4 ms·

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. S

by 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.
slavik81 11y ago
I never encountered most of his complaints on 14.04. I still have other occasional problems, though. The most annoying one is that WiFi auto-connect happens on the login screen, but it apparently can't access the WiFi password until I log in, so it pops up a WiFi password prompt that steals focus while I'm half-finished typing my login password.

by talles 11y ago

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.

slavik81 11y ago

I never encountered most of his complaints on 14.04. I still have other occasional problems, though. The most annoying one is that WiFi auto-connect happens on the login screen, but it apparently can't access the WiFi password until I log in, so it pops up a WiFi password prompt that steals focus while I'm half-finished typing my login password.