I’ve been working on an x86 laptop for work. It came with Windows XP Home and I put Linux on it, trying a number of different flavors but always coming back to Ubuntu.
There are a couple things that have frustrated the heck out of me with respect to ubuntu on this particular laptop —
* the sound server, ‘esd’, has some flakiness with respect to starting and stopping sessions.
* I cannot for the life of me get it to ‘suspend’ so I have to shut it down and start it up every time I change locations with the laptop. (The laptop is very low-end and does not have built in suspend capability in the hardware, and Linux’s software suspend capability is way too bleeding edge.)
So I decided, to heck with it, I’m gonna go with Windows! I can get a very linux-like situation going on there with the help of the Cygwin project, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, Emacs for windows, python and perl and wxwidgets and everything I need is out there. Why not just use windows and not fight the hardware?
A couple days later, I have my answer:
It totally sucks.
Back to Ubuntu.
UPDATE: to be fair to Bill, most of the suckage seems to have been caused by being nearly out of disk space. It’s much “snappier” when that problem is fixed.
Sucks how? Crashing? Only one desktop?
no crashing so far, but everything’s just slow and awkward and painful.
The desktop is ugly as hell, it’s a pain clicking through that stupid start menu, fonts look even worse than linux… Everything’s just awkward.
A large part of it is probably me and what I’m used to, but hey, I’m me.
Every time I use Windows I’m amazed at how ugly the fonts are. After all this time they still look like they’re printed by a dot matrix printer. :)
If you really wanted to try windows, you should get LiteStep, a NeXt-ish window manager for windows. It basically makes it like using a *nix window manager with windows hardware support. And BSOD’s. :)