It's been a few months since the latest Ubuntu distribution has been out and it's overdue to be reviewed. The latest edition is almost perfect, certainly there were very few things that were bothersome and those could be configured with the included menus. Unfortunately there were still rare but irritating bugs that cropped up at bad times.

I'll go through the various areas by section, to better organise the general point.

Usability

The Install is fast and simple although it lacks the configuration of other distributions. It doesn't appear to be able to load install profiles like Redhat, although if you've previusly used a different home parition, it's quite possible to partition your drives and transfer your settings before conducting the main install.

The desktop itself uses Gnome, and is straightforward to use. One nice feature is the Compiz integration, it's easy to turn on and off depending on your preferences. The defaults are irritating in a few ways, it doesn't enable vsync by default and has irritating window open and close animations however these can be changed from the compiz configuration. The distribution is based on Debian roots and this makes updating and installing extra packages both fast and easy. It's hard to overstate the superiority of apt and dpkg over their rpm equivalent. Even ebuilds are blown away if only because all the .deb packages provided actually work without needing extra configuration.

Ubuntu does however have two important changes over other distributions. Firstly, the proprietary driver loader is finally working, although it doesn't come up instantly. This means you can use your new and expensive graphics card without having to wrestle with the system. In addition, there is a package called “ubuntu-restricted-extra” that pulls in proprietary codecs for mp3 and video.

If you're interested in more esoteric results, you can add and remove alternative kernels through the package manager, they all have restricted drivers available although some don't install by default. The kernels themselves appear to work perfectly although I noticed interesting bugs appearing on the system after extended use. It's probably better to stick with tried and tested settings if you're planning to make this your desktop.

Specific Issues

One particular irritation is that while they DO include FUSE with the system, pre-installed even on the CD version, they (Ubuntu) also uses GCC-4.2. This is generally a good thing, the latest edition of the compiler is both fast and pwoerful. However many of the more interesting FUSE filesystems like ZFS, Coda and Gluster tend to not compile on the system. ZFS for example is apparently not updated to use GCC-4.2. Well those are the breaks and it's fairly minor considering the community engineered version is not comparable to Sun's official specifications just yet. Nevertheless, it was irritating.

Speed

Ubuntu's fast, really fast. It's not as bad as previous versions of Suse, where there are memory leaks or indexers that take up processing power. The system's lightweight, the kernel's fast and despite all the supporting deamons running in the background, it doesn't interfere with the speed of the system. Certainly this reviewer would be hard pressed to recommend even Gentoo as providing a speed advantage.

There are however certain issues that impinge with the speed. While there are no memory leaks or processor hogging applications, the system does appear to take a considerable amount of RAM to keep running. After a few hours of use, it pages out to 40MB with 500MB or more resident. Fortunately it gets no worse. At no point was the memory use over 1GB no matter how long the sytstem was used for. Nevertheless, if one is on 512MB, they would benefit from using Xubuntu instead.

Security

Being based on Debian gives Ubuntu good credentials to rely on although their tendancy to use fairly recent packages is probably not to their net-benefit. The Ubuntu and Debian teams do stay in constant communication and work to fix bugs as they come up. Ubuntu itself will check for security updates on a daily basis and notify you when they're available; installing them can be done with a few clicks or one command-line statement and they apply themselves without needing a reboot.

Certainly Security is not something that one would need to worry about when using linux in general.

Appearance

The default theme grows on you after a while. It's easy on the eyes, not too bright and not dark enough to cause any problems, the background got swapped out 10 seconds in, but you hardly notice it. One important distinction is the ease of use for the Compiz engine. Well, after tweaking it a few times, it got to the point where it was nice and not too intrusive. Well maybe it's the old nerdiness talking, but anything that slows down the reaction speed of the computer gets switched off; which is to say, I don't use Compiz. The fading animations take time that you could be using the computer in. One thing that was an issue is that when the Compiz settings are set to maximum, there are rare situations where the windows will “bounce” beneath the bottom of the screen. Although they are still running, consuming memory and processing power as well as maintaining file locks, they don't appear on the screen or task-bar. The only way to get rid of the app is to fire up the system manager or run a “kill -9” from the command line. If you know what's happening it's not too much trouble although it can get tiresome to keep wondering if this time you'll have to kill it suddenly. One final thing, windows snap to the side of the screen by default, apparently this is a desired feature however having the window suddenly shift beneath the cursor is a bit distracting. Especially when you don't want them lined up; if feels like the deskop just isn't listening.

Well there's that and the fact that not all applications are compiz-compatible and very rarely there are irritating bugs that can't be gotten rid of. For example, some applications can't go full screen because the Application bar will be on top. If compiz is running, Quake Wars will work ok for a few minutes, in full screen or not, but then drop to a window and be unresponsive. Even after all the development time invested in it, Compiz doesn't seem completely stable for day to day flawless use. Lately there's been an especially irritating one where Firefox will always start up bigger than the dimensions of the screen and overshadow the top and bottom bars, it will periodically return to these dimensions disrupting whatever you're doing at the time. The only way to set it back is to whack F11 to unstick it and then the maximize button until the borders line up.

In General

Who said Linux isn't ready for the desktop was wrong. It works fast, reliably and although there are still issues, there are fewer of them than in Windows. More to the point, the system is being designed with people who have an interest in making the best system they can build, not the best system to help marketing sell.