Tempted by Ubuntu
Published June 8th, 2007First of all, yes I’ve been quiet for a couple of months but it’s because I’ve been heads-down on a new, open-source project that I hope to announce in the next few weeks. Details to follow soon.
Anyway I just wanted to add my twopenny-worth to the rising flood of verbiage about Ubuntu, the Linux distro that finally seems to be bringing the open source operating system into the mainstream.
I’ve dabbled with desktop Linux a few times in the past, but was never able to make the switch because I was so tied-in to Windows software (mainly Flash). But I rarely touch Flash these days and since then I’ve switched almost entirely to open source software: I develop web sites on PHP/MySQL in Firefox using jEdit. I use OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheet etc. and Thunderbird for email.
So out of curiosity, last night I downloaded the latest Ubuntu release (Fiesty Fawn at time of writing) and tried running it as a live CD, i.e. booting from CD without installing to the hard drive. On my (Dell Inspiron 6400) laptop, it ran out-of-the-box without a hitch (although it did take a couple of goes to pick up my wireless network). Very slick.
Then I tried it on my (homebrew AMD Athlon) desktop. Now I should point out that I tried installing Ubuntu on this machine last year and it chewed up the master boot record, resulting in a dead Linux partition and a complete re-install of Windows. And a vow by me never to touch Linux again.
However, this time it ran flawlessly out-of-the-box, having auto-detected all my hardware without blinking. Colour me impressed. It’s fast, looks very good (I love the orange/brown interface style) and comes pre-installed with plenty of handy software.
So, am I going to switch? Sadly, no.
I’d like to, I really would. But as luck would have it, I’ve just begun getting myself up to speed with C# and .Net 2.0, which means I’m tied to Windows. Yes, Mono is getting there but it’s a ways off yet and I don’t know if it’s ever really going to be a drop-in replacement for the .Net framework itself.
So, for now at least, I’m stuck with Windows. I might well end up trying a dual-boot setup but I can’t see that I’m likely to want to spend time switching back and forth between the two. Virtualisation is another option, but in my experience it’s so slow as to be practically unusable for all but the most basic of tasks.
So I guess it’s back to restarting Explorer every ten minutes or so…*sigh*
Josep on June 8, 2007
I’m also a php developer(among other things) and my life changed since I switched to Linux (debian), but it was not easy at all, there were a lot of new things to learn.
I was tied to some Windows software too, so the solution was to install Linux in my desktop and Winxp in the laptop. This way you can easily share files using Samba, run Apache/mysql in the Linux box and use the laptop for coding and testing(IE6).
RobotDeathSquad on June 8, 2007
Stickman, Seriously, 3 words, “GET A MAC”.
Stickman on June 8, 2007
One word: no
I don’t see what advantage it would bring, over and above what I’d get from switching to Linux. Yes it’d be more secure + stable (supposedly) but so would Linux, and I wouldn’t have to shell out for new hardware. I know of no software that I need, that requires OSX. And I’d still have the .Net problem.