{"id":43,"date":"2006-06-01T08:09:31","date_gmt":"2006-06-01T14:09:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fefnet.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2006\/06\/01\/ubuntu-the-good-and-the-bad\/"},"modified":"2006-07-12T10:48:59","modified_gmt":"2006-07-12T16:48:59","slug":"ubuntu-the-good-and-the-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/2006\/06\/ubuntu-the-good-and-the-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"Ubuntu: The Good and The Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My Windows machine crashed about a year ago, and I finally said I&#8217;d had enough with the reinstalls and decided to pick up Linux. I&#8217;d been reading about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ubuntu.com\/\">Ubuntu<\/a> for a while, but at first I thought it was just really overhyped. I&#8217;ve really come to enjoy a lot about it since I installed it back in March. Let me tell you about a few of the things I like, followed with what I don&#8217;t like.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n<strong>The Good:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Installing Ubuntu was a piece of cake.<\/em> When I installed it the first time, I found it to be easier than installing Windows (something I&#8217;ve done dozens of times).<\/li>\n<li><em>Upgrades are simple.<\/em> This one sort of blew me away this morning. I had been waiting for the new release of Ubuntu &#8220;Dapper Drake&#8221; and I had been sort of putting it off because I figured I would have to download a CD and reinstall everything I had already done with the system. Boy, was I wrong! The upgrade was much easier than installing the OS in the first place; it was just like downloading a new program (albeit a very, very large program). I recommend following these <a href=\"https:\/\/wiki.ubuntu.com\/DapperUpgrades\">Ubuntu upgrade instructions<\/a> under &#8220;Upgrading with the Update Manager&#8221;. Here is <a href=\"http:\/\/daniel.holba.ch\/blog\/?p=14\">the step-by-step upgrade with pictures<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><em>The focus on the user<\/em>. This one is the biggest key to successful software. The only other Linux distro I have much experience with is Gentoo, which took me about three days to install. I admit I&#8217;m a bit of a Linux newbie (although I&#8217;ve been using it for ten years, that&#8217;s mostly been at the command line and I hadn&#8217;t ever installed it until this year). The fault with Gentoo is not making things <em>easy <\/em>for the user. Ubuntu is getting easier, and they have identified the missing link. I&#8217;m not saying the other distrubutions don&#8217;t have their place, but I am saying that they just don&#8217;t make it as easy as Ubuntu.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>The Bad:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>It still needs to be easier<\/em>. This is the reason I still have a desire to buy a Mac. I think that&#8217;s partly because I&#8217;ve been through the learning curve on a Mac but not really on Linux. I want to be able to look at a simple cheat sheet and see all the keyboard shortcuts, but I don&#8217;t want it to be like learning how to use vi.<\/li>\n<li><em>Speed up the downloads<\/em><em>.<\/em> I know this is partly my fault: I&#8217;ve seen how to get <a href=\"http:\/\/ubuntu.wordpress.com\/2005\/10\/14\/22x-faster-upgrade\/\">faster upgrades in Ubuntu<\/a>, but I&#8217;m missing the feature I saw in Gentoo that chose this for you automatically.<\/li>\n<li><em>I don&#8217;t want to spend so much time under the hood.<\/em> I admit that some of this is the fault of other related programs (like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mythtv.org\/\">MythTV<\/a>), but I don&#8217;t want to have to change my <em>sources.list<\/em> every time I want to install a program that isn&#8217;t in the Ubuntu repositories. I want a simple .exe installer like Windows has or a <a href=\"http:\/\/nathan.bethandnathan.com\/?p=16\">drag-and-drop feature<\/a> like Mac OS X.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I may have another good\/bad post in the future, but this is how I&#8217;m feeling now before I really get to using Dapper Drake. There has been a lot of hype about the increased usability in Dapper, and I&#8217;d like to see how well things have been updated since the previous release. So far, I&#8217;ve been <em>extremely<\/em> impressed with the upgrade process. None of the problems I listed apply to the upgrade process I took, so maybe Dapper really is <em>that good.<\/em> I&#8217;ll keep you updated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My Windows machine crashed about a year ago, and I finally said I&#8217;d had enough with the reinstalls and decided to pick up Linux. I&#8217;d been reading about Ubuntu for a while, but at first I thought it was just really overhyped. I&#8217;ve really come to enjoy a lot about it since I installed it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fefnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}