Ubuntu 7.10 Thoughts

A third post in one day!? I'm going crazy, I think.

Anyway, I wanted to drop a few comments on the new Ubuntu 7.10 release. As with every major Ubuntu release, the rest of the web does a good job of summarizing what's new, so I'm going to keep my comments relevent to my own personal experience.

I choose the upgrade path to 7.10 rather than the installation path. I did download a 7.10 Desktop image, so anyone interested in trying Ubuntu can still get a copy from me as usual. My Inspiron 5150 laptop dual-boots XP/Ubuntu, and I was running 7.04. I ran the Synaptic Upgrade utility and let all the upgrade files download overnight. The next day, I clicked through a few dialog boxes and within another half hour, I was back at the exact same desktop that I left.

Suffice to say, my first reactionto 7.10 was the sluggish feel to it. Granted, I'm sure a clean install of the OS would provide a speed bump, but that's not why I upgrade: I don't want to have to format and reinstall every 6 months (although Linux by its nature makes this task easier than Windows ever will). Graphically, Gnome seemed a bit slow. I was impressed that no compatibilities were broken among my programs. Compiz Fusion desktop effects did not work for me until I forum hopped and found that I needed the "xserver-xgl" packages installed to get things moving. Compiz is neat (and neater than Vista) without being intrusive, but it's just as much a system hog as Vista's Aero is. I can see using it to show off Ubuntu to friends and family, but I'll work with my old-school 2D Gnome desktop, thank you very much.

Driver management is cake, and my wireless card is now supported out of the box, so to speak, which used to be my biggest complaint about Ubuntu (I always needed to compile ndiswrapper, find my drivers, and poke around a terminal before I could surf... blasphemy!).

I attribute the speed slowdown to a poorly-configured X setup and outdating drivers (I dinked around with them back when I was running 6.06, and haven't touched them since). I'll be working in a geek-like zen over the next few days to tweak Ubuntu back up to speed.

All in all, however, I'm finding Ubuntu being used more and more in my daily work. I'm down to just a few scant Windows applications keeping me from switching entirely, but otherwise I am still a fan of the penguin.

Out.