My experiece installing Ubuntu Lunix 2579

Followup: Day 2. ---------------------

- Last night, I spent a few hours playing with my "new toy". Installating applications was a very pleasant experience, although a few didn't work. I didn't bother troubleshooting.

I played a bit with Google Earth, and was disappointed when I got some distortions of the graphics: While zooming into an Egyptian artillery range, the screen fractured, interposing bits of a game I had played earlier (Abuse) over parts of the landscape. It was a very odd behavior, but one I'd seen from X before.

A few minutes later, Google Earth froze - Taking the system with it as well. The mouse pointer was able to move, but I was unable to click on anything, quit out of the program, or start new ones. I was unable to kill-restart X with ^-ALT-Backspace (Which worked for me in past distros).

I left it overnight, but the machine did not recover. There's likely some whiz-bang keystroke that would recover the situation, and perhaps there's a solution or explanation buried in some document somwhere, but that should not be necessary, given Ubuntu's reputation of ease and usability.

So, altogether, I am unsurprised. Although I am impressed by how far things have come in the Lunix world, the current wave of Linux hype is, as usual, overstated.

Ubuntu is a visually and functionally very pleasant, and much improvement has been made in usability over the years, but it's still not "there" yet.

Ubuntu is easy to like, but like windows, also easy to distrust.

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"Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us." -Ariel Sharon, 1982

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