Bye Bye Ubuntu, a sad Christmas

My parents are on 12.04 and will be as long as the long term support lasts. I'm pretty sure forcing them to use Windows would mean a lot of telephone support for the next months. If anything, I would migrate them to another distribution.

I also don't really dislike the Amazon ads. I'm not so much concerned about privacy, but I find them very distracting and awfully implemented. However, it's only one ``sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping``. That is not going to make me change my default distribution.

It's pretty stupid to expect everything to just work. Your parents should have grabbed the source code, learned how to program, deciphered the problem and then fixed it themselves. Then they could have shared the code to help everyone else's parents fix their problems.

Or just get them iPads.

I'm so glad that someone is writing about this issue. It is important to understand that 12.04 and 12.10 both SUCK.

Here's why: Previously I was on 10.04, the best thing that happened to me ever. Boot speed was amazing and shutdown speed was the fastest among the three OS'es I had then (Windows Vista, OSX, Ubuntu 10.04).

Then something happened. I purchased the Windows 8 Upgrade edition and I had to partition my drives (because I wanted to) and I thought "you know what? Let me upgrade my Ubuntu, it's been sometime since I upgraded it." I upgraded it to 12.10 and I used it as my only OS before installing Windows 8 (because the setup was corrupted and I had to re-download it).

It was a nightmare. Unity is a nightmare. Before using 12.10, I was on 11.x and 12.04. I don't see why they have to thrust Unity onto your face. Everything was really fine before Unity came.

Unity is one of the poorest experience one could ever experience on any operating system. I'm not sure if it was inspired from some other OS, but whatever it is, it's a poor implementation and clearly no proper research has gone into designing Unity. For example, switching between open program windows is a nightmare, if you have auto-hide enabled, it just gets worse. If you are a developer, nothing could get even worse than trying to switch between a text editor and a web browser, for instance.

Now to the core, the OS itself is painfully slow. Post installation of Windows 8, I compared the boot and shut down times of both the OS'es. I'm not exaggerating here, but Windows 8 shuts down much much quicker than 12.10. The only reason I loved Ubuntu was for its speed, let alone security. Now what Canoncial has done is taken the only reason for me to use Ubuntu and bastardized it as much as they could. Video drivers are another issue. Back on 10.04, I had to manually install Nvidia drivers myself, but it would work well once installed. 12.10 just fucked it up big time. It would automatically try to install something and you will have to spend sleepless nights trying to remove it and install the correct driver only to realize that it wouldn't work either!

I know you can bring back Gnome using some terminal commands, but the speed of the OS itself is still slow. Try switching between tabs on Chrome, you'll realize what I mean.

Ubuntu's target audience has always been developers and power users first, and everyone else next. With Unity, they're trying to push Ubuntu towards general users, which will be a difficult task. Moving away from your target audience to attract a newer audience is the worst strategy I could ever think of.

Hence, here's another Bye-bye from me to Ubuntu. Hello Windows 8! (single boot!).

I'm on Xubuntu 12.04 and don't seem to have any of these problems. Unlike Windows, where you are stuck with the corporate decisions, Ubuntu still provides many options if you don't like the flagship distro.

That is what I thought for a while. I was really a Ubuntu fan since early releases. I always encourage people to use Ubuntu. I am really disappointed after last release because of this Amazon stuff.

I can understand, how hard to maintain this kind of software without any revenue but in Linux world there were always good business models. Also Ubuntu for Android is very good idea and I believe in near future we will be hearing it so much.

While trying to expand market share, let's say trying to access more users, making a move against user's liberty really hurts previously gained traction. It was going good but now I am not sure how can I trust a Linux distro that send my search terms to Amazon by default.

I don't want to be part of this anymore.

Recently I decided to play some game and had to boot windows partition which I did not use from the date of laptop purchase. So I went through Windows clean installation process and then it all started - scrolling on touchpad not working, directx not working with pre-packaged drivers (had to download over 600 megs of video drivers - have no clue what take so much space.) While downloading it, I browsed some news and got my Internet Explorer crashed - I would not be surprised if this was some trojan stuff delivered through null-sized iframe.

Since I do not have DVDROM, I had to find some ISO mounter. Again, downloading megs of software from some website and hoping it is not packaged with some trojan.

After installing this iso mounter, it asks me to install .NET framework. After googling it - it says ~1 meg to download. Fine, downloading and running it from microsoft website. After it run it starts downloading something else form somewhere.... Done.

Video drivers downloaded - installing. Asks to reboot. Rebooting - blue screen every time I restart machine.... In the end - whole evening was spent to play single game and I end up with BSOD. Saying "FU" and return back to my Ubuntu to continue coding.

After couple hours of coding my machine randomly freezes... this started to happen after installing AMD proprietary drivers...

So two things I learned that evening: - We are all screwed no matter what OS we use! :) - I need to buy xbox/ps/wii to play games :)

For those saying "why not try Debian, mint, etc", I've been running my mother on Debian for the past 18 months and it hasn't been at all easy and I am starting to wonder if I shouldn't move her back to Windows. I gave her fairly simple hardware (an Atom PC) with enough RAM and disk space. I migrated her to Picassa and Libre Office. She's surviving but supporting is a little tedious, there doesn't seem to be a convenient alternative to LogMeIn (any VNC requires mapping ports on the router and teamviewer needs user intervention at the target). I was also running Ubuntu with KDE on my main laptop at home but I recently bought a new laptop and my wife was delighted that it came with Windows 7 pre-installed. I haven't yet decided if Linux will go back on. Possibly not.

So much in domestic Linux is unprofessional, that is why the professional Linuxes command such money. Linux seems to remain a hobby system with similar process control because it allows everything, if you don't constrain your model then you can't ensure quality. For example: how much testing is done against the kernel? I don't mean beta testing, how about instituting some standards regime with unit testing and interface compliance measurement? Linux depends almost entirely on peer code review, in critical parts that is reviewed by 'experts' but it remains a manual process.

How come researching hardware first is bad thing - you are not going to a shop and buy first thing you see.

Also windows is not perfect either, my old scanner doesn't have windows 7 drivers and will never have it seems. It works just fine in XP and Linux.

Sometimes things break, they even break in software that cost shitloads of money too. Six month old Oracle EBS SR with localization(!) problem - not critical, but surely half a year is enough to swap two strings. Sometimes it doesn't work well with some server vendor too (I don't know all details about this one).

Don't blame canonical for all the software in the distro, all they really do is adding eye candy and try to make it nicer, but they can't fix everything.

I find it silly when people try to force other people to migrate to Linux - show them around, tell about ups and downs and let them decide if they want to try it.

I use linux not because it open source, but because it does most of the stuff I need better. My parents use windows PC, because they can just install that thing which came with new printer and it works without calling me, despite I could probably make it work in linux just as easy since I know how to.

And for God's sake, don't install linux if you play games most of the time, but you read linux is better on the interwebz. Stop hammering nails with a microscope already!

For fuck sake, please stop acting as if Ubuntu was the only Linux distro! Last time I tested Bodhi Linux, I found it quite simple to use and yet not flashy.

I'm encountering something similar this Christmas. We'd given my wife's grandma a Chromebook - and it has died of its own accord after just 14 months.

After talking about the replacement, she nearly begged for a Windows or a Mac. By name. This same woman that doesn't think she can run the microwave while being on the cordless phone.

We (Linux, and I'm lumping ChromeOS into this albeit a different beast) aren't going to win the marketing battle. With sites like Netflix not working on Linux and "you'll get it if you try it for two weeks" UX mentality (looking at you Unity), we're not going to win the experience battle - the only one where we stood a shot. Short of a product that thoroughly feels superior we just can't expect consumers to cope with a product just to "fight the [men]". And until that happens, I (and I suspect many fellow nerds) are following this round of the cycle and moving our families away from Linux (again, for now.)

Why move your parents to Windows rather than to some other Linux distribution? (Fedora, Linux Mint, Debian...)

Good work. I understand the stance you were taking but it's equivalent to "I think wooden bats are better for baseball, so I make my tee-baller use a wooden bat." You were fighting the right fight but on the wrong field. Don't let people make you feel bad. When it comes to an OS for a non-saavy family member ease of use and keeping those phone calls at bay are the only things that matter. Installing antivirus and running an anti-malware application when you visit for holidays is much easier than the nagging calls. Also, Mom won't get those weird looks in best buy when she asks the 16 year old girl if this copy of Microsoft word runs on Ubuntu.

I had the opposite experience. Notice the out-of-band patch that Microsoft released Saturday? Yes, Viginia, if you run Windows, you better apply it and update your malware scanners. I spent a small chuck of free time this weekend scanning, cleaning and in vain before restoring from backup.

Vexed by the ease that malware slash through my defenses, I switched to running Linux as the main OS on my laptop and every other OS as a VM. It's amazing that Linux can deal with my hardware better than the OEM recovery disk. And if I need to reinstall or migrate, I can just copy the VMs from backup. I was using VMs on the other OSes, now Windows 7 joins the crowd.

A lot of people doing this will quickly learn that Windows is not perfect either. On my Windows box, Chrome regularly crashes, the NVIDIA driver control software has a memory leak that causes it to balloon to using 3+ GB of memory, and DirectX 10 didn't work at all (games crashed) until a recent update. There are also intermittent problems with the screen going blank, requiring me to Remote Desktop in and reboot the machine.

I would much rather have a bug in Ubuntu than in Windows. I had no way to fix that DX 10 bug or communicate with the developers. I was just lucky that it got fixed.

It's sad to see what ubuntu have become.

Yes

And the worse thing is that Ubuntu is moving away from 'common users' BUT ALSO away from 'traditional linux users'

Sincerely, it's been getting worse and worse by every release. Under the banner of 'making it more user friendly', they're adding more useless clutter, more 'funny pictures' but have no clear direction or desktop concept.

Yes, I believed it was going to be great as well.

I am much more productive in a linux distro with XFCE/IceWM, half of 'infrastructure' turned off (network manager, pulseaudio, etc) or I just go with Mac OS X

Those people who claim Ubuntu is ready for parents, brothers, sister, and those with little computer experience to use are kidding themselves. I understand the work that has to go into supporting devices that don't ship with nix drivers, but the amount of issues I've encountered as a slightly experienced Linux user puts me off, let alone anyone who hasn't a clue about the stuff you need to perform on command line.

I completely agree with OP.

Out of curiosity: you gave Windows 7 to your parents, what are you using right now? Another flavour of linux?

I find apt-get and the huge amount of troubleshooting information available the main reasons I'm still using (K)ubuntu. I have tried other distros but always came back...

I downloaded Ubuntu 12.10 by mistake. Nothing worked that were not already included in the DVD.

I then downloaded Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and all my hardware (with the proprietary AMD driver) and preferred software (Opera, Blender, Skype) works there.

Lesson learned.

Why not Kubuntu or straight Debian? I remember a few problems when KDE went Plasma on us, but they pretty quickly worked out the kinks and we have been pretty happy with Kubuntu for several years now.

Bye bye Linux! Hello viruses, trojans, and ever-increasing bloat!

It's always been the same story. Of course you shouldn't give Linux to your parents...

So. Your updating your parents to a now obsolete operating system? Why not Windows 8?

This story stinks, what an obnoxious sense of entitlement.

How dare they break YOUR webcam, and why should you invest untold hours in learning how to contribute and then fixing it.

World on a plate with no effort to give back? Meh.