Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04

First Thoughts

Since this is Part 1 of a 2 part series, rather than ending on a conclusion, we’ll end on some first thoughts.

In searching for an answer to our question of whether Ubuntu is good enough to convince me to switch, I ultimately have failed to find enough compelling reasons to entice me as a user to switch to Ubuntu for my day-to-day operations. I should make it clear that this is not taking price into consideration – this is only taking into account my current situation as a Windows Vista user. Ubuntu does plenty of things well and I could certainly use it for my day-to-day operations, but there are few things it does better and more things it does worse as compared to Vista, such that using Ubuntu likely hurt my productivity even after I adapted to the differences. It’s hard to fully compete with commercially developed software when you’re giving yours away for free, so I don’t consider this a surprise.

From a performance standpoint, there’s little reason to switch in either direction. As I stated early in this article performance was never a serious condition for evaluation anyhow, and the results don’t change that. Ubuntu outperforms Vista at times, but at other times it looks to be held back by compiler differences and the disadvantage of needing to play nicely with proprietary products that don’t return the favor (e.g. SMB performance). As far as I am concerned, Ubuntu performed no worse than Windows for my day-to-day needs.

Now there are some situations where performance is important enough that it can’t be ignored, and the gap wide enough to make a significant difference. In Part 2 we will be looking for these situations.

I do think there are some niches in which Ubuntu works well, where the operating system itself is the killer app. One such situation is (or rather was) the Netbook market. It’s a market that used to be dominated by Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix. On such devices where you don’t have the resources to do anything fancy, Ubuntu’s weaknesses become less important. Meanwhile price becomes more important. However cheap copies of Windows XP specifically for the Netbook market appear to have killed this idea for now.

For what it’s worth I do have an older laptop (for guest use) that currently runs XP. For the same reason as the Netbooks, I’m considering replacing XP with Ubuntu 9.04 for the security benefits of it not being Windows. I’ve already had to wipe the machine once due to a guest getting it infected with malware.

As I haven’t gone too much in depth yet, let’s talk about user-to-user support. In spite of its user-friendly label, I have not been particularly impressed with the Ubuntu support structure. A lot of this comes down to the difficulty in finding help for existing issues, in spite of colorful names like Hardy Heron to help weed out results. Ubuntu’s Wiki, package archives, and forums all have a great deal of old information that turns up with searching. Results for 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon for example are now a historical curiosity – support ended for Gutsy back in April. Those pages and threads are largely unhelpful, and yet they clutter the search results of Google and the Ubuntu site’s search engine, pushing down more relevant information. Meanwhile the opposite is also true: results for newer versions of Ubuntu are also unhelpful.

The source of the problem comes down to 3 things. 1) Old information still exists and apparently doesn’t go away very easily. 2) Particularly for Ubuntu’s forums, they are divided up by topic but not version. 3) New versions of Ubuntu are published too often.

Now #3 is probably going to be a bit of a touchy subject, but it goes back to why we started with 8.04 in the first place. Either you’re on the upgrade treadmill or you’re not. Ubuntu moves so fast that it’s hard to jump on board. This is good from a development perspective since it allows Ubuntu to improve itself and get feedback sooner, but I don’t believe it’s good for users. A working user-to-user support system needs a lot of knowledgeable users, and the Ubuntu community is clearly full of them, but they seem to be spread out all over the place with respect to what versions they have experience with.

It’s to the advantage of less-knowledgeable users that they stick with a well-tested LTS release rather than be on the bleeding edge, but that’s not where the most knowledgeable users are. Compared to the Mac community where everyone is in sync on Leopard, or the Windows community where everyone is hating Vista and lusting over Windows 7, there’s a lack of cohesion. User-to-user support would be better served by having the community less spread out.

I have mentioned this previously, but the driver and packaging situation needs to be reiterated. While I don’t think the Linux kernel developers’ positions are unreasonable, I do think they’re hurting Ubuntu as a user-friendly operating system. The driver hell I had to go through shouldn’t have occurred, and if there was a stable API for “binary blob” drivers perhaps it wouldn’t have. The pragmatic position is that users don’t care if their drivers are open source or not, they would rather things just work. Ideals can only take you so far.

Along these lines, the packaging/repository system and the focus on it needs some kind of similar overhaul. I like how it allows updating software so easily and how easy it is to install software that is in Ubuntu’s repositories. But software that is not in a repository suffers for it. Installing software shouldn’t be so hard.

Finally, there’s the value of free as in gratis. Ubuntu may not be perfect, but I am still amazed by what it does for the price of $0.00. It’s a complete operating system, entirely for free. This is something that needs to be recognized as a credit to the developers, even if it doesn’t encourage anyone to switch.

Looking forward, coming up in the next couple of months will be the launches of Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Ubuntu 9.10. Compared to where Ubuntu stands with 8.04, there’s a year and a half of time for improvements, along with another LTS release due inside of a year. I think the new releases of Windows and Mac OS X are going to tip the scales away from Ubuntu in the immediate future, but given the lifetimes of those operating systems it’s going to give Ubuntu plenty of time to improve. This is something we’ll take a look at first-hand with Part 2 of this series when we look at 9.04 and more.

As a parting thought, we’d like to hear back from you, our readers, on the subject of Ubuntu and Linux in general. We’d like to know what you would like to see in future articles, both on the hardware and software side. Including some form of Linux in some of our hardware tests is something we’re certainly looking at, but we would like specifics. Would you like Linux-focused hardware roundups? What benchmarks would you like to see in Part 2 of this series (and beyond)? We can’t make any promises, but good feedback from you is going to help us determine what is going to be worth the time to try.