Ubuntu Ugliness
Ubuntu is the pretty girlfriend who treats you like garbage, yet you continue to go back for more, under the insane idea that she cares about you and things will improve, it'll be better next time, she'll give back what you're putting in.But not really. She continues to treat you like waste and you don't get squat. Is there a halfway house for abused users?
My first successful Debian install was on a junk Gateway laptop and I've been hooked on it ever since. Many friends raved about Ubuntu and its additional features, newer software, better interface...unfortunately, my experience has been poor. The one-size-fits-all approach has left it with too many annoyances for my taste. While I could modify it however I wished, I prefer configuring a bare Debian install to reconfiguring an overzealous Ubuntu one.
I've been running Ubuntu on two laptops for about a year, one x86 and one PPC. I'm still fixing the upgrade from Breezy to Dapper on the x86 and I'm not prepared to start on the PPC one. While Dapper did obviously improve some things, such as the 15s GDM login, it also removed or broke many working software packages I had--such rare and obtuse programs as xscreensaver and xine.
The upgrade process itself was strange. update-manager wanted to download another dozen packages after aptitude dist-upgrade had already downloaded all it thought it needed. Dapper came out 800MB larger than my Breezy installation, on what bloat I don't know. And things were broken. Suck.
Within Debian, anything obtained from the main repositories is supported in some fashion and does not get accepted without verifying that it works (or at least doesn't break anything). My experience with Ubuntu's universe and multiverse sections made me extremely wary--an attempt to get kerberized ssh working broke my entire ssh config because the kerberized universe package conflicted with other packages I had.
The administrators seem to have an extremely zealous (overzealous?) approach to copyright that makes it very difficult to play free media codecs. I had a working xine installation before I upgraded...
In short, it's all hype. It's not a bad distribution and I'm going to continue running it, but it's not something I can just give to someone without providing assistance. It doesn't just work yet. And even once you have it working, it treats you like a Microsoft or Apple junkie and changes your setup until something is broken.
posted by Lachlan @ 4:27 AM
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