Ubuntu Ready for the Primetime?
I have hearing a lot of nice things about a fairly new Linux distribution called Ubuntu. Ubuntu according to its official website is:
Ubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. It is developed by a large community and we invite you to participate too!
The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.
These freedoms make Ubuntu fundamentally different from traditional proprietary software: not only are the tools you need available free of charge, you have the right to modify your software until it works the way you want it to.
Aside from its admirable philosophy and its strong user community, Ubuntu has also impressed me with the usability of its software releases. Ubuntu is used by the Ateneo de Manila University as its official computer laboratory Linux distribution. I am pretty impressed at the speed in which new (non-Linux) users are easily able to adopt and use the system. A lot of them easily find out how to load a browser, navigate the system and find the office productivity tools. Most of them hardly even realize they are using Linux (a lot of them think it is MacOSX).
To impress me even further Slashdot has this article about the impending release of the newest Ubuntu release called “Dapper Drake”. This is what makes this release spectacular in my opinion:
Dapper Drake will be supported for three years for the desktop version and five years for servers, compared to 18 months for the current 5.10 ‘Breezy Badger’ version. The code release will come after the development process was extended by six weeks in order to improve the reliability of the software.
This is the longest commited support cycle for any piece of fully open source software that I know of. RedHat only commits around 18 months of support for its Fedora Core releases. Other distributions carry less. The five year support period is normally only available for the commercial editions such as RedHat Enterprise Linux. I find it really impressive that the Ubuntu community is willing to commit this long a support period. So, is Ubuntu ready for the primetime? If the Ubuntu community is willing to commit a five-year support cycle then I believe so.
By the way, I also recently read in the plug-misc mailing list that a Ubuntu Dapper Drake Release Party is scheduled for June 3 3:00 pm at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Greenbelt.
