Appreciating Ubuntu 12.04
This morning I was once again updating my Ubuntu 12.04 laptop and realized that were it not for a crummy hardware platform - the trackpad is horrible, and the display is very inexpensive, this would be a really nice laptop/development box. It's got all the tools I could ask for, it's got some wonderful fonts for the Terminal and such, it's got Google Chrome for all the web stuff… it's really pretty slick.
I gotta tip my hat to the Ubuntu folks. This is a much better distro than RedHat/Fedora was. I'm guessing Fedora is getting better, and it's probably as nice as you need, but the ability to do the updates easily - and have them on by default, is really nice. It's nice to have it all right there.
Certainly, I'm not giving up my MacBook Pro anytime soon, but I've looked at BestBuy, and you can get nice Wintel hardware for $700 to run this on… all of a sudden, it's something I might actually carry from time to time. Certainly nicer to work with than the crummy trackpad and display.
It's a great compliment to the MacBook Pro. Nice to have.