A few weeks back I downloaded the 64-bit PC (AMD64) desktop CD ISO and tried out Ubuntu. I was immediately impressed, Gnome looked awesome, user friendliness was written all over it, I had to try it out on the hard drive.
Backed up the laptop yesterday, fired up PartitionMagic to lay out my 80GB drive. A 20GB partition for Ubuntu and a 2GB one for swap, I’m old school, swap equals twice your memory. I thought of trying the partition tools that come with Ubuntu but I’ll leave that exercise for another day.
Once the CD booted, I clicked the install desktop icon, answered a few questions, assigned the partitions to their mount points and 20 minutes later I was running a 64bit operating system. The laptop was very responsive and I can’t get over how nice Gnome looks, the fonts have nothing to envy ClearType.
The package updater popped up and informed me that 127 packages needed updating, I looked them over, new kernel, a newer Gnome, yeah let’s do it. 15 minutes of downloading, updating, rebooting for the new kernel and I’m back to a friendly signon screen.
Now it’s time to start customizing, go into network settings, assign a static IP, DNS servers and add some hosts. Copy over my Firefox bookmarks and cookies from the Windows partition and I’m starting to think that I don’t ever need to boot back to Windows.
An hour goes by and I have the system tweaked to my liking, everything works and I’ve yet to hit a command line. Desktop Linux has truly arrived, the other distros need catching up, Windows is something you copy your settings from and Mac OS X has become obsolete.