Ubuntu 8.10 made its appearence this week, and while everybody was busy touting the network manager’s new-fangled ability to handle mobile broadband connections, what nobody seemed to be mentioning was that it doesn’t actually work very well.

The networking manager is brilliant. It’s a nice clean interface that shows you all the internet connections on your computer, whether that’s Wi-Fi, mobile broadband or any other. It works fantastically well for Wi-Fi, putting Vista’s overly fiddly version in the shade. 

Mobile broadband is an entirely different matter, though. We have three USB dongles in the office – hangovers from our mobile broadband comparison feature. Of the three, Ubuntu refused to recognise the O2 dongle even existed, and while it acknowledged the BT dongle, it had absolutely no idea what to do with it. In fact, lucky number 3 was the only one that worked, but it worked beautifully. We just plugged it in, selected the 3 option and off we went. No need to install software or drivers of any sort. Great stuff, but country to popular opinion, one out of three is actually bad.

Mind you, while I was disappointed with the network manager, I was far more impressed with how easy Ubuntu 8.10 makes it to run a persistent OS from a flash pen drive – a feature that’s been around for a while, but usually accompanied by a long list of intimidating instructions that look like they’ve been typed by somebody with frying pan for hands. In my humble opinion, the ability to carry your operating system around with you is the future, though not one I’ll be embracing after this week.

You see yesterday my flash drive with all my files on it went the way of the Dodo. Being me, I hadn’t bothered backing anything up in … erm… three years, or so. I’ve since been on a rollercoaster ride of hope, despair, and downright anger trying out a number of recovery programs in order to salvage some of my files. So, far this has yeilded some older temp files, but not the latest versions, which is a pain.

None of this, of course, would have happened if I’d transferred my files onto Windows Live Mesh, as I’d been intending. Unfortunately, everytime I’ve tried to get it running on my work machine, it’s thrown up half a dozen little errors and crashed, hence I never bothered. 

My data disaster has prompted me to try out Drop Box though, which is very much like Live Mesh – except that it works. For a comparison of the two you could do worse than following this shiny link where our own Mr Collins lays out the difference.

And the lessons to be learned from all this? Stuart is simple, Microsoft still can’t do simple, and Ubuntu hasn’t worked out how to do simple well.