Ubuntu Project: The Final Briefing

What I Learned:

After several months of consultation and troubleshooting with Max, the student who volunteered to live on an Ubuntu laptop (see intro), I'm going to pronounce the Ubuntu project a qualified failure -- and by qualified, I mean that this is a failure out of which we both learned a lot.

Ubuntu failed to meet Max's day-to-day needs without extensive intervention which, owing to both of our schedules, we didn't always have room for. Here are the particulars:

1. If any college student is going to switch to Ubuntu, they'll need intensive, hands-on introduction at the beginning and professional support throughout the early stages.
2. Ubuntu does not integrate seamlessly (or sometimes at all) with the mobile devices on which Max's generation relies (as do plenty of his elders), and that's a huge drawback.
3. On a campus in which desktops running Microsoft Windows and Office are everywhere and freely available, most college students will not use an Ubuntu laptop, even if it's free. Microsoft has an abiding commercial interest in making sure of this.
   

Here are some more particulars from Max:

Last year, I didn't have a functioning living place. I was using public space a lot more. This year, I have a very organized house; I came back early from break. I can sit and study in my house instead of driving to the library every day.

I also wasn't as comfortable with Ubuntu, so when I really, really needed to get stuff done, I went to a public computer so I wouldn't have to worry about losing documents or not being able to do stuff. I hate doing stuff over again.

But I made a conscious decision back in November. I realized that I really wished I used the computer for everything, so over the break, I decided to organize my folders so that I could do literally everything through the computer. I also had problems with my old computer and so I was forced to use the Ubuntu machine. I took some time to get more comfortable with it, and now I am.

I've been taking all of my notes on the laptop, so at the end of the semester, I can just go and print out all of my notes for every single course. I made a template that has terms, concepts, everything I need.

Word documents and PowerPoint slides work really well on OpenOffice. I haven't encountered anything like formatting issues or stuff not displaying properly.

The problem with peripherals...

The only problem is that anything that isn't online has been difficult to put in here. I thought it would be a breeze to get a handout that the instructor didn't put on Telesis. The problem is that when I tried to hook the laptop up to a scanner, it wouldn't retrieve the scan. I ended up going to the ArtSci lab to scan stuff and putting it on a zip drive or e-mailing it to myself.

I've also never been able to get my Lexmark printer to work with Ubuntu. On campus, I put it on my zip drive or e-mail it to myself, but that's the same for people with Windows laptops, at least in the ArtSci lab.

Here are some of Max's observations on his reliance on mobile devices:

I figured out a way to get my music collection to work the way I wanted to, but I haven't gotten around to it. I also don't have a way to synch it with my phone.

My Sprint phone has stopped working twice now. They've had to reset the phone and that leads to me losing my contacts. If I had a Windows machine, I'd have all my contacts and could just synch them onto the phone, so if I wanted to do that, I'd have to save them onto some other Windows computer.

I don't use the calendar on here. I use my phone and my planner.

Thank you, Max, for your patience, forbearance, and willingness to try out new things that might (eventually, maybe!) benefit other students.

It's unclear what the next step in this exploration should be. I think I'll just keep it in the oven on warm...