I’m all sorted at work now – I’ve left my Windows environment to atrophy and am using Ubuntu 7.04 as my main environment. What have I found?
The good:
- It’s worth it just for the decent console.
- Windows magically change height to match as you drag from screen to screen. My Mac could do with this!
- The font rendering is vastly improved other past attempts, although the fonts themselves could use a few touch-ups.
- The package management is quite comprehensive and rather handy.
- Gnome session saving is handy.
- It doesn’t lock up when IO occurs, unlike Win XP.
- It also loads a hell of a lot faster than XP.
The bad:
- The package repository has notable exceptions, such as the compatibility libraries needed for Fedora Directory Server (and present in older versions).
- Swing compatibility problems about. XToolkit won’t work with Beryl, but MToolkit leads to horrible problems with rendering with more standard window managers, such as sometimes blocking text input.
- Speaking of Swing, the GTK+ theme is terrible – it drops textures, borders and sometimes doesn’t draw menus. And Metal /Motif are just plain ugly.
- The menu editor is just plain ugly, and similar to a trip back in time.
- The Window Manager crashed on me one day, and the session saving ensured it didn’t start up again. Hence auto-session saving is best left off.
- gEdit doesn’t pick up file permission changes, hence if you have to make a file rewritable you’ll be reloading it.
The Ugly
- I’m pleasantly surprised to say there’s nothing really to whine about there – there are plenty of little niggles but it’s solid and overall works quite well.
All in all, well worth the jump for development. And you get geek points – huzzah!
