I obviously got it done, it’s just Red Hat had a more logical interface to the process that actually required less knowledge than the ubuntu. Red Hat assumed that with a new disk there were a couple of standard designs that would work for almost anyone, so they offered those, as well as, ‘roll your own’. It was little things, like highlighting the wrong drive after every partition was built, that was annoying and dangerous if you weren’t paying close attention.

I’ll play with Unity some more, but Gnome is definitely in the back of my mind if this sucker doesn’t start making sense.

Some people with good ideas get infected with the expert bug, and don’t want to listen to other people. They also tend to assume that the only reason you would ask a question is because you were stupid, and didn’t understand the obvious advantage of doing everything their way. There have been a lot of great ideas flushed down the loo by developers getting religious about their product and pissing off the people who really want to use it for a specific purpose.

Note that 12.04 gives you all the control that Red Hat gives you too, it just doesn’t put it all up front and central. The Debian core is still back there behind the scenes and you can manage the OS with /bin/vi if you like, the Unity front end is just a shell, and one I don’t particularly like (I installed the Gnome Shell instead because it’s more Mac-like as vs. Windows-like).

Sun did some great things, but they did them their own way, so migrating is a PITA. I’m deciding on my partition structure at the moment, and planning ahead, so I can upgrade hardware without messing in the partitions.

Red Hat used to take care of that stuff, so well in fact, that I used my install disk to partition large drives for Windows, because M$ couldn’t hack it at the time. If I was still interested in mucking about, I would probably be loading Red Hat instead of Ubuntu, because it has more control if you want to use it, but doesn’t require you to use it.

I played some with 12.04 today, and it was so close to Win 7 it’s scary. I was impressed that so far it recognized all of my hardware without complaint.

There are always compromises.

I’ve been playing with ZFS For Linux lately. Pretty cool, but doesn’t integrate well with Linux’s boot process, ZFS either starts up too soon (if you have ZFS pools on iSCSI shares) or too late (if you want system partitions on ZFS). You need a two-stage boot like Red Hat uses for the rest of its filesystems, but ZFS is an alien import from Solaris and making it work with Linux would require a lot more udev hackery than currently present to bring pools in as their devices become available. Next I guess I need to play with BTRFS…

Well, I have to locate some driver updates first, because I always assume that what comes on the CDs is out-of-date before the CD is burned. At least the sucker is sort of useful with GIMP, LibreOffice, and a few other programs and utilities on board.

It actually loaded the three most current updates almost as soon as I plugged it in. For the moment ESET has stopped complaining about it being out of date.

MacOS is almost as bad. The only OS that does it right, IMHO, is Linux, where you run ‘yum update’ after your install (or run ‘apt-get upgrade’ if on a Debian type platform, or the zypper equivalent if you’re using SuSE) and it all Just Works(tm), pulling down the latest version of every updated piece of software and installing it and then that’s that. Decidedly a different experience from running the commercial operating systems, that…

– Badtux the Geeky Penguin