Ubuntu 8.04, The Hardy Heron, continued

Mac OS X and Ubuntu have one thing in common: You have to keep reminding yourself that that's Unix under the hood. Gnome is like Leopard, and both are to transparency what the Wizard of Oz is to hiding behind screens.

I reiterate my chief gripe about Linux, and I've played around with Slackware and Redhat before coming back via Ubuntu, to wit — it's a geek toy, and not a place for conducting business. Only Windows has enough clout to make ordinary users jump through the "You need to install drivers" hoop. Macintosh wouldn't dare try to get away with that, not with their right-brained artsy crowd.

Ubuntu looks inviting — it has Open Office, Gimp and Firefox, after all. But things get passing strange rather quickly, and in my case, I'd fallen happily backwards and full length onto my old Linux toolbox experience without even noticing the back flip.

You find the Synaptics Package Installer, and sanity resumes, or rather, the comfortable feeling that endlessly, plangently twanging the guts of this hotrod† is the same as productive work reasserts itself with the calm words, "Sane? Yes, of course, perfectly sane. Why do you ask?"

In a nutshell, Hardy is fun, and you my friend are Laurel if you think so too.

---

†E.g., partitioning my Dell Inspiron 1525 hard drive, discovering that my Master Boot Record is now totally flummoxed for the other members of my family, tracking down qgrubeditor and discovering how really, really easy it is to rearrange boot order whilst holding a tool capable of slicing your own ignorant head clean off, and so forth and so on...!