Will Chatham

You may have read here before about my ven­tures with Linux on the home pc, where things must work for the whole fam­ily, not just me the Linux Geek.

Back in March or so, I grew tired of Win­dows XP on my home desk­top. I was sick of hav­ing to keep up with WGA cracks (ahem), sick of bloated crap­ware, and not inter­ested what­so­ever in Vista.

So, I installed Red­Hat Linux (Fedora Core 6 to be exact). This was highly tol­er­a­ble for a cou­ple of months since I was used to using it at work all the time, and I am well versed in Red­Hat oper­at­ing sys­tems. How­ever, it caused issues for Ali­cia because it just wasn’t intu­itive enough, and it didn’t just work. There was always some fin­gling needed to be done in a ter­mi­nal window.

I decided a few weeks ago that I would install Ubuntu 7.4 Fiesty Fawn, and I haven’t looked back since. When I learned that Dell was ship­ping PC’s with Ubuntu instead of Linux, I knew it must be time. The instal­la­tion was fast, and it was insanely sim­ple to do. The Ubuntu devel­op­ers have thought of every­thing, and it seems like they are dri­ven to make some­thing with mass appeal that is bet­ter than Win­dows. In my opin­ion, they have.

It just works. Plugged in my iPod, it worked. Plugged in my old NTFS data drive, it worked. Plugged in my USB card reader, it worked. All of it works. Needed a codec to watch some video clip, and Ubuntu went and found it eas­ily, let­ting me start watch­ing within seconds.

The final test of Ubuntu’s readi­ness for the masses was how well my wife han­dled it. So far, the only com­plaint is that she can­not lis­ten to music she bought from iTunes (until I work around that). So all in all, Ubuntu passes with fly­ing colors.