Morroni Blog

What a long road. Back in October of 2006 I decided to ditch Windows for Ubuntu as my primary desktop environment. I migrated a file server and two desktops in our office to Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy. I also migrated a home laptop and home desktop. The goal was to remove as much dependence on Windows as possible. There were a wide variety of reasons for the switch to Ubuntu. They included:

• Vista did not look promising. All of my experiences with Vista were negative ones. It appeared to me that Microsoft was losing focus and that the OS was suffering.
• I missed my shell. I used Unix a lot as a Computer Science major at Penn State. It really felt like my use of Windows was taking a lot of fun away from the computing experience. So I felt like I needed to get back to my roots.
• We stopped developing applications using Microsoft Technologies. We are a small business and the license fees that come with Windows Servers and Development packages can become very cost prohibitive. Because of that, I started using open source development tools almost exclusively. I quickly realized that most of the open source development environments were actually just as good if not better than anything Microsoft was producing. Most of our sites now are developed in either simple HTML, PHP, or J2EE. Because we no longer had a dependence on the Windows development environment, we could break away from Windows as a desktop pretty easily.
• Supporting open source software seemed like the right thing to do from a moral perspective. I have always had an interest in community-based projects. I felt like I was contributing to a good cause.
• In Ubuntu it seemed like Linux finally had a desktop environment that was ready for prime time.

So off we went. We started installing Ubuntu on everything we had. It was absolutely amazing to see how easy it was to install Ubuntu. The install process was almost definitely one of the most impressive aspects of the entire project. Over the next week or so, I setup my environment with as many open source equivalents as I could find out there. A lot of them fit the bill and a lot of them did not. I was so blinded by my passion to become totally Ubuntu-centric that I looked past a lot of the shortcomings of many of the dekstop apps. This eventually came back to haunt me. I’ll put this together in a simple list. Here’s what I liked the most about Ubuntu.

The Good Things About Ubuntu

• The power of the shell. I love having a shell to do a wide variety of tasks in. It felt great to have it right on my desktop.
• SSHFS. How cool it was to mount drives at various outside locations via sshfs. This took the place of any high overhead VPN that I needed in a windows domain.
• The predictable release schedule was great. It was really nice to have a company behind the builds doing some level of quality assurance.
• Compiz. I like eye candy and Ubuntu had plenty of it. Compiz was a lot of fun to tweak.
• Huge and easily accessible software library. I was blown away at how quickly I could find and download applications that I needed via apt-get. There are so many cool apps out there that did so many cool things.
• The server was easy to install and had a great build system. I was able to get tomcat, apache, potgresql, mysql and a variety of other server projects installed with ease.
• It is FREE! Ubuntu didn’t need really high costing hardware and the software was free so there were some significant savings happening for both home and work. However, these savings were clearly being wiped out by the amount of time it took me to configure items. More on that below.

The Bad Things About Ubuntu

Let me preface this by saying that a lot of these issues are not issues that are all related to just Ubuntu. A lot of this stuff falls in the realm of general Linux architecture issues(I think).

• The audio system. Wow, this was a biggy. I’m a total audiophile and I just could not believe how buggy the sound system was. I tried ALSA and I tried the Open source one and I tried whatever I could but all of them failed in some capacity or another. The biggest complaint was that I could never seem to have two applications playing audio at the same time. So if I was playing something in rhythmbox and then went to a website to watch a movie, I got no audio. The only way to get the audio was to stop rhythmbox, restart firefox and go back to the page. This happened A LOT.
• Mainstream software support. I love Photoshop. I need Quickbooks. I sat down so many times and tried to use Gimp instead of Photoshop. I took the time. I invested several nights trying to master it. It just never worked out. Gimp is powerful but it just doesn’t cut the mustard. I literally had a headache after using it sometimes. For Quickbooks, the options were wine or just running a virtual machine. I opted for a virtual machine. This was not a huge deal and by no means was it the biggest drawback.
• General User Interface issues. A lot of people comment on the lack of refinement with open source user interfaces. Ubuntu put a lot of work into this area but they are still kind of ham stringed by whatever the Gnome projects decides to do. One example of a UI issue that drove me bonkers was the icons on the quick launch bar. I could never do any sort of auto-organize. I had to manually spread them out. It was really silly. I tried using some other alternative that was suppose to mimic OS X but it really kind of flailed at it. It was biggy and it did not support a notification area. It was a common theme. These great ideas that just can’t make it the final 10 yards to become great software. There was always just one small shortcoming that made the software really annoying to use.
• Java/Flash support. Linux seems like Sun’s ugly stepchild. The JDK and JRE never seemed to be really stable. I had a slew of issues with Java. I tried to settle on a few Java sound apps to no avail. The Java sound system was more problematic then ALSA. I also never seemed to really be able to gt the firefox Java plugin working perfectly. It always seemed to crash randomly. Same went for the Flash plugin. My daughter would try to play webkinz and the whole browser would crash. It was unbelievable.
• Integration and cross-application communications. I lost sight of the fact that computers were suppose to make tasks easier. While using Ubuntu, I often felt like I had to hack the system to make different apps communicate with one another properly. I can’t provide specifics because this blog entry would go on forever. There is just a general feeling that you are hobbling together a hundred different packages in Linux while with other platforms, everyone is talking to one another and things “just work”. I began realizing that I was working harder at getting my environment fine tuned then on the work I had on my plate.
• Sleep mode. The home laptop would never ever sleep properly. I tried a lot of stuff. A LOT of stuff but to no avail. I reproduced these issues with multiple laptops. Sleeping and hibernating with laptops is an absolute headache and almost never worked properly for me.

So all of these things started adding up until one day I realized tht I hated working ion Ubuntu. I felt like I was working inside a jar of mollasses. My response time for tasks and different projects was lagging because I would often get sidetracked trying to fine tune some kind of setting that would finally once and for all make my desktop environment “perfect”. It seemed like that for 2 years I was searching for the killer desktop in Ubuntu and I never even really got close. So needless to say, I was ripe for a change of platform for my work and office computing. Then one day I was out on my roof and I crushed my Palm Treo 755P. This is the same Palm Treo that it would sometime take me 15 minutes to synch with my desktop because of all the weird nuances of JPilot. I called Sprint to ask how much it would cost ot replace it. They said it was $590. I couldn’t believe it. What a ripoff! The palm i seriously antiquated and here they wanted $590. I promptly cancelled my service agreement and switched to AT&T where I could get the iPhone 3G. I never expected that I would love the iPhone as much as I do. I never expected that I would be typing a large part of this blog entry from the software keyboard on an iPhone. I am not one to embrace mainstream technologies. I usually do whatever I can to avoid them. That is part of what led me to ubuntu in the first place. There is simply no denying the groundbreaking features of the iPhone. I was taken aback from the outset. I was so pleased with what Apple had did that I took a fresh look at OS X. What looked so appealing to me was the fact that I had the ease and comfort of a fully integrated system while keeping the powerful aspects of the shell.  So I decided to jump in with both feet and start drinking the Apple Kool Aid.  I picked up a Power Mac for the office and my iMac is coming for home tomorrow.  The irony here is that my first computer was an Apple II+ back in the early eighties.  I then moved onto the Apple IIGS.  After that I was lost to the world of Windows and most recently, Linux.  It feels good to have a Mac again and I am looking forward to having a more prodcutive computing experience.  I’ll try to post my thoughts on OS X as I proceed through the process of migrating my entire platform over to it.  So far, so good.  More interopibility, less needless hours spent tweaking.  All this and I still have my beloved *nix shell!  Good times ahead!