I'll be brief...

Friday February 11, 2005
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/logo.jpg

Best. Distro. Ever.

I am not exaggerating.

I ran out of disk space over the weekend, and after buying a new hard drive, I figured I'd better give Ubuntu a try. I installed the latest snapshot of Hoary Hedgehog and I was up and running in under an hour.

There are still some familiar Linux-y problems, for example, configuring X to support my 12-button mouse is still an unmitigated disaster, and some people just cannot write drivers to save their lives.

Before you Mac naysayers in the crowd start to gloat, at least I can burn a god damned CD without using a command line, okay?

Still, the drivers work. Installing Hoary somehow increased the performance of all my disk drives - I don't know how that happened, but it was automatic, and I can now use my USB drive without looking at my watch. Ying's tablet, after not working with 5 different distros over 4 years, magically started to function properly. My USB headset was detected without complaint. My laptop can suspend and resume (though there are still a few kernel problems there).

I know that many of the tools that they use were already available, but Ubuntu is the first Linux distribution that I have found which actually unleashes the full power of the free software community in a coherent way.

By the way, did I mention that it includes Twisted as part of the default install? ;-)