Been Running Ubuntu

Since Novell drank the Microsoft Kool-Aid, we've been replacing our SuSE servers and desktops here at work with Ubuntu. Overall, it's been a very pleasant experience. I got Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy running on my work laptop and desktop, and on my home desktop as well. I then upgraded all three to 7.04 Feisty with no problems on any box except my 64-bit desktop, and that seemed to only be a problem with some X fonts.

I then had the hard drive crash on my home desktop, so I reinstalled 6.10 and immediately upgraded it to 7.04. (I was too lazy to download the 7.04 install CD.)

The only minor annoyance I had with upgrading to 7.04 the first time was that I clicked Go and went to sleep, only to find the next morning that it had stopped awaiting confirmation to something about 10 minutes in. The 2nd 6.10->7.04 upgrade didn't do that, so I'm guessing it was from something that I had installed. But if you're upgrading, you might want to babysit it, and not assume it can run unattended. (YMMV.)

Comparing Ubuntu with all other distros I've used (Gentoo, SuSE, Red Hat, and Slackware way back when), this is very sweet. I had been limping along with wireless on my laptop under SuSE. Under 6.10, I followed some info from the forums, and it just worked. (Admittedly, 7.04 has seen a minor step backwards in wireless, but it still works, and I just haven't taken the time to ask/troubleshoot it yet.)

Synaptic is much nicer than Yast. Not sure how to explain it, but it's just a much more comfortable experience. Gnome is also very nice. I was expecting to try to figure out how to get back to fluxbox, but after a few hotkey tweaks, I'm enjoying Gnome pretty well, and prefer it over KDE, which I used briefly when I installed SuSE.

Bottom line on Ubuntu: I wouldn't go back. Much nicer experience than I was having with SuSE.