Back in April, right around April Fools Day, my primary Windows laptop decided it was going to have some hard-core registry corruption.  And since I couldn't do any sort of repairs (XP doesn't like SATA drivers) without some difficult work (slipstreamed drivers, a USB floppy or some magical friends with an extensive workshop) I decided instead to give Ubuntu a try.  I popped in a new hard drive and moved my projects over to an Ubuntu 9.10 installation.  I was working on Java projects at the time, so it was a pretty easy move.  The Qt C++ based project I had been working on in Windows also turned out to be a fairly easy move as well - getting out of Eclipse taught me a lot about qmake.  All told, I was in heaven having a REAL bash shell and the unending supply of Unix command line tools at my finger-tips without the impedence mismatch of cygwin.  And when 10.4 came out, it really was a one-click upgrade.  And that's about where my happiness with the setup comes to an end. 

The first thing that killed me when using Ubuntu as a desktop replacement for XP was Flash.  Though it's available, it's a pig dog of unbelievable dimensions on Linux.  Short of compiling and running JBoss on my little 2GB Core Duo laptop, Flash was the only thing that routinely caused my fans to kick into high gear.   And that's the second thing - under XP the only thing that caused my fans to sound like jet engines was when I was compiling my Qt C++ project, or running the unit/integration tests for the Java web service backing it.   And the power management - for a few weeks after the upgrade I'd start doing some seriously heavy computations, the fans would kick on, and 5-10 minutes would go by and the system would shut down.  It took a week or so before it occurred to me that this was the BIOS tripping the CPU temperature limit.   Okay, so here's the list of things that Ubuntu doesn't do so well for me: 

  • fan control
  • Flash
  • Power/CPU management

Okay, so next I started using Powertop and one of the first things it told me was the high-resolution timer was sucking down juice - that I should fix this because it was keeping the CPU from entering a low-power sleep state.  Okay, so I could recompile my kernel and do that.  I also can't install VMware Server 2.02 on my laptop now - the kernel Ubuntu ships with is unsupported by VMware.  Again - I could recompile the VMware drivers to match.  Not outside the scope of my capabilities, but not something I want to deal with.  I did this for years - I'm finally at a point in my life I don't want to deal with my OS - I just want to get work done.   So let's see what we have now: 

  • Recompile kernel to change power options (why is the timer not a boot-time GRUB option?) 
  • Recompile vmmon drivers for VMware.

Ignoring the Windows applications I used that have no existing versions on Linux (TurboTax, evernote, photoshop) - I had some success with Wine.  But it wasn't good enough that I'd use it over a Windows VM to do actual Windows work.

 

The next issue that's plagued me has popped up fairly recently - my X session will hang - then die.  And when it dies, it dumps me back to the login prompt, but leaves all my old programs still running (firefox, chrome, eclipse, etc.).  I haven't figured out how to get my old programs back to my new desktop once I log back in.  Something like NX would be great.  Some way of dealing with this would be awesome, but I think you're supposed to just die and/or reboot at this point.  

 

My next problem is media management - every time I plug in a media card (USB HDD, CompactFlash, SD card, CDROM, etc) the Ubuntu desktop and taskbar go off into la-la land trying to mount the device.  I've read there are solutions to this - but it's incredibly annoying, and again, I'm more interesting in USING my computer than FIXING it. 

 

And my last problem is that my task-bar power-button disappeared.  Poof gone, and I have no idea how to get it back.  

 

Anyhow, I just received a new quad-core 8GB Lenovo laptop running Windows 7 that I'm migrating to.  I'm done my Linux experiment for now.  It's getting good, damn good.  But it's not there for a power-user yet.  Or not this power user.  Windows for now until I can save up for that 17" Macbook Pro.