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My Disastrous Experience with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Thar (2015)

77 points by bmaupin 11y ago

th0ma5 11y ago
Been running 14.04 on a hacked Chromebook, a Zbox, and an old iMac for more than a year and haven't had any issues. Looking forward to 16.04!
lorenzhs 11y ago
The article is from January 2015, and the title should probably reflect that.
- leblancfg 11y ago
  This. And it's "Tahr", goddamnit. XD
  - CalRobert 11y ago
    Argg, thar be tahrs, matey!
raverbashing 11y ago
I don't think this is an issue with 14.04 only Updating a Ubuntu install has been a "surprise", some things start working, some others stop working It seems there are two types of packages, the "base system" (kernel, libs, etc) which is rock-solid but anything that gives "user friendliness" is a crapshoot
blakesterz 11y ago
This was a pretty interesting read. I've been using Trusty on a desktop (his problems are laptop, maybe somewhat different) for about 2 years as my primary machine. This is one of the lines that really stood out for me: >>How can a consumer figure that out? I still hit problems on this thing. Weird random problems, basic things that should just work, and sometimes just fail. I frequently think "If I can't get this to work without an hour of work, there's no way this is ready to be widely used".
- xlm1717 11y ago
  Like the author, I also tried to upgrade from 12.04 to 14.04. The difference is I was on a desktop VM. I went with just upgrading the existing VM thinking it would take less work than spinning up a new VM and transferring all my files and settings, but that turned out to be a huge miscalculation. Originally left it to upgrade overnight, only to come in the morning (this is on my work machine) to see that it hanged somewhere in the process and wouldn't move on without user input. So I proceeded with clicking through all the prompts, and when 14.04 first loads, it's SO SLOW. Long story short, it took me 4-6 hours to finally get it usable. The whole time I was thinking, "how could they mess this up so badly?" The host OS for the VM is Windows 7, and I have to agree with the author, it is much better to use. I only run the VM for the command line, but may upgrade to Windows 10 when Ubuntu on Linux comes out of beta this summer.
- bhauer 11y ago
  > How can a consumer figure that out? I still hit problems on this thing. Weird random problems, basic things that should just work, and sometimes just fail. I frequently think "If I can't get this to work without an hour of work, there's no way this is ready to be widely used". Though, to be fair, even as a Windows user and relatively firm fan of Windows, that happens for me routinely on Windows. Windows Update in particular is confusing with its many error messages that either magically resolve themselves if you retry enough times or require significant and arcane manual resolution. Managing home network file systems and printers with Windows in 2016 seems basically unchanged from 1998. Microsoft added "HomeGroups" to make this a bit easier for lay people, but they have more or less abandoned to its Windows 7 iteration, with virtually no evolution since. Now they channel their efforts toward integrating their cloud storage services. Generally speaking, this is the trouble with general purpose computing and general purpose operating systems—there are rough edges and a huge number of corner cases that get ugly. In several decades of evolving these systems, we've not buffed those rough edges down as much as we'd like. It's similarly the reason mobile operating systems are popular for primary computing devices for a growing segment of the population. (Although, I will add that mobile operating systems are picking up the same rough edges as their capabilities expand to encompass more of the terrain typically associated with general purpose systems.)
- 11y ago
Mikeb85 11y ago
Yeah, my experience with 14.04 has been seriously sub-par, 12.04 was much better. Seems Ubuntu and desktop Linux is seriously regressing, with the newer kernels my laptop won't suspend any more (Thinkpad T530 w/ Ivy Bridge and Intel graphics), after 4+ years of flawless usage. Seriously, nothing went wrong for years and now there's some horrible regression that has fucked up the whole experience and I can't suspend my laptop. WTF (and I have checked mailing lists, it is an upstream bug of some sort though some blame the kernel, others blame systemd).
- nickspacek 11y ago
  Anecdotal, but suspend has always been a huge frustration for me (T510). Between trying different video drivers and kernels and having them bork the machine I decided to see if any modern release of a distro would just work out of the box (hardware acceleration or no, whatever the OOTB Live experience gave). My procedure was to boot the Live version, then standby and wake multiple times and see which would reliably work. I had been on Ubuntu for a while but it didn't work, neither did (maybe unsurprisingly) Mint, but Fedora just worked. I've stuck with Fedora for a while and have gone for good stretches where standby + resume would work for weeks... and then fail inexplicably. But with Fedora it's the best it has been in the 6 years I've had this machine.
- teekert 11y ago
  Could it be the constant back-porting of patches that leads to problems? And in fact you are using and old, patched kernel? Perhaps a truly new kernel would surprise you.
  - Mikeb85 11y ago
    Maybe. But according to others, it's an upstream bug that still exists in the new(est) kernels. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1504584 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1504584
- erik14th 11y ago
  My experience is the opposite, 12.04 used to crash(X) on me quite often. I did have some problems with 14.04 that would send a regular user go back to windows, but nothing I couldn't solve in a few minutes. I tried to use arch, but I ended up fiddling with dwm and other stuff instead of working on what I should and I don't really like any of the linux DE's other than unity. So I don't really see any good alternatives for a distro to use with as little hassle/configuration as possible.
techthroway443 11y ago
Is it just me or do most of his issues seem video related? In which case that would probably be a driver issue which would be poor vendor support and not necessarily a problem with Ubuntu. Why not switch to onboard/integrated video card and see if he notices any difference?
- jandrese 11y ago
  One thing that Ubuntu really falls flat on is third party video driver support. The default nVidia blobs for instance are stuck on an ancient version that don't support modern cards very well and break every time the kernel updates (so twice a week). The fix is to ditch Ubuntu's "third party" support and just install it directly from the nVidia website instead. This is a bit of a hassle (you have to shut down X on the first install), but it fixes the breakage on every kernel update and gets you a far more modern driver. I find Ubuntu's insistence on maintaining bug comparability on LTS releases to be pretty baffling. mplayer's GUI doesn't work out of the box, and the fix is easy, but they refuse to do it because it's an LTS release. nVidia drivers are broken but again, you can't fix it because it's LTS. Zsh manpages don't get installed, but that can't be fixed because it's LTS. Whatever happened to being the distro where everything just works out of the box?
  - cellularmitosis 11y ago
    Yes, that's the whole point: LTS only recieves security updates and nothing else. There are two products here, for two kinds of people: LTS is a product for people who want security updates but absolutely no other changes. The next release is a product for people who want bug fixes and new features, in addition to security updates. Your comment is essentially asking "but why didn't they make the spicy flavor taste like the mild flavor?". They didn't make the spicy flavor taste like the mild flavor because it's the spicy flavor, not the mild flavor.
    - jandrese 11y ago
      The unstable releases have their own problems though. The big one being that the old repos disappear almost the instant they version bump, meaning you have to be willing to drop everything and upgrade when they do to not be left behind. Plus LTS is the default. Ubuntu doesn't really have a good middle ground distribution. Something like the old -STABLE release track on BSD where you get fixes and reasonable support but no ABI changes or major OS changes.
pfarnsworth 11y ago
"Oh no, my desktop experience on a completely free operating system made by volunteers doesn't work as well as one made by thousands of well-paid employees. I guess I'm going to write a rant blog post, and then sit back and wait for someone to fix my problems instead of learning how to help with the effort." Honestly, these posts have been around since the dawn of Linux. Unless the author actually decides to get involved with the effort, I don't see how relevant this is. Making a complete operating system is hard and requires a lot of work, which is why the desktop still is Linux's biggest challenge. There's a reason why Windows and MacOS are still around, because it does a lot of very hard things right, and it's easier when you're paying people and forcing them to do the boring grunt work that makes a completely OS.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Its a fair criticism. Its been a decade, and the free OS still doesn't work as well. This is not likely to change.
  - reitanqild 11y ago
    Worse, it is now more broken than it used to be according to some of us. For me it is Unity. For others it is suspend/resume or graphics.
  - reitanqild 11y ago
    Worse, it is now more broken than it used to be according to some of us. For me it is Unity. For others it is suspend/resume or graphics.
- lorenzhs 11y ago
  Canonical is a for-profit company, but your comment isn't very constructive regardless of that.
- slazaro 11y ago
  Sure, but this kind of experience has been going on forever, and your kind of complaint won't change the fact that most people won't use Linux ever. Users don't care about this.
matt_wulfeck 11y ago
Every year I try and switch over to a Linux desktop from Mac and every year I rage quit because of some stupid bug. On the surface things always work "flawlessly", but then I try something slightly out of the ordinary and I'm digging through logs and obscure message boards to figure out what is broken (adjusting the speed of my mouse off hyper drive... More than the slider allows). In the end I think I'll probably end up using a chromebook for Linux if I want to escape from BSD Mac. Or just stick with Mac on the laptop and Linux on the server.
- teekert 11y ago
  Haha, I have the opposite experience, usually I use Linux to get things done. When I configure my wife's Mac (which I also often use) I get so frustrated that I can't use TimeMachine to make backups to an smb-share (Why? I ended up using rsync). Also, I can't use sshfs without significant hassle. FTP is not support in finder... And I have once spent an entire night trying to make my external mouse not feel like I'm mousing through mud only to find out that the mouse behavior (accel curve etc) can't be adjust anymore since Leopard (or something) came out. That was pretty frustrating. Other that those things osX is pretty stable but it does get slow over time, I have 16GB of ram in my 2011 Core-i7 MBP, I see a lot of beach-balls even though I reinstalled last year.
  - tmikaeld 11y ago
    I keep seeing this repeated, why would it be OK not to use tools to fix issues in Linux but not OS X? Here tools to fix your issues: - Time Machine only support HFS+ filesystem but you can use the excellent: Carbon Copy Cloner - For mounting SFTP, FTP and any cloud drive use: ExpanDrive - It's actually not the mouse curve, it's the rendering buffer, most people don't notice it but a windows user should, fixable with: Smoothmouse - If it's slow you probably don't have an SSD drive in that computer, so while it's indexing all hundreds of thousands of files it will be slow while using it.
  - matt_wulfeck 11y ago
    Totally fair. Mac is great as long as you stay in the ecosystem, but I'm trying to escape! This is the reason why chromebook sate starting to looking appealing. The hardware already comes totally supported but I can also get a root shell. We will see. I expect things to slowly get better over time.
dkuntz2 11y ago
My biggest question is why does the author keep trying to use Ubuntu and Unity, and not just switch to a different distro. My experience with Ubuntu has been really similar to his, 10.04 was the peak, I had a great setup with gnome 2, everything was fast and responsive, things worked, crashes happened very infrequently. Every release after it has seemed significantly worse than the previous ones. And I put the blame on Unity and Canonical forking every Gnome application to work with it. Anecdotally, I play around with two VMs, a Debian one running Gnome, and an Ubuntu 14.04 one. The Debian VM has half the ram and processing power as the Ubuntu one, and still runs significantly faster. Gnome 3 is great, and if I were still running linux full time I'd use it as my DM.
- akerro 11y ago
  Completely agree. I used to use Debian, then Ubuntu since 6.06, the last Ubuntu that was usable for me was 9.10, I didn't even bother to install 10.04, just switched back to Debian. When Gnome2 changed to G3 I gave up and installed KDE on my every * N *X machine. Still using KDE, never came back to Ubuntu. I didn't have any problem author described, no one ever asked me to help them with such problems - I converted a lot of people to Linux or PCBSD.
- lorenzhs 11y ago
  Yup, I agree. At work my machine had Ubuntu 14.04 preinstalled when I started in late 2014 and I gave it a couple of months but couldn't get friendly with Unity. Eventually I installed Debian unstable (which I've been using with xfce on my private laptop for years) over it —it's a university, I can run whatever distro I like. I'm really happy with Gnome 3 with some very minor extensions (alt-tab behaviour, workspaces in a grid). That said, the Ubuntu setup had one bug that still cracks me up from time to time. I have two monitors, one of them rotated 90°. Sometimes I would get two cursors, one of them rotated 90° and shifted to the side by ~1cm.
  - antod 11y ago
    > That said, the Ubuntu setup had one bug that still cracks me up from time to time. I have two monitors, one of them rotated 90°. Sometimes I would get two cursors, one of them rotated 90° and shifted to the side by ~1cm. I had that one too. From memory it was fixed in 15.04.
pjungwir 11y ago
So even though this article is from early 2015, commenters here seem to confirm 14.04 is still bad. I've been feeling guilty lately for running 12.04 and am just waiting for a slow weekend to upgrade. I run Xubuntu and have no intention of adopting Unity. I have two monitors with an Nvidia video card. I like how in Ubuntu things "just work". Also I like running the same OS as many of my production servers. But maybe in spite of that it's time to try a new distro? Any recommendations?
- coldpie 11y ago
  If you don't mind using a command line, switch to Arch. It's always up-to-date, it never breaks, proprietary software like Steam and the nvidia drivers are available in the official repos, and it doesn't force crap like Unity onto you.
  - pjungwir 11y ago
    I am happy using the command line and even prefer it to GUIs. I've always thought that Arch was a "project" distro, like having a car you work on every weekend. I spend enough hours fussing with systems already, so I want my desktop to "just work". In the past I thought Ubuntu was the "just works" distribution, but perhaps that is changing. "Never breaks" is pretty appealing. Maybe my stereotype about Arch is wrong!
    - coldpie 11y ago
      I've been using Arch for a decade, and it's the only Linux distro whose package management I find to be sane. I spend about one minute per day maintaining my machine by executing "pacman -Syu" to upgrade all installed packages before I log out. Occasionally (once or twice a month), I'll need to manually port my changes to a config file into a new version of that config file. Rarely (once a year), I'll need to hunt down and fix something that broke. For example, a few years ago the proprietary nvidia drivers dropped support for my graphics card, so X refused to start until I installed the legacy drivers. Extremely rarely (count-on-one-hand), Arch will make a major system change that requires manual intervention, such as the switch from SysV to systemd. Breaking changes like those are noted on the arch-announce mailing list and the homepage <https://www.archlinux.org/> https://www.archlinux.org/>. It has an intimidating install process, but once you understand the system and have it up and running, it's actually very low maintenance. I attribute this to the fact that it doesn't try to "do anything for you," which usually actually means "break the system for you" in my experience.
bithive123 11y ago
In my experience all of Canonical's software is better in theory than in practice. I've been burned so often that these days I just stick with Debian.
badmadrad 11y ago
I use ubuntu on Macbook Pro and its a clunky experience for sure. The main issue is that the drivers aren't up to date with the latest hardware so there are all types of bugs if you try into install ubuntu on certain hardware. I would say if you wan't a more seamless experience you should try to use certified hardware so it just works. http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/ http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/
maxaf 11y ago
I've come back into the warm embrace of OpenBSD this year, and couldn't be happier. On supported hardware (cheapo refurb ThinkPad T420) everything works out of the box. Suspend/resume, graphics, Wi-Fi, sound, etc... Hibernate to disk works seamlessly despite full-disk encryption being present as well. Everything Just Works (TM). I don't care if Linux is a wee bit more performant or supports a wider range of hardware. Truth be told, I simply want to do my thing & not think about the computer as such. I'm way past that age when "they say it's free, if you get it to run; the geeks say hey - that's half the fun!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85p7JZXNy8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85p7JZXNy8) was a viable approach to computing.
- teach 11y ago
  I think the key part of your experience is "on supported hardware." I've run Ubuntu on a desktop machine for years and generally things have worked quite well. But I make sure that Linux will support it before I upgrade my video card. I really prefer Linux but I wouldn't install it on a random laptop.
- montyedwards 11y ago
  I'd use OpenBSD if it provided: 1. significantly faster vioscsi(4) driver for VirtIO SCSI adapters -- I can live with vioscsi being up to 2x slower than Ubuntu or FreeBSD, but 5x - 10x slower is probably a deal breaker for some other folks that would like to use OpenBSD on Digital Ocean, Linode, etc. 2. binpatches directly from OpenBSD, similar to the way a third-party is providing them at https://stable.mtier.org/ https://stable.mtier.org/ Other than that, really love OpenBSD and even their man pages are awesome.
  - maxaf 11y ago
    Whatever for would you use vioscsi on a laptop? I'm only asking because the original discussion seemed to be somewhat laptop-centric. Apart from that, now that the initial Xen port is breathing (I ran it on EC2 just before 5.9 was cut and almost had a happy heart attack) I suspect the other goodies will follow quickly.
- VLM 11y ago
willcodeforfoo 11y ago
I tried using Linux as my primary desktop mostly out of curiosity because I'm wondering what my options are as Apple continues to focus its efforts on iOS (c.f., the Mac buyers guide which paints a pretty bleak picture of the current state of Apple desktops and portables: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac) and hopes that Docker performance would be as close to native as possible without a VM/laggy shared folders in the way. Plus I had a spare PC laying around. I didn't give it as long as the OP, but it just took way too much time fiddling to get to a stable, working place and even then things weren't as nice as on OS X with very little to no tweaking. HiDPI in particular is a mess, with support all over the place. OS X nails it. Plus there are some really great apps I use every day on OS X that there is no substitute for (Sketch, Tweetbot, Reeder, Alfred, and Photoshop come to mind.) Even "little" things like font rendering is kind of a mess on Linux and really is a big deal if you are a developer staring at them all day or are a web developer and need to see what things look like with proper fonts installed. I hope OS X sticks around for awhile or a worthy competitor appears. I'd think there is an opportunity for someone to create a great portable, a great desktop, and a great OS for both but I'm sure it pales in comparison to the tablet and mobile ecosystem.
- ocean3 11y ago
  The last 2 OS X upgrades has made my laptop lag too much. I now do more setup on OSX then Ubuntu. Ubuntu on the same laptop runs so much better. Only issue i have is the touchpad. Could not make it behave the same as in OSX.
zeveb 11y ago
I think the problem is that Canonical's reach exceeds its grasp: it has some good ideas (and maybe even a few great ones), but it can't drive them to completion. Moreover, while there're willing to be revolutionary about some things, they don't seem to be willing to take that as far as it could go (e.g. Unity breaks compatibility with lots of stuff, but fundamentally it's the same WIMP interface one knew from the 1984 Mac). Finally, they have made it progressively more difficult over the years to tweak any parts of Ubuntu (try running a different window manager, or login manager, or …). I finally got tired of Ubuntu's far-but-not-far-enough, our-way-or-the-highway nature. Now I use Debian, with everything tuned and tweaked for the way I develop and use software. It's modular enough, it's good enough, it's stable enough. I couldn't be happier (although some days I think I'll give Arch a shot …).
moondev 11y ago
I have been very happy with elementaryOS (based on trusty). Been using it on my desktop for about 4 months and I don't miss windows at all. Only thing that gives me trouble is viewing video that uses drm protection in flash. (watchespn)
roryrjb 11y ago
Over the past 10+ years on and off I've used Linux on the desktop, mainly Ubuntu (started with 7.10), but also Arch, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, openSUSE and aside from Arch (for obvious reasons) I have got on pretty well with all of them, with very minimal tinkering. I've basically found that newer versions of Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu have had less issues. I guess I've been lucky with the hardware I've had, granted I haven't owned many setups in that time frame.
deleted 11y ago
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nacs 11y ago
This is pretty much the opposite of my experience with Ubuntu vs Windows. All of my hardware worked immediately after install on Linux whereas Windows required hunting down drivers. Most impressive was that the suspend/resume feature works perfectly in Ubuntu (and the suspend/resume completes in 2-3 seconds) whereas in Windows, it goes into suspend after a good bit of crunching but never finishes the resume process (I hear the system fans/drive wake but nothing else happens and requires a hard reset).
- regularfry 11y ago
  The problem here is that the author had hardware that was bought with Linux in mind. The experience should have been the same as yours, but wasn't.
  - antod 11y ago
    When I think of choosing hardware with Linux in mind, the primary overriding consideration for me is using Intel graphics rather than Nvidia or AMD. That sucks if you want fast 3D, but it is by far the best choice for a mostly 2D desktop experience. Using Intel for wifi/ethernet etc is also a good (but less important) choice.
dre85 11y ago
I have never once managed to get "suspend" working on my computer with any version of Ubuntu. Every time I install a new distro I immediately disable this feature. Suspend on Ubuntu is basically a "freeze/crash immediately" button. I've experienced the majority of the bugs that the author is talking about and a lot of them do happen on a daily basis. Somehow, I just learned to live with it. It's kind of like a chronic disease. For me operating systems are a "choose the lesser evil" situation. For me it's a balance between: A) Linux (Ubuntu) - negatives. boring, super buggy desktop. Mainly weird/incompatible for entertainment purposes. Major hardware incompatibilities. Fixing bugs takes hours of Googling and compiling random things. Q. My so and so doesn't work? A. It's a free product, don't complain! - positives. Despite what people say I find package management wonderful. Awesome for developers, everything is one apt-get install away with the exception that you may have to add a PPA like the author mentions. Fast. Never bloated. No viruses. No spyware. B) Windows - negatives: Bloated. Slows down over time. Needs a yearly reinstall. Viruses galore. Spyware galore. Windows 10 has taken the Google approach of spying on you as much as possible and sending home every last drop of personal data for their own financial gains. - positives: Most software works well. Pretty much every application ever made has a Windows exe for simple installation. Nice looking GUI. C) Mac: - Negatives: Pay double the money for half the hardware. What if I want a touch screen? Buy our other products too! What if I want a 2 in 1? Buy our other products too! What if I don't want to pay 2-3000$ for a laptop with a 1 inch bezel in 2016? Buy it anyway! - Positives: Never used it, but it looks brilliant at first glance. Seems to be the perfect combination of Linux performance/capabilities with the good looks and refinement of having a multi-billion dollar company behind it.
- cowardlydragon 11y ago
  Mac positives: - searching... sweet sweet searching magic - reloading your state after reboot magic Mac negatives: - Mac hotkeys... slowly drives you insane, remapping doesn't work, 1/3 applications won't respect it or are broken by it. - Finder / file manager is just awful. Awful. I could probably argue Win 3.1 file manager is better. - not a Linux UNIX core... It drives me nuts that desktop OS isn't a solved problem, given how many people use it and how much CPU horsepower exists to emulate the crufty old stuff. Why Google never grabbed Linux and made a genuinely usable desktop OS is beyond me.
gregmac 11y ago
It has been nearly a decade since I last ran Linux on my desktop (I think I might have been Ubuntu 6.06 actually), and this exactly sounds like my experience. With a desktop PC, it's generally manageable, but every time I tried on a Laptop (and I have tried several brands) I have had various problems with display/bluetooth/sound/network/power/sleep/hibernation. It also seemed like everytime I did an upgrade, while it may fix one problem, something previously working would break. I even specifically researched and bought hardware that was "Linux friendly" (eg: was generally considered to be well supported). I eventually realized that my desire to run an open source OS on my machine was consuming far more time than it was worth, and I'd rather be getting actual real work done than fixing my display not scaling properly with an external monitor plugged in, or having to reboot because it just came out of hibernation and now can't see any wifi networks. Since then, I've run Windows on my desktop, even when I am 100% working on code running on linux servers (and basically just spend my time in an SSH terminal, IDE or web browser). Apple has the unique position of owning the hardware: they basically have a very, very limited set of platforms to test on, and as a result, it's pretty easy for them to ensure that everything works. Microsoft builds an OS that is supposed to work on all kinds of random hardware from random manufacturers.. They largely take the position that it's up to vendors to implement drivers correctly, but even then Microsoft apparently runs an extensive hardware compatibility test lab and generally spends a lot of time and money making sure it "just works" as much as they can. I have no doubt that crash reports directly feed to this, and when necessary if they suspect some combination of specific hardware is leading to a crash, they likely test it. Linux distros, on the other hand, seem to have none of this. Many of the drivers are open source, created by volunteers because they bought it and want it to work, and still not many vendors put effort into releasing their own drivers. No one tests even close to all the combinations possible, nor as far as I know, is there anyone monitoring crash reports and trying to deal with combinations of problems like Microsoft does. Am I wrong in this? Is there some organization that is putting lots of effort into getting desktop linux into "just works" state? Canonical has some hardware certification programs for Ubuntu Server, but I don't see anything for desktop. For what it's worth, Ubuntu Server from my experience DOES "just work", but they don't have to deal with some of the tricky things like recovering from sleep modes. From experience, today, 2016, if I wanted to run linux on a new laptop and have it "just work" (meaning: zero issues with sleep, networking, plugging into multiple external displays/projectors, bluetooth), what are my options? Is zero issues a reasonable expectation? For the true die-hards, at what point does your ideology of rejecting a proprietary OS become counter-productive to actually getting work done?
AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
I've tried at least 20 distros over the past six months (osboxes.org is really amazing for trying a bunch in pre-installed, VM form). My picks for the best combination of aesthetic and works-out-of-the-box were: - Fedora Cinnamon (I'm using the Cinnamon version of Korora, which is Fedora with some packages and themes preinstalled to make it a little more user-friendly) - Linux Mint - LMDE (Linux Mint: Debian Edition, if the whole security and package-breaking thing scared you off the regular version) - Kubuntu (KDE Plasma is a really, really nice desktop. I fully admit that I'm sticking with Cinnamon because I spent 20 years on Windows only and it feels more "familiar") I've also got Ubuntu Trusty + xfce on my Chromebook, but it's running in a chroot and piggybacking off of the Chromebook's native Linux support, so I don't quite consider it a full install and can't evaluate it's "out of the box" support for hardware, etc. I'm personally thrilled with having found Korora (https://kororaproject.org/ https://kororaproject.org/). Fedora's hardware support seems to be better than some of the other distros I've tried as far as getting stuff working out of the box, so being able to throw Cinnamon on top of that pretty much gives me everything I want, sans perhaps less native packaging availability than Debian/Ubuntu. elementaryOS would be somewhere up there, as I do like it, but I'm mostly just interested in the Pantheon desktop, which has been nearly impossible to get working on anything other than Ubuntu.
known 11y ago
Like Microsoft, Canonical should also hire couple of psychologists
talles 11y ago
Anyone knows if the complaints in the article are still happening in 16.04? I recently installed it for a friend of mine and it's his first time using linux. So far so good but the problems listed in the article worries me...
- AlphaGeekZulu 11y ago
  For 16.04 it is hard to say, as it is only beta right now. But I do have Ubuntu/Unity on my laptop and one desktop computer since 12.04, updated to each intermediate release about a week after its publication and encountered almost none of the problems that the author described in all the time. My laptop is a 4 year old Thinkpad W520, the successor to the W510, that the author referred to in his user story. I use fulldisk encryption, have two graphic cards in the laptop and a Gefore 970 in the desktop system, I use the Lenovo dock and have multiple monitors connected to it. The desktop system is a dual boot with Win10. I use tons of software of different trades. So my setups are not completely trivial, but work absolutely flawless. The mass of problems described by the author probably indicate a more general problem, either caused by the video setup or, considering the range and randomness, maybe a hardware defect (RAM?). Maybe the laptop is also a bit old, which, of course, should not be much of a problem for Ubuntu. The things to take care of, in my experience, are: 1. setting up the proprietary drivers for the dedicated graphic card can cause trouble. Ubuntu offers the driver installation (Nvidia in my case) from Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center but it is a matter of fact, that the installation cannot be done reliably from within a running X-Session. It is mandatory to boot into the terminal and do the installation manually with an apt-get command, then reboot the computer. If you know it, it is absolutely no problem, but Canocial does not give instructions for this procedure, probably because it contradicts their claim for usability. Users who fail on the graphics driver installation often start to hack in random commands they find in user forums, maybe go for the xorg-edgers drivers and eventually end up with a seriously messed system. But: the problem exists in other distributions as well (except, maybe, Arch ;-) 2. background light control per hotkeys did not work out of the box but needed a manual tweak. 3. I made bad experiences with the Unity Tweak Tool. Some of the author's description match my experiences when fiddling with it. Try not to touch it. System preferences and "Ubuntu Tweak" are completely sufficient for me. Otherwise I am more than happy - the system is super fast, super stable, all major upgrades worked flawlessly so far, hardware-changes (graphics cards, hard disks) caused no trouble, incremental backup (backintime) works perfectly, and I cannot remember a crash, not even a crash of the X-environment. In my experience, nagging problems that require significant research and fixing are very common for me on Windows, much less so on Ubuntu and almost not existing on OSX. On the other side: I can almost always fix an existing problem on Ubuntu, for Windows I often need help from others or the problem ends in a fresh install and on OSX there is not much to fix at all ;-) In conclusion, I cannot believe that the aggregation of problems described by the author is in any way typical for Ubuntu per se.
jopython 11y ago
I converted to Ubuntu 9 years ago and it has been my Home desktop ever since. I cannot be more satisfied. Yes, I have tried the filth that is Win XP, Vista, 7 and what not, during these years only to go back to Ubuntu. I am currently in 14.04. I wonder how much better it can get in 16.04?!
blahkins 11y ago
I guess I am not the only one with the WiFi wont work after coming back from sleep/suspend. Honestly there is a much faster solution that I found: close your laptop, let it go to sleep then open and wifi should be back. I am sure there is a cli that you can force restart but honestly this is probably just as fast :P I didn't quite finish this article as its a bit lenghthy and sort of drives the same point again and again "Ubuntu sucks and has bugs, Unity sucks...and it sucks." yeah we get it, and you aren't the first person to actually say it either. There are other Distros, other Desktop environments other then Unity (you can even get them prepackaged! I am not even going to google it but i am sure there is a modern 14.04 Kubuntu fork.). I guess the main point is that Canonical is trying to position themselves as a leader in terms of consumer end-user linux desktop OS vendor. And they are. Honestly even with its many bugs Ubuntu is usually the first choice of linux Distro for me personally is because of the usual catch22 with software: the bigger you are the bigger you get because people get familiar and because there is a wealth of information out there to help you if you do run into problems. Most software that is made cross OS compatible usually means its made compatible with Debian/Ubuntu. And that is valuable.
- Thetawaves 11y ago
  I figured out that 'wifi not working' after sleep/suspend was caused by the wifi card getting shut off and then not getting turned back on when the screen is back. The fix is to simply enter the key combination to turn the wifi card on. Irritating, but not a deal breaker like having to reboot or re-sleep.
julie1 11y ago
almost all windows since 95, a lot of mac OS since 7.5.3, OS2, a lot of linux, OS9000, solaris, AIX and *BSD. My experience recently has been that all OS are having problems. Just to name a few : - HW vendors doing sub par drivers and documentations, and integration :you even have more than one HW for the same model; - ACPI - forced obsolescence of peripherals; - outsourcing is clearly related to loss in quality especially in HW; - too much packages and dependencies; And still : most developers don't know how to do asynchronuous programming, and that is really a problem when everything is about handling events.
bigpeopleareold 11y ago
The article describes a few problems that I have (the network-manager issue, the frequent bug windows), but I think I have more patience for these issues, since the issues tend to be smaller than the little and constant nuisances I experience with using my Mac at work. However, I did stop using Unity, with the benefit of having a little more memory to work with (I really don't use the desktop itself, except for widgets on the top for time, battery, resource usage, etc.) The bigger problems I had with 14.04 on my laptop have been solved in 16.04: poor wifi performance and the seemingly random times it would just come out of sleep mode while the lid is closed.

77 points by bmaupin 11y ago

Been running 14.04 on a hacked Chromebook, a Zbox, and an old iMac for more than a year and haven't had any issues. Looking forward to 16.04!

lorenzhs 11y ago

The article is from January 2015, and the title should probably reflect that.

leblancfg 11y ago
This. And it's "Tahr", goddamnit. XD
- CalRobert 11y ago
  Argg, thar be tahrs, matey!

raverbashing 11y ago

I don't think this is an issue with 14.04 only Updating a Ubuntu install has been a "surprise", some things start working, some others stop working It seems there are two types of packages, the "base system" (kernel, libs, etc) which is rock-solid but anything that gives "user friendliness" is a crapshoot

blakesterz 11y ago

This was a pretty interesting read. I've been using Trusty on a desktop (his problems are laptop, maybe somewhat different) for about 2 years as my primary machine. This is one of the lines that really stood out for me: >>How can a consumer figure that out? I still hit problems on this thing. Weird random problems, basic things that should just work, and sometimes just fail. I frequently think "If I can't get this to work without an hour of work, there's no way this is ready to be widely used".

xlm1717 11y ago
Like the author, I also tried to upgrade from 12.04 to 14.04. The difference is I was on a desktop VM. I went with just upgrading the existing VM thinking it would take less work than spinning up a new VM and transferring all my files and settings, but that turned out to be a huge miscalculation. Originally left it to upgrade overnight, only to come in the morning (this is on my work machine) to see that it hanged somewhere in the process and wouldn't move on without user input. So I proceeded with clicking through all the prompts, and when 14.04 first loads, it's SO SLOW. Long story short, it took me 4-6 hours to finally get it usable. The whole time I was thinking, "how could they mess this up so badly?" The host OS for the VM is Windows 7, and I have to agree with the author, it is much better to use. I only run the VM for the command line, but may upgrade to Windows 10 when Ubuntu on Linux comes out of beta this summer.
bhauer 11y ago
> How can a consumer figure that out? I still hit problems on this thing. Weird random problems, basic things that should just work, and sometimes just fail. I frequently think "If I can't get this to work without an hour of work, there's no way this is ready to be widely used". Though, to be fair, even as a Windows user and relatively firm fan of Windows, that happens for me routinely on Windows. Windows Update in particular is confusing with its many error messages that either magically resolve themselves if you retry enough times or require significant and arcane manual resolution. Managing home network file systems and printers with Windows in 2016 seems basically unchanged from 1998. Microsoft added "HomeGroups" to make this a bit easier for lay people, but they have more or less abandoned to its Windows 7 iteration, with virtually no evolution since. Now they channel their efforts toward integrating their cloud storage services. Generally speaking, this is the trouble with general purpose computing and general purpose operating systems—there are rough edges and a huge number of corner cases that get ugly. In several decades of evolving these systems, we've not buffed those rough edges down as much as we'd like. It's similarly the reason mobile operating systems are popular for primary computing devices for a growing segment of the population. (Although, I will add that mobile operating systems are picking up the same rough edges as their capabilities expand to encompass more of the terrain typically associated with general purpose systems.)
11y ago

Mikeb85 11y ago

Yeah, my experience with 14.04 has been seriously sub-par, 12.04 was much better. Seems Ubuntu and desktop Linux is seriously regressing, with the newer kernels my laptop won't suspend any more (Thinkpad T530 w/ Ivy Bridge and Intel graphics), after 4+ years of flawless usage. Seriously, nothing went wrong for years and now there's some horrible regression that has fucked up the whole experience and I can't suspend my laptop. WTF (and I have checked mailing lists, it is an upstream bug of some sort though some blame the kernel, others blame systemd).

nickspacek 11y ago
Anecdotal, but suspend has always been a huge frustration for me (T510). Between trying different video drivers and kernels and having them bork the machine I decided to see if any modern release of a distro would just work out of the box (hardware acceleration or no, whatever the OOTB Live experience gave). My procedure was to boot the Live version, then standby and wake multiple times and see which would reliably work. I had been on Ubuntu for a while but it didn't work, neither did (maybe unsurprisingly) Mint, but Fedora just worked. I've stuck with Fedora for a while and have gone for good stretches where standby + resume would work for weeks... and then fail inexplicably. But with Fedora it's the best it has been in the 6 years I've had this machine.
teekert 11y ago
Could it be the constant back-porting of patches that leads to problems? And in fact you are using and old, patched kernel? Perhaps a truly new kernel would surprise you.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  Maybe. But according to others, it's an upstream bug that still exists in the new(est) kernels. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1504584 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1504584
erik14th 11y ago
My experience is the opposite, 12.04 used to crash(X) on me quite often. I did have some problems with 14.04 that would send a regular user go back to windows, but nothing I couldn't solve in a few minutes. I tried to use arch, but I ended up fiddling with dwm and other stuff instead of working on what I should and I don't really like any of the linux DE's other than unity. So I don't really see any good alternatives for a distro to use with as little hassle/configuration as possible.

techthroway443 11y ago

Is it just me or do most of his issues seem video related? In which case that would probably be a driver issue which would be poor vendor support and not necessarily a problem with Ubuntu. Why not switch to onboard/integrated video card and see if he notices any difference?

jandrese 11y ago
One thing that Ubuntu really falls flat on is third party video driver support. The default nVidia blobs for instance are stuck on an ancient version that don't support modern cards very well and break every time the kernel updates (so twice a week). The fix is to ditch Ubuntu's "third party" support and just install it directly from the nVidia website instead. This is a bit of a hassle (you have to shut down X on the first install), but it fixes the breakage on every kernel update and gets you a far more modern driver. I find Ubuntu's insistence on maintaining bug comparability on LTS releases to be pretty baffling. mplayer's GUI doesn't work out of the box, and the fix is easy, but they refuse to do it because it's an LTS release. nVidia drivers are broken but again, you can't fix it because it's LTS. Zsh manpages don't get installed, but that can't be fixed because it's LTS. Whatever happened to being the distro where everything just works out of the box?
- cellularmitosis 11y ago
  Yes, that's the whole point: LTS only recieves security updates and nothing else. There are two products here, for two kinds of people: LTS is a product for people who want security updates but absolutely no other changes. The next release is a product for people who want bug fixes and new features, in addition to security updates. Your comment is essentially asking "but why didn't they make the spicy flavor taste like the mild flavor?". They didn't make the spicy flavor taste like the mild flavor because it's the spicy flavor, not the mild flavor.
  - jandrese 11y ago
    The unstable releases have their own problems though. The big one being that the old repos disappear almost the instant they version bump, meaning you have to be willing to drop everything and upgrade when they do to not be left behind. Plus LTS is the default. Ubuntu doesn't really have a good middle ground distribution. Something like the old -STABLE release track on BSD where you get fixes and reasonable support but no ABI changes or major OS changes.

pfarnsworth 11y ago

"Oh no, my desktop experience on a completely free operating system made by volunteers doesn't work as well as one made by thousands of well-paid employees. I guess I'm going to write a rant blog post, and then sit back and wait for someone to fix my problems instead of learning how to help with the effort." Honestly, these posts have been around since the dawn of Linux. Unless the author actually decides to get involved with the effort, I don't see how relevant this is. Making a complete operating system is hard and requires a lot of work, which is why the desktop still is Linux's biggest challenge. There's a reason why Windows and MacOS are still around, because it does a lot of very hard things right, and it's easier when you're paying people and forcing them to do the boring grunt work that makes a completely OS.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Its a fair criticism. Its been a decade, and the free OS still doesn't work as well. This is not likely to change.
- reitanqild 11y ago
  Worse, it is now more broken than it used to be according to some of us. For me it is Unity. For others it is suspend/resume or graphics.
- reitanqild 11y ago
  Worse, it is now more broken than it used to be according to some of us. For me it is Unity. For others it is suspend/resume or graphics.
lorenzhs 11y ago
Canonical is a for-profit company, but your comment isn't very constructive regardless of that.
slazaro 11y ago
Sure, but this kind of experience has been going on forever, and your kind of complaint won't change the fact that most people won't use Linux ever. Users don't care about this.

matt_wulfeck 11y ago

Every year I try and switch over to a Linux desktop from Mac and every year I rage quit because of some stupid bug. On the surface things always work "flawlessly", but then I try something slightly out of the ordinary and I'm digging through logs and obscure message boards to figure out what is broken (adjusting the speed of my mouse off hyper drive... More than the slider allows). In the end I think I'll probably end up using a chromebook for Linux if I want to escape from BSD Mac. Or just stick with Mac on the laptop and Linux on the server.

teekert 11y ago
Haha, I have the opposite experience, usually I use Linux to get things done. When I configure my wife's Mac (which I also often use) I get so frustrated that I can't use TimeMachine to make backups to an smb-share (Why? I ended up using rsync). Also, I can't use sshfs without significant hassle. FTP is not support in finder... And I have once spent an entire night trying to make my external mouse not feel like I'm mousing through mud only to find out that the mouse behavior (accel curve etc) can't be adjust anymore since Leopard (or something) came out. That was pretty frustrating. Other that those things osX is pretty stable but it does get slow over time, I have 16GB of ram in my 2011 Core-i7 MBP, I see a lot of beach-balls even though I reinstalled last year.
- tmikaeld 11y ago
  I keep seeing this repeated, why would it be OK not to use tools to fix issues in Linux but not OS X? Here tools to fix your issues: - Time Machine only support HFS+ filesystem but you can use the excellent: Carbon Copy Cloner - For mounting SFTP, FTP and any cloud drive use: ExpanDrive - It's actually not the mouse curve, it's the rendering buffer, most people don't notice it but a windows user should, fixable with: Smoothmouse - If it's slow you probably don't have an SSD drive in that computer, so while it's indexing all hundreds of thousands of files it will be slow while using it.
- matt_wulfeck 11y ago
  Totally fair. Mac is great as long as you stay in the ecosystem, but I'm trying to escape! This is the reason why chromebook sate starting to looking appealing. The hardware already comes totally supported but I can also get a root shell. We will see. I expect things to slowly get better over time.

dkuntz2 11y ago

My biggest question is why does the author keep trying to use Ubuntu and Unity, and not just switch to a different distro. My experience with Ubuntu has been really similar to his, 10.04 was the peak, I had a great setup with gnome 2, everything was fast and responsive, things worked, crashes happened very infrequently. Every release after it has seemed significantly worse than the previous ones. And I put the blame on Unity and Canonical forking every Gnome application to work with it. Anecdotally, I play around with two VMs, a Debian one running Gnome, and an Ubuntu 14.04 one. The Debian VM has half the ram and processing power as the Ubuntu one, and still runs significantly faster. Gnome 3 is great, and if I were still running linux full time I'd use it as my DM.

akerro 11y ago
Completely agree. I used to use Debian, then Ubuntu since 6.06, the last Ubuntu that was usable for me was 9.10, I didn't even bother to install 10.04, just switched back to Debian. When Gnome2 changed to G3 I gave up and installed KDE on my every * N *X machine. Still using KDE, never came back to Ubuntu. I didn't have any problem author described, no one ever asked me to help them with such problems - I converted a lot of people to Linux or PCBSD.
lorenzhs 11y ago
Yup, I agree. At work my machine had Ubuntu 14.04 preinstalled when I started in late 2014 and I gave it a couple of months but couldn't get friendly with Unity. Eventually I installed Debian unstable (which I've been using with xfce on my private laptop for years) over it —it's a university, I can run whatever distro I like. I'm really happy with Gnome 3 with some very minor extensions (alt-tab behaviour, workspaces in a grid). That said, the Ubuntu setup had one bug that still cracks me up from time to time. I have two monitors, one of them rotated 90°. Sometimes I would get two cursors, one of them rotated 90° and shifted to the side by ~1cm.
- antod 11y ago
  > That said, the Ubuntu setup had one bug that still cracks me up from time to time. I have two monitors, one of them rotated 90°. Sometimes I would get two cursors, one of them rotated 90° and shifted to the side by ~1cm. I had that one too. From memory it was fixed in 15.04.

pjungwir 11y ago

So even though this article is from early 2015, commenters here seem to confirm 14.04 is still bad. I've been feeling guilty lately for running 12.04 and am just waiting for a slow weekend to upgrade. I run Xubuntu and have no intention of adopting Unity. I have two monitors with an Nvidia video card. I like how in Ubuntu things "just work". Also I like running the same OS as many of my production servers. But maybe in spite of that it's time to try a new distro? Any recommendations?

coldpie 11y ago
If you don't mind using a command line, switch to Arch. It's always up-to-date, it never breaks, proprietary software like Steam and the nvidia drivers are available in the official repos, and it doesn't force crap like Unity onto you.
- pjungwir 11y ago
  I am happy using the command line and even prefer it to GUIs. I've always thought that Arch was a "project" distro, like having a car you work on every weekend. I spend enough hours fussing with systems already, so I want my desktop to "just work". In the past I thought Ubuntu was the "just works" distribution, but perhaps that is changing. "Never breaks" is pretty appealing. Maybe my stereotype about Arch is wrong!
  - coldpie 11y ago
    I've been using Arch for a decade, and it's the only Linux distro whose package management I find to be sane. I spend about one minute per day maintaining my machine by executing "pacman -Syu" to upgrade all installed packages before I log out. Occasionally (once or twice a month), I'll need to manually port my changes to a config file into a new version of that config file. Rarely (once a year), I'll need to hunt down and fix something that broke. For example, a few years ago the proprietary nvidia drivers dropped support for my graphics card, so X refused to start until I installed the legacy drivers. Extremely rarely (count-on-one-hand), Arch will make a major system change that requires manual intervention, such as the switch from SysV to systemd. Breaking changes like those are noted on the arch-announce mailing list and the homepage <https://www.archlinux.org/> https://www.archlinux.org/>. It has an intimidating install process, but once you understand the system and have it up and running, it's actually very low maintenance. I attribute this to the fact that it doesn't try to "do anything for you," which usually actually means "break the system for you" in my experience.

bithive123 11y ago

In my experience all of Canonical's software is better in theory than in practice. I've been burned so often that these days I just stick with Debian.

badmadrad 11y ago

I use ubuntu on Macbook Pro and its a clunky experience for sure. The main issue is that the drivers aren't up to date with the latest hardware so there are all types of bugs if you try into install ubuntu on certain hardware. I would say if you wan't a more seamless experience you should try to use certified hardware so it just works. http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/ http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/

maxaf 11y ago

I've come back into the warm embrace of OpenBSD this year, and couldn't be happier. On supported hardware (cheapo refurb ThinkPad T420) everything works out of the box. Suspend/resume, graphics, Wi-Fi, sound, etc... Hibernate to disk works seamlessly despite full-disk encryption being present as well. Everything Just Works (TM). I don't care if Linux is a wee bit more performant or supports a wider range of hardware. Truth be told, I simply want to do my thing & not think about the computer as such. I'm way past that age when "they say it's free, if you get it to run; the geeks say hey - that's half the fun!" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85p7JZXNy8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85p7JZXNy8) was a viable approach to computing.

teach 11y ago
I think the key part of your experience is "on supported hardware." I've run Ubuntu on a desktop machine for years and generally things have worked quite well. But I make sure that Linux will support it before I upgrade my video card. I really prefer Linux but I wouldn't install it on a random laptop.
montyedwards 11y ago
I'd use OpenBSD if it provided: 1. significantly faster vioscsi(4) driver for VirtIO SCSI adapters -- I can live with vioscsi being up to 2x slower than Ubuntu or FreeBSD, but 5x - 10x slower is probably a deal breaker for some other folks that would like to use OpenBSD on Digital Ocean, Linode, etc. 2. binpatches directly from OpenBSD, similar to the way a third-party is providing them at https://stable.mtier.org/ https://stable.mtier.org/ Other than that, really love OpenBSD and even their man pages are awesome.
- maxaf 11y ago
  Whatever for would you use vioscsi on a laptop? I'm only asking because the original discussion seemed to be somewhat laptop-centric. Apart from that, now that the initial Xen port is breathing (I ran it on EC2 just before 5.9 was cut and almost had a happy heart attack) I suspect the other goodies will follow quickly.
VLM 11y ago

willcodeforfoo 11y ago

I tried using Linux as my primary desktop mostly out of curiosity because I'm wondering what my options are as Apple continues to focus its efforts on iOS (c.f., the Mac buyers guide which paints a pretty bleak picture of the current state of Apple desktops and portables: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac) and hopes that Docker performance would be as close to native as possible without a VM/laggy shared folders in the way. Plus I had a spare PC laying around. I didn't give it as long as the OP, but it just took way too much time fiddling to get to a stable, working place and even then things weren't as nice as on OS X with very little to no tweaking. HiDPI in particular is a mess, with support all over the place. OS X nails it. Plus there are some really great apps I use every day on OS X that there is no substitute for (Sketch, Tweetbot, Reeder, Alfred, and Photoshop come to mind.) Even "little" things like font rendering is kind of a mess on Linux and really is a big deal if you are a developer staring at them all day or are a web developer and need to see what things look like with proper fonts installed. I hope OS X sticks around for awhile or a worthy competitor appears. I'd think there is an opportunity for someone to create a great portable, a great desktop, and a great OS for both but I'm sure it pales in comparison to the tablet and mobile ecosystem.

ocean3 11y ago
The last 2 OS X upgrades has made my laptop lag too much. I now do more setup on OSX then Ubuntu. Ubuntu on the same laptop runs so much better. Only issue i have is the touchpad. Could not make it behave the same as in OSX.

zeveb 11y ago

I think the problem is that Canonical's reach exceeds its grasp: it has some good ideas (and maybe even a few great ones), but it can't drive them to completion. Moreover, while there're willing to be revolutionary about some things, they don't seem to be willing to take that as far as it could go (e.g. Unity breaks compatibility with lots of stuff, but fundamentally it's the same WIMP interface one knew from the 1984 Mac). Finally, they have made it progressively more difficult over the years to tweak any parts of Ubuntu (try running a different window manager, or login manager, or …). I finally got tired of Ubuntu's far-but-not-far-enough, our-way-or-the-highway nature. Now I use Debian, with everything tuned and tweaked for the way I develop and use software. It's modular enough, it's good enough, it's stable enough. I couldn't be happier (although some days I think I'll give Arch a shot …).

moondev 11y ago

I have been very happy with elementaryOS (based on trusty). Been using it on my desktop for about 4 months and I don't miss windows at all. Only thing that gives me trouble is viewing video that uses drm protection in flash. (watchespn)

roryrjb 11y ago

Over the past 10+ years on and off I've used Linux on the desktop, mainly Ubuntu (started with 7.10), but also Arch, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, openSUSE and aside from Arch (for obvious reasons) I have got on pretty well with all of them, with very minimal tinkering. I've basically found that newer versions of Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu have had less issues. I guess I've been lucky with the hardware I've had, granted I haven't owned many setups in that time frame.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

nacs 11y ago

This is pretty much the opposite of my experience with Ubuntu vs Windows. All of my hardware worked immediately after install on Linux whereas Windows required hunting down drivers. Most impressive was that the suspend/resume feature works perfectly in Ubuntu (and the suspend/resume completes in 2-3 seconds) whereas in Windows, it goes into suspend after a good bit of crunching but never finishes the resume process (I hear the system fans/drive wake but nothing else happens and requires a hard reset).

regularfry 11y ago
The problem here is that the author had hardware that was bought with Linux in mind. The experience should have been the same as yours, but wasn't.
- antod 11y ago
  When I think of choosing hardware with Linux in mind, the primary overriding consideration for me is using Intel graphics rather than Nvidia or AMD. That sucks if you want fast 3D, but it is by far the best choice for a mostly 2D desktop experience. Using Intel for wifi/ethernet etc is also a good (but less important) choice.

dre85 11y ago

I have never once managed to get "suspend" working on my computer with any version of Ubuntu. Every time I install a new distro I immediately disable this feature. Suspend on Ubuntu is basically a "freeze/crash immediately" button. I've experienced the majority of the bugs that the author is talking about and a lot of them do happen on a daily basis. Somehow, I just learned to live with it. It's kind of like a chronic disease. For me operating systems are a "choose the lesser evil" situation. For me it's a balance between: A) Linux (Ubuntu) - negatives. boring, super buggy desktop. Mainly weird/incompatible for entertainment purposes. Major hardware incompatibilities. Fixing bugs takes hours of Googling and compiling random things. Q. My so and so doesn't work? A. It's a free product, don't complain! - positives. Despite what people say I find package management wonderful. Awesome for developers, everything is one apt-get install away with the exception that you may have to add a PPA like the author mentions. Fast. Never bloated. No viruses. No spyware. B) Windows - negatives: Bloated. Slows down over time. Needs a yearly reinstall. Viruses galore. Spyware galore. Windows 10 has taken the Google approach of spying on you as much as possible and sending home every last drop of personal data for their own financial gains. - positives: Most software works well. Pretty much every application ever made has a Windows exe for simple installation. Nice looking GUI. C) Mac: - Negatives: Pay double the money for half the hardware. What if I want a touch screen? Buy our other products too! What if I want a 2 in 1? Buy our other products too! What if I don't want to pay 2-3000$ for a laptop with a 1 inch bezel in 2016? Buy it anyway! - Positives: Never used it, but it looks brilliant at first glance. Seems to be the perfect combination of Linux performance/capabilities with the good looks and refinement of having a multi-billion dollar company behind it.

cowardlydragon 11y ago
Mac positives: - searching... sweet sweet searching magic - reloading your state after reboot magic Mac negatives: - Mac hotkeys... slowly drives you insane, remapping doesn't work, 1/3 applications won't respect it or are broken by it. - Finder / file manager is just awful. Awful. I could probably argue Win 3.1 file manager is better. - not a Linux UNIX core... It drives me nuts that desktop OS isn't a solved problem, given how many people use it and how much CPU horsepower exists to emulate the crufty old stuff. Why Google never grabbed Linux and made a genuinely usable desktop OS is beyond me.

gregmac 11y ago

It has been nearly a decade since I last ran Linux on my desktop (I think I might have been Ubuntu 6.06 actually), and this exactly sounds like my experience. With a desktop PC, it's generally manageable, but every time I tried on a Laptop (and I have tried several brands) I have had various problems with display/bluetooth/sound/network/power/sleep/hibernation. It also seemed like everytime I did an upgrade, while it may fix one problem, something previously working would break. I even specifically researched and bought hardware that was "Linux friendly" (eg: was generally considered to be well supported). I eventually realized that my desire to run an open source OS on my machine was consuming far more time than it was worth, and I'd rather be getting actual real work done than fixing my display not scaling properly with an external monitor plugged in, or having to reboot because it just came out of hibernation and now can't see any wifi networks. Since then, I've run Windows on my desktop, even when I am 100% working on code running on linux servers (and basically just spend my time in an SSH terminal, IDE or web browser). Apple has the unique position of owning the hardware: they basically have a very, very limited set of platforms to test on, and as a result, it's pretty easy for them to ensure that everything works. Microsoft builds an OS that is supposed to work on all kinds of random hardware from random manufacturers.. They largely take the position that it's up to vendors to implement drivers correctly, but even then Microsoft apparently runs an extensive hardware compatibility test lab and generally spends a lot of time and money making sure it "just works" as much as they can. I have no doubt that crash reports directly feed to this, and when necessary if they suspect some combination of specific hardware is leading to a crash, they likely test it. Linux distros, on the other hand, seem to have none of this. Many of the drivers are open source, created by volunteers because they bought it and want it to work, and still not many vendors put effort into releasing their own drivers. No one tests even close to all the combinations possible, nor as far as I know, is there anyone monitoring crash reports and trying to deal with combinations of problems like Microsoft does. Am I wrong in this? Is there some organization that is putting lots of effort into getting desktop linux into "just works" state? Canonical has some hardware certification programs for Ubuntu Server, but I don't see anything for desktop. For what it's worth, Ubuntu Server from my experience DOES "just work", but they don't have to deal with some of the tricky things like recovering from sleep modes. From experience, today, 2016, if I wanted to run linux on a new laptop and have it "just work" (meaning: zero issues with sleep, networking, plugging into multiple external displays/projectors, bluetooth), what are my options? Is zero issues a reasonable expectation? For the true die-hards, at what point does your ideology of rejecting a proprietary OS become counter-productive to actually getting work done?

AdmiralAsshat 11y ago

I've tried at least 20 distros over the past six months (osboxes.org is really amazing for trying a bunch in pre-installed, VM form). My picks for the best combination of aesthetic and works-out-of-the-box were: - Fedora Cinnamon (I'm using the Cinnamon version of Korora, which is Fedora with some packages and themes preinstalled to make it a little more user-friendly) - Linux Mint - LMDE (Linux Mint: Debian Edition, if the whole security and package-breaking thing scared you off the regular version) - Kubuntu (KDE Plasma is a really, really nice desktop. I fully admit that I'm sticking with Cinnamon because I spent 20 years on Windows only and it feels more "familiar") I've also got Ubuntu Trusty + xfce on my Chromebook, but it's running in a chroot and piggybacking off of the Chromebook's native Linux support, so I don't quite consider it a full install and can't evaluate it's "out of the box" support for hardware, etc. I'm personally thrilled with having found Korora (https://kororaproject.org/ https://kororaproject.org/). Fedora's hardware support seems to be better than some of the other distros I've tried as far as getting stuff working out of the box, so being able to throw Cinnamon on top of that pretty much gives me everything I want, sans perhaps less native packaging availability than Debian/Ubuntu. elementaryOS would be somewhere up there, as I do like it, but I'm mostly just interested in the Pantheon desktop, which has been nearly impossible to get working on anything other than Ubuntu.

known 11y ago

Like Microsoft, Canonical should also hire couple of psychologists

talles 11y ago

Anyone knows if the complaints in the article are still happening in 16.04? I recently installed it for a friend of mine and it's his first time using linux. So far so good but the problems listed in the article worries me...

AlphaGeekZulu 11y ago
For 16.04 it is hard to say, as it is only beta right now. But I do have Ubuntu/Unity on my laptop and one desktop computer since 12.04, updated to each intermediate release about a week after its publication and encountered almost none of the problems that the author described in all the time. My laptop is a 4 year old Thinkpad W520, the successor to the W510, that the author referred to in his user story. I use fulldisk encryption, have two graphic cards in the laptop and a Gefore 970 in the desktop system, I use the Lenovo dock and have multiple monitors connected to it. The desktop system is a dual boot with Win10. I use tons of software of different trades. So my setups are not completely trivial, but work absolutely flawless. The mass of problems described by the author probably indicate a more general problem, either caused by the video setup or, considering the range and randomness, maybe a hardware defect (RAM?). Maybe the laptop is also a bit old, which, of course, should not be much of a problem for Ubuntu. The things to take care of, in my experience, are: 1. setting up the proprietary drivers for the dedicated graphic card can cause trouble. Ubuntu offers the driver installation (Nvidia in my case) from Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center but it is a matter of fact, that the installation cannot be done reliably from within a running X-Session. It is mandatory to boot into the terminal and do the installation manually with an apt-get command, then reboot the computer. If you know it, it is absolutely no problem, but Canocial does not give instructions for this procedure, probably because it contradicts their claim for usability. Users who fail on the graphics driver installation often start to hack in random commands they find in user forums, maybe go for the xorg-edgers drivers and eventually end up with a seriously messed system. But: the problem exists in other distributions as well (except, maybe, Arch ;-) 2. background light control per hotkeys did not work out of the box but needed a manual tweak. 3. I made bad experiences with the Unity Tweak Tool. Some of the author's description match my experiences when fiddling with it. Try not to touch it. System preferences and "Ubuntu Tweak" are completely sufficient for me. Otherwise I am more than happy - the system is super fast, super stable, all major upgrades worked flawlessly so far, hardware-changes (graphics cards, hard disks) caused no trouble, incremental backup (backintime) works perfectly, and I cannot remember a crash, not even a crash of the X-environment. In my experience, nagging problems that require significant research and fixing are very common for me on Windows, much less so on Ubuntu and almost not existing on OSX. On the other side: I can almost always fix an existing problem on Ubuntu, for Windows I often need help from others or the problem ends in a fresh install and on OSX there is not much to fix at all ;-) In conclusion, I cannot believe that the aggregation of problems described by the author is in any way typical for Ubuntu per se.

jopython 11y ago

I converted to Ubuntu 9 years ago and it has been my Home desktop ever since. I cannot be more satisfied. Yes, I have tried the filth that is Win XP, Vista, 7 and what not, during these years only to go back to Ubuntu. I am currently in 14.04. I wonder how much better it can get in 16.04?!

blahkins 11y ago

I guess I am not the only one with the WiFi wont work after coming back from sleep/suspend. Honestly there is a much faster solution that I found: close your laptop, let it go to sleep then open and wifi should be back. I am sure there is a cli that you can force restart but honestly this is probably just as fast :P I didn't quite finish this article as its a bit lenghthy and sort of drives the same point again and again "Ubuntu sucks and has bugs, Unity sucks...and it sucks." yeah we get it, and you aren't the first person to actually say it either. There are other Distros, other Desktop environments other then Unity (you can even get them prepackaged! I am not even going to google it but i am sure there is a modern 14.04 Kubuntu fork.). I guess the main point is that Canonical is trying to position themselves as a leader in terms of consumer end-user linux desktop OS vendor. And they are. Honestly even with its many bugs Ubuntu is usually the first choice of linux Distro for me personally is because of the usual catch22 with software: the bigger you are the bigger you get because people get familiar and because there is a wealth of information out there to help you if you do run into problems. Most software that is made cross OS compatible usually means its made compatible with Debian/Ubuntu. And that is valuable.

Thetawaves 11y ago
I figured out that 'wifi not working' after sleep/suspend was caused by the wifi card getting shut off and then not getting turned back on when the screen is back. The fix is to simply enter the key combination to turn the wifi card on. Irritating, but not a deal breaker like having to reboot or re-sleep.

julie1 11y ago

almost all windows since 95, a lot of mac OS since 7.5.3, OS2, a lot of linux, OS9000, solaris, AIX and *BSD. My experience recently has been that all OS are having problems. Just to name a few : - HW vendors doing sub par drivers and documentations, and integration :you even have more than one HW for the same model; - ACPI - forced obsolescence of peripherals; - outsourcing is clearly related to loss in quality especially in HW; - too much packages and dependencies; And still : most developers don't know how to do asynchronuous programming, and that is really a problem when everything is about handling events.

bigpeopleareold 11y ago

The article describes a few problems that I have (the network-manager issue, the frequent bug windows), but I think I have more patience for these issues, since the issues tend to be smaller than the little and constant nuisances I experience with using my Mac at work. However, I did stop using Unity, with the benefit of having a little more memory to work with (I really don't use the desktop itself, except for widgets on the top for time, battery, resource usage, etc.) The bigger problems I had with 14.04 on my laptop have been solved in 16.04: poor wifi performance and the seemingly random times it would just come out of sleep mode while the lid is closed.