Ubuntu, why it is crap

[Attitudeless Badger]

Having bigged up Joli OS, this morning I ordered an Asus Transformer tablet, then this pm the Joli OS crashed and burned.  I cannot get beyond the grub loader.  XP boots OK, but Joli OS gives an error message too quick to see and then leaves a DOS type "grub>" command line.

Some investigation needed, but a bit miffed that it all died suddenly. It was almost as if it new the replacement was on its way....

[Tewdric]

Is anyone running 11.10 on a tablet?  How does it work?

[rogerzilla]

If you change the keyboard and mouse settings on the Unity desktop, how on earth do you apply them?  It is the least user-friendly GUI I think I've ever seen.

[sas]

If you change the keyboard and mouse settings on the Unity desktop, how on earth do you apply them?  It is the least user-friendly GUI I think I've ever seen.

Aren't the settings applied instantly?

[rogerzilla]

Apparently they're not applied at all.  And this is a live USB, not a live CD.  It does remember other stuff like browser history.

[TimC]

Is anyone running 11.10 on a tablet?  How does it work?

Well, I can run it on my iPad via Splashtop and the Ubuntu VM on my iMac! How does it work? Just as impenetrably as it does on anything else!

[itsbruce]

I never have tried Ubuntu, or ay other Debian-based distro.  (one of the few gaps in my historical linux coverage).

Significant gap, then.

My Gentoo is rock stable, though. 

True, it's a bit scary when a major upgrade (e.g. of gnome or KDE) comes in, and even scarier when you put off doing that upgrade because of OTHER STUFFS^TM and another couple of major upgrades sneak in, but by and large, the portage system has proved better (MUCH more so) than, certainly, rpm at resolving dependency issue in upgrades.  I gave up on older RedHat, Mandrake/Mandriva and SuSE for reasons of rpm dependency hell.  No idea how ubuntu's package management (.debs ? via apt?) compares with rpm though.

RPM dependency problems are mostly in the past, now that Yum, Apt-RPM and similar tools are available.  The quality of many packages for Red Hat and Fedora is questionable, but that's another story.

 If you have never tried a Debian-based distro, then you may be in for a shock if you ever do.  While APT blazed a trail for sensible package management, at least as important are the configuration management tools (debconf and friends).  Gentoo's equivalents are still neolithic in comparison, with upgrades still often needing a bunch of manual fixing of config files.

[itsbruce]

RPM used to be crap at resolving dependencies. With SuSE its not too bad these days if you use their YAST frontend. Don't know about Redhat as I haven't used it in years.
Debian based distros (Ubuntu, Mint etc) don't have dependency issues as the deb format is designed to list the dependencies within the deb then the tools you use to install a deb file (eg apt) automatically install any debs that are dependencies. It even suggests packages that are not strictly speaking necessary but might be useful, for example if you install say Gimp it will suggest you also might want to install gimp-print and some other gimp add on packages and if you say OK it will download and install these for you too.
Deb is the best packaging system I have found. Arch's pacman is a pretty good as well. Never tried Gentoo so I cant comment on portage/

RPM has also always listed dependencies.  You're trying to compare RPM with APT, when it's actually an equivalent to the dpkg tools.  The problem used to be that Red Hat and derivatives simply had no equivalent tool to APT.  This is no longer the case.  Where Debian does still have an edge, though, is in the quality and consistency of the packaging (there are some shockingly poor packages in the RH/Fedora core, for example), the configuration management (debconf and co) and the stable repository.  This is the plus side of Debian being a loose confederation of thousands of smelly hippies all shouting at each other.  There are downsides...

[hubner]

It looks like Ubuntu's going to abandon the mouse clicking menu windows system altogether.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16731071

Ubuntu swaps application menus for HUD control system



The Ubuntu operating system is to replace its application menus with a "head-up display" (HUD) box.

Users control the HUD interface by typing in the command they want carried out.

Developers of the Linux-based software say they will initially offer the HUD as an option, allowing users to "hide" their menu bars.

They say that using the HUD is faster than "mousing through a menu" and makes applications feel more powerful.

[DaveJ]

I installed 12.04 (32bit workstation version) over the top of an earlier version (10.4).  Now I can't copy the USERS folders from any VISTA/Win7 system.  "Too many symbolic links".

Is it 12.04, or is it this hardware, or is is just me??  Whatever it is, its very frustrating!

Dave

[BrianI]

I'm loving xubuntu 12.04!   

[philip]

"Too many symbolic links".

Is that the complete error message?

Is the error really "Too many levels of symbolic links"? If so then the problem is two symbolic links that point to each other:

$ ln -s $PWD/x1 x2
$ ln -s $PWD/x2 x1
$ ls x1
ls: cannot access x1: Too many levels of symbolic links