Remember that odd James Bond film of the same title? It's one of my
favorites, actually, even though it, seemingly, had no reason to be
made: a remake of a an earlier film in a franchise that THIS one film
was modeled after, but not directly a part of; it starred an actor who
was/is likely the most popular Bond of them all in the aforementioned
franchise; it starred the incredible Klaus Maria Brandauer as the
villain (how the hell did they score HIM?); it had Kim Basinger as the
Bond Girl, I presume because she was an A-Lister back then, for no
reason I can fathom (a lousy actor, but I must admit, she WAS easy on
the eyes); it made no great attempt to incorporate itself into previous
Bond "cannon" -- if you could even use that term for a franchise that
had had such a tumultuous production history.
I bring up this film, specifically, for precise reasons I'll get around
to, but...for now, let's just say, I'm doing it because I seem to have
settled on Ubuntu 10.04, using Gnome, for this machine. I am eating my
words as I write this. I used to use Hardy Heron once upon (and for an
extended) time, and, really, never had issue with it, but it's been
while since then. My experiments on this hardware with other "big"
distros have proved disappointing. I started out with Mint, then went
to Fedora, OpenSuse (which seemed very nice, but wouldn't install,
despite repeated attempts), and then PCLinuxOS for two weeks. All but
OpenSuse had sound and/or video issues right out of the box. I expect
that sort of thing with smaller distros, NOT from one of the big guys.
On a whim, I fired up Lucid Lynx, and, sue me, but everything "just
worked". And, even though it's Gnome, it's fast. I don't know what
crippled piece of skunk crap Fedora uses for Gnome, but it crawled,
gasping on its knees, compared to this thing. I mean, I just have no
complaints.
Which is a far cry from dying and going to Ubuntu heaven, mind. I'm no
fanboy. I like it. It works. But I don't love it. Why? Maybe
because it's easy to DISLIKE a supposedly-solid distribution that
doesn't deliver on it's hype and/or promise, but harder to LOVE one that
simply does what its supposed to do. Ubuntu works? Well, great. It's
SUPPOSED to, right? Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse (close, but no cigar), and
PCLinuxOS couldn't even manage what a year-old Puppy Linux Live CD could
pull off with ease...and What Ubuntu 10.04 pulled off as well: working
the way they're supposed to work, with no problems. Also, not to add my
voice to the many who bitch about compiling woes on rpm-based systems,
but -- I had nothing but.
I'm hoping to actually get some work done on this machine. So far, I've
installed a bunch of slightly higher-end games on it, which I guess
doesn't count, but I wanted to take advantage of this modern hardware
while it still qualifies as such; and, getting these things to work at
all has been a new experience entirely for me, so I feel it's been
worthwhile, for that. Hell, one of my original goals was to have
something that looked nice -- maybe not something to pimp out,
necessarily (I turned off the wobbly windows -- damn things always make
me seasick), but something I can look at and enjoy. I'm also determined
not to let my /home directory become a mess of random files, like usual.
We'll see how THAT goes, but if I have a good-looking machine, running a
fast, solid, modern distro (at least for a few months), I think I might
make the effort to keep it spruced-up. Worth a try, anyway.
Thus, my clumsy analogy fits in like this: I'm back on Gnome, after
swearing at and off it. I'm back on Ubuntu, after looking for a good
alternative. It's all familiar, but new. And it's pretty good. I
mean, it's really very nice. It's not the be-all end-all, but I'm
enjoying it. "Never say Never Again"? I liked it. It was really good.
Not the greatest film ever, but satisfying. Familiar, but different.
Better, in many ways, than the Bond films that had come before it.
Maybe not as good in other ways. No matter. Takes nothing away from
it, or from any other film out there. Ubuntu worked on this specific
hardware, with the smallest amount of effort from me. The others
couldn't do that, which was exactly what I WASN'T after this time
around. They sit on my distro CD pile, while Ubuntu runs. Next time,
maybe things will be different.
So, it's Gnome for me, again. Ubuntu for me again. I'd ask how the
hell that happened, but I guess it's easy to see. Humble pie, anybody?
