Bloatso Simple.

OK, it's been just over a year since I started my 'dabble' with Linux (first Mandriva, then Ubuntu) and I suppose it's time for me to take a moment to review the experience.

First, a little background: I was a long-term Windows man that bought a PowerBook running Mac OS X in 2004. I was quite cautious in my use of the Mac platform at first, as I had tried the odd Mac (in college as they say!!) and was completely underwhelmed by Sys 7 and OS 9. And, at first, OS X seemed a little numb, with too few 'fiddler' apps and a couple of holes in the software coverage that I had been used to under Win 2000 and XP.

I then, however, began to have somewhat of a mindshift with the Mac. The operating system was extremely reliable, attractive and free of ominous malware (I know it recently got hacked on the second day of some Whitehat event, but to compare this kind of active trouble-seeking to the inadvertent 'Oh-my-god-I-downloaded-a-pic-of-Aylissa-and-am-now-running-a-spambot threat on a Windows machine is frankly bollocks). In quite an organic way, I started to use my Powerbook more and more, especially for the 95% of tasks that most of us perform in the home: email, music, photos and surfing. It didn't harm the machine that more and more free 'techy-lite' apps started to appear on the platform at this time, presumably offered by open-source wizards that had forgiven Apple for hijacking Unix and releasing what is essentially a commercial flavour of Linux. My computer had ceased to be hard-work and now performed (in the best possible way!) like a household appliance: it worked when I wanted it to and didn't brashly demand long hours of maintenance like my WinLap.

Plus, the platform has had somewhat of a renaissance in terms of market share, propped up by the iPod halo-effect, and more and more commercial apps are appearing that either compare to or exceed the quality if their Windows counterparts. So, a win for Apple then....


But, hang on, what's this? Here comes Ubuntu and bless me if I haven't helplessly shifted again. Only this time there are a few caveats to my commitment. First, the rules:

1. I will, for the foreseeable future, continue to use my Mac for the management of all those bits of personal media like music and photos. The iLife Suite is unsurpassed on any platform for this purpose and shall not be abandoned.

2. For any long-term, five year purchase of a computer product (which I am approaching still!) I will be investing in Apple hardware. It has by far outperformed any competitors wares and since the move to Intel, can be dual-booted anyway.

3. My peripherals, for many of the above reasons, are likely to be Apple-produced. The iPod is still my preferred method of blaring music and podcasts, and is only slowly being superseded by my (fabulous) iPhone. I have had literally dozens of wildly differing mobile phones over the last ten years and the iPhone is by far the best, hands-down. End of argument (!).

Ubuntu (and Linux in general), however, have really thrown a cat amongst my pigeons with their superb offerings. The same organic shift has, to some extent, occurred again. This install (the Hardy Heron) is just so sleek and fast and trouble-free that I find myself actually looking forward to booting it up to get emails and surf and whatnot.

As mentioned in a previous blog, I installed the Mandriva on an old work PC which, whilst it was no slouch, found it at first difficult, then impossible to run my new copy of Vista. I briefly toyed with the (admittedly attractive) idea of buying a shiny new PC, but the Powerbook had made that choice less simple to justify to myself and my superior female partner than it had been before. Besides, I was slightly miffed at Microsoft for putting me in this position: what was I actually getting for all this extra investment? I couldn't quite get it out of my head that I was paying to support a bloated cash-cow: that at some point in the development of Vista, they had put a load of performance-sapping legal-spyware in there, without actually doing much in the way of actually protecting its users from network assault. This was confirmed when my new install refused to work for two weeks due to Redmond believing it to be pirated.

Mandriva was a very interesting change for me because before I used it, I was fairly confident that, as a three-year veteran of using Mac and Windows, I was sure to be able to take to operating it with minimal fuss. But Linux isn't really like that to be honest. I suspect that if I had gone straight to Ubuntu, things may have been different, but I initially found it difficult to grasp the fundamental differences Mandriva offered. The method of installing software seemed overly awkward, the names of applications were unfamiliar (obviously) and with their predisposition to overdose on the letter 'K' often offered no insight in to what their underlying functions were. The windows manager was also the web browser (what a good idea for a home machine, in hindsight!) and then there was the menacing reliance on use of the command-line, something that years of windows use had relegated to the level of, say, looking up my own arse and cleaning my intestines.

The unfamiliarity grew, as I learned that my 'desktop' was KDE, but could just as easily be Gnome (two systems that initially appeared to be at odds), or even something called xFCE, or both, or all of the above. I could run Gnome apps in KDE anyway, so what, I thought, was the point? I didn't know what a dependency tree was and a lot of the terms and references for apps and routines seemed to be archaic and geeky. I was used to cocoa-y stuff on the Mac, called things like 'Fling' and 'Finder', so what was this 'CoqLDE' and 'xBFGvh008'? The whole experience seemed very modular, with no packaging, something I had initially thought about OS X, but tenfold.

Of course, anyone that has used Linux for more that six months will recognize all of these things and see them for what they truly are: advantages.

After I had stuffed the Mandriva install with hundred of apps (all in one go!) and ground the system to a halt, I very nearly abandoned the idea altogether. But a Mac magazine (of all things) ran an article on the ease of use of Ubuntu and I haven't looked back since. I have learned that all the unfamiliar elements of Linux only seem intimidating due to the very strict nature of the operating systems we are used to. But where Ubuntu excels is in its ability to thrive as an alternate OS WITHOUT having to tweak it to death. Just because the OS is so flexible, it doesn't mean that you have to use any of this flexibility to have a better experience. I now add functionality at a gradual rate, knowing full well that, for me at least, a full reinstall, with preferences reassigned is literally an hour away.

But, to illustrate exactly where Ubuntu and Linux in general excel, I offer you the package, or rather, the lack of it. Windows (and to a lesser extent Mac) is so bloated and slow due to it's continued use of .exe packages (and the Mac program-file equivalent). In simple terms, for I am extremely simple, this means that a standalone package of tools and files is required every time you install an application. As far as I can tell in Linux, this is streamlined through the use of dependencies. For example, if you install four web browsers on XP or Vista, everything needed for each install is carried it the .exe file and also the subsequent install. What happens in Linux (and what took me so long to grasp!) is that, in theory, the four installs share all those functionalities that are common to them (html, xtml, flash, java etc) from a 'tree' or central depository. This reduces the install footprint, but also reduces the stress on the machine if all four are in use. Now I know that it will be a rare event for you to use four different browsers at the same time (although before the open source community introduced tabbing, I can remember having IE open in duplicate windows), but as you can imagine, a lot of the standard tools for windows management, system resources and GUI interface will be shared by different elements of the OS. Now imagine that system-wide, and in an OS optimised to run like this. Not only does it make things run a lot smoother, but it also seems to give less scope for malware, with a much smaller base to patch up once security issues are exposed.

But how much smoother? To test this, I opened Firefox, an Excel sheet and Evolution (plus the task manager) in Ubuntu. I then opened the equivalent items in Vista and XP (Firefox, Excel and Outlook) and inspected the resources in terms of RAM and to a lesser extent CPU usage. The Mac is harder to test for me as I do not use Office on it, but I have been told that the results from the Mac running Tiger will be closer to the Linux machine than the Windows machines due to Apple's insistence on making its own hardware and the optimising scope that this affords. The systems were all tested on the same machine and I used fresh installs as I would use them in everyday life. Obviously I cannot possibly present this test as anything other than a personal indication of my needs.

The Linux machine was running all these items for a RAM deficit of 286MB. The CPU at rest was at 0-2%. The XP install on the same machine used 625MB of RAM and the CPU never dropped below 4% and often sprang to nearly 20% for no apparent reason. The Vista install needed nearly 785MB just to run with no apps and opening the three items pushed the RAM usage to 1184MB. The CPU usage on Vista is so high and unpredictable that there really is no point registering it here.

Hardy Heron Ubuntu has been around for a few months. One of the hardest things for a new operating system to manage is RAM bloat. XP has been optimised for nearly seven years, even Vista has been out for nearly two and it cannot perform three identical tasks without using FIVE TIMES more system resources than Ubuntu! And, after a year of using them both I can tell you that it shows with everything you do. The only reason I can think that anyone would need Windows is if you are a dedicated Enterprise user or a PC gamer.

Drawback? Well, for a user like me, all this flexibility can be a little bewildering I am definitely a follower when it comes to tech and .com innovation and sometimes I need a Jobs telling me what is good for me. Like I say, iLife remains my killer app and indeed the way Ubuntu and Linux is geared, it is much more as a system than its individual apps. Due to its quite limiting nature, I can't imagine Linux coming up with an iLife equivalent. Any auteur-based programming influence seems to be at a much lower level in the Linux committees, which makes sense if you think about it. There are also some gaps in functionality, or at least it takes 12-18 months for a really user-friendly Linux alternative to, say SlingPlayer to appear and sometimes, sadly, they never seem to. This isn't Linux's fault, but that is neither here nor there to a selfish end-user like me!

For that 70-75% of my computer use, however, I find myself firing up Ubuntu more often than not. Hardy Heron is guaranteed supported for the next 3 years for home users and I can quite safely say that another 3 years of this would suit me down to the ground!