On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 12:06 PM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote:
> > 1 - Have the distro wars settled enough so that Ubuntu is emerging as the > desktop of choice? > I don't expect the distro wars to ever settle. My feed from distrowatch.comhas had 23 postings in the 20 days of January. > > 2 - Can Ubuntu run on the most modern laptops, with full access to the > often proprietary device drivers? Ubuntu has run on all of my last three laptops. And, though there were some hiccups when the machines were new, because I tend to buy at the bleeding edge, they all run flawlessly now. I ran fedora and redhat prior to that, going back through 4 more laptops. My current thinkpad has a proprietary fingerprint reader that wasn't supported and the old ways of accessing the accelerometer weren't working when I researched the issues back in november. The issues may be resolved by now. > > 3 - Is Ubuntu's package management sophisticated enough that upgrades are > trivial to perform and free of version conflicts? > My talk about package management hell last week (inspired by discovering nixos.org the functional meta-package manager) wasn't based on Ubuntu experiences. Apt and Synaptic do a fine job of managing packages as long as you don't try mixing and matching packages from different system distributions or from idiosyncratic repositories. [Nixos is both a package manager and a version of linux which organizes itself using the package manager. It bootstraps from a minimal core and builds consistent branches of installed libraries and programs. It looks to me like the right way to manage packages and configurations in the long run, but I have yet to get my feet wet with it, or Windows 7, or the jaunty jackelope.] > 4 - Are there players/viewers/editors for the common media/formats? Maybe > this is better asked as: What applications and data formats are you missing > most? > I haven't noticed missing media/formats. The applications which I have installed under Wine are World of Goo (linux version promised), Firefox (just testing), Robodance (don't ask), and Pathaway (a GPS map manager for the Palm Treo I don't have anymore). I believe that Picasa brought along its own copy of Wine, too, when I installed the linux build a few weeks ago. -- rec --
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