Hardy har har

Ubuntu 8.04 a.k.a. Hardy Heron was released last week. I'd been waiting for it for a few weeks. I had decided to re-up my home Linux installation on my Alienware computer. But rather than installing the beta, I figured I'd just wait for the actual release. At long last it arrived to breath some life into my desktop computer. I've had a few days to play with it and if I was never convinced before, I now feel that:

Linux is absolutely ready for the desktop.

I mean, I've used 7.10 on and off and that was great too, but I never used it often enough and is for the following reason:

Linux may not be quite ready for the laptop.

That is why, in this case I installed it onto my desktop computer. Granted, I have not tried Hardy on any of my laptops but that will come in time.

But as far as desktop computers are concerned, I was thrilled. I've always been a little accepting of the fact that Linux always takes some tweaking to get working. Usually that means a bunch of web searches and manual installation and editing of configurations and such. For the desktop though, just about everything worked instantly and the only "hassle" was to get the multimedia up to snuff (not included by default for licensing, etc. reasons). But that's one thing that over the past few years has been wonderful, practically everything is available to install very easily. If I had to scratch install Windows, that would require a couple days of manually loading in all the software, dealing with all of the bloody registration notices that keep popping up over and over again when you do, all of the multiple "updates" to account for the difference between the CD version and the latest updates... well, everyone knows that Windows and all of the software isn't quite as quick as they suggest. In modern Linux distros, the package manager makes it as simple as clicking a bunch of check boxes and letting it go.


Early highlights for me:

• Installation was largely unattended and quick.
  
• Windows partition auto detected and available.
• Compiz loaded cleanly (after NVidia drivers uploaded).
• I was able to get my basic working environment setup very quickly thanks to package manager.
• Some things like audio and such which were always a little flakey seemed to work out of the box.
  

er... not quite so effortless but not bad:

• Had to do digging to allow network shares with Windows.
• Multimedia of course.
• Still puzzled why things like c/c++ development stuff isn't default, this is Linux afterall.
• Downgrading Firefox3b to Firefox-2 for some reason required some digging to get right (hint: delete .mozilla from home directory). Sorry, but I need my Google toolbar.

Again, early stages but so far so good. I played around with some newer OSS software I haven't been able to play with in the work environment. I was able to download something via the bittorrent app and burn it to CD without any fuss. All in all, it was rather refreshing.