Comment by rorrr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rorrr | Hacker News Reader

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I recently had to install Ubuntu for work. Before that I normally used Win7 at home (+ unix shell at work via Putty).

Things that Ubuntu sucks at:

1) Power management. It really blows.

   a) My laptop keeps shutting down without any warning that the battery is low, and half the time Ubuntu doesn't even know whether my laptop is plugged or running off of battery.

   b) My laptop is blasting the CPU cooler at full power, all the time. Under Win it's only audible when I do some crazy calculations.

2) No Photoshop replacement. I'm into photography and doing a lot of RAW processing. GIMP is not even close to Photoshop. There are lots of people online who try to convince you otherwise, but it's all bullshit.

3) Hardware acceleration seems to be often off in random places with various plugins.

4) I use a second language keyboard layout, and I'm used to Ctrl+Shift shortcut. Coincidentally, Ctrl+Shift+arrow buttons are awesome for text selection. Windows understands that. Under Ubuntu if you set keyboard layout key to Ctrl+Shift, the selection stops working.

5) Putty vs Ubuntu terminal. I'm used to Ctrl+C = copy, "mouse selection" = copy, and "right mouse click" = paste. It's extremely useful. Just doesn't work under Ubuntu.

6) Lack of file organization. I never know where programs are installed, where logs go, where configuration files are, and why they have to be in different places.

7) Little things like "Backspace button" = "go back" not working in Chrome. Like touchpad freeze while I'm typing (it just randomly stops working, even though the ckeckbox is checked in settings somewhere).

I realize I'm a Linux newbie (even though I've been using shell commands for a decade), so probably most of these problems can be resolved with some workarounds. My point is that they should be resolved out of the box.

For better or for worse Linux is not a windows clone. I hear you on power management though.

I can only speak to 5 and 6, but:

5) Ctrl+Shift+C works as copy in the default Terminal setup; mouse selection to copy should work, and middle-click is paste.

6) dpkg -L <packagename> is your friend, logs are in /var/log, configuration is in /etc, and it's that way primarily so that they can be on different partitions.

If it makes you feel better, most of those issues are issues if you moved to Mac as well. Not the power management issue, but then, if you purchased a laptop made for Ubuntu, I imagine you'd have more success. =)

Ubuntu is great at power management (or, more accurately, Linux in general), but if your laptop isn't supported for whatever reason Ubuntu is just screwed and there's nothing it can do.

5: The problem is actually that there are two copy and paste buffer in X Windows. There's the mouse selection buffer, which is copied on any highlight operation, and pasted via right mouse button, and the "conventional clipboard", populated by an explicit copy and pasted via explicit paste. This is further screwed up by the fact that few programmers have understood this and a large number of programs have tried to "fix" what they perceived as bugs in the clipboard in various horrific ways. See [1]. In particular, it seems like the programs that correctly deselect text when somebody else grabs primary has been going down lately. I've had a pretty good run with this actually working as designed on KDE lately, but recent Gnomes seem to be going back to mucking with it and I've been having trouble, and Chromium itself also seems dubious.

3 and 7 sounds like more poorly-supported hardware. Unfortunately, your Linux experience with proprietary hardware with no released documentation will always be bad. The situation is ever-improving but still not perfect. It is possible and maybe even likely your laptop will never work properly under Linux.

[1]: http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html

I agree about the well supported hardware bit. In my experience buying Thinkpads is near optimal for using linux since so many other hackers use them that any bugs get fixed quickly.

1 and 3) Most of those problems look like they step from your laptop not having very good software drivers for Linux. What brand is it? Some laptop manufacturers like Lenovo put effort into making sure their products can be used under Linux, but other brands don't. Also, even if a laptop is new enough the drivers for it might not have made it into the distribution you're using yet. In the end, you expect Windows to Just Work on your laptop because Windows is installed by the laptop manufacturer. If you buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled you won't have any of these issues.

2) As for Photoshop, you can run it under Linux but it does take a bit of effort. http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&...

7) try alt + arrow keys

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