my years of resistance have broken down and i’ve finally given ubuntu a fair chance. i decided to give it 2 weeks of trial before either sticking with it or trying an alternate distro. and ultimately, i only have positive things to say about ubuntu.

but first…why did i end up ditching mandriva (mandrake) after so many years of brand loyalty…
mandriva (the company) has had financial instability for years…that’s not news. but recently i had read that the company was looking to be purchased. this was new. and i hadn’t heard of any of the potential buyers before, nor was it clear what a purchasing company’s intent was. then there were reports that said that mandriva laid off approx. 35 core technical employees. a lot of who went on to start the community branch called mageia.

it seemed to me… that mandriva ended up keeping only a handful of developers. i can’t see any possibility of the distro maintaining the momentum it has had in previous years. this time around i’m very unsure if mandriva can restructure itself back to profitability (and still put resources into a desktop distro). that sounds very negative, but i’m just being practical.

worst case, the distribution ceases to exist altogether. all the uncertainty revolving around the distro’s future made me jump ship. so it was time to find a replacement distro. my 2nd choice was opensuse, which i’ve always regarded as another great distro. however, there’s lots of uncertainty in the air about what is novell’s future or what is the future of novell’s suse branch.

…….and thus i gave ubuntu a try. wireless worked without tinkering (although this is my first centrino laptop). previously i’ve always had to mess around with ndiswrapper with broadcom chips. the nvidia driver install was the easiest i’ve ever seen. lots and lots of packages pretty much comparable to mandriva’s repositories. deb packages available for download for a lot of software that wasn’t in the repositories. my only complaints have been about the default theme, but that’s not much of a complaint. i always have to alter default themes to my liking. to get things exactly as i wanted in ubuntu i had to use “gconf-editor”.

i think my entire experience with ubuntu so far has been smoother than any time i initially installed mandriva.

update 11/17/2010: read an article today that mentioned mandriva will indeed release a 2011 version and may start releasing only once a year. nevertheless, i’ve found a new love.