I tried Ubuntu 10.10 now for 14 days and I think I need a break and will return to Mac OS X. Trying to find out what I really want and really like. The main reason is that I currently have to learn so much new stuff in the office and are pretty busy with school so I dont have much spare time figuring stuff out. The Experiment so far was fun but still proves that it’s not quite ready yet. There are things that I liked but other things that I dont like so much.

Good things:

• memory usage is lower
• boot time is lower
• ThinkPad specialties: trackPoint is awesome!, powered USB Port
• Integrated WWAN
• Android Teethering works out of the box and far more stable than in OS X
• Workspaces, You only see the apps of the current workspaces when you do Alt+Tab
• Aptitude and Ubuntu Software Center
• Switching Tabs in Chrome using the scroll wheel

Bad things

The screens are not hotplugging, everytime I plug in the screen I have to press the “Beamer” Button a few times until I get what I want

Network transfer speed is slow. I tried a lot of things and in the end I managed to get about 18 mb/s which is far lower than OS X with 45 mb/s. It might seem that I over react here but since I’m having all my data on my nas, Network speed is really important to me. Loosing more than half the speed is just inacceptable.

Scrolling really sucks. It took me 6 hours to find a way to increase the scroll speed in chrome which in the end is just a hack. The hack itself is pretty buggy, imwheel dies a few times a day which is pretty annoying. It’s no fun do debug basic stuff like that, especialy since there are tickets asking for a scroll speed setting back from 2003.

Panel items are moving when switching screens. I’m really starting to think that Ubuntu is not made for dual screens. I constantly have to rearrange the applets and icons in the top panel after I change from internal to external monitor on my notebook. This is annoying, I tried to “fix” them in position but that’s not helping either.

Sleep is funky. Sleep works out of the box but it’s not as nice as in OS X, you’ll have to wait a while till it goes to sleep or wakes up. If you have an external monitor connected you always have to move the cursor a bit so X Server becomes active. Also if you send it into sleep while beeing plugged into the external screen and wake it after you removed the screen you’re unable to log in. It somehow shows the normal login box as If you just started the machine but doesn’t let you login, it just loops five times over the login procedure and sleep status text and then gives you a blackscreen. Also often stuff doesnt work anymore after sleep. In the beginning the trackpad scrolling stopped working after sleep, if you have a “.*” rule in imwheel it also stops working after sleep. Figuring stuff like that out takes a lot of time.

GPU Acceleration for IntelHD isn’t ready yet. On nvidia GPU Accelerated Video works fairly well. On Intel HD it doesnt really work. The out of the box drivers encoding 1080p very sluggish with lots of artifacts. After spending hours installing bleeding edge drivers and compiling xbmc by hand I got it playing ok but still not really watchable.

Application Problems

Workspace overlapping windows dont resize. If you increase a windows size, say using a big external monitor and then unplug it, the window doesn’t change it’s size to fit the internal screen. They overlap to another workspace. In OS X you can fix that by click on Window > Zoom. I didn’t find anything like it in Ubuntu.

No Photomanager Application that’s close to Apperture. I tried different photo applications but couldn’t find what I was looking for. Shotwell does A good job but is more like iPhoto. Nowhere close to Aperture.

Skype version is super old. I really liked it when they changed the Skype layout a few weeks ago on OS X. Even harder is it to go back to an ancient version of Skype which is the only one available for Linux. It can’t disable notifications for certain chat’s which is extremly annoying because people are constantly changing they “Personal Messages”.

Backup – I tried different Backup Tools in Ubuntu, they are ok but dont really work out of the box if you want to have a full copy of your disk like in Time Machine. I settled for “Back in Time”. When I told it to backup on / it started to backup all mounted network shares as well as devices which is messed up. Second try was to apply it only on the homefolder. Problem was that it started to backup certain hidden .files which contained mounted volumes which had a infinite recursion effect. Luckily I noticed before it was to late.

JDownloader has graphical issues. Jdownloader sometimes has problems displaying captchas in the interface, this is really annoying as I use it a lot.

Missing Applications

Some application alternatives I chose weren’t as good as the ones I used before, which increased my desire to switch back, this was mostly caused by:

• Textmate
• Aperture
• Office 2011 for Mac
• VMware Fusion

Also I should mention that I really liked Gwibber as a Twitter application, I will miss you little friend

Final Conclusion

As you see on my list it’s pretty obvious. The very few advantages just dont justify the disadvantages. So far I’m happy with Ubuntu as my Server and Media Center but I cant yet use it as my everyday system. I think the biggest problem right now for me is the multi monitor support. It works but is to flacky for me. If you’re just browsing the web and listen to some music Ubuntu is good for you but currently it doesn’t fit my needs. I really hope they’ll improve the multi monitor support and make it possible to adjust the scroll wheel speed. The hardware related issues will probably never be fully gone. If you think how less OEM support they get how much is working is really awesome, on the other hand it’s not enough for me. Why doesn’t ubuntu pair up with a hardware manufacturer like HP, Lenovo or Dell and create hardware that works perfectly on Ubuntu and will in the next few releases? Yes I’m aware that there’s Ubuntu ready and Ubuntu certified but that’s not hard- and software that were made for each other it’s just told to be working. IMHO this is what makes Apple’s notebooks so good at the moment.

That’s mostly all I have to say right now. I hope my experiment could help you to get a bit a better picture about Ubuntu’s current state. I’m not sure if I will try it again soon or just sell the notebook and stick with my mac. I’m backing up my current Ubuntu install as I write this so there’s always a way back.