The latest version of Ubuntu, version 7.10 aka, Gutsy Gibbon, was released four days ago on the 18th. It does bring some minor updates to Feisty Fawn, like default eye candy from the Compiz Fusion group which is working on bring Vista-like 3D effects to the desktop. Some of you have in the past expressed interest in using Linux, so here are some thoughts from playing around with it.
The installer seems to work very well when it comes to resizing
a Windows partition to make room for Linux partitions, making it
possible for anyone who wants to try to it to do so without having to
buy a partition utility. Obviously you would want to backup everything
on that Windows disk that matters to you. You might want to go a step
farther and image the whole drive so that getting back to where you
were, if it fails, isn't so painful. That said, I had no problem
resizing my laptop's main NTFS partition to make room for Ubuntu. Dual
booting works without any problems for me. Unless you passionately hate
Windows, to the point that you are ready to burn bridges, dual booting
is a must in the beginning.
The new eye candy worked for me
while I was running the LiveCD, but didn't work once Ubuntu was
installed. Since GNOME, the default desktop of Ubuntu, is a pretty
heavy weight desktop environment, it wasn't worth it for me to use the
stock Ubuntu distribution. Therefore I chose Xubuntu. Xubuntu uses Xfce
which is similar to GNOME, but much more lightweight. I have some GNOME
libraries installed in order to run Rhythmbox and a few other programs,
but that's about it.
In terms of resource consumption, Xubuntu
seems to be fine for me so far when I don't have business using
Windows. It still has some process scheduling issues, but it is a
positive step forward. If you are going to switch away from Windows XP,
and not use a Mac, you could do a lot worse than switching to Xubuntu
7.10.
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