realize that nobody is putting a gun to my head forcing me to upgrade,
and my machine isn't really that important so I don't mind the
adventures, up to a certain point. I'm sure that one could pick apart
each of these following points, suggest a fix, call me an idiot, more
things to try, blame something, whatever... I'm sure that many of these
arguments would be sane and reasonable to some extent. There is no
particular castle I want to storm, and I'm not advocating one OS over
another or trying to attack. With this disclaimer, read on... :)
I like Ubuntu, and I like Linux (especially on the server end of
things), but we are so incredibly far away from the "year of Linux on
the Desktop" it's sort of laughable.
The upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 has been a disaster for many, this has been
widely documented online. The new kernel version crashes with my
Ethernet controller randomly, I lost the ability to interact with Flash
movies (I've since fixed this), and I was disappointed to find that
shared printing no longer works (this was an area I felt that Ubuntu was
pretty strong in prior). I can't prove ext4 to be the culprit yet, but
it seems like I'm having to unmount and fsck my ext4 so much more
frequently now, and this is with a new disk that checks out fine with
the long Smart Monitor self test (I'm not blaming ext4 just yet, just
adding this to my list of woes). Some applications monopolize my sound
(I have to quit them if I want to play sound in another app). Sound has
always been pretty temperamental, as has CD/DVD burning and other
related stuff. It's great that the team is working on features like
Ubuntu One, but it would be the highly mundane sorts of fixes and
features that would make my life so much better and allow me to consider
switching to it full time, features like the ability to easily control
the behavior and interaction between multiple monitors, etc.
I realize that every OS has its strengths and weaknesses, and I realize
that Ubuntu is not designed to be a more conservative sort of Linux OS
like Debian. I don't mind being on the bleeding edge with getting some
new stuff to work. I also understand the difference between the two
kinds of Ubuntu releases. However, what is incredibly frustrating is all
of this regression - no matter what kind of release. I'm sick of
fiddling with my sound, and I'm sick of features like Compiz that are
available but seem to cause all sorts of problems when enabled (e.g.
compatibility with MythTV, Flash, etc.) Like I said, Compiz is great,
but I would gladly trade off these sorts of features to get the more
mundane stuff working consistently and reliably. It's odd to me that Mac
OS has had far better monitor management for a countless number of years
so far, one would think that this would be a priority to match in Linux?
Again, I know that my problems here are pretty vague and sketchy...
My main point is more of a question. Why doesn't the Ubuntu team put a
hold on adding new features and just work their butts off getting the
mundane unsexy stuff to work, and in improving performance overall?
There is no point in trying to keep up with the pace of Apple or
Microsoft in terms of adding new features, but I would bet that most
people don't need half of those features anyway and would gladly trade
off these sorts of things for stability, reliability, and performance.
I'm at the point in my IT career that fiddling with my Desktop is just
not that fun anymore when I'm cleaning up stuff that one would think
shouldn't be broken in the first place.
I realize that Ubuntu may not be the most conservative choice for this
criteria, but it is also the first Desktop Linux OS that comes to mind
for most people. They have a unique opportunity to deliver something of
this nature and for it to be noticed. As it stands, there were a few
past Ubuntu releases that seemed to work well enough to perhaps
recommend, but right now the OS just seems like a big mess, and this is
not even getting into GUI/usability issues which have always been a
problem too, which is another story altogether...
--
Joe Auty
NetMusician: web publishing software for musicians
http://www.netmusician.org
joe@netmusician.org
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