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I remember, back in the old days (2005 or so), that I heard about “Ubuntu” for the first time. For some reason it has become a core memory… where and how. My trusty Opel Astra slid like butter through the ink-black darkness of dawn, racing out towards Antwerp for my daily commute. Inside you could hear the dulcet tones of one Andy McCaskey of the Slashdot.org podcast. An unofficial podcast where Andy read the news headlines on Slashdot every day. When the dulcet tones of the word “ooh-boon-tooh” slid out of his heavily midwest accent, my accent piped up. Jaded with hundreds of Web 2.0 brand names that tried to remove vowels like pesky boils, this melodic brand name stood out and piqued my interest. It was a new Linux Distribution … and it was promising.
As a budding Linux user I was still in my puberty faze: After the initial wonder of “not using a linux distro” wore off, I was distro-hopping out of frustration. Unable to get some core functionalities to work on one distro (for example, play an MP3), I would nuke and pave my machine and try another distribution. I was burning through my blank CD collection and getting nowhere fast. So, after Suse, Mandriva, Manjaro, College Linux, Knoppix, and a slew of other “Linux One night stands”, I gave “The brown stuff” a try. It changed my Linux path forever.
Fast forward 18 years, and i“m popping in a USB stick with the daily build of Ubuntu 22.04. Still not 'ready for prime time” (It will be out in about a month), I dare to erase the contents on the harddrive of my Lenovo X1 to accommodate the latest Long Term Support version of Ubuntu. Like the infamous Dr Jeckyl, I forgo a trial run of this new potion in a Virtual Machine lab rat. My harddrive gobbles down the digital potion like sending caution to the winds.
The install doesn't run smoothly. Since this is a daily build, there are some little issues where the installer gets stuck and dies. No matter. I choose to go for a minimal install and decide not to download the updates during install. That can be done afterwards. 20 minutes later the install is complete and I boot into the system for the first time. I am surprised, pleasantly so at the first impressions I get from the new Gnome interface. Until this day, I disliked it because it felt like a user interface that got in the way. Somehow it felt a little sluggish and slow to respond (like Internet Explorer 6 on Cocaine), but whatever they did in 22.04 fixed that bug. Gnome is fast, slick, and, with a couple of tweaks, gets out of your way.
Now comes the big test. Because I regularly switch machines (but not distro's), I've written a little bash script that installs all of the applications I use on a daily basis. Resembling the text version of a crude cave painting, it's enough to have a coder vomit up the dark pits of his entrails, but it works for me. The script runs, downloads the packages, installs the snaps, pips, and apps into place. Joplin, Yewtube, NcSpot, Mc, Discord. One after the other, the bits flow down from the sky and cement themselves onto my harddrive. Now for the big test. Judging from experience, I do know not to get my hopes up that everything will work from the get-go. Whenever I'm trying out a newer distro, things are about to break. Getting all of my apps to run requires some Googling and some tinkering. But not this time. Everything works out of the box! I am very impressed.
From Tinker-Toy to Daily-Driver.
The step from an experimental machine to “tinker around” with to a “daily driver” is small. As a freelance IT Consultant I run my own company using mostly cloud software so all I need to do is download the stable version of Microsoft Edge, sign in using a personal Outlook account (You can't login with Office 365 account yet) and sync down all of my bookmarks and extensions. Next up I quickly click through my favorite bookmarks and turn them into webapps. I add their icons to the launcher and I'm good to go. Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint .. it's all there. If I need to sign into the work environment of one of my clients I use a separate Edge profile to keep the digital environments separated. I even found an app that allows me to sync my Onedrive (and should I want to, Sharepoint) folders to the harddrive. This is something that comes in handy when I choose to go “off the grid.” and ditch the distractions of the net.
So in the end.
Taking a look at the finished product, I am pleasantly surprised how well it has all turned out. Playing around with Linux used to be just that, “playing around”. Tinkering with an experimental system that you would never dream of taking into a real-world environment where your livelihood would depend on it.
Sure you would play around with getting the desktop tweaked just right, days getting drivers to work and weeks bragging about how you cobbled together a system with 3rd party script, hours of googling and multiple instances of despair where you would fling your laptop into lower earth orbit out of pure frustration. Like some kind of war veteran you would have earned bragging rights that you got “something-something” working on linux while getting dubious looks from Mac and Windows users who got whatever you mentioned working “out of the box”.
But here is the difference: Looking at 22.04 Linux is no longer a puzzle, a tweakathon, a geek challenge. It's an operating system that is ready for primetime BUT also offers the power of a highly tweakable operating system. Some bearded enthusiasts mumble whether this is “the year of the Linux Desktop”. My answer remains the same: It's not and it never will be. Because the years of the desktop wars are over. These days it's about platforms in the cloud. The ability for your operating system to interconnect and interact with these platforms is what makes an OS relevant. This is true for desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, smart TV's, cars and fridges. If it connects .. it's relevant. We have come to the point where getting your Ubuntu machine ready for primetime has become a somewhat un-challenging and boring experience without any major hurdles. And that is exactly where we want it to be.