I finally got around to reworking my main computer this weekend, to do a fresh Windows installation, but also to install Linux. I’ve been playing around with Ubuntu Linux for a while, but the machine I had it installed on previously was an old, slow spare-parts machine. Some random thoughts from playing around with it on a faster box this weekend:

  • Ubuntu is a very easy install, and gives a nice clean system with good basic functionality out of the box. Still, I’ve been installing quite a bit of stuff to get to a comfortable environment (like Mono and other dev tools). I can understand they want to keep it to one CD, but perhaps an ubuntu-extras CD or something would be nice.
  • In general, the hardware support seems to be good. My sound card, NIC, and video card are all recognized and working. The one hitch is that my printer (a Samsung ML-1740) isn’t working, even after installing the drivers from Samsung’s website. It recognizes it, but won’t print anything.
  • I’ve installed xcompgr to get drop shadows under the windows. It looks really nice, but has a few visual bugs and really slows things down. It’ll be very nice once all that stuff gets integrated and accelerated.
  • I’m really liking Muine for a music player. In a lot of ways it’s pretty bare-bones, but it’s amazing how the simple addition of something like automatic album-art can really make a program more usable. It comes closer to flipping through a box of CDs or records than any other program I’ve used.

There’s probably more to come as I use the system more. I’m already finding it more comfortable than Windows in a lot of ways…