More Ubuntu

I played some more with Ubuntu, and I continue to be very impressed with it. It really does "just work", I find it intuitive, fast, and efficient. If I hadn't been so entrenched into running Windows, I would very likely switch over to Ubuntu. Out of the box, Ubuntu does the following with minimal or no configuration:

• Browse the web (Firefox), read and write e-mail (Thunderbird)
• Read and write office documents (OpenOffice) and PS/PDF (Evince)
• Instant Messaging (Gaim)
• Download and browse digital images (gThumb), edit images (Gimp), scan images (XSane)
  
• Burn CD/DVD (Gnomebaker)
• P2p (Bit Torrent)
• Detect and automount external hardware (printer, flash drive, digital camera, iPod)
  

Notice anything missing? Here's a hint: digital media. Ubuntu has its roots in Debian, so as a matter of philosophy it wants to support only free formats (such as Ogg). That being said, it is possible to install support for other formats (most notably MP3 and others), but the process is a mess.

First, there is a staggering number of digital media players out there for Linux: totem (gstreamer and xine flavors), xine, ogle, mplayer, rhythmbox, sound-juicer, kaffeine, amarok, and many more. Each one has its own idiosyncracies, and they only share codecs to a limited extent. The user interfaces (especially for DVD playback) are a huge hack and look like they were written by a 5 year old with a spoon. Some players (notably xine) natively support the important formats (WMV, MOV, etc.), while others use elaborate wrappers around Win32 DLLs (yes, you read that right) to decode the more stubborn formats. DRM formats (e.g. iTunes) are decidely out. DVD playback requires the controversial DeCSS library, and even then only works right about half the time (the gstreamer flavor is very slow, while the xine flavor works). Integration in Firefox only works with MPlayer, and even then crashes about a third of the time. In the end I got it to work acceptably well, but it was not easy, and does not do everything that Windows does.

The one lesson I took away from this is that the entire digital media software world is a gigantic mess. There are huge interests (and probably lots of $$$) in keeping these formats proprietary and opaque, and I wonder if Linux (or, more specifically, the free open source world) will always be one step behind in that regard. The fact that you have to run through so many hoops to play a DVD on a Linux installation (and even then with problems), is simply crazy in this day and age. I would have hoped that Apple would provide a Linux version of iTunes, given that it already runs on a flavor of Unix (OSX), but I wonder if that will ever actually happen.

It will be interesting to see what the future brings.