Saturday, May 23, 2009

Sometimes Linux is really better

networkMenu.jpgI've been very impressed with the latest Ubuntu and it seems that the polish goes far deeper than just the eye candy.

Next week I'm off to Melbourne and the office lent me a nifty 3G USB wireless dongle, a Huawei model E169, supplied by Optus.

First I tried it on the Mac, the device has an embedded USB storage area that mounts as a disk and has the software in it. It's rather clunky but functional and of course you have to eject it before removing the device.

I plugged it into a netbook running the Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix (but presumably it's the same in the normal mix), and was automatically shown a very friendly connection wizard.

Network wizard.png


It seems to be pre-populated with all the details you might need. Suffice to say, it just worked.

Great to see a clearly superior user experience on Linux.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Ubuntu 9 is much better than 8. I experienced many crashes under 8, but 9 has been great.

Peter Marks said...

The rate of improvement is amazing.

Anonymous said...

I've tried the Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD (not installed on my hard drive) and I really enjoyed using it, even though it was slow, but one day when I get a new computer, I'll dual boot Windows (whatever version is installed) with Ubuntu and gNewSense (the last 2 installed on a 2nd hard drive and a 3rd drive for storage)! I'm a big supporter of Free software and secondly Open Soure software. I've done a blog post on my blog about the Free/Open Source software vs non-free software and I really enjoyed doing that post! I enjoyed reading your post about GNU/Linux (sorry, I like to use the proper way of saying it as Linux is the kernel, GNU is the Operating System)!