Recently I put an old 1.8GHz P4 computer in the living room to use as a dedicated media player for music, pictures and video.  As an experiment, I first tried to install Ubuntu Linux as the operating system, thinking the Linux desktop had surely matured enough by now to perform this simple task.

It did perform well in most areas.  I used XBMC to play music and show slideshows from my TVersity media server and Miro to play downloaded video podcasts from Revision3 and Mevio.  They worked beautifully.

However, one area where the Ubuntu box did not do well was in playing back Flash video content.  Hulu and YouTube, for example, were both jerky and unwatchable in full screen and not much better at the original size.  (The computer has an ATI Radeon 9600 video card - not great by today’s standards, but plenty powerful enough to play full screen video.*)

The nail in the coffin was Netflix.  Netflix instant download videos (or whatever they call them) wouldn’t play at all because they require Windows Media Player.  That’s not Ubuntu’s fault of course, but it was still one less thing I could do.

So I finally gave up and switched it back to Windows XP.  It’s just easier.  There’s really nothing wrong with Ubuntu, but you still have to wrestle and tweak it for optimum performance, which is kind of a pain.  And, just like the Amiga used to be, it’s not high on the list of priorities for major vendors to support, so you’re always going to be lagging behind.

(As a side note, anyone that has ever complained about Windows pushing too many updates should try Ubuntu sometime.  There are updates galore on a weekly basis.)

* I should probably mention that Hulu and YouTube also don’t perform very well on this box under Windows XP, either.  Flash video unfortunately uses more CPU processing power than GPU processing power.