Last weekend I decided to change my laptop over from Fedora to Ubuntu. Why? Well, it was time I made a change, and I'd started to hear pretty good things about Ubuntu, but the real reason was I tried to upgrade an old laptop to Fedora 8 a while ago and it wouldn't even find a commodity PCMCIA network card, so I couldn't use the network based installer. Ubuntu not only found that card, but also found the oddball wireless card and installed a driver for that. So I figured I might give it a go on my laptop, which is my main computer.
The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 6400, with Intel 945 on-board graphics, and Intel 3945ABG wireless chip. Fedora 6 was problematic on this and I had to hunt to find drivers that would run the display in 1680x1050 mode, and to get the wireless to work. This wasn't a major problem once I got hold of the correct drivers and updated my RPM repository configs, but it did take time. So I was prepared for a bit of a battle with Ubuntu.
The battle lasted a very short time. Basically I had to decide if I wanted to leave the current operating system there and just add Ubuntu into the spare space on the disk, or use the entire disk, and then if I wanted to encrypt the disk. OK, lets go with encrypted. From that point on it was disturbingly simple. The install went without problem, and the graphics and wireless worked flawlessly from the start - no need to figure out any arcane settings.
It was after this point that I started to get pleasantly surprised time after time. I typed in my favourite editor command 'gvim' and it told me that it couldn't run it, but if I installed one of the following packages, complete with the command line to run, I could run the command. OK, run the command, run 'gvim' again, gvim worked. Cute.
It didn't stop there though. I installed Totem to view some videos. On Fedora I had to install that then go find all the codecs and replacement libraries to get over the restrictions on MPEG encoding. On Ubuntu I started viewing a movie, it came up and told me it didn't have the codec required, did I want to search for it. OK, I'll search - then it finds the codec and warns me about the legal restrictions, asks for my confirmation, then installs it and once completed the movie starts playing. No needing to restart Totem, no need to click on anything to replay, it just takes off where it left! Impressive stuff.
When I was testing it on the older laptop I had problems with the wireless card (which kept locking up under heavy load), so upgrades would hang. I killed them off then started it up again with a wired connection. It found that it had failed, started off again where it left off and completed the upgrade. This really started to give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.
At every point I've so far been reasonably impressed by Ubuntu. Everything just seems to work and seems pretty solid. There have been a few quirks getting my calender file back from my Fedora install, but a quick look at the Ubuntu forums and we had the answer. Just about everything I use was available in either the standard software installer or in the extended installer. The only thing I had to go outside of the standard installers was Skype, and that was a pretty simple install.
There are going to be roadblocks, I am after all what may be termed a 'Power User', so I don't expect plain sailing, but I've gotten a great head start so far and feel confident that the problems ahead will be minor.