I have been an OpenSUSE user for a while now, but I had a burning desire to see what the big deal is with Ubuntu. Everybody's talking about it. It's even the most popular distro on distrowatch.com. How could it be better than what I was using? I was determined to find out.

I stuck the disc in my CD drive and rebooted. The first thing I wanted to do was verify that there were no errors on the disc (I've been burned by a bad disc before - it's worth the few minutes to do the check!). This is easy to do - it's right in the main menu that comes up upon boot.

Ubuntu is interesting because it launches the Live CD version instead of going straight into the installer. While checking my email and some news via Firefox, I decided to partition my drive from the live cd. Saying goodbye to not only OpenSUSE and Windows, I wiped everything. I partitioned about 6 gig for Ubuntu itself, 68 or so for my /home directory, and I had another older drive in there that I would use for swap and storage space. I wouldn't say that a beginner would know what to do in this situation, but I had no problem partitioning the drives exactly how I wanted.

This made it a bit easier for me when I actually double clicked the "Hard Drive Install" icon on the desktop. The installation process was quite quick - I didn't time it, but I doubt it took a half hour.

Being used to Linux, I was aware that Ubuntu would not support all of the file types that I wanted out of the box. I went into the package manager "Software Sources" and told it that I wanted to use all available sources (which include software and codecs that can't be included on the installation cd). Adding support for mp3 and similar codecs was as easy as searching for "mp3" in the package manager.

Ah, the package manager. I'm used to YaST, which is great, but I always dreaded the long wait while loading it up and refreshing it. Ubuntu's package manager is quite quick, under a minute or two, and is absolutely packed with all sorts of great software.

I'm new to Gnome, too, so I tried avoiding all of the software I'm used to (k3b, kmail, etc) and installed gnome counterparts. Of course, nearly everything that a typical desktop user wants is right here, waiting to be installed. Now I've got some CD/DVD burning software, a GnuPG frontend, avidemux, azureus, and everything else that I need.

I'm very impressed with how simple Ubuntu is in comparison with Suse. The Ubuntu menu is so simple and clean... now when I need to find a terminal on one of my Suse machines with kde, it takes me ten seconds or so to figure out where to find one - the kde menu is just that cluttered.

It took me the better part of the day to get everything set up exactly how I want it. Now I've got firefox 2.0 (comes standard in Ubuntu 6.10) with exactly the right fonts and font sizes, Evolution has imported all of my mail contacts and calendar, my palm pilot syncs up with Evolution perfectly, Azureus is already downloading some files, my icq/msn/aim accounts are up and running under gaim...

Gnome is very easy to get used to. I've been using it for less than a day now and it just seems that everything I need is exactly where I would logically look for it. I used to think that Suse with kde was a great beginner's system, but Ubuntu is just far more intuitive.

The important thing to remember is that a lot of stuff won't be installed "out of the box": mp3 and some other multimedia support, encrypted dvd support, Acrobat Reader, Java Runtime, and a few other things. Luckily, every Ubuntu forum has great links to Beginners' Installation How-To's.

Installation is as easy as searching for a word in the package manager or opening up a terminal and pasting "apt-get" instructions from any number of helpful websites.

More advanced things (such as setting up Tor, Privoxy, NFS network shares, and so on) are also extremely easy to do. I was worried about the difficulty of doing things like this, since YaST is basically like a Control Panel, giving you a GUI front-end for tweaking these things. In fact, the lack of something like Suse's YaST makes it easier to set these things up! Want to share files over NFS? Google "ubuntu nfs", take your pick of sites, and follow the five or six easy instructions and you're all ready.

In my review, I gave Ubuntu 6.10 "Excellent" across the board. Of course, this is relative to the linux world. I debated scoring "Features" lower, since mp3, acrobat, java, etc. aren't installed by default and require jumping through some minor hoops. This is common in the linux world, though, and is required by the GPL. Taking this into consideration, given the licensing-related limits, Ubuntu does everything expected of it and more.

***** - Five stars! I honestly don't feel that there's any reason for me to go back to OpenSuSE.