My current paramour is Ubuntu Linux. I have been with them since the Dapper Drake release. I have to say that I am a big fan and and becoming downright evangelistic about it.
I wont take the point of bashing everything else out there to justify my own. I have used several variants along the path to now and have to say as time goes by I am both pleased and impressed with the efforts of all those clamoring to make their distro the king of the desktop.
I first put Ubuntu on my Sony Vaio laptop and used it for about a day, before my girlfriend asked to borrow it for school. Like me she is a procrastinator, and had waited till the last min to ask. Meaning I didn’t have time to do the 4 hour reinstall of Windows-office-patches.
Issues? Problems? This neonate user, this blissfully ignorant windows novice had none. Aside from telling Open Office to “Save as …”. She was able to use and navigate the Network, Internet, and file system with minimal questions and those relegated to simple howtos.
Imagine my surprise when I find out she is now using it to manager her mp3 player, downloading files, and generally doing the things expected of a pc owner.
So here’s the crux, could I have done this with another distro (excluding a windows answer)? Have we reached the point where Linux is “that good”? Or is this a case of a user with no expectations and therefore everything is a plus?
For the past year she has used it and I am only aware of one real “problem”: the system wasn’t shutdown properly and had to run “fsck” in Maint-mode. Which was straight forward, as i just held down the “y” key. One problem? I would be out of a job here if that were the case…
Thoughts?