Experiences with Ubuntu Jaunty
For those of you who haven’t heard already, the latest version of possibly the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty” was released earlier this week.
I’ve been an Ubuntu user for some time now, and it is without a doubt the best distribution for the desktop (I’ve used most of the major ones, so I can say that with some degree of experience). In fact, apart from the occasional problem with printing and wireless, I find that Ubuntu beats XP hands down for Just Working. Even my Vodafone 3g dongle works better in Ubuntu than it does in XP —no software to install and connection is much easier. If it wasn’t for the fact that people occasionally send me documents which don’t look right unless opened in the latest version of Word and I could get to grips with the Gimp as a substitute for Paint Shop Pro, I would probably delete XP altogether.
A word of warning before you rush to update though – make sure you read the release notes as there are a couple of irritating bugs. I was hit by the corrupt tracker index problem when I first logged in and it took me a while to figure out how to fix it. Hopefully the known issues will be fixed in the next few weeks though, so if you’re really paranoid you might want to postpone an upgrade until then.