Ubunutu on my home desktop

A couple of weeks ago, when my friend, Pete, told me he was having a go setting up Linux at work, I ridiculed it telling him it wasn't worth the effort based on my past experiences with the OS. My first jobs were in a Unix environment using Apache/Perl on Solaris and (some) Linux. I hated it and it was great when windows application servers became usable. But still, once in a while, I download and evaluate a Linux distro for use as my home computer.

At home I use my PC primarily for entertainment: watching TV/videos, web surfing, photos and music and VOIP. I have a TV tuner, web cam and various other bits and pieces and the TV is used as a second screen for video.

Each time I tried getting this working under Linux it was an immense struggle and in any case the software wasn't very usable. So I gave up after a couple of days. It's been about a year since I last tried, most recently with Ubuntu (circa V.5). Last weekend I installed Ubuntu 6.10. My! things have come a long way. The WiFi card was identified immediately, I was able to get the TV-out, IR Remote, and Canon A710 DigiCam working fairly easily.

I have SMB file sharing working both ways with a windows box, a windows development Virtual Machine hosted under VMWare (at near native speed), all the video and audio codecs work flawlessly, a very nice TV based Media Centre system and pretty much all the software I need for day to day activities. Most of this was achieved in the first 5 hours. The system is stable and rock solid. Windows creeks and crawls from time to time, but Linux just keeps on going.

The bad points

• I came across several minor bugs in settling up hardware, for example: I had to specify the serial IDs of the DigiCam to get the system to read images off it, and modify a script to enable the Nvidia driver to work. The issues I encountered are known ones and I was able to easily find solutions, however the complexities of the solutions would be beyond the ability of most users. The fact that I stumbled on these leads me to suspect there are many others I didn't come across. To be honest the bugs seem to be related to the "glue" scripts and default configuration files that hold the distribution together - but in a sense this is more worrying than bugs in the core software packages. I had quite a lot of prior Unix experience without which I doubt I would have got very far
• Configuring the system is hard work: Lots of editing of cryptic text files, calling other scripts to restart deamons, remembering to use sudo, etc - all completely unacceptable to most people. The default installation only comes with the most basic admin and configuration graphical user interfaces.
• I still haven't got the TV tuner, Sony MP3 players, video camera and web cam working and doubt I will be able to - although my knowledge is growing and I might tackle these again soon.
• Lots of software doesn't exist on Linux. Notably to me: skype video. I was very pleased to see Picassa for Linux but I actually like Ubuntu's built in image management package. Some of the built in packages such as Azures and the Video editor have died and I can't get them to come up - tasks for another days and not a major problem.

The really good points

• It's (legally) Free!
• The Ubuntu shell and default packages are so consistent and well integrated that day-to-day usage for things like web, word processing, email and image manipulation are actually easier on Linux than on windows. The whole thing feel sleek, fast and uncluttered.
• Security - this is a very serious concern for most non experts. Having to deal with viruses and spy ware is a nightmare. Many of my friends and relatives abandon their computers due to this. With Linux this is so much less likely to be a problem.
• Good alternative packages for most tasks, at least for the needs of a non professional user. Quite a few commercial ones too.
• Terrific for web development. Not sure why I haven't looked at the LAMP stack for such a long time - but now it's on my desktop I don't have any more excuses. I'm also exploring ROR which is pretty nice.
• No more rebooting! The system just keeps going, 99% of updates don't require reboots either. If something goes really pear shaped, I press ctrl+alt+backspace which kills X and it's processes which pops back in n2 seconds, and then, after singing in, restores everything to exactly the way it was. It restores the session after a shut down too! Booting from cold takes about the same as windows but there is no endless crunching after logon.

I think there is no going back to windows for me!

ps: I haven't evaluated vista properly yet ;-)