Ubuntu, why it is crap

[inc]

I have a strong dislike for multi millionaire spaceman Mark Shuttleworth and all he takes with little put back to the community, how he takes a snapshot of Sid and freeze it for six months until the next release, this is a nice article explaining better than me why. Cloned Distro's: Why Ubuntu sucks and should be banned -  Journal - MrLinux's Lucky Fingers

[border-rider]

Fair enough. Ubuntu's a distro for non-geeks.  If you're a purist, it does indeed likely suck.  but for mere mortals like me who just want an easy and comprehensive alternative to Win, it's ideal.

[Chris S]

"Clones are unstable."

That's hilarious. I spent years playing with Gentoo. Custom built from the ground up to suit my hardware perfectly. Hmm... crashed more often than Ubuntu.

Oh - and Ubuntu crashes waaaay less often than Windows - and that's good enough for me.

I'm not a Code Weanie. I actually want to use my PC for useful stuff. Ubuntu is fine.

[Lucky]

Well, there's come truth in that. You wouldn't, for example, use Ubuntu on a business-critical server; and Ubuntu's lack of contributions back upstream isn't terribly community-spirited. But what Ubuntu has contributed, is a greatly enlarged user base. And Ubuntu's measly 100 kernel patches is still 100 patches more than Microsoft has contributed!

[inc]

That's hilarious. I spent years playing with Gentoo. Custom built from the ground up to suit my hardware perfectly. Hmm... crashed more often than Ubuntu.

Gentoo is for geeks, compiling from source takes hours with no real advantage.   I was talking more about how Ubuntu just takes from the totally non commercial  Debian  putting very little back to Linux in general. Why spend all those manhours coding for six months release intervals when all those man hours could be used developing Debian. I use Sid, I update daily. it is more recent than any version of Ubuntu but I  installed the current system three years ago and it is stable with fixes for the recent X server and 2.6.30 kernel closed source driver problems as fast as Ubuntu. Making Linux more accessible is very credible to Ubuntu but the reality is Debian would be as good for most users. Ubuntu is a marketing over reality success.

[border-rider]

Making Linux more accessible is very credible to Ubuntu but the reality is Debian would be as good for most users.

But most users wouldn't have stumbled across Debian.

[inc]

Making Linux more accessible is very credible to Ubuntu but the reality is Debian would be as good for most users.

But most users wouldn't have stumbled across Debian.

Apathy rules OK, most people use Windows, says it all really.

[rae]

I spent years playing with Gentoo. Custom built from the ground up to suit my hardware perfectly. Hmm... crashed more often than Ubuntu. 

Hmm.  My Gentoo fileserver and general network dogsbody has uptime measured in years.  OK, I rebooted it after 400 days when a disk crapped out and my cheapo RAID controller had a fit, but apart from that, pretty solid. 

For desktop use, Windows just works - really it does.   For work, well, my sysadmins are losing the will to live getting fault tolerant networking really working on RHEL, and a host of other stuff that they've had on Solaris for years.

It's just an OS - in the non-back end world, who really cares any more?  Choose your platform for your particular apps, nothing else really matters.

[PrettyBoyTim]

That article just sounds like sour grapes to me.

The author started his own distribution from scratch seven years ago (Yoper), aimed at the desktop. It seems to have enjoyed a brief period of popularity that waned at around the time Ubuntu came on to the scene; the author blames the distro's lack of success on Ubuntu and all the money that Ubuntu has behind it.

[DuncanM]

That's just envy.  What he says is:
I started this distro, with the aims of creating a desktop specific linux, and it was good and doing quite well, and then this milliionaire bloke came along and without innovation created a better, more hyped distro.  Lots of people now run this distro and only the early adopters run mine.

So what?  He then criticises all the clones for lack of innovation and says that a clone is by definition unstable.  Well, if they do all this work on top of the base distro, then there is innovation, and if they don't, then they would have no usp and no difference with the base (and no instability problems).  So his argument isn't even internally consistent.  And look at his website (linked in PrettyBoyTim's post).  Would you choose the linux distro from that homepage?  The only mention of linux is on the forum links with someone asking if he can use his smartphone as a modem.  It's fundamentally unprofessional.   It does not look like the website of a distro that believes that it is the desktop distribution of the future.
 
Ubuntu suits me very well because of the LTS versions.  If they didn't exist, I'd run Debian (as I did before), but because they do, I can have a linux box that requires comparatively little maintenance (and I'm fundamentally lazy).

[ian]

Making Linux more accessible is very credible to Ubuntu but the reality is Debian would be as good for most users.

But most users wouldn't have stumbled across Debian.

Apathy rules OK, most people use Windows, says it all really.

Apathy doesn't really rule. Computers are tools and most users just want to - well - use them. For the majority of people, Windows works fine and does everything they need to do. There's no particular reason for them to go out and hunt an alternative. That doesn't make them apathetic or idiots. Just pragmatic users who have things better to do than sort through 101 varieties of Linux.

[fred the great]

I'll stick with Ubuntu Desktop.

It does all I want, better than Microshaft, faster than Microshaft and has never crashed in 5 years.

In contrast Microshaft..................

[Bluebottle]

Never crashed?  You want to run Ubuntu 9.04 on a thinkpad.  It seems incapable (it is that or its me which is more likely) of regulating the fan. 

[border-rider]

8.04 LTS works like a dream on Mrs MV's mum's Thinkpad...

9.04 seems fussier - it doesn't have support for the graphics card in my Acer, whereas the last 4 or 5 releases have.

[Bluebottle]

Indeed.  I should never have updated the damn thing.  8.04 worked fine, 9.04 was OK until one batch of updates.  Really don't have the inclination to reinstall everything at the moment...will await a patch.

[Adam]

Having used PC's from the time of DOS 3.0 I only got round to looking at Ubuntu earlier this year, and I can agree that it's a load of crap.  Just downloading the install file wasn't made easy, and then at the 4th attempt it finally installed itself as a dual boot on a low end PC which is currently running Windows 2000.

The PC only has 512MB but Ubuntu runs much slower than Windows in doing any tasks, Firefox ran at a crawl and I couldn't even manage to get it to install a printer driver.

At least with Windows I know I've got a usable operating system.

[border-rider]

Downloading the install file is a matter of downloading a CD image.  No more tricky, so I'm not sure what the issue is. although for an older machine the one to use is the text-based installer, not the GUI one.

But yes, if you install standard Ubuntu, you;'re installing the Gnome desktop and all its little daemons.  It'd be like expecting XP to run on a system designed for Win 3.1

Ubuntu though is the underlying OS; if you used, for example Xubuntu, or just installed the xfce desktop on your existing install to use instead of Gnome, you'd get something more amenable to a machine built for Win2000.

I've been using the full Ubuntu as dual boot on machines built for XP since 2004 or so, and in every case it's been faster and more stable than XP. 

[Chris S]

Having used PC's from the time of DOS 3.0 I only got round to looking at Ubuntu earlier this year, and I can agree that it's a load of crap.  Just downloading the install file wasn't made easy, and then at the 4th attempt it finally installed itself as a dual boot on a low end PC which is currently running Windows 2000.

The PC only has 512MB but Ubuntu runs much slower than Windows in doing any tasks, Firefox ran at a crawl and I couldn't even manage to get it to install a printer driver.

At least with Windows I know I've got a usable operating system.

I wouldn't use Ubuntu on a PC with only 512mb of RAM either. I'd use XUbuntu - same OS, much less bloat. Less bloat even than Windows 2000 - and that was the last gasp for Windows as far as I'm concerned; I still run Windows 2000 when I need to run Windows for work - much to the amusement of others at work who are all Vista/Eye Candy slaves who keep having to put yet another stick of DRAM into their PCs to keep them usable .

Edit: Bah! Cross post with the V

[border-rider]

I wouldn't use Ubuntu on a PC with only 512mb of RAM either

My 2004 vintage Dell laptop with 512 megs and a 1.2 GHz processor was OK up to 8.04, which is as far as I got before  the HD failed I dropped it.

Edit: I'd add that I had full Ubuntu inc Gnome running on my eeePC. 

[Adam]

Downloading the install file is a matter of downloading a CD image.  No more tricky, so I'm not sure what the issue is. although for an older machine the one to use is the text-based installer, not the GUI one.

The problem at the time was the download page was not at all clear about which file to download, giving multiple conflicting options.  Having just checked again, they seem to to have completely altered the page, making it much simpler.  However, too late, as that PC will keep running Windows 2000.

[border-rider]

However, too late, as that PC will keep running Windows 2000.

fair enough, but maybe try it with a GUI that's suitable for the hardware before condemning Ubuntu

I had it running fine with xfce on a c2000 Win NT machine, and using WindowMaker it'll work on a Win 3.1 spec PC.  Though DSL was faster.

[DrMekon]

I have Ubuntu Netbook Remix running on all my PCs (thinkpad, aspire one, old dell desktop). Great when you've got a wife who isn't really safe around computers and a 3rd old who likes to poke things. Since I installed TwonkyMedia, I can even stream to my 360. If there are better options, great, but I suspect that the extra footfall means more people figuring out how to get things working and documenting it. Getting twonkymedia up and running was a doddle as there were several walkthoughs available.

[Adam]

However, too late, as that PC will keep running Windows 2000.

fair enough, but maybe try it with a GUI that's suitable for the hardware before condemning Ubuntu

The specs said it should work, especially as it was a 1Gb processor.  Perhaps I had been too optimistic in thinking that it was only Microsoft that lies about minimum specifications. 

[simonp]

I wait 20 minutes for my work Windows XP laptop to stop hammering the hard disc after boot. 

I really don't have that amount of time to waste at the start of every working day. 

[fred the great]

I have a basic spec notebook and the full Ubuntu plus XP just work. As a non power user, I have used Ubuntu for about five years.

Ubuntu is quick, non intrusive and I've only ever had one problem which was caused by me. You do of course need to learn how to use it and really, it isn't very complicated.

Hence, if anyone has Ubuntu problems, they will not be caused by Ubuntu