[CS-FSLUG] A short experience with Ubuntu

[Nathan T.]

I've been looking for a good distribution to run on my laptop for
quite some time now, if only Mandriva had worked the search wouldn't
have been long, but then I also might not have tried any other
distributions and learned what I did about Ubuntu.

Anyway I was pleased to see that Ubuntu seemed to recognize all my
important hardware immediately, it even correctly set the screen
resolution for the wide screen. I played around with the distribution
absolutely impressed at the speed in which it came up and shut down,
although I was disappointed that the hybernate feature didn't work and
there didn't seem to be a sleep feature. I tinkered with the desktop
(yes it was Gnome) and started getting used to it, I even liked that
Firefox integrated so well with it and I was considering keeping it.

After tinkering I also learned that CPU scaling wasn't within Ubuntu's
ability on my laptop, and finally I also learned that root access was
only available through the specific root console link in the menu or
by using sudo which was inconvenient compared to what I'm used to. The
real turning point, however, had to be when I had finally gotten my
NTFS partition to mount and gotten my music collection copied to my
home folder, when I tried to load the songs in Rythmbox the mp3s
wouldn't work, they wouldn't play in Totem or XMMS either. I went
through synaptic searching and adding anything I through would add mp3
support to no avail. I did try mpeg123 as is suggested one does with
Fedora, I also installed just about everything else I could find that
looked like it supported a multimedia codec I wanted but in the end
all I would up with was a mess of software that didn't do what I
wanted.

I won't say Ubuntu isn't a good distribution; however, I will say that
it isn't a good one for me to use, and quite frankly while it did
provide a better Gnome desktop than any other distribution I've used
before, I still don't like Gnome.

I'd rather not try to get Ubuntu working, I preffer distributions that
don't require too much tinkering to get them the way I want. Anyone
know when the next Mandriva is due for a free official release?