I got my new laptop at the weekend and, obviously, the first thing that I had to do was get Linux on there. I have to say I’ve been a bit suspicious of the direction Linux-on-the-desktop has been heading of late. Having already tried Ubuntu 11.10 (aka “Oneiric Ocelot”) for a while on the missus’ machine I had some reservations about shoving it on my new one. In the interest of science, I tried out a few alternatives to see what the state of the art is these days.
Windows 7 Home Premium
Forgive me, I’m just curious. I still use XP at work, and now I’ve paid for this, I might as well give it a go.
First of all, what a weird install process! When switching on for the first time*, it asked me various things like name, timezone etc, the stuff you’d expect. Then it asked me how I wanted to partition the disk! Did not see that coming. Not in a Windows install, Linux maybe. I got a flippin’ DOS box in my face while it did its thing. So not slick. Several reboots later and I’m in Windows 7.
(* Not really the first time, as I always boot into a USB-stick Linux first to clone the disks in case I ever need to do a proper factory reset. Well, for once this paid off, but I’ll get to that in a later post.)
And that’s where I lost interest. Severe case of “meh”. I was instantly bored, and put off with the prospect of having to deal with anti-virus programs and windows security. I’ll leave it on as dual boot for now in case I decide to ever use it, but I suspect that’s the last boot into Windows for a long time. It has to be said though that I’m quite jealous of battery life in Windows which appears to be at least twice as good as Linux.
Linux Mint 12 (Lisa)
This is the up-and-coming saviour of Linux for geeks on the desktop, according to the Slashdot crowd and co. It’s based on Ubuntu, but replaces Ubuntu’s newish Unity windowing environment with a slightly customised Gnome desktop. I was drawn to this because I’ve been using Gnome for years from back at uni and up to Ubuntu 10.04. It did everything I needed it to without too much fuss.
However, Gnome 3 has reportedly screwed all of that up and tried to be too fancy. So along came Mint to save the day, making Gnome 3 feel more like the old tried-and-tested Gnome 2 experience. Well, I’m afraid to say it didn’t do it for me. Still too many settings, things to tweak and odd, unexpected, unintuitive behaviour. I don’t have time to fart around with this sort of stuff, I expect it to keep out of my way these days.
It feels like there’s a lot of wasted space too. They (I think Gnome, rather than Mint) have gone to the trouble of shoving the application’s title in the bar at the top with a fancy icon, but actually repeat it again in the window title. What’s the point? With laptop screens getting wider and wider instead of squarer (don’t get me started), those valuable vertical pixels are getting wasted.
Kubuntu 11.10
Having had my hopes dashed by Mint, I thought I’d give this a shot. It’s Ubuntu again, this time with KDE instead of Unity. Well, to cut a long story short, I thought the quality of Qt would have rubbed off on KDE, but no. It’s a gui-tweaker’s wet dream. More knobs and whistles than the Death Star’s control room, and half as intuitive. This is the opposite of what I want. Next!
Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)
I’m surprised to find myself in the position of ending up with vanilla Ubuntu after all, and I actually rather like it. Yes, there are a few slightly annoying things (like the lame battery meter, easily replaceable (edit – no version for oneiric yet)), a few missing things (like a decent system monitor in the tray, easily sorted) and some eccentric things (like the launcher bar). However, there’s nothing unexpected and every ounce of screen real estate is at my disposal. I didn’t have to tweak any obscure XML files or system settings, it just works, and it stays out of my way by default.
And no, I’m not a simpleton who’s only going to surf the web and watch movies. I consider myself a power user – I develop software for a living and in my spare time, still use emacs (maybe that loses me geek points already), and am very comfortable at the command line.
If using Unity with Ubuntu 11.10 makes me less of a geek, then so be it. I’m already good at avoiding writing software without the extra distraction of pimping up my desktop environment.