"Ubuntu 9.10 for a Lazy Windows XP User" on a SAMSUNG NC10 - Part 2

It's been a couple of days. I have enjoyed playing with the Koala, which brings us to

Part 2. First impressions.

The short story is: I haven't encountered a single problem, not even a 'glitch', in these three days. The netbook has been sitting on my desk; I connected it to the outside world via cabled and wireless LAN at the office.

The long version:

• All built-in hardware devices were recognized at install and worked.
  
• Localizations (I am using the German language UI - who knows, I might want to keep Ubuntu for a while...) had to be downloaded from the Web, but as far as I can see, everything I used so far is localized properly (with some rather unimportant exceptions, see below).
• As many other community members pointed out, the default desktop theme sorta sucks... but the one in XP does, too, doesn't it?
  
• The default screen font is slightly larger than the one I was used to from working with Windows, but it's very clear and good for readability. The overall graphics experience is as good as or even slightly better than that under XP.
  
• Boot time to login prompt is about the same as in Windows XP; from login to desktop, it's slightly better, but then again I have more apps installed in XP, some of which preload stuff, so no fair comparison here.
• It is my unconfirmed impression, but the Koala seems to produce much less hard disk activity than Windows XP which probably is a good thing when you're mobile.
• Still, there's no magic in Linux - you can't have a full-featured graphical OS running on an Atom N270 with 1 GB RAM and a standard laptop HDD under the hood and not experience delays sometimes. Loading Evolution takes as long as loading Outlook; GNumeric doesn't load any faster than Excel does.
  
• Network browser works fine, no problem accessing shares on member servers or workstations. I haven't measured (yet), but the perceived SMB perofrmance equals that of Windows XP. Well, OK, the NC10 is equipped with a lowly Fast Ethernet NIC, but still.
  
• FireFox is preinstalled as standard browser and works flawlessly, including Plugin Finder etc. I installed Opera and it seems even a bit faster, but I think the taskbar icon is a bad idea, given the limited screen space on a netbook.
• Evolution is preinstalled as the standard PIM client and works very well with my Exchange 2003, at least in online mode. I will test the offline mode as a part of my mobility experience.
• Skype (2, still in beta) installs and runs without issues. Sound input and output (using the built-in mic/speaker) are as poor as they are in Windows. A generic USB headset (Genius) got recognized at once and delivered a very good experience, as Skype goes.
• Remote desktop to my Windows 2003 Terminal Server required installing an RDP client, which was delivered by Synaptic within seconds and worked perfectly. I have very little experience with Linux based RDP clients so I chose rdesktop. Apart from having to start it via command line, it just worked.
• Office apps... Well, OpenOffice.org never was among my favourites, but it is preinstalled and works out of the box. GNumeric runs waaaay faster, but seems to have a localization glitch somewhere.
  
• Video player works well, plugin search was not 100% successful, but those were rare encodings.
• PDF viewing experience in the preinstalled file viewer is rather basic; the ePDFViewer from the Synaptics list has a slightly better rendering (which surprised me since they both use the same library) but is still pretty basic. Adobe Reader 9.2 installs without issue (you save a couple of precious minutes if you switch from the .bin distribution preset by Adobe to the .deb one) and offers the expected PDF viewing experience plus forms support etc.
• I have always used MindJet's MindManager for mindmapping and have zero experience with other programs. Synaptics offers two packages here: VYM and KDissert. Both lack the comfort of MM and have localization glitches, albeit different ones. But MM wasn't free either, so I will download iMindMap from Tony Buzan and see if it does the job better.
  

This sorta covers what I usually do on a netbook.

Next week, I'll be testing more interesting stuff: Mobility with 3G and printing, so make sure to check back here :)