Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Oct 5th, 2009
Some things in life are just plain rare. Proper alignment of the planets… a royal flush in poker… finding good pizza west of the Hudson River… a Mets appearance in the postseason. All of these should be savored when they happen, because who knows when they’ll come up again in our lifetimes?
This month will bring with it another such situation, as not only will a new version of Ubuntu be unleashed on the public, but so will the much talked-about Windows 7, Microsoft’s latest attempt to atone for the mistake that Vista turned out to be.
Of the two, it is perhaps Windows 7 that might represent the more significant upgrade from its immediate predacessor. Having played with a prerelease copy I can vouch for the fact that Win7 definitely seems faster, leaner and meaner than Vista, without most of Vista’s overly-paranoid security features (UAC seems to be a thing of the past, or at least, has become far less annoyingly intrusive) and with an improved user interface that takes ideas that worked in Vista (namely, the composited windows and introduction of OSX-style “gadgets”) and updates them; gadgets are no longer constrained by default to a sidebar, and there’s a new and improved Taskbar that will make anyone who’s used it think of the OSX Dock. Backwards compatibility with earlier Windows versions has been improved greatly, with some hardware configurations that presented problems in Vista working again in Win7. In fact, once updated drivers for your hardware are available that work in Win7 I would almost certainly recommend it as an upgrade from the now-venerable WinXP, and will absolutely be championing it over Vista! I never thought I would hear myself say this about a Microsoft product, given my admitted bias against the company, but I think they have a real winner on their hands here. Win7 is definitely one to watch for if you are at all a Windows fan, or even if you feel like you must use it.
However, for those of you who, like us, prefer to use Free Software and/or Open Source systems as much as possible, the tried-and-proven Ubuntu distribution will be unveiling a new version, 9.10 “Karmic Koala,” about a week after Win7′s expected street date of 22 October in the US. However, compared to the most recent version (9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”), this isn’t a very major update, but that seems to be par for the course with Ubuntu; their October releases are generally bugfixes and/or package updates to the major versions that come out every April. With that said, there are some interesting developments in the Land of the Orange Desktop, including updates to the default GNOME desktop (now up to 2.28), an improved install program, a move to the ext4 filesystem as the new default choice (though you can still, of course, choose any filesystem you wish for a new install, including RAID, ReiserFS, or ext2 or 3), and an updated grub system boot utility. Perhaps the biggest change comes in the end-user experience, as the “Add/Remove Programs” tool is now history. In its place: the Ubuntu Software Center, an improved utility designed to make the Ubuntu repositories even easier than ever to browse through, search for specific programs, and install them on your PC with only a few mouse clicks. There are other small performance boosts and interface tweaks as well, but overall this doesn’t represent as major a leap for Ubuntu as Win7 does for Windows, it must truthfully be said. Still, those who worship at the altar of the Penguin will certainly want to check it out, especially those who’ve long been curious about alternative OSs but have thought you need a computer-science degree to use them.
I’ll be posting some preview thoughts at the Ubuntu 9.10 beta either later this week or the beginning of the next. I don’t know if I’ll be getting a release copy of Win7 in a timely enough fashion for a full review, but if I do, you can certainly expect some thoughts from me on this subject.
Buckle up, folks. October’s looking to be quite the ride.
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