I’ve been running Ubuntu 11.04 for the last couple of hours. I installed it using the MacBook guide on the Ubuntu Wiki. Installing was easy! I decided to follow the single boot guide. I don’t think it’s a simple process to install Ubuntu on a MacBook but console commands do not scare me. Blessing the Linux partition from the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant I put on my USB stick did not scare me.
Things I like so far
Pretty much everything worked out of the box. Had to click 1 time to install the proprietary wireless driver. That’s not how things worked a few years ago!
It’s fast! Mac OS X is fast. But this seems even faster. Or it might be my enthusiasm.
I love the fact that every piece of software is controlled by a package manager again. Every single piece of software can be found be looking it up in the database of the package manager. It just feels good. I know the locations of software in Mac OS X are structured very well, but it just feels better. Just let the package manager check for updates and I know that I’m running the latest version of every single software packages that is on my system. And every piece of software is accounted for in the package manager database.
The font aliasing of Ubuntu is really pretty. I thought Mac OS X had the best font rendering in the world but it seems I like Ubuntu’s font rendering even better!
The dark windows border starts to grow on me. A few years back some programs looked a bit odd. But all the buttons en scrollbars and stuf like that really look great with the Ambiance theme.
Things that have annoyed me
The settings that are saved by Mac OS X applications are pretty much gone. I pretty much have to install everything from scratch. But I guess you can’t do much about that. On the other hand any residual config files of software I no longer use are gone.
Getting used to Unity takes some effort too. I don’t know if I’m gonna stick with Unity but it least with Linux you can choose what desktop environment you want.
Yesterday tried getting Spotify running using Wine but I just couldn’t get it working. Just gave up. I’ll just have to listen to my own collection of music.
The twitter client called Gwibber is not as good as Twitter for Mac. But it’ll have to do.
Well that’s everything I had to say right now. Let’s see if I like Banshee Media Player.
Conclusion
I use Ubuntu 10.04 at my company, but switching from Mac OS X to Ubuntu, for things like Twitter and multimedia and other personal stuff I got used to doing on my MacBook can be frustrating. Not because it doesn’t work but more because you have to change the applications you use. And sometimes it takes a while to get the application to behave the way it was set up on my MacBook.
So far, so good!
