I have finally taken the effort to upgrade my Dapper 6.06 LTS to Hardy 8.04 LTS. I’ve been waiting for Hardy for quite some time, mainly because its an LTS and it’ll be more popular and supported. The experience is pretty good so far, I’m actually evaluating it from the perspective of a Windows user, so its about bringing the Windows pattern to Ubuntu and running the corresponding software here. The steps to get stuff set up will be documented in “The Ubuntu Experience“.
The improvements from Dapper was tremendous, in particular novice usability and software support. In Dapper I often had to get down to the terminal to hack stuff and get things working, but stuff in Hardy just works. Out of the box that is. For example, these were quite important to me:
- Wireless adapter support
- WPA (saw but not verified)
- Bluetooth enabled by default
- SCIM (although no Chinese input by default)
- NTFS read/write
Installation was a breeze, no more fumbling with custom partitions, the LiveCD installer takes care of it for me. Also since all the software was available through Synaptic, so far it all works pretty stably. I’ve added in aMSN, SCIM Chinese, Compiz, JRE, and desktop customizations. Next to explore will be CD/DVD writing, media player, start button and VMWare.
In Dapper all those were quite painful, and I didn’t manage to get VMWare working. Also because of Compiz I could not shut down normally, and had to use a script every time. VMWare would still be critical this time, for my VPN client and alternatives when the software or website only supports Windows.