In my never ending quest to find new ways to procrastinate, I decided to give Ubuntu Linux a try. Initially I tried the "Warty" LiveCD version and was disappointed right away by the lack of support for my laptop's wireless. Afterwards I decided to give the stable 4.10 "Warty Warthog" installable release a try.
Initial impressions: Very nice, clean interface. User-friendly menu system. Stable. Good selection of packages.
After playing with this distro for a couple of hours it has become painfully obvious - it just isn't for me. I am not looking for a new primary OS since I still need to run Windows applications to do some school programming assignments. My plan is to have relatively small partitions for my Linux installation while still having the bulk of my documents and media files on my FAT32 partitions so they can be accessed from both OS'. Every distro I have ever used has automatically mounted my FAT32 drives, until Ubuntu. I had to manually edit the /etc/fstab file and create mount points before I could even mount these partitions.
Another feature I am used to being able to use is to copy my fonts over from Windows. Let's face it, Linux fonts are rather lacking. So I copied and pasted all my truetype fonts from my Windows/Fonts "folder" into Ubuntu's font directory. Apparently the files transferred, but they weren't showing up in the file manager, nor were they showing up in OpenOffice. After some Googling I found out that I was supposed to manually edit a text file for the fonts and add an entry for each one. Thanks, but no thanks.
I am not saying that Ubuntu is a bad OS. It seems perfect for someone who is looking for a user-friendly, memory-efficient and secure primary operating system. For transitional Windows/Linux experimenters like myself, however, I'd have to say that Mepis is what the doctor ordered.
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