This has been a wonderful year for operating systems. Instead of adding garbage featured, more bloat, et… we’re seeing considerable effort put into improving performance. Snow Leopard is a marked improvement, so much so that I am finally getting around to putting it on my work machine. And, everyone already knows about the improvements to Windows 7. What I didn’t expect were the improvements to Ubuntu.
Granted, it it still hideous, and it is still linux, but damn, its fast. Traditionally my experience has been that Ubuntu has performed at around 70-80% of the speed of Windows XP. So, I was surprised how zippy and responsive 9.10 is. I dare say it is actually faster than XP now.
Good work “guys,” keep it up.
3 Comments
It is an impressive improvement.
Personally I can’t fathom how you can call it “hideous” – I think it is long and away the best linux distribution release of all time.
I am running it on a spare work pc and dual booting it on my laptop. I rate it very very highly.
Saying that it is the best linux distribution is not setting the bar very high in terms of aesthetics. Since it uses X, and all the major window managers are horribly inefficient, it remains hideous. All the icons looks like crap, and there is just so much wasted space. The height between the file menu and where the website starts in firefox is twice as tall in ubuntu as it is in snow leopard. There isn’t really any reason for it.
And, I know there are brutally awful window manager that make everything pixel fonts, and those are just as bad in the opposite direction.
The bottom line is that gnome, kde, etc… just need to pick it up and create a nice clean, efficient interface.
i have to agree. linux has always been ugly.