Desktop Linux: Ubuntu Pronounced, "Pretty Cool"
My wife has a laptop that is getting a little old. It runs Windows XP and she uses it mostly for browsing and email. Lately it has gotten really slow. Some disk access silliness is killing the OS. I could troubleshoot the thing or…
A year ago I had an old laptop that had been running its native Windows XP for several years until it got too slow. I tried defraging the disk and other tricks to no avail. I probably could have sussed it out but, you know, I have better things to do. Like installing Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn on it which was fun, in a perverse sort of way, and gave me a screaming fast machine with most of the 40G drive free. On the other hand the wifi was intermittent and tended to be hard to reestablish once it was dropped. Also It was difficult to get my bluetooth mouse to pair up automatically. I hacked the scripts for it but, you know, I have better things to do so I even though I could get it to work it wasn’t very reliable.
To make a long story longer, along came Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. One day I saw the “Upgrade” in the desktop version of the software updater. I should say that one of the greatest things about Ubuntu is its use of the old debian apt-get mechanism to keep the system up to date. When security or bug fixes come along they are automatically made available to all users. The download and installation is automatic too. This even works for upgrades of the OS so the Upgrade Manager was offering me the nifty new 7.10 (they try to do an upgrade twice a year).
I did the upgrade with hopes that it would imporve some of the rough edges of 7.04. It took many hours of download and configure. 
The upgrade asks you to edit conflicting config files, which would probably scare a casual user, but I got through these ok. When I was done the wifi worked flawlessly and my bluetooth mouse paired automatically and connected instantly when I turned it on (even faster than my Macbook Pro).
I pimped it out with a nice theme for the new Compiz-Fusion window manager complete with some slick Mac-ish icons and had a pretty sweet machine with plenty of free disk and all the bells and whistles. Back to my wife who had finally given up using her laptop. One night she sees me playing with my old machine and says, “That looks pretty cool.” I set up Thunderbird to get mail from her account and she hasn’t used her old machine since.
I guess I have to install Ubuntu on her old machine now since mine has been taken over…