Roughly a year ago, I wrote a piece called Ubuntu and Storage about my ideas for both upgrading to Ubuntu (from Windows, it is an upgrade) and setting up a better storage solution. I’m going to focus on the former part here.
It was probably a year and a bit ago, before Ubuntu really started kicking off, that Stuart Langridge recommended it to me. After a quick browse I was sold, and got the live CD. Problems quickly arose.
The biggest problem I had was the perennial problem for former Windows users: wireless networking. My wireless card just wouldn’t work, and no amount of ndiswrapper was fixing it. I did briefly consider writing a device driver, but I thought that if I don’t have time to keep this site as up-to-date as I’d like, then maybe that was a tad ambitious. Instead I got a new wireless card that had a manufacturers driver… which didn’t work. Bollocks.
That set me back a good few months. Sadly, in my old flat, the router was too far for a wired connection, and couldn’t be moved to a more convenient location. I got round this inconvenience by moving flat and using good ol’ ethernet. Sometimes we use a sledgehammer on a nut because it’s so much more satisfying than a nutcracker, or repeatedly smashing our head against the wall that is wireless support.
That gripe aside, it’s mostly good. Beryl is impressive (though mostly just eye candy), and package management is just amazing. Having absolutely everything on the system update automatically, safely and uniformly is just how it should work. The individual updaters on Windows seem positively prehistoric in comparison.
One last complaint though: why the hell does everyone love Amarok. It’s feature-rich, sure, but it looks and behaves like an absolute dog. Want to go randomly through your music collection? You don’t want collection, you want a playlist. The play/pause/forward controls? Tiny and relegated to the middle of the bottom edge. Have the designers never heard of Fitt’s Law? Though I used to be a big proponent of WinAmp, I prefer iTunes now and nothing on Linux comes close.