Why I hate/love Ubuntu

A while ago I got my Dell XPS12, which have been my linux box for about a year now (too much of a gamer to use my desktop to Linux). Since I have gotten, I went with the comfortable route and installed Ubuntu, mainly because with no CD Rom, Ubuntu was the easiest one to create a Live USB with. Since then I have a USB DVD Rom, which I can boot from, and almost every time I use Ubuntu I think it is time to make a jump.

Ubuntu 14.04

Been a while since I updated here, but I have not had the time to play around with my XPS to really come with some feedback. But once 14.04 I immediately updated and have been running it for a while. One thing I only recently noticed is that now the touch screen support is much much better. It now supports drag to scroll, like you do on a mobile device, which really saves you time. I have not really played too much around with the touch screen to tell of any other improvements (most importantly the freezing issues if you use it too much).

Ubuntu 13.10

I have been using Ubuntu 13.10 for a while, so I can finally sum up my thoughts on how well the Dell XPS was performing on this release. In terms of hardware, it is pretty much well supported, everything more or less works out of the box, except the multi touch on the touch pad, at least I can not get any of the gestures to work properly. It also seems to have a bit of a sweet spot in terms of right clicking, which I struggle to hit at times. In terms of the touch screen, it works, but Ubuntu is not made with this in mind, so it is a limited functionality. For example, there is no multi touch zoom, and a touch is only registered as a left click, nothing more.

Getting back into Linux

So it has been a while since I ran Linux. Mostly because I had spent such an amount of money into my home computer, and felt it was a shame that I was not using it to full effect. So I started playing games using Crossover Office, but I constantly felt the games were not as good as they could be. I was dealing with bugs not allowing me to configure better graphics, random freezes etc. In the end, I concluded that Wine or Crossover is not the future, it is much better to live with Windows and use it for what you need.

But recently I was watching a video on Youtube and saw an ad for Intel 2 in 1. I was intrigued, and did some more Googling and ended up buying a Dell XPS 12, on a whim.

Ubuntu 13.10 on XPS 12

I recently got my laptop, after over 2 weeks of waiting. Immediately I removed Windows 8 in favour of Ubuntu 13.10. As the XPS 12 does not have a built in CD drive, I had to make a live USB and in that process I bricked 2 USB sticks which I luckily had gotten for free. Anyway for installation there were a few minor annoyances. I had to turn off SafeBoot in BIOS and for good measure I turned off UEFI as well. I never did try to boot in UEFI mode, but the BIOS never recognized my live USB as a UEFI disk, so I figured it was just as well not doing it that way.

GNOME Shell or Unity?

So, after my crash and burn with Ubuntu’s Unity, I decided to take a go with GNOME3 and OpenSUSE. My first impressions are that there are in fact very little difference between Unity and GNOME Shell..

Ubuntu 11.04… Ehh, no, make that Xubuntu 11.04 pls

So Ubuntu 11.04 was finally released this weekend, with the much anticipated (or dreaded) implementation on Unity instead of GNOME as the desktop shell. Well, I was at least anticipating this one, hoping that Unity would be a breath of fresh air in an otherwise slow moving GNOME development (and I did not like how GNOME 3 is looking either, seems like they are heading the same way as KDE4). Well, I was wrong, I absolutely hated Unity!

Ubuntu 10.10

I recently switched from Mandriva back to Ubuntu for various reasons, like performance. I must say, allot of improvements have been made.

For one, the boot (and shut down) is incredible fast. It even boots faster than my last install of Arch Linux (though on a different computer), and shut down is more or less instant. As for more practical uses, there isn’t many changes. The standard theme is the same, and a small hack is needed for moving the window controls.

The software has been overhauled, but still it has a way to go before it is comparable to Synaptic. One annoyances is that they for (reasons unknown) removed aptitude from standard. If you don’t know what aptitude is, it is a replacement for apt-get, with better dependency handling and better search function. However, a quick fix is to just install it:

sudo apt-get install aptitude

In summary, 10.10  improves mostly on performance. Other than that it is mostly a version boost of your software.