My five year old, home-built PC is now running Ubuntu seven point something something. It was that, or reinstall Windows XP.
Again.
Let’s just say that if I was going to put XP on this machine again, I’d be using an axe to do it. There are limits beyond which no-one should be pushed.
So. How was it?
Fairly not-bad.
After an almost-painless install (modulo a few intermediate hurdles caused by a KVM switch), the machine is online. The default window manager is a surprisingly usable environment, with some sensible defaults.
The one thing that really bugs me is that Gnome Do utterly fails to be a substitute for Quicksilver. Or for LaunchBar. Although many applications claim to behave been called Quicksilver for linux, they all fall disappointingly short.
For most people, that’s a quibble. My main interaction with the box is going to be over SSH and SFTP in any case; its purpose is to be a firewalled local web server, to house my hideous creations, until they are fit to crawl out, blinking and moist, into the light of the real Web.
Or something.
So, yeah. Ubuntu. It beats reinstalling Windows.
Again.
[EDIT]
I should add that David Siegel, who wrote Gnome Do, is right, and the Gnome Do project never claimed to be “Quicksilver for Linux.” My grumpy reaction stems from the fact that I was specifically looking for a Quicksilver replacement, and did not find one.
As to why one would want Quicksilver on a linux box, rather than the command line, there’s a discussion on that topic in the comments to this post.