Decided

The other day I waxed poetic about whether to replace Ubuntu desktop on my netbook, or to continue as I had been going. I have decided.

I installed the "Netbook Remix" version of Ubuntu 9.04 ("Jaunty Jackalope"). It's nice, though I did like the multiple desktop feature of the regular version. On my home desktop machine (the one with two monitors), having two desktops isn't very important. Actually, each monitor is represented on each desktop. On the tiny 10" diagonal netbook screen, a second desktop was a handy thing.

In the Netbook Remix version, you get a full-screen menu thingy that shows all the programs as large icons on a series of pages. Same basic menu structure that you can customize to add items, remove items, and make items invisible, as well. Yeah, I know you can do this in Windows; it's different in Ubuntu, but equivalent.

Everything opens up maximized, and there's no menu bar across the top that you can add things to. I rather liked that feature of the desktop version, since I put most of the programs I used often on the bar. The remix has a "Favorites" tab that I've done the same thing with. On the other hand, a single click launches things off the menu thingy.

I tried out the newer version, "Karmic Koala," (version 9.10) which is in alpha version 4. The menu thingy crashed on shutdown both times I booted. I also liked the look of the new version, better, but I decided I would rather be productive than always sending crash reports to the folks working on the OS. No offense, but this is a "production" machine for me, not something to experiment with. Note that I am writing this blog post on my netbook. Not that that's something remarkable, despite the fact I've remarked about it.

Perhaps once they've gone gold with 9.10, I will upgrade to it, since restoring all the (useful) applications onto my netbook took only about 3 or 4 hours. Most of what I use already comes with the distro, which is one really nice--dare I say huge--advantage of Ubuntu. There's nothing else (or hardly anything else) to install. It comes with Firefox, Open Office, no fewer than 3 or 4 email clients, Pidgin IM client, and about 25 games. There are many other programs included and/or available. Oh, and did I mention that everything's free?

Free, as in beer. Let's not discount that.

Of course beforehand I off-loaded everything onto a portable hard drive. I have a (relatively) new Seagate Free Agent 250 GB hard drive. Nice small, quiet drive. I reformatted it to ext3 (though that's not entirely straightforward to do in Linux), so it serves as yet one more place where I store stuff. You can never have too many backups. Trust me. Device support in Linux is better than in Windows.

Another useful side-effect of having a Linux netbook is my ever-increasing familiarity with the Linux command-line. That's another thing that the average Windows user never gets to experience. (Too bad.) Of course, I will admit that it's not entirely necessary that every user become familiar with the command line, but if you are it does make many things quite a bit easier. Or maybe it's just because I haven't learned about all the GUI tools that do the same things. *nix was built by geeks who used the command line, and it shows. And that's a good thing.

Not sure what else I can report, except that everything works (including the webcam). What else can I say? I recommend Ubuntu as a solid alternative to Windows.