Decided to install ubuntu 9.04 today. My current distro of choice is debian by default, but since I haven't used ubuntu since 7.04, and that was on a much slower machine, I thought I'd give it a try. I've only been using it for a few hours, at intervals, so I'll give a follow up over the next few days.
1st things 1st, installation has come on a long way, and is very user friendly. I had some troubles trying to format my hdd with ext4, as it kept complaining when I deleted the partition and then made a new ext4 partition (as I would normally do), but it would work when I cleared the contents of the current partition and then formatted the drive, sorted. That doesn't really matter anyway, as ext4 is considered experimental and most people wouldn't notice. The actual installation was over in no time, a much quicker isntall than vista, but then again vistas dvd has about 5 times the content.
Bootup is very fast, slightly faster than Debian, and much faster than what I remember ubuntu being. It was quite a low profile bootup though, in contrast to fedoras beautiful plymouth bootup, but this shouldn't really bother anyone, you only see ubuntu boot for about 20 seconds.
Next you get to the login window (GDM naturally)... Dark, fairly sums it up. Essentially it's a dark screen with Windows 7 toolbar at the bottom (ie wide transparent toolbar) and a login field in the middle. Exciting. I think the gdm theme was created at the stage when the ubuntu devs were going to stop the brown theme, before quickly changing there minds back with the desktop. Nah I'm only joking, it's not too bad, and there are loads of great GDM themes available online and for selection in the login window manager preferences. Another thing that you instantly notice (well, I do anyway), it recognised my screen resolution by default (unlike vista) and the free graphics driver actually displayed graphics (unlike debian)!
Physically logging in and loading the desktop takes surprisingly long though, which is slightly annoying. The startup music is still there though, hasn't changed since 7.04, no problem there. The theme is brown by default, naturally, but the themes available by default are actually quite good, and people who complain about the brown have a great selection.
A quick word on drivers, they've come a LONG way. Ubuntu recognised all my graphics driver by default, and prompted me to install the proprietary drivers instantly, which is a great feature that could really help new users. What really surprised me though is that it recognised my motherboards wifi driver by default, while even vista, with the given drivers, won't recognise it!
And next of course the notification for updates comes, this is before the new drivers have taken effect, and it is the most frustrating thing to move your mouse over to the notification to try and click, only to have it continually disappear on you. I knew that it was going to disappear, but my gut instinct told me to try and click the notifications. This is probably just me though, and after I restarted my system, compiz and the drivers took effect and you can really see how attractive the notifications are. As for updates, the update was a pleasant 44mb, much lower than I thought, and they were installed without a hitch.
I haven't had time to do much in 9.04, but I'm quite happy at the moment. All the sound issues I've heard about are non-existent on this machine, and I've even been trying to reproduce them. Enabling compiz by default after I updated my drivers is another great feature by the ubuntu devs, as things do look alot prettier, and it's still quite smooth. Actually, now that I think of it, the only bad unexpected thing I can find in this release, is that ctrl-alt-backspace doesn't seem to log you out (what's with that?). Oh, and fluxbox still has an annoying moving windows bug, but I think that's fluxbox's problem.
At the moment, ubuntus come a long, long way, and really surpassed my expections for a mainstream OS.
No comments:
Post a Comment