Tuesday, March 25, 2008

FUbuntu

Goodbye Ubuntu. I sampled your Freaky Frog and poked around in your Greasy Goat and even noodled around with your Horny Heron for a few days. Es bunku.

For being the best supported community Linux distribution with the biggest desktop install base (I'm making that up), Ubuntu has its canonical thumb up its canonical arse when it comes to hardware support. I have no idea what that means, but I'm not good at clever insults.

Case in points: many wifi cards (specifically in my case anything with an ralink or hermes chipset) and some ATI video cards (namely mobility Radeon).

Ok, so really I'm just pissed that your Ubuntu sucks on my Thinkpad R32 laptop and completely drops the ball when it comes to drivers for my Linksys WUSB54G wifi adapter. When I came to realize that support for my adapter actually worsened in the Haggardy Heffer beta, I decided to kill this retarded installation.

Interestingly enough, I wiped Ubuntu from my laptop the day I got a new wifi adapter that would have worked with it. Why me so krazie? Well, because I'm just not terribly impressed.

My Ubuntu 7.10 (and 8.whatever Beta) experience:

1) Terrible installation process.

2) Poor performance with default software load installed. Very poor, actually. In your defense I didn't give it enough memory, but I've seen much better performance from other distributions.

3) It's damn ugly. A stock Gnome installation straight out of 1995. You want bling? Be prepared to manually install drivers and edit your xorg config if you've got ATI video. You want something besides a solid color panel? Break out the terminal.

4) Where are the features? There is no centralized management interface that I can find, just a bunch of disassociated applications stuck to a start menu. It's very difficult to remember where to find various settings. The printer management is horrible. HORRIBLE! The themer is easily broken beyond repair and features from some themes just don't work. Network management is a joke. File sharing is more painful than it need be.

From my perspective, Ubuntu brings exactly two things to the table: 1) Automatic updates and 2) a network applet in the panel. Those are the killer apps that are year-of-the-Linux-desktoping the world. wow. Oh, and thanks for the links to "non free" codecs and drivers. A little silly to have deliberated over this one for ten years though, don't you think?

Ok ok, it also has a very large repository which is a plus. No complaints there.

Is this the best that the free Linux desktop world has to offer? I sure hope not.

I replaced Ubuntu with PCLinuxOS 2007 (real clever name there fellas) which installed in minutes from a LiveCD and seemed to setup and use all of my hardware correctly. Yay! But not so yay. After doing nothing but configuration via the GUI control center, my sound has stopped working completely and I no longer have a graphical login. Oh, and installing Kismet broke some dependencies. And most notably, it's been installing updates for over 70 minutes and i have no idea what the hell is going on. Kubuntu? Fedora? I'll blog my little heart out about all this later. You can't wait.

Soon I may end up putting Windows back on this machine because in the long run, really, I've got some shit to get done. (no I don't, I'm just trying to stir some shit up)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

On 29th April 2010, Ubuntu goes to 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). It has a greater support for your personal Cloud (which is free for the first 2gb of space) - and the desktop goes purple in the Gnome version of Ubuntu and has support for three years for the desktop edition and five years for the server edition. I also understand, that the the speed that the machine takes to get to your log-in screen has been drastically reduced from 30 seconds to 15 seconds or so. So much better than M/soft's 4 minutes on a bad day!

On Kubuntu which is the KDE version of Ubuntu you get bling that makes M/soft7 look like a rag and bone man and approaches more towards Apple's lite version of its Macintosh desktops. So your childish outburst has no real foundation since it only shows your inadequacy and unsophisticated attempt of keeping your temper. So we are better without such infantile dramatics being shown on here.

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Hi. I've been using Linux since 1993, and I hate Ubuntu too, but for different reasons.

I've had no problems with the hardware support. What I HAVE had problems with are the constant addition of all sorts of unnecessary crap. Take mono, or gvfs, for example. The former is incredibly hoggy (>100 MB of memory for each instance) and slow, and there is NOTHING you need it for, yet it's part of every install. Gvfs caused the sysadmins who work under me endless problems with backups, and I've now found ways to turn local exploits into remote exploits, thanks to gvfs's mounting of filesystems over networks. (I'm a professional security geek, and I, personally, have compromised hundreds of hardened servers through trust relationships over networks, like remote filesystem mounts.) Yet if you want to remove gvfs, you basically have to remove the whole OS, which is coded to depend on it being there.

So I am saying FUbuntu, too, and going back to OpenBSD, which isn't loaded up with needless and insecure garbage.

But Windows? Hah! Not a chance!!!!

Anonymous said...

I'm currently on Precise Pangolin (12.04) on my Netbook. On my main computer (Desktop) I am using a straight 13.10 Ubuntu Saucy Salamander - with no problems (though I miss the Mir program). If you are having problems with this particular Linux try Open Suse 13.3 - it is more professional and works with most hardware and software these days out of the box. Unix, the system upon which Linux was built on, Hosts also the superb system known as the Mac. Their latest offering coming out in December in the all-new cylindrical Mac Pro system supporting 7 terraflops and better than anything else on the planet for Desktop Computers!