6 ms·

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 r

by 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.
djsumdog 11y ago
Totally agree. I've been on Gentoo since 2012. Any issues with Wi-Fi/Bluetooth have mostly been because the chipsets on my MSI laptop were too new to be supported (it was kinda neat being on a bug tracker listening to what worked and what didn't and being one of the first to get that particular ath10k Wi-Fi chip working. Now it's in the official stable kernel/linux-firmware so hopefully it will "just work" for everyone else). Gentoo + i3 has been great for me. I occasionally had hibernate issues, but I've had that with Windows and Mac laptops in the past as well. Basic acpi suspends I never seemed to have an issue with. Networking reconnects too. I will say that my draw to Gentoo and Linux is that I'm a developer and I don't really mind working on these problems. It takes a little longer to get stuff working for me, but I gain knowledge about how my system works and how the full stack operates. That's not for everyone and it's been years since I advocated Linux on regular peoples' (non-developers/tech people) laptops. Ubuntu was suppose to be that golden distro back in the mid 2000s that finally made Linux accessible on the Desktop. After trying to get some friends to use it, almost all of them went back to XP at some point. I still think Linux distros are great developer operating systems and if you do any web Java/Scala/Ruby/Python, you should really look at trying to work natively in Linux with a tiling window manager. Ubuntu might be good for people who just want to browse the web and check e-mail, but Google Chromebook seems to do that pretty well without sucking at it.
- yo-code-sucks 11y ago
  Ahhh Gentoo, my favorite.
- zxv 11y ago
  Yes, chromebooks can provide a rock solid linux kernel + hardware combination. Developers can install debian, ubuntu, etc. in a chroot, which all benefit from the kernel and driver stability. Gad, personally, the amount of time I've saved never having to troubleshoot my chromebook quite a contrast to other laptops.
dorfsmay 11y ago
Are you aware of Ubuntu Gnome: https://ubuntugnome.org/ https://ubuntugnome.org/
- dkuntz2 11y ago
  Ubuntu Gnome is my suggestion to people who want to try out Linux because it has most of the Ubuntu ease, but none of the Unity bloat.
- sandGorgon 11y ago
  Actually I would recommend Fedora 23 if ur on the Gnome bandwagon. It runs bleeding edge Gnome and is spectacular.
  - dkuntz2 11y ago
    For my personal installs I just run Arch with the latest version of Gnome stable. The reason I still suggest an Ubuntu derivative is because it's really easy to find instructions on how to do something, and their still mostly the same. I don't know if the same is true for Fedora just because I haven't used it before and encountered the same googling problems. Of course, this may be a bad thing, because the number of wrong answers, or unanswered questions out there.
  - dorfsmay 11y ago
    Fedora has a lot less packages then Ubuntu, enough that it makes a difference. I'm sure I could manage but it'd be very painful for my wife and kids, and I like to dog-food the systems they use.
    - sandGorgon 11y ago
      Im kind of surprised why this perception exists, when most of the kernel/Gnome/systemd/driver developers are actually employed by Redhat. Canonical actually employs very few people. Redhat is the largest Linux company out there and the only thing it probably does is ensure software is well supported. I ran Ubuntu for 10 years before switching to Fedora on my laptop. And I have been blown away.
apozem 11y ago
> Until that day arrives, one might ask why I have not tried another distribution. I doubt my experience will be much better. Many of the bugs are related to code shared across distributions. I know that a few bugs I listed in this article also exist in Fedora. Most bugs are upstream.
- dkuntz2 11y ago
  I mean, a large number of the issues he wrote about seem directly related to Unity, even if similar problems occurred in other distros. The lack of even giving it a try just seems weird to me, given the amount of kvetching and problems the author encountered.
vkjv 11y ago
My thought as well. I've used Mint Mate (Mate being the Gnome 2 fork) for the last few years on Ubuntu certified laptops (Lenovo 4xxs) and have not had any issues. My complaint about the linux desktop experience is the amount of research necessary. If you are careful to purchase hardware that is well supported, everything will go swimmingly. This isn't really different with other OSs, but that information seems a little more difficult to discover (especially with bleeding edge hardware).
- gshulegaard 11y ago
  https://system76.com/ https://system76.com/ http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop?c=us&l=en&s=biz http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt... (Beware of the Dell's though...their last iteration of the XPS 13 had a rough start since many of their drivers were patched for kernel 3.19 and they shipped with 14.04 (kernel 3.13) Should be more stable now, but I was right mad when I got my XPS 13 and the touchpad, keyboard, AND WiFi were all bugged out of the box.)
digi_owl 11y ago
I think unity is a scape goat. The real issue is the CADT churn of the underlying user space between the DE and the kernel.

by dkuntz2 11y ago

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.

djsumdog 11y ago

Totally agree. I've been on Gentoo since 2012. Any issues with Wi-Fi/Bluetooth have mostly been because the chipsets on my MSI laptop were too new to be supported (it was kinda neat being on a bug tracker listening to what worked and what didn't and being one of the first to get that particular ath10k Wi-Fi chip working. Now it's in the official stable kernel/linux-firmware so hopefully it will "just work" for everyone else). Gentoo + i3 has been great for me. I occasionally had hibernate issues, but I've had that with Windows and Mac laptops in the past as well. Basic acpi suspends I never seemed to have an issue with. Networking reconnects too. I will say that my draw to Gentoo and Linux is that I'm a developer and I don't really mind working on these problems. It takes a little longer to get stuff working for me, but I gain knowledge about how my system works and how the full stack operates. That's not for everyone and it's been years since I advocated Linux on regular peoples' (non-developers/tech people) laptops. Ubuntu was suppose to be that golden distro back in the mid 2000s that finally made Linux accessible on the Desktop. After trying to get some friends to use it, almost all of them went back to XP at some point. I still think Linux distros are great developer operating systems and if you do any web Java/Scala/Ruby/Python, you should really look at trying to work natively in Linux with a tiling window manager. Ubuntu might be good for people who just want to browse the web and check e-mail, but Google Chromebook seems to do that pretty well without sucking at it.

yo-code-sucks 11y ago
Ahhh Gentoo, my favorite.
zxv 11y ago
Yes, chromebooks can provide a rock solid linux kernel + hardware combination. Developers can install debian, ubuntu, etc. in a chroot, which all benefit from the kernel and driver stability. Gad, personally, the amount of time I've saved never having to troubleshoot my chromebook quite a contrast to other laptops.

dorfsmay 11y ago

Are you aware of Ubuntu Gnome: https://ubuntugnome.org/ https://ubuntugnome.org/

dkuntz2 11y ago
Ubuntu Gnome is my suggestion to people who want to try out Linux because it has most of the Ubuntu ease, but none of the Unity bloat.
sandGorgon 11y ago
Actually I would recommend Fedora 23 if ur on the Gnome bandwagon. It runs bleeding edge Gnome and is spectacular.
- dkuntz2 11y ago
  For my personal installs I just run Arch with the latest version of Gnome stable. The reason I still suggest an Ubuntu derivative is because it's really easy to find instructions on how to do something, and their still mostly the same. I don't know if the same is true for Fedora just because I haven't used it before and encountered the same googling problems. Of course, this may be a bad thing, because the number of wrong answers, or unanswered questions out there.
- dorfsmay 11y ago
  Fedora has a lot less packages then Ubuntu, enough that it makes a difference. I'm sure I could manage but it'd be very painful for my wife and kids, and I like to dog-food the systems they use.
  - sandGorgon 11y ago
    Im kind of surprised why this perception exists, when most of the kernel/Gnome/systemd/driver developers are actually employed by Redhat. Canonical actually employs very few people. Redhat is the largest Linux company out there and the only thing it probably does is ensure software is well supported. I ran Ubuntu for 10 years before switching to Fedora on my laptop. And I have been blown away.

apozem 11y ago

> Until that day arrives, one might ask why I have not tried another distribution. I doubt my experience will be much better. Many of the bugs are related to code shared across distributions. I know that a few bugs I listed in this article also exist in Fedora. Most bugs are upstream.

dkuntz2 11y ago
I mean, a large number of the issues he wrote about seem directly related to Unity, even if similar problems occurred in other distros. The lack of even giving it a try just seems weird to me, given the amount of kvetching and problems the author encountered.

vkjv 11y ago

My thought as well. I've used Mint Mate (Mate being the Gnome 2 fork) for the last few years on Ubuntu certified laptops (Lenovo 4xxs) and have not had any issues. My complaint about the linux desktop experience is the amount of research necessary. If you are careful to purchase hardware that is well supported, everything will go swimmingly. This isn't really different with other OSs, but that information seems a little more difficult to discover (especially with bleeding edge hardware).

gshulegaard 11y ago
https://system76.com/ https://system76.com/ http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop?c=us&l=en&s=biz http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt... (Beware of the Dell's though...their last iteration of the XPS 13 had a rough start since many of their drivers were patched for kernel 3.19 and they shipped with 14.04 (kernel 3.13) Should be more stable now, but I was right mad when I got my XPS 13 and the touchpad, keyboard, AND WiFi were all bugged out of the box.)

digi_owl 11y ago

I think unity is a scape goat. The real issue is the CADT churn of the underlying user space between the DE and the kernel.