OK, well, better late than never, I suppose. Things have been crazy lately, but I wanted to say a brief word about my Ubuntu 6.10installation experience. From boot-up to wirelessly browing the internet took 25 minutes. This is slightly longer than for Vista, but several of those minutes were caused by my fat-fingering the partition configuration and having to redo it.
Overall, I have been very happy with Ubuntu 6.10 so far. It detected my Vista installation, installed itself nicely alongside it and gave me a nice menu to choose which operating system I want to boot. The GNOME desktop looks excellent and the system is very fast, which is to be expected. Ubuntu’s default setup gave me the OpenOffice suite, a more than capable Microsoft Office replacement. The other big two apps I need immediately were also available - Evolution, the outstanding Outlook clone/alternative and Firefox, for web surfing.
I certainly cannot complain. In 25 minutes, I had a fully-functional, free operating system with all the essential apps in place and ready to go. Installation could not have been easier. By the way, I have never had a Linux default installation detect and configure my wireless card on the first try — Ubuntu did.
Highly Recommended.
Technorati Tags: dual boot, evolution, Firefox, openoffice, ubuntu
No doubt it’s fab. The 6.xx series has really ramped up on the wireless capabilities. That is huge to me. I have no idea why other distribution developers don’t try to solve that. (Perhaps they are.) Wireless hardware is so commonplace now.
David Russell
January 16th, 2007
I had an old desktop lying around and decided to give Ubuntu a shot a few weeks ago. My experience was pretty similar to yours, though I have no near-term intentions of abandoning Windows. My biggest sticking point is being able to run some of my day-to-day apps like Quicken. I guess I could run Wine, but it’s just easier to stick with the status quo for the time being, I suppose.
Drew
February 14th, 2007