Pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Ubuntu have been prom­ising but noth­ing short of hassle and annoy­ance for an aver­age com­puter user. The prob­lem lies with Win­dows, and the fact that it’s tied into everything and every­one. Mov­ing some­body away from it just spells trouble.

First Impres­sions

Even from the first screen­shots, I could tell 8.04 was going to be dif­fer­ent. The pre­vi­ous ver­sion, 7.10, had installed Compiz Fusion, a 3D effects engine, by default which really made Ubuntu shine. It still needed more though.

Wow

In terms of “wow”, 8.04 really scores high. It comes installed with Fire­fox 3 (Beta 5) which is some­thing in its own (espe­cially as it feels so at home in Ubuntu) but what really grabs me is the fact that I really want to use it as a primary desktop and that I can feel that I can make it work. Strange, I know, but all the other Ubuntu ver­sions just never had this. I’d try it in VMWare and delete the vir­tual machine a week later, sub­sequently revert­ing back to my trusty Win­dows XP. There’d always be prob­lems with drivers, pro­grams or some other major hassle. 8.04 seems to have all I need which makes it dynamite.

Compiz Fusion

Compiz Fusion is fant­astic! Let me reph­rase that, Compiz Fusion is the best! It’s able to just do the job with no hassle. I can barely hear the fans on my graph­ics card (256MB nVIDIA 7900 GS) which, com­pared to Vista, is an incred­ible achieve­ment con­sid­er­ing the immense work its doing to wobble win­dows and so forth. You’ll real­ise that most of the effects are utterly point­less but once you begin to use them, you’ll be mes­mer­ized by them.

But, Oh Wait…

There are still prob­lems I should add. It took sev­eral attempts to install Ubuntu and it’s still made a mess of my RAID array (I can only access one of the two 250GB hard drives), not to men­tion enter­ing BIOS setup is a time-critical night­mare (the screen loads in lit­er­ally mil­li­seconds). I’ve got an Cre­at­ive X-Fi sound card which I’ve found that many people have had prob­lems with. After a good day of search­ing, the OSS driver is the only easy solu­tion — but you’ll only get ste­reo sound (as opposed to the meaty 7.1 I had with Win­dows). Also part of my prob­lem was my Logit­ech G15 which now is a nor­mal lit-up key­board, it’s extra but­tons unable to facil­it­ate. Hav­ing said that, most of my hard­ware was auto­mat­ic­ally picked up and con­figured without any bother.

Final Ver­dict

Ubuntu 8.04 has very good poten­tial to use as a primary desktop but not if you’ve got incom­pat­ible hard­ware and you may find set­ting up to be a pain. Things are get­ting bet­ter all the time, though, and I dare say that 8.10 is the def­in­ite one to get, if not this one.

As for me, I’ll be rein­stalling XP on one drive, with Ubuntu on another so I can switch between the two. I’ll be keep­ing a close eye on Ubuntu and I recom­mend that you do too because it can really revo­lu­tion­ize how you work.