OS Chasing (Part 4): Running In a Big Circle
I took advantage of one of the Dell deals recently to get myself a second desktop computer. After my experiences with various forms of Ubuntu and Linux through virtual machines I felt confident and ready to install Linux for myself on a real physical machine. Pride goes before the fall and after running through installs of Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu and PC-BSD, I ended up back where I started: using Vista and virtual machines for anything I want to do in Linux.
Without getting into all the details, I made the following observations on my tour of popular desktop Linux variants.
64 bit versions are more trouble than they are worth:
Excited about my new AMD X2 processor, I initially went with Xubuntu 64 bit version. The install was easy and the OS itself ran great. However, the rest of the application landscape is not really ready for 64 bit. This is not a knock on Linux itself, since the same problems exist in the Windows world, but it was a hassle to discover that there were either not 64 bit versions of applications or the 64 bit versions were crippled in some way, such as Firefox 64 bit, which lacked almost any media plug in support.
Sometimes you can get too much help:
Between Synaptic, Add/Remove, Automatix and EasyUbuntu, and plain old apt-get, I found myself overloaded with options on how to install and remove applications from Ubuntu. Most of these did not play nice with each other and did not realize if you had installed an application using another manager, or if they did, would refuse to do anything with it. I ended up really missing the relative simplicity of the MSI style guided install on Windows. In fairness to PC-BSD, this did not seem to be a problem because it features the PBI format, a kind of Linux MSI.
Configuring fonts is no fun:
I'll freely admit to a strong, perhaps irrational bias towards Windows in one respect, I like the way that IE and Firefox render web pages, particularly how they display fonts. So, it really throws me off when I start up Firefox on Linux and pages just don't look right, even after installing the Windows fonts. At one point I was able to download a set of configuration files that helped, but they also changed all the system menus. I will claim ignorance here on how difficult this must be, but I really have no desire to learn the nuances of Linux font management just to get ESPN.com to look right. Again, PC-BSD (at least the VM) was configured much better out of the box in this respect.
I'm OK with a binary driver:
My new Dell has an Nvidia chip for its onboard video. The Ubuntu variants had an open source driver for it, but I could not get up to higher resolutions until I installed the binary/closed source driver from Nvidia. This was easy to do on Ubuntu, although I did have to go through a somewhat menacing "Restricted Drivers" dialog that warned me that I was installing something that was hard to support and could be broken by future changes. I know for some people it is very important that everything on their machine be totally "open"*, but for me, I'm not going to get myself stuck at low resolution so I can stick it to Nvidia.
Kubuntu is kluttered:
The worst part about my new Dell so far was removing all the crap ware that came with it. From AOL installs, to a trial edition of Norton, I can't be happy until my system is nice and clean of extras that I didn't ask for. Xubuntu and Ubuntu came with a pretty light load of pre-installed applications, whereas Kubuntu comes with an relative explosion of them, all somewhat irritatingly starting with "k". Hopefully this is appreciated by novice users because I just wanted to get rid of everything and build up from a clean slate. Also Kubuntu's many level of control panels allowed me to tweak almost anything, but made Windows' control panel structure seem clean by comparison.
Back to where I started.
Although PC-BSD uses KDE, which I just criticized for being a little cluttered, I was excited to install it after a good experience with the VM. Unfortunately, I was stymied by lack of support for my SATA II controller and Nvidia graphics problems. I tried 2 different versions of install CDs and a Live CD with no luck. For now, I will just use the VM.
So, I end up back where I started; Vista or XP for most things, with Linux VM's around if I need them. I gained some good experience along the way and discovered a great little utility EasyBCD, which allows you to easily configure (and restore!) the Vista boot loader, which is very useful when messing with Linux installs. I'm not sure if all the time and effort was really worth it, but it certainly cured me of my desire to OS chase, at least for a few months :)
* See Mark Pilgrim's blog, Dive Into Mark, and Gobuntu