Comments & Rants

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Update on Ubuntu 8.04…

I’m in the continuing process of evaluating Ubuntu as an alternate to MS XP/Vista.

There are still a few things that are not quite up to snuff:

• Great improvements on Firefox add-ins for videos: lots of “restricted drivers” are being installed. 7.10 had issues there…
• Stand-By and Hibernate both complain a lot when turning the laptop back on…
• Ubuntu and Applications are quite sluggish on the Dell C610 LapTop. WinXPP is much faster on same platform…
• I like date and time formats in the form of: YYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss as in 2008-05-06 17:27:32. However, I had to set the “International Settings” as “English (DK)” in order to get it. English (CA) does not!
• Last, but the most annoying: French-Canadian Keyboard Mapping is still not mapped properly!!!

I find it interesting that the general consensus is that Linux is much faster and that Vista got beaten up for the need for humongous resources. All I can say is that another C610 ¹ with XP is much faster! Perhaps Ubuntu also suffers “Modernization Bloat” just like Vista did… Or is it that the Linux kernel is stuck at “x86-generic”, instead of an optimized “x86-686”? The Linux core is Debian, after all. I’m using another C610 as a Linux server, no GUI and the Debian install is an “x86-686” optimized… Any thoughts there? I’ve searched the Ubuntu sites and I read the party line on the “x86-Generic” only. Ok! And…? so what, does not wash with me… If ALL other Linux Distros do offer optimized Linux Kernels, this may just well kill it for Ubuntu. Who has a 386 left around? What about all these CoreDuo and AMD-64s?

I won’t get all excited overall, but the worst is the keyboard mapping: this has been a bone of contention with me in EVERY Linux Distribution that I tried. Yes, I know I could re-map, etc. etc. but that is not the point. If MS can do it why can’t a Linux distribution, that claim that localization is important, do it as well? The second point is the Date formatting: this is ridiculous. I have searched everywhere and I can’t find any way to set the Date/Time format the way I want!…

Since I do have an additional hard drive for the much faster Dell 6400, I will install Ubuntu on it as well when I finish my home painting project.

In the mean-time, I’m still on C610 and Ubuntu 8.04 and I mostly surf and e-mail as the platform is much too slow for any Image editing… at the moment. I have not tried any Video stuff yet. But if the behaviour is like the one in Firefox WITH restricted drivers (so slow if hangs Firefox), I won’t hold my breath yet… Stay tuned for further details.

Regards.

• Posted by Michel at 09:02:00 in Linux
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