Ubuntu has been installed for a couple of days now, and so far it’s far exceeded my expectations. One of the nice things about FreeBSD is that there is a lot of useful information around to help you through problems, but as I’m discovering the amount of documentation available for ubuntu is as great, if not greater. What’s more, a lot of it answers specific questions I have.

It took me only an hour or so to get to a point where I had the nVidia graphics drivers installed and a dual head setup running. This gave me direct rendering and resulted in glxgears giving speeds in the 3500 range (FreeBSD was giving approx 180) – more than fast enough for me.

After some more digging I managed to install mplayer and had movies playing with a smoothness I had never seen under FreeBSD. The whole system still felt responsive and usable, whereas under FreeBSD it was sluggish. Of course getting mplayer installed took a little persuasion and learning about the way the installer works, but thankfully mads was helpful to point me in the right direction.

When I plugged in my external hard dirve it just appeared. No messy mounting configuration, just “plug and play” – exactly as it should be.

Overall I’ve been very impressed so far. The system is stable and everything just seems to work (so far). Plugging in a webcam and it’s detected and available to Gnome Meeting! This is where all operating systems should be. Thom told me when I debated making the switch that Linux had come a long way on the desktop, but I didn’t believe him until now. Sorry mate!