First there was a problem with the CD – it was probably badly scratched, since the only thing the ElementaryOS installer told me was something along the lines of “Invalid data“. Only after several attempts did I manage to install it using an external DVD drive.
But that was not the end of the problems, quite the opposite. The first thing I did was enter the WPA password for the Wi-Fi.
However, the laptop and eOS kept freezing so badly that even the mouse/touchpad stopped working and the only remedy was a reset. In the end I managed to almost eliminate the freezing by plugging the laptop into the mains. Another time, when I left it unattended for a little while, it decided not to wake up again. It was not asleep, but once the display went dark, it stayed dark until I did a hard power-off.
I could not find a way to set this; I do not know whether it was in a different distro or in a package I did not have installed at the time, but I simply could not find it here. Now I am looking at it and it seems it is “Put display to sleep when inactive for:”. In any case, I did have “Dim display when idle” unchecked. Neither did fn+F4 help, nor an attempt to suspend and wake it up.
Now it occurred to me that I could also try connecting an external monitor, well, we will see. As for programs, I only installed Opera and Chromium, in which I wanted to log in to Twitter to announce that I have Linux, and even on its own separate laptop, but I quickly gave up on it under the weight of these problems.
The last straw was being unable to set custom parameters for eth0 – it could only work with DHCP. I wanted to be connected to Wi-Fi only on the main laptop and bridge the connection from Wi-Fi to this one. And there was more, for example loading thumbnails and photos from the camera in Windows is instant, while in Linux I waited about 3 minutes for a few photos. I understand that in Luna all of this will be a generation further, and there is also a difference of 6 Ubuntu versions, but I do not feel like waiting, and anyway Linux will never be as well thought out and polished as Windows, and on top of that, Linux has no IDE anywhere near VC# on Windows..
The only thing I praise Linux for is its lower hardware requirements; Linux handled brilliantly even this weaker hardware. I was also thinking about how I could compile Chrome OS or Chromium OS and put it on that laptop – but then again, who would want such an insanely limited OS. Especially since Google has terribly disappointed me lately in other respects as well :-(.
So who knows, maybe I will sell the laptop, maybe I will try other distributions on it. But I do not really feel like waiting for Luna either, because from the preview version videos I have seen, I did not like that environment either. And Ubuntu is also going completely off the rails, first Unity and then some kind of U-Bahn(o) in the style of W8 tiles. But Metro on W8 looks professional, unlike U-Bahn on Ubuntu. Linux cannot learn from the mistakes of Windows – it repeats them..
Actually, there should not be any problem even though I do not have a spare DVD; I have an old MP3 Sencor player, and hopefully it could be used to boot if I put the ISO on it with Unetbootin. Well, we will see what happens next. But still, either way, on Linux most applications are not as polished as on Windows and some are missing entirely :(.