Gibdon Moon

This afternoon saw several hours spent test-driving Ubuntu 8.04 directly off the CD. My initial impression is being impressed, desktop Linux has certainly made great strides since my last attempt many moons ago. It feels like it's "almost there", and I'd be fine with using it on a casual computing machine, such as one in my living room for guests or something for either of my parents. Here's just a few notes I made while playing ...

Text is often fuzzy or stuck too close together; I changed the system to "high contrast" and then saw more of the latter versus the former. This is the biggest problem I have and it seems like it would be simple tto solve; I ranked it so high that I took a screenshot to demonstrate. Microsoft Windows is still the king of easy-on-the-eyes (not necessarily sexy) fonts and the rendering thereof. Consolas with ClearType enabled is not only crisp, it's gorgeous (without it's ugly as sin, but then you wouldn't use it without CT enabled).


Text Rendering: Ubuntu (left) versus Windows (right)
Besides that one biggie, here's the rest of the things I noted ...

• No ActiveScript / COM objects. I didn't expect it to have these, obviously, but the absence of Windows Scripting Host (WSH) and Active Server Pages (ASP) is a thorn in my side. My intimate knowledge of JScript combined with these technologies allows me to churn out tiny apps at will to do my bidding. What I found for ASP compatibility/emulation is fairly lame and generally leaves JScript out entirely in favor of VBScript. ChiliSoft (acquired by Sun) seeks to run ASP pages from Java and looks like it supports "everything", but I haven't tried it. It wasn't immediately apparent how I could give it a try easily and without spending any mula.
  
  
• Paint.NET is being ported to Linux, called Paint Mono, but it lags behind the current release and there are some missing features. I enjoy using this program for not only simplicity, but creating and editing things quickly; GIMP feels like a CLI hidden behind a clumsy GUI.
  
  
• TextPad, my text (development) editor of choice, runs well under WINE. It's current status is: Only the fonts were slightly off, but was very useable. I didn't try it, but it occurs to me that fonts being slightly off in a text editor is more than a small issue.
  
  
• Flash is unavailable OOB, but isn't difficult to install. However, sound didn't work at all (ThinkPad T60p) and the extensive Ubuntu community documentation supplied no answers. Eventually I found something somewhere to download and install, but I can't seem to find the link. Afterwards what I would hear sounded kinda crappy/low-quality. Full-screen videos on Hulu played smoother than on Windows (possibly since I have a debug version of the Flash player on Windows), but also had strange tearing and flickering.
  
  
• All audio is quieter than it should be with everything turned up; my ears should have melted off but it was only mildly painful. I couldn't get it to pump up further and I had trouble figuring out what to search for to get answers.
  
  
• No Start > Run. I forgot how much I use this for opening specific folders, navigating to URL's, and running applications like calculation (calc.exe). There are probably keyboard short-cuts and sure I could have a terminal open, but being able to press WIN+R and then type in something to have the operating system interpret is really quite fast, not too mention a crutch of mine.
  
  
• Power management is lackluster, but I also didn't try out anything specialized for it.
  
  
• Oblivion might run; it's the only game I've been playing lately, albeit casually. I didn't actually try it, because it didn't seem like I'd be able to while using the read-only version of Ubuntu booted from CD.

So there you have it, a handful of things an entrenched Windows user experienced. Thankfully all my hardware was recognized and utilized appropriately, something I thought would be the biggest problem (as it has been in the past), so it seems that block is finally crumbling. Really the only thing left is for me (Old Man Neil) to learn new applications (ugh) and development environments (sigh), and I could probably put up with the font funkiness.