Ubuntu: Getting in with the Grunge Set

By Matt Stephens
May 20, 2007

My story is a common one: I tried GNU/Linux a few years ago (and a few years before that, and even a few years before that), and each time grew excited by the possibilities. However I quickly realised that, although the open source OS had come along in leaps and bounds and showed serious promise, frankly I had real work to get done, not to mention deadlines. So each time, I resolved with heavy heart that I would return to Linux later, when it had become more usable and I would spend less time messing with config files just to get the basic system working.

As many people have already noted (along with a few welcome dissenting opinions), Linux is practically a viable desktop OS now: that is, it's suitable for mainstream use (as long as it comes pre-configured). And the timing is just right. With all the negative press that Vista is getting, and all the positive hype surrounding GNU/Linux (especially around the latest release of Ubuntu), I recently gave Ubuntu another try (7.04, the Feisty Fawn; I also tried the Edgy Eft and Dastardly Dalek the previous year, but failed miserably to even get the display working due to an ATI driver bug).

To say that I was impressed with Feisty is something of an understatement. I'm almost ashamed to say that it was the allure of Beryl 3D desktop eye-candy that convinced me to give Linux another try. But Gnome – and particularly the super-slick Ubuntu-ised configuration of Gnome, with its consistent and nicely balanced set of applications – quickly comes into its own.

So it was that I decided to take the plunge and have a go at using Linux as my primary OS for a while: doing the dual-boot thing, of course. It's been a liberating experience. For some reason, even seeing the Package Manager tell me that there are updates available warmed the cockles of my heart; “Wow, this is a slick OS!” The equivalent Windows Update, on the other hand, fills me with dread: “Oh crap, what gaping security flaw are they scrambling to patch now? Or, what OS-pwning DRM or WGA sinisterware are they trying to foist beneath my radar this time?” Funny how an almost identical piece of software with virtually the same function can produce such opposing reactions.

Linux definitely has a different feel to it. Of course there's the freedom stuff, which is all good. But, it's got to be said, the Linux experience does have something of a grungy flavour. I've willingly eschewed my fully paid-up Windows installation to live in a freebie OS; in a way I feel as if I've turned myself into a second-class citizen. Now I can join the disgruntled, underprivileged geeks bemoaning the lack of driver support from the hardware dudes; I can legitimately rail against Electronic Arts for not releasing Linux versions of their PC games; I can bang the drums that the big software makers aren't taking any notice of this great OS and it's like, so unfair; I can feel threatened by the Redmond behemoth, but in a totally different way from when I was a Windows user. My God, I feel like a middle-aged man in a suit trying to fit in at a student rally.

If you've seen the movie Flushed Away, I feel like the rodent from the upmarket house in Hampstead who eventually realizes that the grungy life with “real” salt-of-the-Earth creatures down in the sewer, living on garbage and cast-offs, is altogether more fulfilling. Life “down here” with the sewer rats has much more substance and meaning. Of course, I'm not comparing Linux users with sewer rats (at least not deliberately); it's an analogy which I'd better move hastily on from.

So, the point that I'm really trying to make is that Linux is good; it has its grungy studentware feel, but it's all about substance. The 3D eye candy is just a ruse to get you hooked and make you more productive.

Of course, there are problems: the honeymoon period lasted for at least a minute or two. The first problem, which really can't be blamed on Linux, is that it's still a predominantly Microsoft world out there. To get anything done, I had to boot back into my Windows XP partition, rattle around for a bit, and then reboot into Ubuntu, sort of hoping that no-one noticed. It's a bit like someone deciding to live alone in the jungle for a month, but nipping into their nearby luxury motor-home any time they want to cook some food, order a pizza, shave, take a shower, browse the BBC news headlines, or download the latest episode of Lost. It kind of palls the whole adventure and defeats the object.

My main issue was having to work with MS Office documents. I did try OpenOffice to see if it could work for me as a Word substitute. In fact, I'm writing this article using OpenOffice Writer (that's why the apostrophes you're seeing aren't smart-quotes). OpenOffice does have some nice features, and I've found that I can set it up the way I like it (e.g. mapped its full-screen toggle to F11 so it's consistent with Firefox). But there's just... something. Something inexplicable that I feel I've lost by not using MS Word. Perhaps I'm merely thirsty from not suckling the KoolAid; but I'm sure that's not it. There's obviously a huge amount of work that's gone into this free office suite. And that, I'm convinced, is the real problem: MS Office is powerful, sure, but it also seems somehow effortless. It's got that “understated power” feel. By contrast, behind OpenOffice's attempted-cool exterior one senses that there's a legion of workers desperately shovelling coal into the furnace to keep the boiler running.

It's the difference between cruising along comfortably in a BMW 5-Series, and thundering down the motorway in a tiny Fiat Uno, pedal to the metal, engine screaming, cage rattling, exhaust pipe exploding, and just about keeping up with that Beamer (which happens to be at half-throttle).

(I'm just kidding, by the way; I like OpenOffice; but I do get the feeling that if its developers just stopped trying so damn hard, they might achieve better results. Crazy, I know).

What else? Oh yes, anti-Microsoftees (Microhardees?) tend to snigger at the number of times Vista users are faced with popup dialogs asking if they really, really meant to click OK on that last popup dialog. But as a Linux user, be prepared to type in your password an awful lot; and be prepared to type sudo gedit xorg.conf at least twenty times a day, until you eventually (maybe) manage to get your whole system configured just-so.

Canonical's aim with Ubuntu is to create a desktop OS that even somebody's grandmother could pick up and use. To that end, they're certainly making progress. The default desktop is lovely and clutter-free; nicely focused on user-oriented tasks. But heaven forbid that the same grandmothers should be expected to configure the system. Ubuntu will be killing grannies at twenty paces. All it takes is one little typo or misconfiguration in your xorg.conf, and “bang!” there goes your X desktop. When you Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X, you're faced with the following nastiness:

The recovery process is not nice. Ubuntu, if it's really being targeted at grandmothers and the like, needs a fail-safe Get Out of Jail Free card. Instead of the above screenshot, there should at least be a dialog offering to restore your xorg.conf from a backup; or to return to a “last known good configuration” - the sort of thing Windows does, in fact.

Eventually (we hope), Ubuntu won't face this problem because the configuration will all be automated; but there'll always be weird hardware to configure, which involves making manual changes. And in the meantime, setting up most hardware just seems to involve Googling for things like “Feisty ATI 3D lock-up”, discovering a forum post where someone had a similar problem, and following the prescribed steps – which invariably begin with “Open up a Terminal window, and type sudo ...”

That's another issue, in fact: having to drop out of the GUI to configure stuff that isn't even all that eclectic. Personally I blame all those “how-to” web pages and forum posts out there (“how-to get your ATI card doing a dual-display”, next to “how-to nail jelly to the ceiling”; “how-to get the little side-buttons working on your Intellimouse Exlorer 1st Edition in Feisty”; etc. It's just a matter of time before the OED officially admits "howto" the verb in addition to how-to as a noun). For one thing, there's a shallowness to these quick-win solutions. No explanation; don't even try to understand what you're typing into that scary console window; just type, and paste, and if it doesn't work then you're stupid. (And believe me, when it doesn't work, like me you'll feel stupid).

Don't get me wrong, these how-to guides are infinitely useful, and they're posted by tirelessly patient gurus who work hard to keep the Linux world spinning. And, without being able to Google(TM) for specific solutions to little hardware or OS config irks and issues, I expect I would have lost patience and scurried back to Windows quite early in the setting-up process. But the existence of these mini-guides really takes the pressure off the OS/driver developers, and in particular the distro makers, to incorporate all this step-by-step config stuff into the UI. Instead of spending time kindly providing a boilerplate xorg.conf entry to copy & paste, perhaps these (admittedly nice and helpful) howto-page authors should link to an on-line petition, urging the distro makers to help automate that specific set of steps.

The process would be rather painful, as no-one would have a clue how to get their installation working in the meantime, meaning everyone would either suck it down and sell their souls to the DRM-slurping Daemons of Redmond, or buy a Mac; but we sure would see some speedy improvements to the (already rather good) distros out there. The pressure would be intensified to raise the bar of user-friendliness in Linux.

Okay, that's a fairly mixed signal that I'm sending. Either the Linux distros are rather good, or they fall short and the developers need to be petition-bombed to get their arses into gear and automate more (all!) of the setup process. Thing is, both of these things are true. Linux, particularly with the extremely slick, Ubuntu-ised Gnome UI, comes sooooo close to being wonderful and easy to use/set up/support. But the moment you need to step off the path most travelled and configure something, you're dumped into scary console-land, and the whole experience is revealed to be a haphazardly daubed façade on a highly technical OS. It's like a group of geeks actually shaving, dressing up in smart clothes and heading out to a trendy wine bar; and then letting themselves down by talking loudly about Babylon 5 all night. And doing the super-loud nerd laugh, of course; it starts at the back of the throat and guffaws out of the nose.

There are definitely things about Ubuntu/Gnome/X/GNU Linux that I love, though. For example, after taking the “screwed X” screenshot, I plugged my digital camera into a USB port and switched it on. Instantly a “Camera Import” dialog popped up and offered to import my photos:

“Yay, this is more like it,” I thought, “much better than Windows' obtuse 'Found new hardware' wizard.”

So I pressed Alt+PrintScreen to grab a screenshot (old Windows habits die hard). Another dialog popped up, asking where I would like to save the grabbed PNG. Ooh, it's like walking into a ***** hotel and the doorman offering to rub my tired, street-weary feet. Actually, that's never happened to me, I'm glad to report; but anyway... The filename was even a useful take on the title of the first dialog. In a fit of Hofstader-esque recursion, I took a screenshot of the “save screenshot” dialog:

In fact, it's exactly these kinds of simple little nods towards usability that are making me warm to Linux more and more. For example, using Nautilus (the default Gnome file manager in Ubuntu), if you choose to rename a file, instead of selecting the whole name, only the first portion (not the .extension) is selected. Makes sense, and it's another little nod towards usability. Like it.

Talking about renaming files, one of those niggling things that (after a decade of it) drives me up the wall in Windows... changing a filename extension produces a dialog with the most asinine message: “Changing the file type may cause the file to stop working with some programs. Are you sure you want to proceed?” Err yes, otherwise I wouldn't have tried to change it in the first place. Changing the filename extension is a common thing in everyday work flows, e.g. creating a text file then changing it to .html or .xml. Windows assumes that you don't know what you're doing and tries to correct you. But using Gnome's Nautilus file manager... no more asinine dialog. Bliss!

And I solved the OpenOffice issue by installing CodeWeavers' excellent CrossOver Linux (a commercial product based on the open-source WINE) and digging out an old MS Office CD that I'd forgotten I still had. I loved seeing the “Simulating Windows reboot” message pop up while installing MS Office. Linux itself didn't need a reboot, of course. Actually that's not strictly true; I had to reboot to get the OpenOffice menu item to appear in Ubuntu's Main Menu; and then reboot again to get the MS Office menu items to appear. But given the near-miracle of seeing these archetypal Windows apps run flawlessly in an alien OS, that's a less than trivial issue.

Sometimes, it must be said, you get what you pay for. Being able to run MS Office removes a major hurdle from switching 100% to Linux. Without that ability, I would have been faced with the prospect of having to boot back into Windows any time I needed to just “get important stuff done”.

Linux does have something of a grungy feel compared with the faux-substance, glitzy world of Windows; but when all the little things add up, I'd rather be grungy than glitzy (although it's just a matter of time before I buy a shiny Kool-Aid keyboard). I flat-out refuse to grow a goatee, though.

Messages

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ubunto 7.04
jOe faddell
e-mail address etc
Gray
  If you don't want your email address published, then don't put it in!     ...
Anonymous person 
Printers and emails
Matt Stephens 
hi Matt,  ......um, since i posted my email address BEFORE you put the disclaime ...
jOe faddell 
Familiarity
Wayne 
open office minor problem
jOe faddell 
re: Familiarity
Matt Stephens 
Welcome to our world
Neil 
presenting from ubuntu
Taylor 

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