Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

I recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my old laptop circa 2005). Ubuntu is a Linux distribution which focuses on making a free operating system which is simple, easy to use, and a viable alternative to Windows + Office.

I'm impressed by the consistent high-quality of the the entire OS and the included programs. I have also been very impressed with the fast performance. It has breathed fresh life into the aging machine due to how well it performs. My computer starts up in about thirty seconds and is very responsive while using it.

As an example of high-quality of the OS, take Gnautilus, which is the file and folder browser, essentially the same thing as Explorer on Windows and Finder on OS X. Gnautilus has the GUI I want from a file browser. It's beautiful, quick, and laid out in a logical fashion, which makes the discoverability of features go up. (On a side note... As much as I thought Vista was a better OS than XP, Vista's Explorer interface killed me. Its poor layout and lack of obvious features killed me. (Thanks be to God that Explorer was fixed in Windows 7.)

Screenshot of Gnautilus:

I suspect a lot of the high quality feel of everything has to do with the community feedback that is a natural part of the open source model.

I'm also amazed at the great performance Ubuntu has exhibited. I'm running a beautiful GUI (thanks go Compiz Fusion, which kicks ass by the way), a simple text editor, Firefox, a music player, with a PDF open in the background. I'm only using 396.2 MiB of memory. On Windows 7 or OS X 10.6, I would easily be using around 1.2 GiB by now. Granted, memory is incredibly cheap right now, but there's no reason to excuse that kind of performance difference.

Anyways, I suspect the problems I experienced (a temporary problem with a wireless card driver) would be fixed if the desktop market-share of Linux would grow by five or ten percent which would be enough for hardware vendors to start taking them more seriously and releasing better quality drivers. I hope it grows; competition benefits everybody.

You can download your copy (for free) here if you are interested: http://www.ubuntu.com/

A screenshot of my Desktop:

A screenshot of OpenOffice Writer 3.1:

A screenshot of one (of the many) window management options. It functions the same as Exposé does in OS X.