Raring Ringtail Review.

I've been using Ubuntu on and off since 2007. It's consistently been my favorite operating system, and pretty much got me through college. Ubuntu has a lot going for it right now. Along with its (relative) popularity on the desktop is pushing into the mobile environment, a prospect I'm really excited about.


So yeah here's what I think about Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail.


Unity

Lots of people don't like Unity. I'm actually a pretty big fan of it. It easy to open whatever program you want, just hit super and start typing. And lenses are really cool, just hit super and start  Its a smoother experience than Gnome or KDE. The only desktop environment I really prefer is LXDE, and thats for performance reasons.

Performance for Unity use to be a serious issue. I'm running a 3 year old Dell that was $300 when I got it, with a three year old $150 GPU. When Unity 3D came out my desktop couldn't handle it, hence my love of LXDE. This turned me off of Ubuntu for a couple of versions. But the 13.0

Packages

In general the status of supported packages is good. Go is at 1.0.3, and Node is at 0.10.0. These two in particular have been frustrating recently. Using ruby is still not as straightforward as I would like. Installing through apt-get requires gems to be installed with admin credentials, not cool bro. However I don't think this is really a knock, since I prefer to install through RVM regardless of the operating system.

Games



The real reason I still have a windows partition hanging around, games. I'm a big fan of the Total War series, and to a lesser extent Starcraft 2. I've been able to get Starcraft, but total war series crash pretty hard.

However, there are some positive developments on this front Steam has a couple hundred games for Linux. Some of them are actually pretty cool. Unfortunately for me, none of the strategy games are that compelling, they are mostly tower defence, do not like.

I've also heard that Unity (not the desktop environment) is raising money to port their application to Linux. That would be pretty sweet.

Chrome

As far as browsers go Chrome is the shit. I can't remember the last time I ran into someone in my friend circle wasn't using chrome. How does it work on Ubuntu? Well not so great. Facebook locks up all the time. Trying to run flash player on it is a disaster. I would imagine that Google would continue to improve the Linux platform. And Chromium appears to work better, but I think I'm going to be sticking to Firefox.

Conclusion

Ubuntu is a dope OS. Unity works better than ever before. A lot of the packages I use are now supported at a reasonable level. Games are promising.

I know games and Chrome are a bit outside the scope of Ubuntu as an OS, but what use is an OS if it doesn't support applications you want to use. 13.04 is an improvement over previous version, and I'm excited about the future of the project.