Ubuntu 8.10
Waiting for the next version of Ubuntu, the countdown is over but I guess someone has to actually be awake to update the site. I do all my work on a Mac but have an old PC from 2000 with XP. It's mainly used as a second screen to look up code examples, write articles, email, Google docs, etc. This got a lot easier when I found Synergy [http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/] which lets me use the keyboard and mouse connected to my PC, I can go off to the left of my pc screen and right onto my mac. It lets me copy and paste between them, syncs the screensaver and does it all over the network. The downside is that any heavy network traffic makes it jumpy, the upside is that it works with linux too.
XP is a great operating system but it's already 7 years old and Microsoft has announced plans to fade out sales. While they plan on supporting it (probably paid support and security fixes) until 2014 I think xp will start to be forgotten by developers who will want to focus on newer versions of windows. I get into it more on my other blog [http://chalk-it-out.com/blog/2008/10/how-the-internet-is-changing-media-software-and-how-we-use-computers/] but the idea that I won't have to have an anti-virus package scanning every file coming in and out of the system and updating it's definitions all the time, and the idea of being stuck with a forgotten OS (my pc will never be able to run Vista or Windows 7 and I wouldn't want it to) when I could get Ubuntu which has the security of a Mac, all the apps I need for now, it even looks better than Leopard and as I'm writing this the community built apps of linux/Ubuntu are a lot more advanced than anything free available for Windows XP and they'll still be improving off into the future. From now on Windows will just be something I have to run in parallels now and then to test sites in IE, and make sure the Windows version of AIR doesn't have any bugs that affect my apps.
As a side note some of the new features in Ubuntu 8.10 that made it ok for me to switch (after trying the release candidate) are:
- Improved stability
- Better networking (It used to be a pain to setup wireless networking, now it's all automatic)
- SAMBA (my pc is also a media server and now it can easily share files with my Mac and Xbox with SAMBA built in)
- Installing software (It used to be quite complicated for someone unfamiliar with linux to install proprietary software like Flash, now it just takes a few clicks)
- nVidia (My graphics card was always a pain to set up in Ubuntu, word is that 8.10 won't make me manually change it from 640x480, but nVidia is still working on 3D graphics support for all the cool effects.)
Edit:
Legacy nVidia card support still seems limited.. it defaulted to a higher(usable) resolution and eventually the developer over at nVidia in charge of writing legacy linux drivers did write some that were compatable with the new xorg, but I still can't get any fancy effects going.
