Ubuntu 7.04, The Nutshell Verstion

My Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" experience is as follows:

I have been testing the waters of desktop Linux for about five years now. My first experience with a Linux distribution was Knoppix, the live-CD version. I slowly built up the knowledge and know-how (not to mention the courage) to try something more serious, and over a span of about three years, I tried Fedora Core 2, 3, and 4, Mandriva, Damn Small Linux, and eventually landed on a version 4 of Ubuntu Linux. Since then I have tested the water of Ubuntu 5 on a desktop machine, before accepting the challenge to move to a laptop environment with Ubuntu 6.06. I enjoyed a brief stay with this excellent distribution, but the update to 6.10 introduced bug after bug for me that hampered my experience with Ubuntu.

Recently I did a clean install of the latest release of Ubuntu, known as version 7.04 - or "Feisty Fawn" - take your pick. My thoughts, all positive, are below.

• As far as a desktop, "newbie-friendly" Linux distro goes, Ubuntu is getting closer to nailing it on the head with every release, and 7.04 just feels great. Installation is a breeze, as the ISO is a live image, which means you can test hardware and applications before ever touching your precious hard disk. The graphical installer (run from the live-CD desktop) is cake, and quite frankly, is far easier to deal with than an XP (and actually, Vista) clean install.

• Ubuntu has always come loaded with the proper binaries for a wide range of productivity software, including the GNOME (or KDE) desktop, OpenOffice, Gaim (now Pidgin), Firefox, the Evolution group ware suite, and many more. Best of all, these are always the latest and greatest version of each respective package, given Ubuntu's 6-month upgrade release cycle. Most Linux distros come with these software packages, which to me has always upped Windows: out of the box productivity is a grand step ahead for operating systems, especially compared to Microsoft's "spend $399" on our office suite if you don't like Wordpad.

• Partly GNOME's fault, but administering the OS is easy with two dedicated menus available with one mouse click. Any settings adjustment that needs lower-than-user level access prompts for "sudo" access, a la Windows Vista User Account Control. Unlike Vista, however, Ubuntu doesn't ask for credentials at every third button click. Damn you, Vista. This isn't a Vista/Ubuntu comparison, however, so that brings me to my next minor point: security feels solid, if for nothing else, than because Linux is a minority OS, and serious threats are few and far between, and Ubuntu features plenty of tools to allow a user to monitor system usage should a potential threat be loosed on the system.
  

• Hardware support is great across the board thus far, with every major component in my laptop detected and working just fine, with the exception of my wireless chipset. This was expected, however, as the Broadcom-based chipset is rarely ever supported outside of the Dell/Windows XP driver site. ndiswrapper got it working just fine, however. The Ubuntu devs now separate non-open-source drivers into a separate pool of driver management, but installing said drivers is still easy with the Synaptic Package Manager.

• Finally, Ubuntu 7.04 just works, plain and simple. Drop a Windows newbie at a clean Ubuntu GNOME desktop, and I promise that within minutes he or she can do all the same things on Ubuntu that they could with Windows.

Thus far, an awesome non-Windows operating system experience.