There’s been a lot of talk recently about Ubuntu. Claims have been made that it is the one distribution to rule them all, that it spells the final death knell for closed-source operating systems and there have even been some switchers from Mac OS X. Given the noise I thought it was about time I gave it a try (especially since my DSL has just been upgraded to 8mbps). So I pulled down the live CD for AMD64 and spun it up on my games machine.

I must admit it was a nicer experience than when I last tried a Linux desktop. Most things were there, sound worked, the display worked and almost all default were sensible. AA text wasn’t up to OS X standards, nor did it default to sub-pixel AA, but that’s fairly minor really. I couldn’t read my NTFS partition but that was survivable. And all ports on my card-reader were detected, which was more than one could say for RedHat 9 (yes, somewhat old these).

So I was left with two quibbles, one minor and one a show-stopper. Firstly, I loaded up GPartEd. The thought “I wonder if this can resize NTFS partitions?” leaps across my frontal lobes. So I click the “Help” option. The results were not quite as expected – “This feature is not yet supported”. It then suggests I look on the web-site. So I load up my web browser – and this lead to the show-stopper.

No WiFi. I’ve got a common-as-muck RT2500 based card in the machine. The WiFi control panel showed the driver and gave me a chance to enter SSID and key. Unfortunately, while it said the connection was now active there was arse all happening. Indeed it confirmed it just wasn’t talking to my DHCP server when it gave the card an IPv6 address. Whoops.

Some browsing of the Ubuntu forums revealed that apparently the RT2500 driver doesn’t work with the control panel. It’s a shame they didn’t add a message to that effect. Or, indeed, that an appropriate error message wasn’t shown when the card didn’t connect. I had thought Mac OS X took the biscuit for the most useless error messages when WiFi went awry, but it has been outdone. Which is a shame as it really spoiled the experience for me, and up until that point I had been very impressed with the work that had been done.

But don’t get me wrong – this is certainly an impressive package and this is how Linux is going to get mind-share: distributions that just work. The computing world would be well served by having no single dominant operating system and this is certainly a nice addition to the pack.