My Disastrous Experience with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Thar (2015)
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right now what i am seeing is them locking Linux to their way of doing things, and you either adopt to that or is shown the highway.
Linux used to be flexible, allowing different people to shape it to do different tasks.
But more and more you are met with "why would you do that?!" and "you are doing/holding it wrong!" when you present your use case.
I am a consumer who wants an OSX experience in the Linux world. And there are millions out there like me.
Am I forcing you to buy in ? not at all - the beauty of Linux is that you can use LFS, Gentoo or Arch which allows you to customize and play with your particular set of philosophies.
Not all opinionated software is malicious - at the end of the day, software is merely an expression of the person and their beliefs. And sometimes they just want to believe in one thing.
And frankly recent history at both LFS and Gentoo shows how nasty systemd is.
Gentoo forked udev to eudev, and LFS later adopted eudev, because after udev got merged with systemd every systemd release changed how to extract udev from the larger code blob.
Heck, LFS now have effectively split in two. They are maintaining one document for "classic" Linux, and one for systemd Linux.
Plus its one less step, and if I'm trying to get someone to switch to linux, I don't want to let them even try to use Unity because, despite how pretty it is, it's just so slow.
The lack of even giving it a try just seems weird to me, given the amount of kvetching and problems the author encountered.
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).
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.)
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) was a viable approach to computing.
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.
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/
Other than that, really love OpenBSD and even their man pages are awesome.
I do use Linux at work by way of Vagrant, and it's great for that. It's Linux on the desktop that appears to be unsuitable for everyday use.
You don't have that concern with Windows because mainstream PC manufacturers need to support Windows to be profitable, but there's the exact same problem with OS X. It feels a little different because the OS comes preinstalled, but you're still choosing the hardware for the OS.
If you buy a machine that is reputed to work well with linux, it works well with linux. If you don't bother to check that, you might end up with a bit of homework.
Never. In fact, my laptop connects to wireless networks even before I can unlock my screen.
But then again, I'm on a ThinkPad (with an Intel 7265 Wi-Fi card), and these things are well-designed hardware that try to stick to standards and are well supported on Linux.
On the other hand, "cheapo refurb" is also indicative of my desire to minimize the expense of purchasing an additional computer.
I'm thinking of getting another just to have the parts on-hand if I need to replace anything else.
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).
Using Intel for wifi/ethernet etc is also a good (but less important) choice.
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 …).
- 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/). 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.
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.
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.)
And that's true across most operating systems. I recently upgraded my Dell tablet to Windows 10. Oh the humanity. And with every OS X version, problems with my 2009 Macbook are increasing, especially in the first few iterations.
Apple's post-90s hardware selection scarcity is a boon for them, as you don't really need to check that many configurations. Similarly, running Linux on slightly older Thinkpads is usually a very good bet. Doubleplus that if the wifi card is either libre enough or is replaced with one that is.
But as I'm not doing the hyper-mobile thing (I don't work from a beach or cafe and don't even like conferences), a desktop is usually the best choice for me. Cheap, fast and you can build one with fewer faulty components.
At the end of the day, I just don't recommend people switch to Linux.
It's basically because of Mageia that my linux hand-editing config know-how has atrophied down to nothing.
Why not switch to onboard/integrated video card and see if he notices any difference?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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/>.
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.
For anyone else thinking of trying arch, this bit is actually important. The one sure way to make Arch break is to try and treat it like debian stable where you just get a working system and then expect to not touch anything for several months at a time.
If you do that in arch, you'll likely be unable to use the package manager for much of anything, because the versions of things you have installed will have rolled off the end of the "rolling release" system. Arch expects you to do an upgrade of all installed packages ("pacman -Syu") at least every couple of weeks -- daily is a pretty common pattern. He's right, that the process is almost always completely painless, but you still have to do it. Wait too long and the upgrade command simply won't work without you doing a fair amount of manual recovery.
Come to think of it, that was my problem with desktop Linux in general: small things broke frequently and often times I was tweaking/fixing the OS late into the night.
So I built a Hackintosh 3 years ago and never looked back, haha. It's more stable than any distro I've used.
Despite that, I find Arch is the least disruptive distro to daily work because it doesn't meddle. Canonical is full of people who think they are Steve Jobs and decide they're going to overhaul System Y with some super-special never-before-seen invented-here components this release because it's the visionary way to do things (and that other competing revitalization effort that's seeing widespread adoption, well, it's not). The result is 2-3 Ubuntu releases that are bug-ridden and really not production ready until the new system can stabilize. It seems as soon as one major userspace component begins to mature they decide to rip out another core component (Gnome->Unity; X->Mir).
Source: Arch and Ubuntu user for the last 10+ years
I mostly use ubuntu on the server, but jump between Debian, CoreOS and Ubuntu, and mostly have had a pretty good experience with ubuntu on the server.
My main machine has been a Macbook Pro for the last 4 years, and as long as I don't need to be using Photoshop or Coda, I'd rather be using Xubuntu on a system with even half the specs.
I always use CentOS on my servers, and have been very happy with it. It's rock solid. I haven't even upgraded to CentOS 7 yet. I just moved to a new server in March and decided to stick with CentOS 6 until systemd becomes a bit more stable.
The only recommendation I have is to never run Ubuntu with an AMD card with their proprietary drivers.
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.
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?
I know it's hard to believe but things have changed a huge amount for the better in 10yrs.
My current Thinkpad has no driver/hardware issues at all. Suspend/resume is solid, auto updating of display changes on the fly works fine etc - it works better than a lot of Windows laptops I've owned or borrowed over the years.
> For the true die-hards, at what point does your ideology of rejecting a proprietary OS become counter-productive to actually getting work done?
So you're using your stale decade old experience to presume the ideological "die-hards" can't get any work done?
My current is an i5 T530 with a FHD display and 3rd party RAM/SSD upgrades. Works solidly with Ubuntu - the only time it boots are after I finally get around to installing kernel updates. It flawlessly suspends and resumes in between times.
The 15" models might be too heavy for you - mine spends most of it time docked with a 27" monitor. I didn't need much portability.
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.
- 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.
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.
For me it is Unity.
For others it is suspend/resume or graphics.
You might not know about a bug until it is reported because your particular configuration doesn't trigger it. Or should everyone run your "blessed" configuration?
This software is released under the premise that it is free, and the assumption that it is an actual working operating system.
Unless you're the master of everything, then I'm assuming you've never been a critic of any movie or your favorite sports team. Right?
So yes, complaints from people who aren't in the business are pretty much absolutely irrelevant.
According to Wikipedia, Canonical has 700+ employees.
The post was actionable feedback. Ubuntu can use this to improve.
The alternative is that they release something, there's complete silence, and no-one uses it. Which is much, much worse than people criticising it.