Ubuntu is, in my opinion, one of the easiest desktop Linux distributions around. It caters directly to the end user, and recently such initiatives as the "100 Papercuts" project show how much Canonical is dedicated to improving usability in future versions.

However, one of the complaints that I see come up in the community the most is the fact that although Ubuntu is now competing directly with Windows 7 and Mac OSX, it has lacked that extra visual spice to make Free Software all the more appealing to end users. However, some of the new mockups and goals are extremely promising.

With the release of Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed "Jaunty Jackalope", the Ayatana desktop initiative was launched at creating various usability fixes in Gnome. The most visual of changes was the inclusion of a new notification system. Instant Messengers, IRC clients, mail notifications, device notifications, and all other system notifications were unified under the improved libnotify framework.



One of the central points of focus is a new boot-up experience for the next release of Ubuntu, codenamed "Karmic Koala". Usplash is apparently being replaced with GRUB2. The new splash process seems to be based on Grub2 and could incorporate smooth, subtle animations.

On the desktop side of things, scores of concept themes and icon concepts are being looked at right now by the Ubuntu Art Team.
                                                              

 

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    KDE Developer Frank Karlitschek has an ambitious plan of providing a computer system dedicated entirely to Linux, for consumers. Announced at Gran Canaria Developer Summit, Frank's slides and presentation talk about the dire need for GNU/Linux systems to have a fully open-specification machine.

                      

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There's quite a lot of discussion about patents and Mono in the GNU/Linux community as of late. Throughout the numerous arguments, discussions, and mailing lists, there seems to be a growing effort to replace the need for Mono-based applications with "unemcumbered" alternatives.

   Initially, I was a little skeptical of what currently is offered as alternative-to-mono applications. In my own experience, the Ubuntu Linux distribution is focusing on bringing in a third mono app with the release of Ubuntu Karmic, as well as possibly replacing Gimp on the Live CD with F-Spot. While many of these posts are still speculative, it leaves one to wonder what alternatives there are to offer, in case Microsoft's patents do actually pose a threat to GNU/Linux. Today, let's take a look at Gnote, a C++ alternative to the note-taking application Tomboy.

    Gnote was started on April 2009 by Gnome developer Hubert Figuiere, known also for his work on Abiword. The goal of Gnote is to provide a C++ port of Tomboy, which currently relies on C#. Gnote is an experiment to see what would happen if Tomboy were written using C++. Many Free Software enthusiasts that are against Mono have paraded around it as a Mono-Free alternative to Tomboy, but does it hold up? For our testing purposes, I installed Gnote 0.5.1 on Ubuntu Jaunty through a personal PPA. I would love to see it packaged in Ubuntu officially in the near future.

    What really struck me at first was the visual similarities. Gnote is, in nearly every way identical to Tomboy. The tray applets look slightly different, but the functional implementation is exactly the same.

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  Jake knocked on my door at 9 AM on that hot summer day. He ran to my bedroom window, and started shouting.
 
  "Sean! Sean! Time to get up, you said you were doing this!"

  He was, of course, entirely right. Jake had mentioned for several months that his computer was bogged down with Vista, and he was fed up with the initial user experience. I was surprised by his initial request for me to give him a try with Linux. I had never advocated it or mentioned it. However, he had always known that I had it on all my machines, and I seemed to like it.

  I turned over and looked at my clock. Yup, 9 AM sharp. Jake was not only eager to get this done, he was up before noon. That was enough to impress me. I rolled out of my bed, accidentally stepped on some of the Legos my brothers had left out the night before, and hobbled in pain to the door. (Why is it that those things hurt like the dickens most right after waking up?)

  Jake was sporting his regular appearance of "FRIGHTENING". He spoted a shaved head, and a shirt that read "Divinity is Giving Up the F*cking Ghost Because Truth is Dead to Me". A thick large ring hung from his nose, huge gauges were set in his ears. Iron bars poked out of his forearm, and scars ran up and down his other arm in a unique celtic design. This man had lived a hard life, and he wore all the burdens of visuals that society would never understand fully. He held his rig in his burly arms with the strength of a titanthrope. He slung it over his shoulder, as if the rig were light as a feather. As he walked in, he gently slammed it down on the oak table.

  "Okay, put Linux on it." he said. Distribution choice was really a no-brainer here. Ubuntu has always been stupidly easy in comparison with other distros. I helped him put Jaunty on with an ext4 filesystem.

  "I just think it's great that anyone would spend their time working on releasing a whole operating system for free." Jake said.

   And with that, Jaunty's installation finished. I was far from finished, however. Just leaving the bare-bones system for a non-technical person was somewhat a bad idea, so I installed and set up the following:

-Flash for AMD 64 Linux.
-Nvidia Drivers set up.
-The "ubuntu-restricted-extras" package so that he could watch all of the archived media he had on his other hard drive at home.
-libdvdcss2, so that he could watch his favorite DVDs.
-VisualBoyAdvance, DosBOX, and Wine for his various games.
-Miro for a fresher alternative to just searching YouTube, with him subrscribed to my various video channels.
-Amarok 2.1 for music, with the QGTKstyle enabled.
-Nicotine+, a FOSS alternative to SoulSeek, one of his favorite apps.
-A plethora of free games.

    I set up his accounts in Pidgin, and also made a Jabber.org account for him. This is a common practice I do for anyone that switches to Linux in my circle of friends: I have them support Jabber alongside regular AIM, MSN, and Yahoo protocols. Then, if any of them know each other, I add them on friends lists.
     I walked him through everything, explaining what each app does and how to use the computer. I introduced him to the command line for an easy explanation to how to install apps, and I also introduced him to XKCD.
     Jake has been using Linux for about a month now, and he loves it. I never was in-your-face-about it, I politely mentioned it once or twice and he enjoys it thoroughly. Now I have several other friends asking for me to switch them over to Ubuntu, so it's a strong possibility that they too will be supporting FOSS in ways they could never expect.

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      Over the past four years, I've seen GNU/Linux grow and mature in ways most people just wouldn't have expected. With corporate-backed projects such as Fedora and community distributions such as Ubuntu making such headway, it'd be wrong to say that Linux has miles and miles to go to achieve desktop adoption.  From wifi support to interoperability to numerous projects on integrating FOSS drivers with the kernel itself, Free Software on the Desktop has made major headway.

     However, there is a bit of a shortcoming: while distributions constantly get easier to install, remix, and redistrubute, there are only a handful of providers that even support GNU/Linux as an option. Granted, there are scores of dev teams out there for many distros that gladly dedicate their time to ensure that your machine of choice supports their distribution. It's a handy practice to have, but a problem remains in the sense that many O.E.Ms still ship Windows by default.

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