Some of you might remember one of my earlier posts relating the pain of a linux newbie. Well, after much persuasive preaching by the reverend Dalight I just loaded up the latest release of Ubuntu (6.06).
I'm not an enthusiast; Linux to me is a tool because it hosts some superb networking and security software that you can't get under Windows. What I want from a Linux installation is an easy to install, well-behaved platform that doesn't require you to know arcane phrases from some dead language whenever you want to reconfigure something and which makes it dead easy to install, upgrade and maintain the apps of your choice. And you know what? Ubuntu 6.06 is close. Scarily close. Install was a breeze (apart from a problem if you try to install it into Microsoft Virtual PC and inaccurate documentation 'explaining' how to fix said problem), and as soon as it booted for the first time it updated itself off the internet! Not only that, but you can select the apps you want from a list, it goes off and downloads them, then it installs them, along with all the stupid dependencies previous distros have assumed I must automatically know about, completely automatically and with no command line in sight.
I'm impressed. Has anyone else given this distro a go yet?