Fun with Ubuntu…. NOT
Ugh, I spent this morning toying around with Ubuntu 9.04 and if this is “Linux for the people” or what have you, then they assume the “people” all have CS degrees. What a nightmare. Base install went well, but then have fun installing drivers! To install the Radeon drivers you have to do some voodoo in the terminal window, and as someone with experience with command line interfaces (oh, those heady days of DOS and UNIX back in high school and college) I finally figured it out, but I can’t imagine what Joe Sixpack is going to do in that situation. For example:
$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri
Getting to install something as simple as Adobe Flash Player was a headache until I gave the system access to the “multiverse” repository online and then having fun with voodoo in the terminal window again. I finally gave up trying to get my audio drivers installed; again, facing a nightmare with the terminal window, as the download package from the company won’t install “out of the box.”
Then, as soon as I tried going multi-monitor, the desktop properties freaked out. And that’s when I said screw it and wiped the damn partition. I’m back to Vista, and I’ve got a whole new appreciation for Microsoft. Sure, OS X is pretty solid, but Apple’s engineers get to worked in a closed and controlled environment; Microsoft engineers have to make something that will run in the PC ecosystem where you have roughly a bajillion different combinations of hardware in the form of different CPUs, motherboards, memory, hard drives, optical drives, Ethernet ports, video cards, sound cards, etc. And the damn thing just works, somehow.