michaeldehaan.net

The purpose of Netbooks is largely to launch Firefox. Truth. Basically. Ok, Firefox, thunderbird, and xchat are import for me too. That is largely it. (Except for ChromeOS, which wants to NIH Firefox … I guess so it can run more things via JavaScript… honestly I don’t know). Ok, back on topic…

Lately I’ve been having some problems with various kernel issues on my F11 machines, and Fedora on my NC10 has never been /quite/ happy, so what the heck, I decided to test that other OS so I’d at least have some first hand user experience. To date, I’ve never actually /used/ Ubuntu before, just stock Debian, and I generally still object to them being less free. Anyway, the Samsung NC10… and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

Here goes.

I’m suprised to say it, but I really like it.

First off, it installed out of the box, with everything working. By contrast, I had to install F10 about 6 times to manage to get it installed. (This is not a fair comparison as I have not tried F11 on the same machine). The installer had about 6 or 7 screens and didn’t ask many questions — configuration can happen later if you want.

It looks fine. Notifications and the way apps launch is nice and simple.

Second, I really really like the launcher. By using Gnome but keeping everything fully maximized, it’s a huge win, being optimized for an environment where I don’t want to mouse, but I still want to use NetworkManager and Power management and the other things that GNOME gives me that are a pain to make behave nicely in alternative window managers.

Another nice point — no kernel problems or weirdness (I am told suspend doesn’t work from the web page, but haven’t tried it, but I really don’t ever suspend this machine). My F10 install is /really/ unhappy with that wireless card, and frequently dropped the connection while I was working from Duke’s student center today.

Finally, they have all the settings and buttons in nice, easy to find locations, with a lot of good things installed by default. If you want to get to synaptic or the terminal, you can, and it’s not really crippled in any way or the other. I can see non-techy users using this and I find it better than the menu structure most desktops have (i.e. it’s not Windows like).

For someone who just wants a platform for running Firefox (and maybe a few other simple things) I think they did a pretty good job.

I’d like to see Fedora include something like their launcher — not just for “netbooks”, but also for laptops in general.

While Ubuntu does get a fair share of hype for being “Linux”, when that is clearly /not/ the case (lots of nice distros out there, dudes!), I think they did some good things here that other distros could learn from.

I also like that on the UNR page they list what laptops it works with and what is unlikely to work. That’s good messaging and would let someone who has not yet bought a netbook know which were good models to buy. I really like that they QA’d particular hardware and told you about them.

Just to avoid this from going out of context — my other machines still run Fedora. I’m not planning on changing that. However, for a netbook I primarily want to just surf on from my couch (or when away visiting someone), I do like this, and I would recommend it (so far) to other people with netbooks if they want something easy to setup and use.

Fedora is a developer focused distribution, that brings good things to life, and it is a good ecosystem to foster outstanding upstream projects, but I can also see that there are some good things about the attention to detail people say they are good at. I think they are things to be learned from greater study of UNR, just like I think Ubuntu can learn a heck of a lot from the way Fedora about being more inclusive of the development community.