Ubuntu 10.04 is "mostly" great

I have been using Ubuntu 10.04 on my Thinkpad for about a week now. I have to say, there are great enhancements on the Operating System. For one thing, the boot-up time is just about unbelievable. To shut-down, suspend or shut-down your machine have all become rather synonymous. The GUI has also be enhanced considerably and I find myself quite happy to start working on my laptop if you get me !! Moreover, I believe it is ever easier at this point to work with scanners and printers and other external hardware.

The other day, I needed to scan a paper, and whilst I was at my friends house, we could not use his laptop (which still had Windows XP installed) to connect to the scanner since the scanner driver CD was lost. We hooked the scanner to my laptop, et voilà !! I could scan my document and everything went superbly.

However, life is not all beer and skittles (not for all of us anyway) !! There are some problems when dealing with the new OS. For one thing, there are some problems with the new version of Firefox: When using Firefox with any Extensions, I could not use my keyboard to move around. copy and paste or use the tab key. I believe there is a fault in some upgrade file.

All in all, it is quite interesting to see that Ubuntu is becoming a more mature and more user friendly. My mother, recently quite IT-illiterate currently uses Ubuntu to, inter alia, surf the net and listen to music !! This, in my view means that with time, Ubuntu, and other types of Linux distributions will become more user friendly, easier to use and maintain their main allure as well, namely: no license fee, and most importantly, no vendor-lock.