Ubuntu 8.04 LTS still No. 1 for my laptop
At the risk of repeating myself, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS works great
When it comes to my main computer — a late-2002 Gateway Solo 1450 (1.3 GHz Celeron, 1GB RAM), Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is the best operating system I've ever run.
After pretty much a full year of Debian (first Etch, mostly Lenny), also great but not as great as this new version of Ubuntu, so many things are working so well that I'm reluctant to do anything but keep using this long-term support version of Ubuntu, which will have three years of updates and patches on the desktop.
I keep cranking live CDs of new Linux distributions into the laptop to see if they can do Suspend/Resume, how their desktop environments look and work, and basically whether or not they can do as well.
Fedora 9, Mandriva 2008, PCLinuxOS 2007, OpenSuse 10.3, nothing has been able to handle this particular collection of hardware better than Ubuntu 8.04.
I'm still waiting for CentOS to release its free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, which might offer greater hardware detection on the Gateway than Fedora, or might not.
And I'm open to any distribution that can meld as well with what I call the $0 Laptop.
But for now, I'm reluctant to mess with what, since its release in April, has been a very good thing.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
I could not agree more about Ubuntu and how well it runs on my old laptop, an aging IBM ThinkPad T42. All functions are supported and it runs faster now than it ever did with xp.
With the exception of my eee pc, every computer in our house runs Ubuntu 8.04. I am looking forward to the Dell MIni and Ubuntu to retire my traveling toy eee pc.
A lot of hardware seems to run very well under Ubuntu.
The requirements for desktop and laptop PCs, as opposed to servers, are quite different, and things like wireless networking and ACPI are extremely important.
Everybody wants all that power management stuff to work, and Linux is increasingly getting more of it right.
My Apple iBook does power management so well, I want to see that same level of functionality in Linux, and so far Ubuntu does it the best with my Gateway laptop.
My VIA C3 Samuel-based machine — a converted thin client on which I test distros — however, is doing worse under Ubuntu 8.04. It had better ACPI and autoconfiguration under Ubuntu 6.06, Slackware 12 and both Debian Etch and Lenny.
I hate to see Ubuntu getting "worse" for some hardware, but for those machines on which it's getting better, I'm more than happy to keep on using it.