Why not Ubuntu?

[exploder]

I have way too much time on my hands! My only real complaint about Ubuntu is the poor quality and grabbing all the press. I want nothing more than for Ubuntu to release something of quality that actually deserves the media attention.I was optimistic about 11.04 and Unity, it will not run on any of my computers properly... None of my computers are very old and there is nothing special about any of my hardware.

[MALsPa]

I have way too much time on my hands! My only real complaint about Ubuntu is the poor quality and grabbing all the press. I want nothing more than for Ubuntu to release something of quality that actually deserves the media attention.I was optimistic about 11.04 and Unity, it will not run on any of my computers properly... None of my computers are very old and there is nothing special about any of my hardware.

If that was me, I'd probably drop it, too. Was Unity the problem? Did you try installing a different DE or WM? I don't think I'll like Unity, so that's what I plan to do next time I install Ubuntu. I haven't had issues with the quality, though.

I don't get it about "grabbing all the press" and all that. Ubuntu's (probably) the most widely used distro out there, so why wouldn't people talk about them more than other distros? Funny thing about it, have you ever noticed that a lot of that media attention is negative? Negative comments about the distro's name, the default color, the fact that they do some different things (sudo, moving the window buttons, Unity), Shuttleworth being a billionaire, and so on and so forth.

Ubuntu is Linux' favorite whipping boy, at least right now. Kinda makes me want to pull for them!

By the way, it was really cool how they used to send out free installation CDs, postage paid! At the time, I was a dial-up user, and so I really appreciated that. I used to think, "It's free; it doesn't have to be perfect, I can work with it!" And I guess it never really was perfect (which distro is?), but I was always able to use it to do what I needed to do.

And I've always liked the "Ubuntu" concept. Was it always just a catchy name to lure people in? Who knows? Whatever the motives for going with that name, it's still a cool concept. "I am what I am because of who we all are," or however people want to interpret it. I think it relates to Linux quite well, the way we all get together at these forums to help each other out -- not because we're getting paid for it, but because giving our time like this gives something greater back to each of us. Doesn't it?

[Robin]

I really have mixed feelings about even saying that I prefer Ubuntu over Mint, especially here at these forums. I'm a long-time Mint user and a long-time Mint fan. I didn't start using Mint because of any dissatisfaction with Ubuntu; the fact that Mint was based on Ubuntu was probably a major attraction for me. ... Ubuntu simply works out a little better for me.

Y'know it's kinda funny... Debian and I didn't get along very well, so I went back to Xubuntu and Mint Xfce (LTS). Now future editions of Mint Xfce will be Debian-based instead of Xubuntu-based! I'll pro'lly try it out, but I suspect that I too will be leaving Mint for 'buntu when my superbly wonderful Mint Xfce LTS reaches end-of-life. But I think I'll try AntiX before I decide... it looks fascinating and I'm curious about Fluxbox.

But don't feel bad, MALsPA, you're hardly the only one who may prefer one over the other. No one is mad at Exploder, for example, for singing the praises of PCLinuxOS with such enthusiasm here in the Mint forums! If he can do it, why not you?

[spider2097]

The whole thing about the colors, though, kinda puzzles me. Default appearances don't matter to me at all, and I don't quite understand why people have ever had issues with the "brown," or whatever colors Ubuntu currently uses on the default desktop. But it certainly seems to bug a lot of people! Kinda fascinates me that it's even an issue.

I really appreciate the kind words, lmintnewb. I thought I was gonna get crucified for saying how I felt. But I've spent a lot of time using both distros, and I guess over time I just found myself liking Ubuntu a little better.

It's a bit of a strange one. I just prefer Mint - although I do have to admit that I'm going over to LMDE as opposed to sticking with the Ubuntu based editions (in order to avoid the whole Gnome/Unity issue). I certainly have no problem with individual peoples preferences when it comes to distro choice. I just didn't get on with Ubuntu, maybe it's because I was coming from Windows but Ubuntu did not create a good first impression on me. Mint, however, had that bit of a "wow" factor when I first loaded it up - this was Mint 7 Gloria.

I agree that the colour argument can seem trivial given how simple it is to change theme - after all, it's not like a physical object (such as a chair, mobile phone, DVD player, computer case) that you're stuck with how it looks. It could be looked upon in a similar way to those items though, certain brands will be more popular due to the aesthetics of their product being "in fashion" or "classic" etc etc etc. Functionally, a MyFirstDVDPlayer may be exactly the same as an UltraExpensiveTopBrandDVDPlayer but the UETBDP could be the more desirable depending on whether you felt that looked better.

In a less similar way, those physical objects don't really suffer from the same sort of "fanboy-ism" that Linux distro's seem to suffer from. You're much less likely to get berated for choosing a particular DVD player/TV/phone/etc than you are for choosing a particular distro. Or, on the flip side, if you criticize a particular distro (even for the most minor of flaws) you're much more likely to get torrents of abuse than if you were to point out that a TV is a bit old (for example)

I guess that you might be better comparing Linux distro's to sports teams for all the good that does

[phredbull]

The whole thing about the colors, though, kinda puzzles me. Default appearances don't matter to me at all, and I don't quite understand why people have ever had issues with the "brown," or whatever colors Ubuntu currently uses on the default desktop. But it certainly seems to bug a lot of people! Kinda fascinates me that it's even an issue.

Of course anyone who cares so much will end up changing the appearance anyway, I just think it's funny that they actually have a design team, but still end up with such aesthetically questionable results! OTOH, first impressions are important, and if your first impression is "Eew, gross", (even subconsciously), then you might be more likely to use something else. It's probably an even bigger factor to the "n00bish" casual user (Ubuntu's target audience?), as opposed to the established Linux geek.
Apple is a perfect example; (love them or hate them), their product designs inspire a legendary cultish fanaticism. When the iPod first came out, you just wanted to hold one, be seen with it. The round-base iMac, when you first saw it, it made you go, "Wow, that's a computer?!?" That's the significance of good aesthetic design over pure functionality. Does it make their software run better? No, but it does make people enjoy using their devices more. It's this sensibility that makes Mac OS THE platform for creative professionals. As a professional Audio Engineer, my biggest complaint about Linux audio apps is horrid interfaces. It's tough to be creative when you're having to flip through a half dozen windows, the knobs and sliders aren't scaled in a useful way and things are represented numerically rather than graphically. Aesthetics are important, perhaps more so to some than others. (I like to say "Linux looks rough, even when it's working perfectly, i.e. startup w/terminal text on screen; Mac OS looks beautiful even when it's crashing!")
And that's my long-winded explanation to, "Why hating so much on the brown?"
(Go green!)

edit: re: "Ubuntu" concept: That was actually a significant factor in choosing Ubuntu as my first Linux distro. I've since come to the conclusion that it's all lip service, I mean really, no one becomes a billionaire by being altruistic or a humanitarian...

[MALsPa]

I guess that you might be better comparing Linux distro's to sports teams for all the good that does

Too bad you can't change the "default color" that some of these sports teams use!

Go Raiders!

[AlbertP]

Sports teams always have a winner each year. On Linux it isn't as clear which distro is winner (has most users).

[MALsPa]

On Linux it isn't as clear which distro is winner (has most users).

Nor does that matter (at least to me).

[MALsPa]

Thought some of you might find this interesting:

http://www.ainer.org/news/ubuntu-11-04- ... t-11-katya

[spider2097]

Sports teams always have a winner each year. On Linux it isn't as clear which distro is winner (has most users).

Maybe sports teams was a bad analogy, possibly music acts would be a better one. With few exceptions, the Linux Mint forums are home to quite broad minded people so there's not too many examples of pure "fanboy-ism" on display. Some forums aren't quite as welcoming of threads to talk about other distro's as this forum is.

In fact, I do think the music act analogy would be much better - after all, popular doesn't always equal best

Edit : And of course, what's best for one person is not necessarily best for someone else.

[exploder]

I should explain myself and my comments to the community. I think sometimes I feel like if I speak out about all of the bugs and regressions in Ubuntu that they will listen and make things better. If I run Ubuntu or anything Ubuntu based I spend more time fixing things than I do using the computer. I have to mainly fix the NVidea drivers and Plymouth, it can take days to come up with a good solution. At any given time an update can break what I invested days to fix. So I have the NVIdea drivers working, turn on my computer one morning and I find that the NVidea drivers are installed but not in use! Re-installing the Nvidea drivers does not work and it's like looking for a needle in a haystack finding what all of a sudden broke them so I have to start all over again. This type of thing happens release after release.

MPlayer double and triple buffers and crashes out of full screen playing Apple trailers. In the new releases MPLayer will not even play a trailer from Apple's site. I always though MPLayer itself was the problem but it's not, it's the way the MPLayer package is configured. MPlayer works fine in PCLinuxOS. It works in PCLInuxOS because Texstar fixed the problem and repackaged it. In anything Ubuntu based I have to fix Plymouth because I use the proprietary NVidea drivers, each release since they started using Plymouth takes a different way to fix the problem. The first release with Plymouth you had to edit files and fix it by hand, the next release StartUpManager would fix it, the latest release I either get a black screen or something with a blurry low resolution. There is no fixing Plymouth for me because I have a 25" monitor and none of the fixes will give me any kind of a usable resolution for Plymouth to display in. Even the one shot script will not work...

I use full screen flash constantly because I let my two youngest boys watch their cartoons on the television. It takes some work to get full screen flash to work for me in Ubuntu or anything Ubuntu based and it is hit and miss. Sometimes flash will work and sometimes it just crashes Firefox or looks like a slide show. Full screen flash has worked for me in PCLinuxOS reliably, even using two different versions of the xserver-org packages and with different kernels. I have 2 computers that have NVidea GT 220 graphics cards and 1 with NVidea 6150 on-board graphics, all of these computers work fine with PCLinuxOS but they all suffer from the issues I mentioned in Ubuntu or anything Ubuntu based.

I did switch the computer with the Foxconn main board to Windows Vista because Foxconn did something to the BIOS and it never has run any version of Linux without some kind of serious problem. I have flashed the BIOS 3 times and it almost works with PCLinuxOS but the sound will start skipping at random and I tried everything to fix it with no permanent solution. The computer is a total mess running anything Ubuntu, the DVD writer will not work most of the time, graphics drivers quit working, no sound in a lot of applications and the computer will just fail to load the operating system for no apparent reason. Some of you may remember Foxconn was caught altering the BIOS on some of their boards and I apparently have one of these boards. At any rate, I have all of the open source applications I have always used installed in Windows and it's not so different from running KDE and the computer is useful now.

I have not been able to run anything Ubuntu based since 8.04 reliably on any of my computers and since I got the 25" monitor even that will not work. The only way I can run Mint is in Virtualbox. I was able to run the Debian based version for a while but using testing kept breaking things and I wanted newer versions of Firefox and some other applications I could not get without building the packages myself. I almost gave up on Linux completely after using it for over 7 years. I tried the PCLinuxOS KDE mini and everything just worked! I started by building the system in Virtualbox and installing only the applications that I wanted. I used mylivecd to remaster, tested the Live CD and installed the system to my hard drive. I did all this as a last ditch effort to be able to keep Linux on my computers. I distro hopped threw countless distributions always finding the same things, no long term support, hardware issues, multimedia problems and the list goes on and on. Texstar's communication with the community on Twitter and the forum made me see that someone out there does listen when you have a problem and does everything humanly possible to fix things.

I am not trying to promote anything other than quality. How many others have struggled through the same problem I have? How can we get Ubuntu to improve things if we say nothing? The Mint main edition is built with the Ubuntu base, how can I just sit back and say nothing knowing that people are going to have a lot of problems that can be fixed? I have always tried to post solutions and work arounds for the problems I have found and been able to solve but some of the bugs in 11.04 just don't have any solutions. I can't just sit back and sing the praises of Ubuntu when they are affecting some many many of us with the bugs and regressions they are releasing with. I can't understand why more people do not speak up. I don't hate Ubuntu or else I would not say anything at all. I see PCLinuxOS and Mepis building better releases with only a handful of people, so I know it's possible for Ubuntu to release with better quality than they are.

Doesn't it bother anyone when the multi billionaire founder of Ubuntu stands before the world and makes a keynote speech saying he is going to fix plymouth, the graphics stack and a host of other things and then does just the opposite? It bothers me! Ubuntu effects too many people to just ignore the problem because they effect other projects that other distributions have to use. Even if you do not use Ubuntu or any of it's spin offs you are effected by what they do. There is nothing special about any of the hardware in my Linux computers, just about any distribution should run on them. All I want is better quality and for someone to actually care about the problems all of us have. I do not expect miracles but come on, quit releasing alpha quality releases.

[AlbertP]

Ubuntu have delayed the release of 6.06 LTS. Now they don't want any delay anymore.

I think Ubuntu needs another leader instead of the billionaire named Mark S. And I think they have to move away from 6-month releases if they can't make it stable.

[MALsPa]

I think Ubuntu needs another leader instead of the billionaire named Mark S.

Yeah. Might force Linux people to look around for someone else to hate.

[exploder]

I don't think anyone hates Mark Shuttleworth. I don't.

[AlbertP]

I don't dislike Mr. Shuttleworth himself. I don't like his decisions regarding Ubuntu and Linux.

Bill Gates has at least decided to step back. Mark Shuttleworth hasn't yet done that.

Windows was still a quite good OS in the days of Windows 98 SE, 13 years after the start. I have never had major problems with that version, nor did I have problems with 95 (though I don't remember much of it). Ubuntu's quality is going down with each release from Karmic (some people already blame Jaunty) on. The decay already started after 5 years of development.
Windows at least have seen what they've done wrong in 98 (first edition) and Vista, and released an improved Windows version after that. Ubuntu don't yet see that they're going horribly wrong.

[MALsPa]

Ubuntu don't yet see that they're going horribly wrong.

I guess I don't yet see that they are, either. Maybe I'll feel differently when I replace Lucid with 12.04 next year.

[AlbertP]

If you're still running Lucid, it isn't that apparent but Natty is in my opinion not an improvement.

[exploder]

AlbertP, I like the point that you made about Microsoft seeing what they were doing wrong. Microsoft saw the mistakes they made with Vista and they quickly corrected the issues with Windows 7. Microsoft did supply enough support to fix many of the problems people were having with Vista and they continue to maintain and update it. Microsoft did offer manufacturers and some consumers a free upgrade to Windows 7 and they extended the support for Windows XP. Microsoft did take responsibility for their mistakes and they did the responsible thing and tried to make things right for the consumer. Because of the mistakes made with Vista, Microsoft made the Windows 7 betas available for everyone. In the past Microsoft only allowed TechNet members to test their beta releases and of course their own internal testing. I do remember reading that all employees of Microsoft run the new version on a daily basis before it is released to the general public. Microsoft has a lot of bad business practices but they do seem to listen to what their customers want.

I do not know a lot about the MacOS but they too seem to listen to their customers and if I remember right they did provide an OS upgrade at least once because of problems found by consumers. The only real exposure I have had with the MacOS is when my older kids were little I got to try MacOS 9 on a school computer while I was waiting to see a teacher for a parent teacher conference. A teacher saw me looking at the computer and asked me if I would like to try the Mac and of course I appreciated the opportunity to try it. My oldest Daughter bought a Macbook Pro for college and I helped her get the things she needed installed on it and I did play around with it to see what it could do. My Daughter has had her Macbook Pro for 2 years now and it still runs just as nice as the day she bought it, so the MacOS must be pretty decent.

Both these big companies have their faults with all of the constant lawsuits going on and all the talk about stealing everyone's intellectual property but they both do manage to take care of their customers. Redhat seems to take care of their customers, they are profitable and their Enterprise Edition seems to be accepted and taken seriously in the business world. Shouldn't Canonical try and listen to and take better care of their loyal community? Canonical is where it is because the community supports them and the community members are the ones providing all of the fixes and work arounds for all of their releases.

[AlbertP]

Redhat seems to take care of their customers, they are profitable and their Enterprise Edition seems to be accepted and taken seriously in the business world. Shouldn't Canonical try and listen to and take better care of their loyal community?

Red Hat also takes care for the users of their free product Fedora. I know that it has forked from RHEL but it still uses many RH code. I would almost switch to it if it didn't use Gnome Shell and it wasn't so cutting-edge.

I wish Ubuntu would have a team as good as Fedora's. It would be a much better distro then. And Mint (and many others) would also profit. It could also improve the image of Linux in general.

[phredbull]

Well, when you're as big as M$, you have a lot to lose, so a certain level of QA is really just a practical business decision. If they ignored the backlash from Vista, it would have seriously hurt the company. I'm not sure how much Apple listens to it's customers, they fix things when they're critically broken. But they do apparently commit a lot of talent and dedication to good design and usability.
With both M$ and Apple, there's big $$$ at stake.
Ubuntu is the biggest, that's why they're subject to the most scrutiny. While anything they do doesn't have to affect what other Linux devs are doing, their large presence does affect the overall image of the Linux landscape. No one is worried about what effect the little guys will have, but people that are into Linux for the freedom, openness, and choice aspects might have cause for concern when an entity becomes monolithic. I think people want to see Ubuntu become like Win7, in the sense that M$ busted their asses to right the wrong that was Vista. But it seems that Shuttleworth aspires to more of a Steve Jobs-like figure; he wants to dictate the direction of his OS, and for the world to be enamored by it. Being a free OS for desktop users, I'm not sure how much bearing customer satisfaction has on Canonical's bottom line...