Excellent thoughts, indeed.

Quite frankly, I give davidx an A+ for his perseverance and effort. Had Ubuntu, being the #1 distro for so long, misbehaved with me as it did for him, I simply would have laughed and reinstalled Windows. Maybe I would have toyed with it for a day or two, but even that is questionable.

davidx- There are other distros, and not all behave the same. Perhaps you could try the live CDs til you find one that works?

Cheers

Well, I can understand where davidx is coming from. I actually agree with many of the points made there, because they are true, mostly for certain software versions.

For example Flash player 9 for Linux is quite crappy, Flash 10 is much improved and will run fullscreen for me without any issues and at good quality.

Newer versions of openoffice are faster, but indeed with large files for some reasons it scrolls very slowly. You can try abiword as well, it's somewhat lighter than openoffice, and gnumeric instead of excel (this one you can't argue with, gnumeric is greatly superior to excel even tho it lacks a few features for advanced users).

Formatting issues are typically due to the installer. Bootup speed, bloatware ... I completely agree with those, Ubuntu is bloated by default, unfortunately.

Video, that depends on your video card and the media player, I prefer mplayer, it has the most options and plays almost any movie in existence.

Printing, depends on printer and level of support, check here: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/OpenPrinting

Window manager and file manager, yup nautilus sucks, and konqueror too, both extremely bloated and usually unstable. But there are many other options, try searching for them. I use fluxbox and rox-filer, very light and fast.

Ubuntu, what is it for ? Not more than an attempt to make Linux more user-friendly. I think they failed and wasted their money, probably what you think too, right ?

Anyway, I too hate Ubuntu, because although many people use it, it's not an OS that I would use on a regular basis, it's just too bloated and restrictive. It's not much better that Window$ I think, except maybe theoretically, I mean yes it is FLOSS whereas Window$ is the evil empire.

Some advice from me. I have tried so many Linux distros and most of them suck, some more than others. If you ever decide to try again, try some more distros and see which one you like. I can write here that I hate Ubuntu, but that's just my opinion. Some people love Ubuntu. You should try to find what distro you like best. So try many of them and see which one you like. Or if you are content with Window$ then I guess stay with that. But, I don't think you are, otherwise why would you try something else ?

Also, try many different programs, what you experience with Ubuntu was the GNOME window manager, nautilus file browser, openoffice office software, etc. But there are many alternative that people have made. Try them out too, surely they can't all disappoint you. Most will tho, they disappoint me too. It's hard to find a good text editor for example, but I have found it, same with the rest of the programs. You have to search and find what you want, it's almost impossible to have someone know what you want and give it to you ... right ? So find a distro that is close to what you want and tweak it to your liking that's what I did, and it's way better than Window$ and Ubuntu.

When I first started using Linux, around 1995 or so, all the so called easy distros(Redhat, Mandrake, Suse) wouldn't install without a bunch problems. Either they wanted to take over the whole hard drive, which I wanted to dual boot with my Win95, or something screwed up and I had to repartition/reformat about a dozen times.

Finally I decided to try a few of the so called advanced/hard distros, Debian & Slackware. Turns out, these two were the only ones I could install with less hassles, sure I had to tinker around to get some stuff working, such as flash, music etc, but they install out the box with less issues then the so called easy distros. I've been using them since.

It's just a matter deciding if you want to stick with something to make it work and once you get it working your way, you will love it.

IMO, if you try one of these and stick with it, you're have a much better experience with linux.
Debian, Slackware, Mandriva, Fedora & OpenSuse. They've been at the top of most all linux ratings since linux early beginnings!

In short - you don't like it - don't use it. Or try another distribution.

This piece has no purpose and is completely useless rant. I've seen several like this one, and I'm fed up with idiots who feel obliged to write another piece of crap about linux without ever giving enough effort to make things work.

Flashplayer officially doesn't support opera. Works in firefox just fine. End of story.

There are many other mp3 players. And - surprise! - I never heard about the one you are referring to.

BS. Never had this problem.

Have you tried another desktop? No? Then bye!

You are misinforming people. You won't run into problems after dual boot, if you did it correctly.

It is really strange that it took you so much time to realize it, because it is quite obvious. Linux never tried to be windows. Read this article.

Vista won't work on 900mhz machine. Ubuntu will. End of story. And again - if you are really interested in linux os, try another distribution (at least 5 of them). If you aren't - then go away, people will be quite happy without you.

Nope, it isn't. When something breaks, typically the only way to fix it
is to reinstall everything. Which is stupid.

FYI - ubuntu isn't trying to compete with Windows. Linux isn't trying to compete with Windows. it doesn't need to.

Nope, they shouldn't. You forgot that product is free. People make this
distribution, because they want to do it. If you don't like what they do - it is your problem.

I am with you with the 'Ubuntu sucks' part.

Ubuntu is a overhyped distro that seems to have serious problems with QA from one version to the other.

Unfortunately the drivers for Linux are not up to par in a lot of areas and some hardware will probably never work great with Linux w/o screwing around to get it going because it is build for windows.

No it's not a conspiracy - it's just that companies build hardware as cheap as possible and for example building a winmodem or windows only printer seems to be where the profits are.

Those things are changing rapidly though.

It all comes down to preferences.There are things you can do with Linux you can't with windows and things that would cost you a fortune with windows that are free with Linux.

On the other hand you might get into more trouble than you asked for especially with laptops and apps will not behave the same way as the windows equivalent.

Why?
With laptops you are stuck with whatever hardware is in there.
For applications there is no law I am aware of that they should behave the same way as the windows apps.

Other thing is that there are a lot of Linux apps for some things like playing mp3's.
MP'3 are problematic because it is a closed source codec and support for it varies widely among distros for legal reasons and there is a shitload of media players out there.
Personally I never heard of banshee and songbird.Noatun opens an mp3 in about 2 seconds here (not that I'd actually use it)and so do audacious and amarok being a hell of a lot faster than anything on my windows partition.

Ubuntu isn't the best, of course.
But, anyway, it deserves better article, instead of another pointless "ubuntu - sucks" rant.

It's a waste of time replying to subjective rants (so why did I bother? ).

While I am not a Ubuntu user, Ubuntu has it's place. based on the unstable branch of Debian the Ubuntu developers do a lot of work. .then push that work out to be tested in new releases every 6 months. I can't imagine anything released in that rapid fashion is going to be perfect. (personal opinion) Many of those modifications are passed back to Debian and will be included in Debian in their own good time, after thorough testing, before the next Debian Stable release (That certainly doesn't happen on any rapid release schedule ).

Yes Ubuntu has it's place. it's place is not on my machine, but I surely do appreciate all the development effort and beta testing they provide for the Linux community in general.

Debian Stable, it just works (well for me anyway..)


One of the guys here at work has been raving about Ubuntu 8.04 for months.. He tried upgrading to 8.10 last week and it was a total FAIL. He gave up and switched back to windows. I couldn't get too many details on what went wrong, and why he didn't just roll back to 8.04. It's odd how the new version works fine for some and leaves other peoples machines dead after the upgrade. That should be a clue. Don't upgrade immediately upon release of a new version. Wait, Watch the forums, let the other users do your beta testing, troubleshooting, and problem resolution. That way when you do upgrade you can draw on all the resources those other users have provided.




I'm rather surprised this thread has been this civil.. I was expecting far worse when I spotted the title

to try to end the subjective rant ... hopefully

Yes, it is a subjective rant, but if I explain this to everyone maybe they will realize it and stop posting and try some more distros ...

Can we stop ragging on the OP please? He has been very polite in his responses and, contrary to post #1, is open to your ideas and open to a discussion. I'm pretty sure he has received and understood the message about not liking rants so can we all now try to be constructive and provide advice and guidance - that is what this forum is for after all.

I certainly enjoyed reading this thread. I am still using xp and attempting to move to ubuntu with the dual boot installed. I installed it but am not able to go online. My isp is Verizon, which does not support linux and so they are unable to guide me to get on line. My computer is on a network with one other computer. I am close to computer illiterate and cannot decipher the instructions to get the computer on line with ubuntu. I would appreciate some assistance comments or guidance from this group. I do have a comment I think valid to this thread.

I have purchased every ms system and version (except Vista) from its inception. Besides dealing with all the crashes over the years, ms has invalidated my purchased os through their faulty database and I believe has resently issued malicious code to me that now crashes my xp, the most stable purchase I ever made from ms. I think I installed xp too many times and my key no longer works. That, and free software that works is the reason I am determined to rid myself of ms.

I do agree with you... no doubt!

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This AuroraCA at first compliments me, then disses me later on... Are you ok? Why would you compliemnt me in your first posts to me, then egg on me later? I think some people who aren't appealing to the opposite sex act out in a rage at others who find happiness in choosing things they may not agree, like, choosing an o/s. Because of their frustration, if you're not loyal to their beliefs, like, an o/s, they lash out at you. To them, an o/s is a replacement for a woman they know they can never have. If you diss their "woman", they'll lash out.

So, AuroraCA, we can imagine what you're going through... it's ok, buddy.

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Quakeboy, I'd repond to you, but you're not making sense.it's possibly from syntax. Re-phare your comment in a more understandable manner so I can respond.
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My post was pretty succinct. I paraphrased you, so if you can't understand the syntax, then look to your own post. Unlike the moderator, I feel that you are simply a troll and nothing good will come of this thread.