OT: What's the deal with Ubuntu?

[wj]

On Mon, 2005-05-09 at 21:10 -0400, Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> There's a lot of talk around the Linux camp about Ubuntu: why? I've read
> some reviews about it and a few snippets here and there of users
> opinions on it, but I still don't get it.

I have it running on my laptop right now. I works pretty good. You only
have to download one CD and it was very easy to install. 

Pros:
* Easy to install
* Easy to find software for it
* ACPI support seems like it might be a little more mature. Suspend to
disk is enabled out of the box and from reading it seems to work for
many people. Unfortunately it does not work on my laptop, it acts like
it going to suspend and then starts back up.
* They'll send you a free CD if you ask for it.

Cons:
* Setting up a development environment in order to build applications
and drivers takes a little more time, it's not an install option
* Things are different the FC/RedHat, you have to learn a new set of
configuration tools and such.

Interesting:
Ubuntu does not create a root account by default. It setup to use sudo
for everything. I am not experienced enough with administration to know
if this is a good thing or not. I do know that it is convenient for some
things but does cause problems with some applications that require root
access. For example, ethereal did not work for me after installing it
because of root access issues. It's probably not hard to fix but takes
time to find the solution.

I am going to switch back to FC because I am familiar with it. I did not
find anything compelling enough to justify the time to learn the new way
of doing things. Ubuntu would probably be easier for novice users who
just want to do email, word processing, desktop publishing, etc.