Just finished a laptop upgrade of Kubuntu (the Canonical Linux flavor) from distribution 10.10 to the latest 11.04″Natty Narwhal”. As usually my system was pretty messed up, and it take a couple of hours to put everything in working status. Anyway, the pain pays off and i really enjoy more and more to work with it, some of the key benefits are just awesome:
- It’s free
- It’s fast
- The install/uninstall/upgrade software system is perfect, with thousands of free apps just a click away
- The really beautiful KDE user interface
It’s funny and kind of sad to walk into a room with 20 people, 15 of which running the “Think Different” computers, then boot up your laptop with Kubuntu…
- The full freedom to customize and configure your OWN machine
- The excellent fuse “mount everything” that you think of sub-system
There are still some problems that make it hard for non-geek users to embrace Linux on their desktops and laptops, even on the user friendly distributions (like Kubuntu). At least for me the major upgrades are nothing short of chaotic, some drivers support is still flaky and buggy (3d on ATI for me the worst by far), here and then there are some regressions with stuff unexpectedly stopping working good.
But the Linux community should be very proud, because the system has done such a long way. I still remember when just installing was some kind sorcery, not to speak in starting a graphical windows system (xorg.conf test #383). Or more recently support and configuration of wifi cards/networks/authentication nightmare. All of this is now gone, for instance last week i was able to configure VPN access and get 3G Internet via USB dongle just using the network manager GUI, no black screens, no bash, no googling…. simply amazing… – take that Windows – and then mounting remote filesystems with only one command – take that Apple.
So, is Linux perfect? Of course not.
Would i install it my friends computer? Maybe.
Am i willing to pay for Windows or OSX with Linux as a free alternative? Of course not.