Ubuntu: Second Impressions
I've had my laptop dual booted with Ubuntu for a while now, and I've been using Ubuntu in a Virtual Machine and as a live CD, but I've only just gotten around to rearrenging my partitions and reimaging my Ubuntu partition with Ubuntu 15.04. Previously, I had a bunch of issues with ubuntu (for example my laptop kept heating up), but I seem to have solved most of them and I thought that I'd post here about the problems I encountered, how I fixed them, and what I think of the latest version of ubuntu.
Firstly, I installed ubuntu from a live CD iso on my flash drive. Annoyingly, I used the 32 bit version by accident, and had to do it again. It would be nice if it told you which version you were about to install. Anyway, I found the installer to be rather temperamental. It kept freezing for ages, and all I could do was wait.
After the installation finished, I was left with a brand new, and very buggy, 64 bit Ubuntu 15.04 installation. As soon as it booted, the first job was to stop my cursor from flickering. Because I have an Nvidia GeForce 550M GPU, Ubuntu didn't recognise it properly (it detected it as a second 'unknown display') and so custom drivers were needed to fix it. I found this post, which guided me through the installation of both bumblebee (to control which of my two GPUs I use), and the official Nvidia drivers for my graphics card.
After banishing the flickering cursor, I found my laptop cooler, though it still wasn't right. Next up was to install thermald, indicator-cpufreq and lm-sensors. This trio of packages automatically controls the frequency of your CPU to both save power and prevent overheating. Normally, linux doesn't pay any attention to the frequency of the CPU of it's host system, leaving to run at it's maximum speed all the time - which causes battery drain and overheating.
Now that my laptop wasn't overheating too much, I could focus on other problems. When in Windows 7, I have something called SRS Premium Sound. It is brilliant at tweaking audio just before it reaches the speakers to improve it's quality. I quickly found when I got this laptop that it was essential - the speakers are facing downwards and the output sounds 'tinny' or 'hollow' without it. Since linux doesn't have SRS, the next best thing was PulseAudio, which provides you with an equaliser to tune your sound output with. Note that PulseAudio does actually work with Ubuntu 14, even though some people have said that it has been discontinued (I don't think it has?).
The other thing that needed changing was my touchpad. I felt like I had to hammer it in order to get it to recognise my touch, whereas in Windows it picked up the lightest of touches. My solution was to add the following to my .profile:
synclient FingerLow=2
synclient FingerHigh=3
synclient AccelFactor=0.145
synclient TouchpadOff=0
synclient MinSpeed=1.25
synclient MaxSpeed=2
synclient CoastingFriction=30This improved the responsiveness of my touchpad a whole lot to the point where I could actually use it without getting frustrated :)
That covers the main problems I came across. As for what I think, I'm finding Ubuntu to be a great operating system to work with - now that I've worked most of the bugs out. Things like indicator-cpufreq and thermald ought to be automatically installed on systems that support them at install time. You should also be prompted to install bumblebee and the offical nvidia graphics drivers at install time too, as a system with multiple GPUs (i.e. integrated graphics and a graphics card) are pretty unusable without them. Sensible default settings would be nice too - nobody likes hammering their touchpad just to get a response.
The Ubuntu unity desktop developers seem to have remvoved a bunch of configuration options from the GUI in recent releases. Hopefully they wil readd them - it's rather annoying to have to enter the terminal to change something as simple as the login screen background.
On the plus side, Ubuntu seems to load much faster than Windows 7, and is more responsive too. I also feel like I have more screen space to work with as there isn't a task bar taking up space at the bottom of the screen. The customisability is amazing too. I am finding that there are far more things that you can tweak and fiddle with in Ubuntu compared to Windows.
To finish off this post, here's a list of smaller problems I had, and a link to the appropriate post that fixed it for me: