Back on the Ubuntu wagon

I've enjoyed playing with Linux for several years, but I didn't start using it on a daily basis until last summer, when Ubuntu saved my bacon in Germany. One day, my Windows laptop magically stopped seeing the school's network, and no amount of troubleshooting (even completely re-installing the OS!) would help. So I picked up an Ubuntu CD with a magazine at the local grocery store, and just as magically, it worked perfectly with the network.

Back home, I didn't stick with Linux for very long. Ubuntu was noticeably slower than Windows on my machine, and the 5-minute boot time drove me bonkers. Shutdown took nearly as long, and sleep/hibernate wasn't an option, since my network card wasn't recognized when I woke the computer. There were a lot of simple things that I had to spend a lot of time and effort on to get them to work, so I started to feel silly for bothering. I went back to Windows.

For the heck of it, I decided to check out Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) when it came out recently. I figured the promised "improved speed and boot time" would be relatively minor, and I'd wind up uninstalling and giving up for good. But wow -- my boot time went from >4 minutes to 1.5 minutes! I'm sure it could go lower if I did some tweaking, but this is quite sufficient for now. Performance speed is definitely zippier, too.

For the past few years, I've been saying that Linux is almost ready for your grandma to use, but not quite. I think with Dapper Drake, Ubuntu is ready to pass the Grandma Test. Or maybe I should call it the Steve Test, because it's about ready for the bazillions of computer users out there who are like my brother-in-law. He just wants to email, do a little surfing, listen to a little radio, maybe a little word processing or spreadsheeting here and there, and I doubt if he would ever bother with using software other than the provided defaults.

That's not to say that there's not specialty software -- you can get MIDI sequencing/loops, audio and video editing, graphic design, and just about anything else you could possibly think of. And of course, practically all of it is free.

Don't get me wrong; I still love my PowerBook, and GarageBand especially. Everything is pretty and easy. But I could definitely see myself doing all of my everyday computery things in Ubuntu now.