eastowners

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a best tool for the job kind of guy.  I won’t use a screwdriver as a hammer and I tend to want my computers to work the same way; I don’t really like having to work just to get basic things done.  That said, I’ve become disenfranchised from Microsoft’s offerings lately and had begun to gearlust after the stylish, but seriously expensive Macbook.

Mac’s are basically PC’s hardware-wise these days, so there’s no real hardware gearlust like in the days of yore, but there is a certain lust after the nifty features and ease of use of the latest iterations of the OS; an operating system that has managed to shed the 20-some odd years of paradigm that surrounds graphical computing.  Man… that is dead sexy.

My distaste for Microsoft has been primarily driven by the fact that XP is now over six years old and Vista, which was supposed to change everything, has only been able to deliver an experience that is maddeningly frustrating and lacking in the kind of performance that a modern user interface should have at its core.  Moving forward should not result in productivity loss, and Vista takes the concept of eye candy at the cost of productivity to an art form.

Not that everything in Vista is bad.  The new start menu is what Microsoft should have delivered in the first place.  And shutting down is now easier than ever, which to me is a great irony considering that, in my opinion, this is the best feature of Microsoft’s latest pile of stinky code.  For me, there’s not much more.

I’ve attempted many times over the years to use  Linux and it’s classicaly crappy implementation of a laggy, frustrating, non-cohesive desktop.  I’ve tried every iteration of this problematic bug-laden hippy built desktop environment that the geek press has lauded as the next coming of Christ.  I have, obviously, loathed them all.  That is, except one.

Enter Ubuntu 8.04 or Hardy Heron.  On the day of release, I downloaded the ISO and a couple of days later loaded it on the laptop that I’m now writing this on.  It’s taken a while to make it work the way that I want it, but the Ubuntu team has done a really excellent job of bundling the right set of tools to make a desktop experience that is leaps and bounds better than anything I’ve ever used that heavily makes use of the penguin logo.

The accelerated desktop and bells and whistles added for window management through Compiz Fusion are a joy to use.  The package comes with the beta version of Firefox, which I wasn’t sure of at first, but has grown on me over time.  I still don’t like OpenOffice as much as Office 2007, but it is a workable suite for doing basic home word processing and spreadsheeting.

Oh… and did I mention that it is relatively stable and seems to “just work”, which is big for the computer that I use most for cruising the web in the livingroom, blogging, and keeping up with Twitters.  Speaking of which, that’s a real weakness when compared to Windows, but something that is not insurmountable.  The social tools are just lacking.  On Windows, I really enjoy the application Digsby, which has no Linux equivelent.  There are no real good offline blog editors either.

But as I said, it’s a really workable solution to my current distaste for operating systems coming from Redmond.  It has the added bonus of not costing anything more than the 10 cents or so I blew on burning the DVD ISO.  I’m not sure that it’s completely old folks friendly, but I believe that anyone with a slight technical background could find themselves with a really usable desktop with access to a ton of ok applications that meet most basic desktop computing needs.