Why Ubuntu Rocks

I was first introduced to Linux by Kelly Schuerman. He was the network administrator of my high school at the time. He has since moved on to managing large campus networks.

I was using a lot of illegitimate version of Windows software. I told him that if there was something free that I could use, I would use it. Well, he happened to have an ISO of Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog. This version was just coming out at the time. I said I didn't want to lose what i do have in case it didn't work.

He said I could dual boot my system. Instead of listening to him, I just wiped everything and installed Ubuntu on the whole thing. I had troubles off the bat with it. My biggest issue was the wireless card. He had to basically do all of getting ndiswrapper to work with my wireless card. Of course this was a huge pain for a new beginner without much knowledge about operating systems to begin with. For those that have been fortunate enough not to need ndiswrapper, it is a way to use Windows drivers to communicate with hardware devices.

He eventually got it all running for me. I got frustrated and went back to Windows for a while, then back and forth a few times. Each time I realized that Ubuntu was much easier to deal with. Excluding ndiswrapper of course. The next version of Ubuntu fixed this issue.

Since then, I have run Ubuntu on that laptop. I rented a tablet laptop for my university for a while and got the stylus to work along with Beryl. With my next laptop, I booted it up to Vista long enough to make sure it worked. Once i knew it worked, I rebooted to an Ubuntu installation CD. This time, my hardware was too new. A proprietary display driver fixed this issue for me. The next version of Ubuntu had my hardware working pretty well. Not all of it yet, but this is still an extremely new laptop.

Now that I have all except about four nit picky things working on this laptop, I'm ready to say that I have it almost perfect. I was complaining about battery life, but I've since left the Compiz stuff that sucks battery power. I even wrote up a few blogs about my battery saving methods.

In between these laptops, I've converted an entire business network from Windows to Linux. The speed more than quadrupled. The security was infinitely stronger and more usable. I put in a m0n0wall box for a router. M0n0wall is a version of BSD that is designed to run a high end router system on low resource systems. (http://m0n0.ch/wall/) The backup server runs Ubuntu and only has SSH access from other systems that have a shared key set up. The Email server runs on Ubuntu. It is an open source version of Zimbra and running extremely well considering the system specs. The other server is a file server, web server, samba server, music streaming server, and a few other things. The web server is set up for an absolutely insane level of security and usability.

My Linux experience level has grown to the point where I can compile kernel modules, install Gentoo, live on command line, etc. I consider myself a pretty diverse Linux administrator. There's not a whole lot of things about a server, desktop, or laptop that I haven't dabbled in some. I had previously used a lot of different applications and tried my best to bring them together for a full featured email server, but with Zimbra, my work has gone to administration of the setup.

I run everything except my router on Ubuntu Linux.

Reasons Ubuntu Rocks:
* Very fast
* Can be very battery efficient
* Very secure
* Usually works out of the box
* High level of support
* Everything is free
* VirtualBox can run vmware images
* VirutalBox runs VM's at nearly native system speed
* Very easy to customize
* Sane defaults
* All of your files are in your folder
* All of your settings are exactly where you'd expect them
* No registry
* No fragmentation
* No viruses/spyware/malware/adware/trojans/etc
* Can use wine/cedega/cx office to run windows only apps
* Many ports of windows apps to Linux (and vice versa)
* Can run a VM for anytime that doesn't work
* Every application you will want is probably in a repository
* Meaning that anything you want to install is a click away
* Everything is completely free
* Speed doesn't degrade over time
* Only need to learn the OS once
* Every release only adds features not bloat
* You can try it without needing to install it
* You can do this as many times as you want
* Free to modify almost any installed software and recompile
* Source code is provided for all of these applications
* And Many Many More

Reasons Ubuntu Doesn't Rock:
* Still new, not all hardware works OTB
* You absolutely hate the thought of any of the pros?