This new Ubuntu thingie

I've been using Linux for quite some time, both at home and at work, starting with RedHat 4.2. I've also had the (dis)pleasure of working on two proprietary Unices - Solaris (8 and 9) and HP-UX (11.00 and 11i), plus the occasional FreeBSD installation at home. At work I've mostly used SuSE 9.1 (for the last year and a half) and Mandrake 10 (that was some time ago), the former for C++ development, the latter for Java stuff. At home I've always liked Mandrake/Mandriva - it's so damn easy to install some codecs and mplayer through PLF, and urpmi has always solved dependency problems that I've had. Also, installing updates was quite easy using a simple cron job. It felt like a RedHat fork, but much more polished. However, all of these years I've been double booting with Windows, except for a period of a few months when Windows wouldn't boot on my computer.

However, something happened to Mandrake/iva a while ago - maybe the thing that they were near bankruptcy, maybe the merger with Conectiva... I had't heard much about them since Mandriva 2006.0 when I thought I'd try this Ubuntu thingie everybody kept talking about. I waited for Breezy Badger (6.06) and then gave it a try.

There's been some time since I've been trying new distros (about 3-4 years, since I graduated from University), so I'm not very up-to-date with distro developments. I was impressed with the fact that I could browse the web while installing; as far as I understand, it's not an original idea, since Knoppix did that before, but still, it's good to see people incorporate good ideas from others.

What was striking for me at old RedHat distros was how bloated they were - a lot of times you would wonder "hey, how did this get here?" - a simple server install would bring in lots of apparently useless stuff. Or "why do I have 5 ftp servers installed?". This was propagated in Mandrake, too, since I guess they shared the initial package structure and dependencies. They tried to be "one size fits all", thinking they could please as many users as possible by offering many alternatives and as many packages as possible, and also by building software with all kinds of add-ins (e.g. telnet with kerberos). It could've been also that they had too few people involved in packaging, and maybe the whole thing was too messy to even try to get rid of some of the illogical dependencies.

In contrast, Ubuntu seemed very minimal. One web browser, one email client, one music player, simple interface... Quite good! Also, it has apt-get and synaptic, which allegedly inspired urpmi and its graphical front-end, rpmdrake. So, the first impression was quite positive.

I've used Debian in the past and found it quite unimpressive - old packages, and not too much added value over those same packages that other distros provide. I wasn't particularly impressed with apt/dselect, since Mandrake had something similar.

I've always thought it stupid to say Debian is superior because of the deb package format - you can screw up any package format if you're not careful. The RPM dependency hell is easily solved by stuff like urpmi, and the packager is responsible for the dependencies it introduces. Why am I making this point? Well, after trying to install some video codecs on Ubuntu from multiverse, I got this very nice message: "couldn't find package liblameXXX" (don't recall the exact details, it was some months ago). So, the delivery from RPM dependency hell, you say?

I would say the PLF/Mandrake integration was better than the multiverse/Ubuntu one, at least after having to deal with it for a while. OK, I realize deb packages have their own configuration step , which is quite nice - that may be one advantage, although I'm not sure you can't do the same in RPMs with postinstall scripts.

Otherwise, the fact that after installing mp3 support for Rhythmbox I still had to do the same for Amarok is quite annoying. And boy, is Rhythmbox unstable - I got it to crash three times in a row on one day. Amarok is also quite unstable for something touted as 'the best music player ever' - I have 7 thousand something songs in my playlist, and it can't seem to be able to cope with that much, as opposed to Winamp on Windows.

I like the updates feature, it's quite nice to be able to have a GUI for it like in Windows. Of course, it ain't original, but it needn't be. And I have to notice GNOME has gotten less sucky lately, although I really hate the save dialog box - it's very confusing for people used to the old way of saving files. I usually save stuff from Firefox in all kinds of places on my hard drive, so it's annoying that they make it so hard to change that damn directory.

Well, summing it up, so far it's been quite a decent experience. I thought I'd switch to KUbuntu right away after having to deal with GNOME (boy did it suck in the past), but I haven't yet - I've only installed some KDE apps. I'll talk a bit about woes in my next post.