Jumping on the Bed!

Ubuntu released 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on the 19th of April, and after waiting hours in queue to download the installation disc I gave up and went with my usual practice of obtaining it through various sources. After installing it fresh on my development machine at work (a 2.8Ghz P4 with 512mb ram), an HP Compaq NX9010, and upgraded by Edgy at home on my home built Athlon 2600+, I have to say that I am very impressed.

Of the more important features that were added I am geeked most about quad-core cpu support, built in 3D Desktop which in most cases just works but I prefer the Beryl Project myself, a much improved codec support, and all of the fun bells and whistles you would expect such as no viruses, no spyware, Firefox 2.0.0.3, OpenOffice 2.2, media players, etc.

Now for the kicker. Dell has announced they will soon be offering Ubuntu 7.04 on a select line of its Desktop and Laptop machines. So you have the world’s fastest growing Linux community, and the world’s largest PC hardware retailer joining forces. There is a news post here, and the official Dell statement with video interview with Mark Shuttleworth himself here.

My two cents… I am optimistic that this could be huge. When more people have Ubuntu on their machines, it is much more likely that the hardware manufacturers (Ati, nVidia, Creative, etc) will release linux drivers for their products. The best scenario would be those manufacturers releasing their source code and allowing open-source drivers to be created. That aside, when more hardware is supported, the software is not far behind. I am, of course, referring to games.

Transgaming is doing an alright job of enabling Windows based games to run on Linux with varying degrees of success, but it just isn’t quite right. Valve, iD, Bethesda, etc will need to start making games to install natively on Windows and Linux. I personally can’t wait to be running Elder Scrolls V and Guildwars 2 on my dual 16-core xeon rig in five years.

Until then, I will very gladly share my hard drive with my two operating systems. My gaming OS (WindowsXP), and my do everything else under the sun OS (Ubuntu).