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I forgot to mention in my recent post on Ubuntu that another thing they’ve really improved on is the NTFS filesystem support. This makes it a lot easier to dual boot with Windows since it gives you full read & write access to all the other partitions on the drive (with no manual configuration needed), so you don’t have to try and split up the space.

About a year ago, I mentioned Mark Pilgrim’s switch to Linux in a post.

This last weekend, he posted a progress update, framed around a response to a particularly snobbish comment he received from the operating system community he was leaving behind.

The comment:

What exactly do you think you will be doing with Linux when you install it on that fancy ThinkCentre? You’ll be tweaking MORE, configuring MORE, installing MORE because NOTHING is as packaged and polished. … Enjoy your time with Linux, and when the endless Google searches to fix some miniscule package dependancy version problems finally drive you away, you will of course be welcomed back.

His update, one year later: (excerpts)

I am happy to report that that has not been my experience. I have spent some time tweaking, but only by choice — not to make things work, but to try some radically different ideas about workspaces and workflow that quite frankly would have been impossible to accomplish on a Mac.
…
In fact, none of the usual complaints about Linux (hardware drivers, X configuration, package dependencies) have affected me in any significant way. … On the contrary, working on a Linux system has made the weaknesses of other operating systems more painful to deal with.

He goes into quite a bit of detail about how keeping a system up do date is a hassle on the other “big two” operating systems, whereas in Linux (for most people) it is a simple one line script that can be scheduled to run without manual intervention at all.

Finally…

One year later, I look back on comments like this, and I just laugh. Sorry, Anonymous Commenter, you couldn’t have been more wrong. You got it exactly backwards. When your operating system finally comes with a package management system that is both comprehensive and extensible, you will of course be welcomed… to the 1990s. In the meantime, I’ll continue to enjoy my time with Linux.

… tomorrow, actually.

Ubuntu will release its latest version (7.04) tomorrow, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve been installing and using early releases of this since before beta, and running the beta version on several machines since it was released.

So far, I have nothing but good things to say about it. All the hardware I’ve tried (including wireless and video cards in laptops) has been detected automatically upon installation, with no special configuration required. I can’t overstate how important this is, especially on laptops, since Linux has traditionally needed more advanced configuration for much of this kind of hardware.

One highlight for many users will be its codec installation system; it’s better than anything I’ve seen on any other platform (not just Linux). You just try to open any media file (audio or video), and it will pop up and tell you which codecs it needs to install, along with the appropriate warnings regarding non-free software etc. If you choose OK, it will install them for you automatically - no hunting around and experimenting necessary.

MythTV installation was a breeze, especially compared to earlier versions. It automatically detected both my TV capture cards (granted, they do both have good Linux support - in fact one only has Linux drivers written for it). An up to date version of Myth (.20) is in the repositories and is easily installable via apt-get or Synaptic; I’ve never had a Myth installation go so easily.

Another cool feature that I saw but haven’t had a use for is the Windows Migration Assistant. When you run the installer on a hard drive that already has Windows on it, it will offer to resize your partitions for you to make room for itself, as well as scan through your Windows partition and detect all your users, settings, documents, etc. and offer to copy them into your new Linux install for you automatically. Like I said, I haven’t used this feature myself, but it seems pretty useful for luring the masses away from the land of Windows.

Of course, the installer comes on a bootable live CD, so that you can boot up and get a feel for it before you decide whether you really want to try installing it to the hard drive. All in all, Ubuntu remains my favorite Linux distro for desktop / workstation use, and this release is a solid improvement to its already good status.

It’s my opinion that Linux is ready to take over the OS market; it’s already ahead of the competition (Mac and Windows) in terms of features, including flashy effects (with Beryl, etc.). Now all we need is for companies like Apple and Microsoft to keep clamping down the restrictions on what their users can do with their own computers while making them pay a hefty premium on top of it all, until they are forced to look elsewhere and finally find freedom.

Dan and Sara were over for dinner tonight, and as Dan and I were doing stuff on my laptop, I realized that I haven’t mentioned on here my recent migration to Linux on my laptop.

I currently still need to use Windows for work, since I’m doing .NET development in C#, but for pretty much everything else I am currently using the Ubuntu distro running in VMWare on my laptop, and it’s working nicely. Eventually, I may even want to switch to the other way around (Linux native and Windows in the VM), but I suspect I probably won’t do that for performance and compatibility reasons.

One cool tool that I have recently gotten used to using is rsync over ssh to publish web site updates to my servers. Now I can just code and test all my changes on my local server, and then just send only the differences up to the server for a quickly synchronized update.

If anyone’s interested, I’ll post more on this later, including why I chose Ubuntu, etc. Heck, I’m not fooling anyone - I’ll still post on it even if no one is interested….