Sunday, while watching the Super Bowl, I was playing around with Jack’s computer, and noticed how much faster it seemed than my computer. Since Fedora Core 3 was installed on both machines, and they came from the same store front with the same specs, this seemed very odd. Could it possibly be because I had installed everything, including the kitchen sink, on my machine?
Trying to delete stuff seemed impossibly tedious, and since I was thinking about doing a complete re-install, why not try a new distribution? I had read lots of good things about Ubuntu and had downloaded the install CD some time ago, so I decided to give it a try.
The text based installer seemed very straightforward, and asked a minimum of questions. It took a while downloading all the updates but after a while, I was presented with the opening screen. I had expected to dislike the brown color scheme but found it rather soothing, though I did change the desktop background to something livelier.
I decided to use Evolution as my email client, rather than Thunderbird, which I have been using for a while. I synched my Palm to Evolution, so I can dispense with using J-Pilot. I had previously thought Evolution slow and clunky, but am enjoying it so far. It is certainly faster to set up filters.
Using Ubuntu means using Gnome as the desktop environment. I like the looks and feel of Gnome, so I am quite comfortable doing so.
Ubuntu is based on Debian, which I had not used before. I am not sure if some of the differences that I encountered in working in the shell are due to Debian or Ubuntu, but I did find it odd that cpan was installed by default without gcc (the compiler) being installed. However, it was quick to install the compiler using Synaptic. Using sudo for everything seems a little odd too, though it is simple enough to run a root terminal session for more extensive work setting things up.
Altogether I am quite pleased. And, yes, my new system seems a lot snappier.