Delighted with Ubuntu on my Laptop

For reasons of obscuring/obfuscating the contents of my personal laptop from customs officials of various nations, which includes certain tools like Metasploit and other "cyber-forensics" software, I chose to make Ubuntu Linux the primary (and only visible) boot choice. As a result, I've been using it as my OS while on vacation. Although I use Linux on a daily basis for work, that usage revolves around servers and "fun" applications like directory and web services. I haven't been using it much as a workstation OS for several years. I tend to try out each new release of both the Ubuntu and Fedora distributions as well as several less popular variants, but not so much in a daily usage sense. I have to say I've been very pleased with the experience.

Why? Some examples:

Upon reaching the condo at Villa Bahia, I booted up the laptop and was able to immediately connect to the net.

I connected my camera in the morning. It was correctly detected, the F-Spot photo management application was launched, thumbnail previews were downloaded and displayed for selection to transfer to local storage. A seamless experience, especially considering the lack of pre-configuration.

I wanted to upload a bunch of pictures to facebook and resizing them before upload seemed wise given the four to five megabyte size of the originals. F-Spot doesn't seem to have a batch resize option, or not one which is obvious. Google quickly told me that I could add integrated resize to the Nautilus file browser - Nautilus is the default for the Gnome desktop - by installing the "nautilus-image-converter" module. About thirty seconds later I had the module installed and was resizing my images for upload. On a related note, facebook's image import conversion process really sucks the life out of pictures.

Uncle Barry told me that when he woke this morning, before sunrise, that the stars were brilliant and that the Moon/Venus conjunction was particularly lovely. He wasn't positive that it was Venus, but though it was. I launched Stellarium, set our geographical location to Guaymas, Mexico and rolled the clock back to 0600. There it was - Venus and the Moon.

The kids wanted to watch a movie on the first night so I pulled an HDMI cable out of my laptop bag, hooked it up to the television, brought up the display configuration and was able to add the second display and direct the sound output to the HDMI port. A restart of the display manager was required, but the utility did tell me that. That done, all of the rips from our DVDs at home were available for high-def viewing on the television. If I haven't mentioned it yet, I should note that VLC is the only way to fly when it comes to video.

All of these functions and several of these applications are not unique to Linux. I use application counterparts compiled for Windows all the time, specifically VLC and Stellarium. The fact that they have all been flawless and painless is the point and entirely with Gnu/Linux and free/libre software.

In conclusion, I love open source.