Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop
Sunday, August 31st, 2008So I’ve been using the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition on my laptop since its release and I must say that its a huge improvement since their last LTS release which I was running prior. I was previously on a dual boot configuration but I have been so satisfied with the current state of Ubuntu that I have not felt the need to boot into Windows at all. Anything I need to do on Windows has been far and few between lately and terminal services is just a click away, not to mention wine 1.0, wow has that come along way. Sure this version of ubuntu has its bugs but what doesn’t, and its not necessarily the bugs that bug me, but its the annoyances that get under my skin, sometimes caused by bugs or just design issues or lack of features. The previous Ubuntu LTS was filled with so many annoyances that it drove me crazy sometimes, such as WPA support out the box, buggy suspend/hibernation modes,ipod recognition, audio/video/codec annoyances and numerous other minor issues that just left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Their has been very little that has annoyed me with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and I have never been a huge fan of Ubuntu, but it was the lesser of three evils. I still haven’t gotten to the point where I feel I need to migrate all my debian installations to ubuntu, but this desktop lts version might persuade me to at least give the ubuntu server version another shot. I had a horrendous experience with the last ubuntu server version and I havent looked back since. I dont remember what the exact issues were but debian was just so much less of a headache. And with the lenny branch frozen with a pending release in september this may be a good time to start evaluating my options that will be runnin on my servers for the next couple of years. So thanks to the Ubuntu/Debian teams for releasing a great product. Its been a pleasure.