Everything about Ubuntu, from its "Human" default theme to the "Chocolate" default background, to the RMS approved default package set is polished. I'm big on the concept of a unified desktop appearance. To a certain degree, a set of user interface guidelines should govern the overall appearance of the desktop, and distributed software should comply with at least a basic set of these guidelines. This is one of the things I liked most about the Red Hat/Fedora desktop experience, it's one of the reasons I prefer Gnome to KDE. (Plus I like rooting for the little guy, and Gnome is definitely the little guy)

It takes a really robust GUI to get me to abandon a console command line interface. Most often, I can accomplish everyday system administration tasks in less time with an xterm than I can with most graphical interfaces. Ubuntu is the exception, not because their console is any less powerful than you'd expect from a Debian based distro, but because their GUI smoothes over the shortcomings of Gnome and accentuates the real innovations of Project Utopia.

This is how all desktops would work in a perfect world.

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I never though I'd be saying it, but I've found a distro that can finally replace Fedora/Red Hat on my laptop in terms of simplicity and ease of use.

Everyone knows by now that I have a pretty strict law of laptop stability while taking my desktop off the bleeding edge of a cliff. Consequently, I'd been keeping my laptop on the trailing edge of the Fedora support cycle. But after moving to three, my Nvidia drivers were buggy, my wireless card was intermittent, Fluxbox was responding as quickly as KDE, and all the features of Gnome 2.8 were lost on the beefiness of the install.

I toyed with the idea of Debian, since its reputation is one of a two-headed tortise as far as upgrading and release cycles. I had also heard that their installer was somewhat maddening. After tossing around Mepis, Kanotix, and other Debian cheats, I found myself with an Ubuntu disc.

First of all, one disc! Aside from Gentoo, Knoppix, and Damn Small Linux, I can't think of a single complete distro that comes on one CD anymore. In fact, most full distros are up to DVD size media for install. My laptop's small hard drive was very appreciative.

So after backing up all my data, I took the leap and reformatted my hard drive. After ten minutes I was booting into Ubuntu with a working wireless card. I used the wireless card to download all the new software with a few clicks. The procedure was quick and painless, I almost forgot that I was using Debian.

Once I was inside and finished upgrading, I decided to put it to the test. My digital camera worked on the first try and importing my photos was only a one-click procedure. Project Utopia must be mainstream now, because from the time I plugged in my USB hard drive until the time that I was dragging files back and forth was a grand total of five seconds. That's right, five. Beat that, Windows. In fact, I believe that rivals Mac as far as usability goes.

The only hang-up I had was with Gstreamer, but it's catching up fast and it's a really solid design. Most of my trouble was due to meddling with patent encumbered codecs. I'll be ripping all my music with Ogg Vorbis now.

Overall, it's rare that a Linux distribution satisfies the hardcore Unix geeks and the UI fanatics. This one does it, simple and powerful, Ubuntu is my one-size-fits-all Linux distro of choice. Try it. Screenshots are on the way.

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