I remember the Fedora Core 6 days which was blazing fast back then and pretty impressive. When it came to using Linux again, I used pendrivelinux as a bootstrap operating system to get my network working, attempted to get a full-fledged mandriva out of it, but was disappointed at the lack of some packages or the lack of some GUI config tools I’m used to on Windows.

Having my network running, I downloaded Ubuntu since I’d never used it before and since it’s making so much news lately. Ubuntu certainly is a lot cleaner and professional-feeling compared to Mandriva (the update mechanism, gstreamer plugins, etc.)

It still doesn’t match the speed-of-use I get from my XP (I keep forgetting to buy a Vista licence) desktop. I dogfooded it myself and whenever my friends come over, they use it also. Speed-of-use isn’t always about raw speed of the software. Many times, there are simple UX pieces missing in the media players or GUI config tools which make you go to the command-line occasionally.

1. The default movie player (Totem using a gstreamer backend) is lackluster at best. Before you go ranting about proprietary file-formats, I’m talking about the UX. The “Preferences” doesn’t have enough configurable settings, and I miss most of my settings from Windows Media Player. The progress-bar-thingy (that allows you to control playback position) doesn’t work quite as smoothly as I’d like. And there’s a whole lot of polish, options, configurations, etc. that it needs.

2. Ubuntu hangs quite frequently – more so than my XP box. I have to reboot it at least twice a day. Don’t go telling me how I must have screwed up the configuration – to be fair, I only used the GUI utilities which are supposed to, by definition, guard me against incorrect configurations. Firefox is the biggest culprit here. It times it hangs, and then fails to restart unless I reboot. The desktop shell hangs too in which case I have to “ctrl+alt+backspace” to even be able to reboot the box.

3. The default bittorrent client, Transmission, is nowhere close to uTorrent in terms of features and functionality.

4. I miss some kind of hardware detection/diagnostics utilities, especially for USB. I don’t know the command-line, and I don’t want to know it. I want a Device Manager kinda thingy that shows me all ports, cards, disks, and anything else connected on my system. I want to know the status of that hardware and exactly what my system is interpreting it. I connected an external USB harddrive enclosure which shows up as /dev/sdb, but there is no /dev/sdb[n] partition when I know that the disk contains five partitions. Sure, the system may be confused, maybe the disk has a bad partition table. But beyond /dev/sdb, there’s just no information on what is happening. I presume the USB mass storage protocols are perfectly standardised and available for implementation.

5. I can’t rename my partitions for some reason. They show up as “127.8 GB media”. I don’t remember my disks by their capacity; I prefer to remember them by name. It’s the 21st century – you can give me that much! Come on!

And these have just been my personal experiences. My friends are totally baffled by the system. They can find their way through the Applications menu but, at points they do lack some serious functionality we take for granted daily on XP.

The one thing I loved about the system is when I begin to play an unknown format, it can make the files “just play” in a couple of clicks. And gstreamer does have an impressive set of plugins.