Jaunty Is A Winner

After playing with Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu Linux 9.04) for a few days I have come to the conclusion that I like it. A lot. As a matter of fact, I have only found one thing that I did not like and that was Brasero. Burning an CD .iso image took more than 15 minutes...much longer than I would have expected. For some strange reason, it thinks the DVD-ROM/CD burner in my nc6000 laptop is only 10x...

I have upgraded both my laptop and my desktop to 9.04 and both boot very quickly (the laptop boots in about 30 seconds). As a matter of fact, almost everything in 9.04 seems quicker: Open Office, Firefox, Nautilus...everything but Brasero. Maybe I can tweak it and make it faster some how.

I also appreciate having the eye candy actually work. I can now demo the full abilities of Compiz on a P4 machine with a Nvidia 5600 video card. Yes, I have 1.5 gigs of RAM but that was more for the Windows partition that the Linux one.

I have been singing the praises of Ubuntu for years and I think that with every release, it gets better and better. While Breezy Badger (one of the earlier releases) was pretty good, Jaunty is just awesome.

I have been using Ubuntu since late 2004, shortly after Warty Warthog (Ubuntu 4.10) was released. I had my share of ups and downs but continued to work with it until I installed Windows and Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) as a dual boot. The Linux partition was for me and the Windows side was for my wife who did not care to learn a new OS. At this point I was about 90% Linux and only used Windows on the odd occaision that I could not do something in Linux without a lot of heartache. That was over 3 years ago. Now I have slipped back to using Windows more (I still have some issues with my Garmin GPS and Linux playing nice together 100% of the time) but I still do most of my computing in Linux. I like the freedom it offers.

Well, anyhoo...if you are the experimental type and you have a spare PC lying around or are comfortable with dual boots, give Ubuntu Linux a try. I think you will like it.