in my eyeballs than fight it.
  
  Torturous.
  
  

• PrincessNybor - Thursday, March 20, 2008 - link

  It has been over a month, and I have not heard a peep about this pending article. I have recently made the transition to Ubuntu myself, and would love to hear your thoughts on it as a primary operating system. I think it's far from perfect, but great strides have been made in the past couple of years with Ubuntu.
  
  More Linux stuff on Anandtech would really be great. The "latest article" under your Linux tab is nearly three years old!

• sparau - Monday, March 10, 2008 - link

  sudo is fantastic - get over having to put your password in a couple of times cause it is a big part of the security model and it really works.
  
  ms tried to emulate it with vista but since no apps are written to follow the model of powerless desktop user / admin to do work it sucks.
  
  but the upside of sudo - i dont even run a firewall at home on ubuntu - once setup i have had to enter the password once a week to do updates and thats it - no virus checkers needed like win.
  
  ubuntu feisty general: i have changed video cards 3 times without trauma - and if you get into trouble (and have another pc) absolutely fabolous help is at hand - it runs WOW under wine better than my XP install - it is seriously stable, i tried leaving it going to see what the uptime would end up but ran out of things to download after 43 days and switched it off... runs vmware xp/2k3 svr in the background nicely for .net dev work
  
  i love it (still, i'm not a noob)

• mindless1 - Tuesday, February 26, 2008 - link

  Dad are we there yet? ;-)

• trexpesto - Wednesday, March 19, 2008 - link

  "Expect at least a couple of blog posts related to the review throughout the next month." ? Did it start yet?

• bgold2007 - Tuesday, February 26, 2008 - link

  I like the freeness/open source of Linux, keepallows honest use on multiple PCs, fights the balkanization and DRM-ing down of our rights. However...
  
  Been using Ubuntu 7.10 installed over XP Home via wubi-installer.org
  No Linux distro has ever harmed my notebook (although GRUB has).
  Very nice, almost as useable as Windows. However...
  
  1. The su/sudo system sucks. made for institutions, not in tune with most home users' needs. I can't even repeat the crap I had to go to to enable XP (NTFS) access or other updates (maybe I had the nerve to try and create a folder - who remembers?)-drop to sudo, have to reboot - but Ubuntu wont allow you to login as root no no no...
  (yeah probably some super secret command exists ) it kept me in a loop for quite awhile cant do this as user, cant do that as root yadayada. Yeah somehow i got it done, could never repeat it.
  
  1b. I use firefox in ubuntu. Works fine but the updates are always delayed beyond when the Windows is available. And the update button is greyed out (unavailable). Why? The sudo crap thing again.
  I first used "ubuntzilla" to update ff. Then sourceforge told me I could just run a command (something like sudo firefox -u or something). Of course this requires your password. But it doesn't update automatically. NOW you can go and click on the now-available update button. Sheesh!)
  
  2. the mounting stuff sucks. I had to create a (shortcut? applet? hard link? soft/symbolic link? who the hell knows What I created on my desktop) to invoke NTFS-3g in Terminal, then I have the privilege of access to my XP folders and files.In Windows we do have the Safely remove Hardware icon - but that's for USB external drives, not everything.
  
  3. GRUB absolutely blows. And it's supposed to better than LiLO???!!!
  (for newer-than-me-bies, GRUB is the Grand unified Bootloader which, by being interruptible to use as command line, is supposed to be better than the LiLO = LinuxLoader [also other advantages...]
  GRUB for me is a horror show - some linux distros use hda terminology, some sb0. See how often a different distro will screw up the GRub your previous distro installed...just try and edit it yourself!!
  4. The Linux help system is also arcane. there are some help commands/pages, but mostly its "man" and "info" - and "info" never tells you how to exit it = happy reboot (I'll have to google that later...)
  5. And don't even start with wireless compatability, esp WPA2, with the bizarroworld of MadWifi and WPA-supplicant . yes the newer releases are better but... And the really useful 10-year old (ok slight exaggeration) compatible chipset lists (and good luck trying to cross-reference THAT to actual-existing-for sale wireless CARDS, you know, the stuff you need to buy -or verify is in your motherboard)
  
  In short, Linux is better as the only OS (Maybe some of the boot managers are useful -but I dont know how or if they manage GRub,or just work by installing Grubs to the separate distro partitions) and,
  for a laptop, preinstalled (although prices are no bargain) to cover the wireless angle.
  
  Pros: hundreds of distros; multiple desktops per distro ; good update apps (the basic updater is fine, and Synaptics installed kde and kde beta for me w/o any trouble)
  
  Cons (beside above!) - info. stinks. And why, since the Ubuntu desktop is called "Gnome" didnt these geniuses allow you to restart the GUI by typing "Gnome" (in Terminal)? (after killing the GUI with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace) (I have the command written SOMEwhere...)
  HTY.IMHO. FWIW.

• Jovec - Sunday, February 24, 2008 - link

  You will need to focus a little on Linux Ideology and Open Source principles for a proper review. I am by no means suggesting you should lobby for one side or the other, but there are numerous design decisions influenced by Open Source philosphies as well as legel restrictions that have end-user impact.
  
  The biggest are probably the lack of integrated MP3 and DVD playback, although Ubuntu will ask to install such support upon the first usage attempt. iPods are another issue with the current players that create a hash table of the iPod DB (it was reverse engineered, but I haven't followed up with its integration). Proprietary (restricted) video drivers are another issue. Explaining why Ubuntu does what it does would make for a fair review, as would explaining a few common ways to improve your Linux experience such as selecting a different MP3 player (if you are in the market) which can load files in USB disk mode.
  
  There are definately things Windows does better and Linux should take it's lumps for that, but there are some things Linux and Ubuntu would do just as well if they weren't basing decisions on their philosophies and these issues need to viewed in that context to be fair.

• Jovec - Sunday, February 24, 2008 - link

  In addition, there is nothing stopping developers from porting their apps to Linux. They might not get integrated package manager support in every distribution, but Linux can and does run proprietary software just fine concurrently with Open Source software. In other words, it's probably not fair to say that the Linux community doesn't support current iPods (especially given the steps Apple takes to make it difficult), but rather that Apple chooses not to support Linux. Repeat for various other proprietary hardware and software.
  
  For whatever reason, lack of support is often placed solely on the Linux community, but we would never, for example, expect MS to provide built-in iPod support without any help from Apple.