I recently got an older laptop that refused to take Windows anymore. I tried installing Win2k, XP Home, XP Pro, and they just flat-out would not work. I was going to slap Debian on there, but Debian on a laptop is kinda annoying, especially if you want to get wireless set up. On a lark, I snagged Ubuntu 5.10.
Installation was familar enough; it was a simplified Debian installer. Everything went smoothly, and now that I've had a bit to poke around, I think I can say that Ubuntu makes an excellent desktop/laptop Linux distro. Why, you ask? Well, here are a few reasons:
- -A minimum of services installed - you get cron, at, cupsys, syslog, klog, and that's about it. I installed SSH too, but that's just because I likes it.
-Root is disabled! The best thing about this distro, I think, is that root is disabled and you administer the computer via sudo. From what I can tell, sudo has been sensibly configured. It seems like it'll be reasonably difficult for a n00b to fuck everything up, unless you happen to type sudo rm -rf / or something like that.
-Wireless was easy! The onboard wireless adapter was correctly identified during install, and it was a matter of supplying my wireless router's info, key, and activating the adapter.
-Sensible software choices - They kept the bloat to a minimum. You get Firefox, Gaim, OO.o, Evolution, and, of course, Gnome as a desktop. There's not as much software as debian, but Ubuntu uses Debian's apt system, which I really like. If you really want something, you can always just compile the source, I suppose.
- -The root account is disabled! This was a shocker for me. But it's just a matter of sudo passwd root and you can vim the /etc directory to your heart's content.
-The polishing of the installation and configuration comes at expense of supreme customizability of other distros (like Debian), Of course, you can get away with a simple base install if you want, but if you're a fan of a zillion options, especially if you want to build a server, Ubuntu probably isn't the best choice
