Experience with Ubuntu

I recently wiped Windows Vista off my home PC and installed the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. I've been wanting to try out Linux for quite a while and with Vista being rather annoying and not wanting to spend $100+ to get Windows 7, I finally took the plunge.

Going in, my expectations were muted. I knew I wasn't going to be blown away by the system, that it would be such a superior experience over Windows. I expected some hiccups and some rough around the edges software. But I figured the system would be stable and easy to use, enough that we would forget we're using a new operating system in a short time.

When things work right, I get exactly that. The GNOME desktop is aesthetically pleasing, moreso than Windows to my eye. OK, that's in part because it comes with a built-in desktop background and screen saver made up of Hubble telescope images. But the windows just look nicer. Performance seems a bit snappier than Vista. It's easy to find and run the software you need. The media players--it came with Rhythmbox and I installed Banshee--are perfectly decent players. I wish they were smart enough to automatically import new files in the music library rather than rescanning, but that's the kind of unpolished aspects I expected. The system recognizes all the peripherals I've thrown at it without incident and mounts them easily. All in all, a pleasant experience.

Note my caveat, though: when things work right. What has been very surprising in the few days that I've been running the OS is how often things don't run right. I've seen two significant recurring issues.

As commented already, the system recognizes peripherals and mounts them accurately. That includes the CD/DVD drive. Put in a disk and voila, there it is. Unmounting the drive, on the other hand, is surprisingly sloppy. Ours is a family computer and so each member has his or her own account on the PC, and each of us typically stays logged in. We've done this since Windows 95 at the turn of the century (work computer) without problem. But here it's an issue.

My expectation is that if I eject the disk, the OS will automatically unmount the drive so that it can be used for a new disk. But that doesn't happen. If I eject the disk by pushing the eject button on the drive, the disk comes out (sometimes) but the drive stays mounted. If I try to unmount it, I get an error message telling me only some other user who is logged in can unmount it. Bizarre. So far I know everybody's password and so can switch to that user and take care of it. But it's not very user-friendly. And if one of the other users on the machines puts in a disk, they are in trouble.

Far more problematic are problems with audio. For reasons I have not yet discerned, there are times the machine simply seems to lose track of the speakers attached to the computer. If I bring up the sound options window, there are simply no output devices available. But only for some users. I can go on one account and see the them, and play music just fine. But switch to a different user and there's nothing, while earlier in the day that user ran just fine. So far this has happened on a daily basis, and the only solution I've come up with is the Windows-style reboot. I've worked with Unix for years and know that you should be able to run the OS for months on end without a reboot, and so having to reboot on a daily basis is quite aggravating.

I can probably live with the disk problem, because we don't do too many CDs or DVDs. But this audio thing, if I can't figure out the problem and a solution, could be something that drives me back to Windows. And that would be quite a shame.