Up until recently, all three of my machines (a virtual server, a desktop, and a laptop) have all run Gentoo. With the release of Ubuntu Gutsy, however, I thought I’d give it a try on my laptop, to see how much it’d improved since I’d last used it. The major selling point was that I could use the alternative installer to fully encrypt the disk, which I had been doing under Gentoo. (The last thing I need if my laptop is stolen is for the thief to have easy access to my data.)

To sum it up briefly, I see no reason that the laptop will ever migrate back to Gentoo, unless Gentoo improves its desktop integration experience. Ubuntu’s been stable (with one caveat), the wireless network support has been great, and most of my major media playing concerns have been taken care of. In short, it’s an excellent desktop experience, and it saves me a bit of time going through the updates each morning. The large upgrade every 6 months will take a few minutes to go through and see what’s new (I still have that micromanagement bug). We’ll see how things go over the next few months, though.

I’m still not ready to transition my desktop. While it would probably work fine, I really rely on some of the applications it runs, and I’m not particularly interested in the downtime. That said, I can’t think of any real reasons to keep it running Gentoo, other than the reasons stated in my popular post on why I use Gentoo. So, I suppose I’ll transition it at some point, perhaps. But perhaps not.

My only major gripe about Ubuntu at the moment is that the desktop effects are rather unstable with my NVIDIA card. I can almost certainly make the thing freeze very quickly by using compositing effects. I hope the nouveau project successfully gets a good open-source driver for NVIDIA cards soon, because using the binary blob just leaves issues like this unsolved for the most part, which is a shame, because some of the effects are actually useful, and not just eye-candy.

In just a few years, Ubuntu’s gone from new kid on the block, to a coherent, simple-to-use desktop experience that the most technophobic person could use. I’d wholeheartedly recommend it over Windows to a new user.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Linux, Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.