Do you ubuntu?

[j4]

I've been watching (mostly via her twitterings on the subject) the saga of famous librarian Jessamyn installing Ubuntu on a library computer; it's a heartwarming tale, but it's made a kind of bittersweet parallel to my own tale of woe as I've completely failed to get anything other than OS 9 installed on my old G3 Mac, due to its apparent inability to boot from anything other than its own 60GB-of-pure-stubborness hard drive. (It's a long, frustrating and not terribly interesting story.) Today, even the Motley Fool is raving about Ubuntu. I feel as though someone's laughing at me.

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

Please bear in mind that the first batch of trauma resulted from trying to get it installed on a computer which a) is over 10 years old, b) has hardware which Ubuntu does not even claim to officially support, and c) is not connected to the internet (it's possible I might have been able to make a network install work, but I gave up trying before getting to that).

My experience since then of installing Ubuntu on modern PCs has been almost entirely painless. It took about five clicks of the mouse to install a basic desktop operating system; internet connection, web, email, etc. all Just Worked; OpenOffice seemed to do everything that I'd expect MS Office to do. Obviously the more complicated/out-of-the-ordinary things you want to add, the more likely you are to encounter difficulties; but surely the same's true of Windows!

The wireless stuff was awkward, yes, & I didn't get it working. But with a bit more time (and without the stress of it being someone else's expensive hardware) I'd've probably been able to find the answers somewhere on the web (or would have wibbled at people on irc as usual). It's a popular distribution at the moment and there are lots of people far, far cleverer & more experienced than me working out how to do things with it 8-) so unless you're doing something really weird, chances are someone else will have done it already & posted the answers to one of the forums.

I say go for it -- or at least get a live CD and have a play with it...