Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly, the amount of regressions, packaging problems, hacky fixes, non-stardard configuration and poorly set defaults in Ubuntu is disgusting, look at how bad NetworkManager was / is on it, it's not that bad on Fedora (not that I like it that much) and the whole debarcle with them doing Unitiy on top of Gnome rather than contributing to the community projects, or recently when they released an update that broke all USB 2 ports and if you got that update before they pulled ita and rebooted - you had no keyboard or mouse to work with, their own custom (IMO very gross) init system of Upstart when they could have contributed to System which they're now going to move to anyway, their dodgy partnerships with companies like Amazon where they're putting apps / links on the desktop menus to Amazon (who does very little for the open source community also), it's just a joke and I really wish people would just move on to better distros or at least use pure Debian if they can handle the lack of packages. So often at work when devs complain their DNS isn't working or they can't connect to the VPN or they updated and now their machine doesn't boot - our first questions - 'are you running Ubuntu?' it's like the Windows of the linux world I swear.

I think that Gnome3 has a more detrimental effect on community projects than Unity. Why? Because of the client side controls they are pushing, rendering Gnome apps for everything non-Gnome3 either useless or ugly. And all of that for a few pixels of screen space, something that has been solved more elegantly by putting menus in the top panel.

And talking about breakage: I can't count how many times some important Gnome3 plugin broke after a minor Gnome3 update from the distribution. Or how many times I wasn't able to install a plugin that installed fine just a month ago on the same Gnome3 version. Why? Because you have to download them from some obnoxious website that apparently has no archive and no way to properly match the right plugin version to a given Gnome3 version.

Cinnamon copied the same madness. But you have to install less addons to make it at least usable. KDE is somehow still stuck in the previous decade when it comes to desktop design.

If the Gnome3 project with their questionable design choices and holier-than-thou attitude is the future of desktop Linux, then I have to say that the situation is much worse than it was ten years ago.

BTW, Ubuntu doesn't come with Amazon addons installed anymore. And even when it did, you could entirely remove it and look at the source. I think Canonical realised that they cannot pull something like that anymore.

> rendering Gnome apps for everything non-Gnome3 either useless or ugly.

I use i3 instead of Gnome 3 and the Gnome 3 apps with CSD fit in beautifully. There used to be issues where there were gaps and such, but those are resolved by now.

> something that has been solved more elegantly by putting menus in the top panel

Arguable and probably comes down to personal preferences. For some apps (like the screenshot tool) it fits really well.

andrewshadura is right. Here's just one of your items that is bunkum, for an example.

> their own custom [...] init system of Upstart when they could have contributed to System

upstart was developed several years, just under half a decade, before systemd even existed; it was used by Fedora for three years.

And if Canonical hadn't required contributors to sign a CLA... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7640930

It's true though that Canonical consistently "does their own thing" and then fails to establish it as a standard for whatever reason (technical, political, CLA...). Anyone who adopted the new thing then has to migrate.

Eucalyptus vs OpenStack (ever heard of Eucalyptus?)

Bazaar vs Git (Git won)

LaunchPad vs Github (LaunchPad is alive and well, but Github won the popularity contest)

Wayland vs Mir (Wayland won)

upstart vs systemd (systemd won)

Let's see how these work out:

Juju vs Kubernetes/OpenShift (I'm aware that you can run Kubernetes on Juju, probably won't save them though)

Snap vs Flatpak (vs AppImage?)

It's sad, really. I like Ubuntu and Canonical and strongly believe in competition, but it'd really help if they didn't consistently back the wrong projects.

I guess they need to buy more project managers...

In a lot of those cases (Mir being the obvious exception), the Ubuntu backed solution predated the alternative.

I can't help wonder if this will keep happening as their competition waits to see everything new Canonical chooses to back, then works to thwart it :)

Yeah they invent a new wheel (often poorly) then they fail to test and fix it when it breaks.

a short point of order: Upstart existed and shipped long before Systemd existed, Infact Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 shipped with Upstart. It was the shortcomings in Upstart that led to the development of Systemd. If you're using RHEL 6 you're using Upstart.

So much written, so little sense in that.

Have you actually looked at Ubuntu, have you tried to use it? I'm not even going to go through your assertions one by one to debunk them, as most of them are wrong and unsupported by facts.

Cheers.

he got some details wrong but the frustration is real, especially if you have anything slightly off standard, like a multi monitor setup or, god forbids, a touch screen.

I have a touchscreen. Works great nowadays.

even pressure?

That I wouldn't know. It's not capacitive.

Been using Ubuntu for years in multiple production environments and I agree with him.

Much fewer issues with Red Hat.

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