I bought a new laptop, which arrived last Wednesday. It’s a Dell Vostro 1400; the specs are: Intel Core II duo 1.4ghz, 2gb ram, 120gb hd, and a 9-cell long-life battery. This machine was quite a deal, or so I thought. The next day, Dell sent me an email saying something like “You’ve expressed interest in our Vostro line of computers. We’re running a sale for [$100 less than I paid for the same computer].” Grrr… From what I read online, Dell wouldn’t have been receptive to giving me a rebate, so I decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
Oh well. The thing has a nice screen, very long battery life, and seems to work just fine. I installed WinEDT to edit LaTeX files (a mathematical typesetting markup language), and it had a number of neat features lacking in TeXShop (the Mac equivalent). It sucked in a variety of other ways, notably that the computer slowed down if I didn’t reboot periodically. This sort of poor performance is new to me—I’ve been exclusively using OS X since July of 2002. I wanted to install Linux, though Webs05 advised that I wait until the new version of Ubuntu comes out. Never one to follow advice, I decided to try the release candidate for Hardy Heron.
The install went fine, but WiFi didn’t work. Several hours later, I decided that since all the advice I saw online related to Gutsy Gibbon, I should try installing that. After much more Google searching, I discovered the solution, something which I should have found much sooner. (I didn’t think to check in Windows what chipset is actually in my computer; the Dell documentation was just plain wrong on that point.) Admittedly, I was stupid in various ways, but I doubt that the “average user” would have been able to fix this. On the other hand, the average user probably couldn’t fix a similar problem under Windows, even if the solution would have been easier to find. There was also a problem with the sound, whose solution I found quickly, but it involved editing a config file by hand.
First impressions of Ubuntu: much faster than Windows XP on identical hardware. Install (modulo the driver problem) was much faster and simpler than installing Windows (at least as I remember it). Installing programs is actually quite a bit easier than installing them on either a Mac or Windows. Ubuntu has a neat utility to automatically find supported programs, and download/install them at the click of a button.
I installed TeX/LaTeX, and two integrated LaTeX editors: Kile and TeXMaker. Both were substantially better than anything I’d seen on either Windows or Mac, Kile being the better of the two. It includes a number of features which made me slap my forehead and go “Why doesn’t everyone else do that?”, including templates for common document types, and pulldown menus to find uncommonly-used symbols. Given that LaTeX is my most commonly used non-web application, I think Linux and I will get along just fine.
The video player that comes with Ubuntu is very good, and it actually successfully found codecs online automagically for the video file I wanted to play. Realplayer and Quicktime almost never succeed at that (I still haven’t gotten the AC3 codec working on my Mac).
I had previously used RedHat Linux in the late nineties, and things have gotten a lot better since then. I only had to edit one config file, it found networks automatically, drivers actually existed for all the hardware I wanted to use, I didn’t have to recompile the kernel, there was no obnoxious “screen calibration” thing, etc. After it was installed, I think it’s probably about as easy to use at Windows XP.
The only cons I’ve seen so far are the difficulties in setting up drivers, and that the computer takes a long time to hibernate. Also, that if anyone finds out that I use Linux, then I’ll be branded as some sort of uberl33t jerk that everyone loves to hate.