It’s that time of year again. The latest version of Ubuntu, the most popular linux distribution of the past few years, version 7.04 codenamed “Feisty Fawn” just came out. But what does it bring to the average user?
Before I start my brief review, let me preface this by stating that Feisty is definitely an improvement over earlier versions and most certainly the best Ubuntu release to date.
Yet my concerns with linux on the desktop have little to do with the extremely minor improvements new releases of the main distros bring and have to do with deep-rooted problems regarding system administration and configuration. So is the latest version of Ubuntu alleviating any of the longstanding issues a novice/casual linux user is bound to face? The answer is ‘yes’, although it doesn’t do enough, in my opinion. Two are the additions/improvements in this version that are of importance: Network Manager, by far the most important addition and one that’s bound to affect millions of people as it makes wired and wireless networking as easy as it should’ve been in the first place and — finally — provides WPA support to everyone. Second, the convenience brought by easy, automatic codec installation and data migration from Windows. Other than that the rest are more or less the usual stuff one gets to expect from all new distro releases: new Xorg, new kernel, new versions of applications, dæmons and services, new Gnome, etc. It’s been like that for many years and things have not been changing much in terms of ease of use for the average user.
The new Ubuntu is definitely impressive considering the value and quality of its software and the fact that its free. Desktop linux has progressed in the past four or five years, however I fear that its pace still seems unbelievably slow: use and management of the system remains difficult and convoluted for the uninitiated (just take a look at the number of problems people often have with their installation on ubuntuforums.org and you get the picture), graphical, easy to use tools for the configuration and fine-tuning of important parts of the system are missing: e.g. ALSA, Sharing [SMB/NFS]), device management and power management remain somewhat erratic on several configurations among others and often require use of the terminal, hand editing of configuration files, installation of modules etc. I’ve been writing this type of commentary, more or less unchanged, for more than four years now and it remains as true today as it did back then. Having said that, interest for the desktop seems to be dominating the efforts of the two main commercial vendors (Novell and Redhat) and several developments are taking place at the library/framework level (take for example the work done for KDE 4.0; I really don’t know what the Gnome people are doing to improve the Gnome desktop in the longterm). While it may take a bit more than a year or two until a solid foundation is in place for truly well structured, usable, modern and friendly linux desktop solutions to appear, Ubuntu currently represents the best the community has to offer today and a damn good desktop solution for anyone willing to invest the — admittedly limited — time required to get to grips with the realities of linux. In my opinion its definitely worth it, but I’m still concerned about the lack of vision within the linux development community and cannot avoid noting how hard it all seems to the novice user that does not know (or want to know) anything about lsmod, /etc/*, ./configure and so on.