I realize I’m a bit behind on posting this, since I usually post about new Ubuntu releases the day they come out, but I’ve been a bit busy lately.
I did think it was worth mentioning, though, especially since this release seems to (at least in my experience / on my hardware) make significant strides in terms of hardware support and the “just works” factor.
This time around, installing on my laptop required absolutely no special configuration to get all the stuff that laptops kind of need to work by default (wireless drivers, suspend/hibernate, etc.) without a single config file edit (much less recompiling things), as well as the stuff you don’t really necessarily need, but looks really cool (Compiz Fusion).
Normally, I don’t put too much value into all the flashy desktop effects stuff, but the main reason I care about it is that I think it does a lot in terms of getting the “average user” interested in Linux. Since I’ve been running it on my laptop, I’ve”wowed” quite a few people (Vista and OSX users alike), and they’re generally very surprised to find out that Linux seems to have jumped to the head of the pack in terms of fancy GUI effects.
That, in combination with “everything just working” factor are two of the three things that I feel are most likely to lure more people over to the “free side” of the OS market. The third is something that I don’t see a lot of marketing on, but I think is a key point: good, easy to use, package management GUIs. In my opinion, recent advances in this area have made Linux actually easier to use for a person starting from scratch as far as their computer knowledge goes, because they don’t need to buy CDs/DVDs or even download programs from a web site, they just open up “Add/Remove programs” and pick the ones they want from a list that will satisfy the needs of 90% of “regular users” out there, and they “just work” - no manual download / install / configure required.
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Here’s a pretty good demo video of some of the effect features.
There’s even more than what’s shown here, but this will give you an idea if you haven’t seen it lately; these kind of videos have been around for years, but this one does highlight some new stuff, and the big thing is now (at least in Ubuntu 7.10), it’s stable, right “out of the box”.
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