Inaugural post--upgrade from Gutsy to Heron

OK, I'm a convert.

I've been using Linux nearly 100% of the time since early 2004, and, geeky white elitist snob that I am, I used Gentoo for the bulk of that period. I was very pleased with the Gentoo metadistribution because of the "freedom" it gave me to run things just as I pleased without the hegemonic meddling of the benevolent dictators that run other distributions. I could run really funky X configurations, with my TV and my two fat CRTs, record television shows in HD without a tuner card over firewire--and change channels without an expensive IR Blaster because I could choose with a USE flag to compile that option into MythTV. I could stream my music anywhere in the world (even though I never really leave the general vicinity of Olympia, WA) and I could do it all for *free*. I felt I had so much more control than the average Ubuntu or Fedora user because I could get into my files and not have to worry about what in the world some strange feature in Gnome/KDE was changing on my behalf, what admin scripts and daemons were running in the background, and I knew, because I specifically requested it, exactly what software was running in the background.

You would think that all that power and all that information is akin to freedom--and that's how the majority of the Linux camp, especially the hardcore guys and gals that have been running Slackware since 1993 or Gentoo since inception would have you think--and they're right, to an extent. The power users, the programmers, the hobbyists, and the people that want to eke every ounce of power and speed out of their machines have very specific reasons for their particular levels of customization and/or manual config file hackery. I wanted, oh so badly, to be one of those elite, developer guys who had thousands of posts on the Gentoo forums. I was looking for acceptance from people who just happened to know what the hell they were doing. I spent weekends trolling Freenode, trying to help the new guys, in between marathon sessions of updating my Gentoo. I even, at the urging of some of my l33t buddies in ##otw, changed from the standard Gentoo package/ebuild manager, Portage, to an experimental one called Paludis. Paludis gives all kinds of flexibility and power to the poor, unsuspecting user--with great power comes great responsibility. . .

Again, all this power sounds wonderful, until you realize that you're spending all of your free time maintaining your computer. Now, here's where I fall into the trap: that, to me, is actually a whole shit-ton of fun. I love tinkering with my machine, I love researching all the cool stuff I can do with the settings in my dotfiles, I love trying to cram different programs and services together to get an interesting result. But, the problem was, I never got anything done. I built my machine, I installed Gentoo, and, just for the fun of it, started installing cool new software that was in Portage. I'd tinker with open source applications like FlightGear, getting a GPS simulator and mapping application working just right, with all the terrain and maps for the entire Northern Hemisphere. . . and then never do anything with it. I installed guitar tuner after guitar tuner, submitting bugs for ones that didn't work with my particular sound card, and getting things just right so that I could learn to play--and then I would move on to the next interesting techy project, ill-conceived and prematurely aborted.

Enter Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu on my laptop exclusively for two years, and on my desktop intermittently for about a year and a half. All my IRC friends deride me for using this "vanilla, for-the-masses windows clone," and I have lost serious street cred with the Gentoo crowd I used to run with. (It's also entirely possible I might not get invited to WSU's Homecoming dance next year.) However, I can say that I can get stuff done now. Updates are a trivial matter at best, and, once I get used to the concept of allowing the OS to handle the administrative details on my behalf, and break the habit of dropping to the command line every time something happens that I don't expect or when something "Just Works" and I don't understand why, Ubuntu is the most powerful, cleanest, fastest operating system I have ever used, period. With the Ubuntu-standard Gnome interface (which operates much like a Mac, I'm told), the OS just gets out of your way and lets you do what you want--write a paper? No problem, OpenOffice.org comes standard. Want to run a web server? Just a few clicks, and Apache is running in the background, just begging you to create content. Do you want to learn programming? Environments and IDEs for any programming language that you can conceive (with the exception of a few produced by Microsoft) can be installed in just a few minutes. And the problems that have been plaguing Linux and open-source computing are quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Hardware compatibility remains a challenge; however, more hardware works out-of-the-box, with no third-party driver installation, in Linux than in Windows. What, you say? That doesn't make any sense! It certainly does if you consider that most Linux drivers have been reverse-engineered by enterprising hackers in order to provide support, as Linux support has not been a priority for hardware manufacturers consigned to a world dominated by Microsoft Windows. These drivers have been written for personal use and attached to the Linux kernel (a kernel being the guts of your OS). However, even that trend is changing, as manufacturers are becoming more aware of the increase in the use and acceptance for desktop applications by enterprises seeking a low-cost alternative to proprietary software licensing models.

But that's tangential to what I'm trying to get across here--Ubuntu is ready for mass-consumption. The 64-bit/32-bit compatibility problems that plagued earlier versions are reported to be mostly a thing of the past--even Vista can't make that claim. I can plug the disk in, have a fresh installation installed within 30 minutes (much less on a faster machine), and be setting up my nitpicky environment details (wallpapers, dual-monitors, Beryl desktop decorations and GL rendering, other eye-candy) very quickly. Upgrades, which preserve your data and settings, for the most part, are a little more rigorous and take a bit more time, but not much more if you consider that you're downloading everything on-the-fly. As we speak, the beta of Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support is being installed on my desktop on top of the previous version, and any incremental upgrades between now and release will be taken care of in a very transparent way. As I work through the quirks of this release, I'll keep you posted on what I find.