Linux on the Desktop
Last updated: Sat, 09 Oct 2010 23:42:00 GMT
The future of ten years ago is today!
I've been temtped by netbooks before, but my trusty iBook G4 just wouldn't give up the ghost and I had no reason to replace it. Eventually, I was given a Macbook by work, and I retired the iBook, but the Macbook just never quite did the trick. Less than reliable, and accompanied by continual negative progress from The United Church of Jobsology — features, features, features, while the bugs live on — made me love it less and less.
Don't get me wrong, we love our Mini, but mostly we love our Mini because we don't do a hell of a lot on it outside run of the mill "family computer" stuff. In that position it does well, and I'm rarley called on to provide tech support at home. This is a real plus.
When the iPad surfaced, I was tempted. Surely ReeceCon could afford one for its star employee? Maybe. But as I heard more, saw more, and fell out of love with my iPhone 3GS, I decided that I was tired of rewarding Uncle Steve for his questionable decisions.
With a hole in my life that was ultra-portable shaped, I decided that it was netbook time. Half the price of an iPad, and it'd cover the bases I needed, namely:
- easy to tote, for on-call week, and motorcycle commute
- screen and keyboard comfortable enough to use for a whole battery cycle
- serial, or serial dongle, for machine room use
- more time spent using than administering
Nothing out of the ordinary there, excepting perhaps my need for a good terminal emulator and serial connectivity, which merely identify me as a sysadmin nerd. I looked around, asked around, read the El Reg's recent netbook showdown and finally decided on the Acer Aspire One D260.
First Impressions
It's mildly pleasing to the eye. The keyboard is, as others had mentioned, weirdly full-sized-but-not; it looks right, but you realise that it's a few percent smaller than it should be when you start typing. You get used to it. Battery life turned out to be a genuine 6+ hours, with no ugly wart on the back.
It comes with some ancient Andriod Instant-On. It is almost instant, but it's ugly, and while it may have worked on a phone, it just looks plain stupid on a 1024 x 600 screen. And it works worse than it looks without a touch-screen; displaying large icons in a 3 x 3 grid probably makes a lot of sense if you're not flicking wildly at an 80mm x 40mm touchpad to move a pointer around. No thanks.
So, Windows 7 Starter it is. I'm no fan of Windows, but previous experience with laptop hardware is that if you want it to just work, you stick with the OS the manufacturer distributed. And by extension, if you want it to just work, you at least try to use the apps the OS came with. Well, that was the theory.
Acer dropped the ball on this one. The installed Windows 7 didn't include a driver for the wireless interface. I had to download the driver on another machine and transfer it over on a thumb drive. Nice. They obviously care. A lot.
It took minutes to dump IE in favour of Firefox. It took a couple of hours to dump Firefox in favour of Chrome. Chrome shines, here. It looks clean, gets out of your way, it's fast. It's right at home. About the only thing missing is that "Send Link to this page" feature that so many people miss. No biggie.
Thunderbird got a few minutes' tryout, but it creaked along way too slowly for comfort. Back to Windows Live Mail.
I'll be honest: I used Outlook Express for a long time. I quite liked it. I wished it allowed bottom-posting but otherwise it did the trick. Its successor, Windows Live Mail, not so fond of. It really isn't meant for dealing with a serious volume of mail. It fetches single-threaded, it can't partially fetch a folder and pick up later where it left off. Just those two behaviours meant that it took two days (yes, days!) for it to finish synching my mail down. And it was unusable while that was going on. During regular use, that single-tasking horror made for a frustrating client.
Maybe I'm supposed to be using Hotmail, not IMAP. No-one looks after their own mail these days. But... I care about my mail, and Hotmail demonstrably don't.
So, Windows proved pretty enough, and I gave it its chance, but it wasn't fun. Damn, it was slow!
Before you start wailing about how it's a netbook and supposed to be slow, hark back to my rose-tinted mention on the iBook... 1.2GHz G4 with 133MHZ FSB, 768MB of memory, graphics hardware so low-end as to be non-existent. All I was expecting was something comparable with that.
This was not.
Even simple things like copying a few files to a thumb drive proved painful. YouTube sucked. Windows Media Player virtually brought the machine to a halt. My fourth requirement was that I spend more time using than administering. Here, I felt like I was spending more time waiting that using.
Unix time. I'd deal with the horrors of making it work, because at least it would eventually work.
Finally, Something About Linux
The de facto standard choice seemed to be Ubuntu Netbook Edition so I downloaded the live/ install image, burned it and booted it live, to see how bad it could be.
Boy, was I in for a surprise.
It just worked. No graphics or UI problems, and it looked nice. It found both network interfaces without trouble, and that was enough for me to decide to take the plunge and just install it. Smooth as you like. About the only thing it could have done better is to use a faster local package repository. The default local choice was painfully slow. There's a button right there on the Update Manager's "Choose an Update Server" dialog that says "Best Server" or some such. It takes about 30 seconds to determine the best candidates by latency, then pick a single candidate by actual download speed. I'd rather have burned 30 seconds during the install than waste tihe time I did deciding to pick a different server.
but I've no regrets. It's fast. Way faster than Windows was. It found all of my hardware, which is way more than Windows did. It even works with my old Prolific USB serial dongle, which OS X never did. It came with a Cisco compatible VPN client, which just worked, which, again, is more than Windows did. It understands the two weird little wireless broadband dongles I use for on-call, no trouble. It quite literally just works.
I can Skype, for god's sake! It found my webcam without trouble, and while the mic didn't work first off, it was just a case of finding the Acer section on the UNE Netbook Compatibility Wiki and noting that I needed to turn off one channel on the mic control panel. That's no worse than dicking with Windows or OS X has ever been.
Compare and contrast with the supplied Windows, which had no driver for the wireless network interface.
The supplied apps were just as pleasant a surprise. The Maximus window manager is well laid out and netbook friendly. Rhythmbox is just fine, way preferable to that crappy media player Windows gave me. Chrome fairly sings along, and Evolution makes a good enough mail client that I'm not interested in jumping ship any time soon. Everything hangs together as it should, every link clicked, thumb drive inserted, email received, illicits exactly the response you'd expect from your OS: the right app does the right thing with it.
How long has the Linux user experience been this good? When did it stop being a running gag and start being genuinely pleasant to use? This is usable-by-civilians good.
When the Mini eventually buys it, old Jobsy might not be getting my subscription renewal.