TheRantBastard's Ubuntu Linux Success Story

There are a lot of techie reviews of Linux distributions out there. Techies are the ones that usually read, write, (and flame) these reviews. This is a good success story of a Windows user's Linux experience. Hopefully this will have a little more weight than just me preaching to the choir.

I have been installing Ubuntu on various peoples' machines for about a year now and have had almost no complaints. Occasionally I will get a question about the nature of how to do some sort of maintenance (such as installing an anti-virus product) only to inform them that said maintenance is not necessary. I must admit this lack of support calls surprised me.

One particular friend I gave Ubuntu to was on a testing contract at Microsoft and said he was "fed up" with all Microsoft has to offer and wished there was an alternative. As you might imagine, there was no way out of the discussion at this point. Since he only had one home machine, a laptop, I initially offered to set up a Dual-Boot environment on it. He said "No way, I don't want any Microsoft products on my machine any more." Although he had never used Linux before, he was not a complete novice when it came to computers in general, so I explained the technical barriers he might run into with a Linux-only setup. I told him that he might have trouble with his scanner, printer, camera, sound, and video. I refused to wipe his machine until he assured me he had burned all his data to CDs, and had his XP and Office software available in case we needed to back out of the whole ordeal. When he promised this had been done, I went over to his house and ran a standard Ubuntu 7.04 Live CD.

I was shocked at how well it worked with the hardware even before the installation. Sure enough, after I had installed it, every single piece of hardware in the system worked flawlessly. His Camera, Webcam, Scanner, Printer, and Video chipset were all detected and working without any intervention at all. He was absolutely dazzled by all of this, and couldn't believe something that is free was able to "just work" right out of the box. He was used to fighting with Windows drivers for years. I was taken back myself, until then I hadn't had a system work that well with Linux. I am used to either a. building Linux from source code or b. using distros that were not anywhere near this good with hardware.

I had to call him the other day just to see if he was still alive, or more important for this article, if his Linux machine was still up and running. He said he never has to do any troubleshooting. He just allows the updates to continue. He has been allowing the package manager to perform dist-upgrades since 7.04 and the same installation of Ubuntu is now running 8.10. He said it feels like it is just a snappier, more refined version of the original each time an upgrade occurs. This is impressive when you think about the move from 7.10 to 8.04, which had many fundamental changes.

I find it necessary to tell this story when someone at work or otherwise insists that "Linux isn't ready for users". If by users they mean cutting-edge gamers that require only the most updated DirectX-capable machine, then no it is not ready for them. The gaming market is the last stand for user adoption. I admit I have a Windows XP Home dual-booted with my main Desktop machine. I only use it for playing a Windows game when I can't get it to work with Wine. Some of my Windows games (Call of Duty 2 for example) actually run better in Wine than in Windows. If more games are written with this level of compliance, I see an interest in game studios porting their game engines to Linux (SDL or OpenGL). Most of the work in creating a game goes into creating the universe with graphics and audio, which are just pieces of data that care not what operating system they are being run on.