Ubuntu 9.10 on Fujitsu Siemens Amilo L1300

Impressions of Ubuntu 9.10

Too much eye candy

The gdm theme that starts has some weird animation and generally speaking is directed at the cool kids who care about those things. Does your Windows have a Knight Rider login screen like my Ubuntu does? So then I obviously tried to change the gdm theme. Not easy. Actually the Gnome window manager has never impressed me with the amount of power you have over different aspects of the system. Being able to modify and configure things exactly the way you like has always been a big part of my liking for Linux. You can obviously do that theme change if you want to modify the system at a deeper level, but then you should not have Ubuntu to start with. My easy way out of the login manager problem:
sudo apt-get install xdm
if you want to switch back to gdm, do this:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm
Nothing is as lightweight as xdm. And to my positive surprise, it's now possible to shut down the computer from the Gnome session, despite having a non-Gnome login manager. But what average Ubuntu user with a fairly modern 1.5GHz processor could do that, or even know about that? And why is Ubuntu so heavy that a 1.5GHz processor has trouble showing the cool animation of the login manager? It was a real show-stopper. And whose idea was it to "entertain" the user with some drum sound that you can't even switch off? It really starts to annoy after the second time you hear it.

The same applies to the Gnome window manager itself. It's lightweight enough for this processor, I knew that. But again, there's some blink-blink and translucency setting as default. So more processing power is wasted at unnecessary things. Luckily there was a setting for that in the Appearance menu. I think that the average person who wants to try out Linux will try Ubuntu because they have heard about it. They are not looking for a blinky system that looks like some science fiction interface. They are looking for a more solid alternative to their Windows operating system that is getting slow. And here is the Ubuntu system that is slow by default. I think this is the single biggest problem with this distribution. It has a rock-solid foundation laid by the Debian project so everything under the hood is of high standards, although not as meticulously tested. But then they try to appeal to the 15 year old target group by being cool and by using processing power demanding graphics. These people are just looking for a system that just works. If you are a geek, then use something that is directed at the geeks, not Ubuntu.


Other things

Apart from those annoying aspects, the system seems to be working. I just installed the flash player plugin and a java plugin since I don't know what kind of use this laptop will be for. I also installed vlc and started the ssh server, in case I ever have to do remote administration. And of course my favorite system monitor, gkrellm that always shows me what is going on. I really miss that when it's not there.

I don't know what this system is like in the everyday use, and won't be able to since it's going home soon. These are just my first observations.
The laptop itself is pretty loud both in Linux and Windows, which I'm not a fan of. My 600MHz Toshiba is almost silent compared to this one. I could never imagine running the default Ubuntu on that one. It would just not work.

It's a good thing to have a system that thinks on behalf of the user when that works, but then it seems like some things are incredibly hard to figure out if you do want to change them. So for beginner users this makes the barrier lower but then it also compromises control. Just like Windows has always been.

Finally, the necessary screenshot.