TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

It was suggested to me that after my dismal experience with Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) that I give the newest release of Ubuntu's OS (Breezy Badger) a try.

The reason given by the person recommending it was that they thought perhaps (and apparently erroneously) that the problems I found with 5.04 had been fixed.

I appreciate the effort of said person, but they were wrong, and I will attempt to illustrate exactly why. (For the record, I tried both the X86 and AMD64 versions of Breezy, and both gave me the same results).

Install:

Ncurses installs are functional but not at all user friendly. For a distribution that claims their target audience is everyone (including idiots), they should really consider something like an Anaconda-based installer because like it or not, a lot of folks are scared of text installs.

I am not, and had no real trouble with the install, aside from the complete lack of configurability, but since I'm used to having to bend over and take the defaults from Ubuntu (as I was taught by a Hoary Hedgehog), this wasn't much of an issue.

Install is done in two parts, which doesn't really make any sense to me. The installer spits out the CDROM after the first section and tells you to restart, then it goes through what *seems* to be a final boot, but then dumps you back to the rest of the ncurses install where it configures strangely-named packages such as bicyclerepair.

I'm not making this up. Thankfully all went well and I didn't have any errors, since I wasn't keen on doing this install again. The distro suckage was apparent already and had begun to eat its way into my brain like a carnivorous earwig.

Upon first boot I immediately reactivated the root account (personal grudge for having to do this) and proceeded to test out the theory that my complaints with the last version of Ubuntu had been addressed.

Upon my first attempt to ALT+F2 into a terminal and kill X with the init 3 command, I found that they hadn't been. X will still not die, no matter who asks it to.

Init 3 simply brought me back to the GDM login screen again, and neither "killall X*" or an explicit "kill -9 Xorg" would get me anywhere. The /etc/inittab file didn't work either. Boo.

After doing some digging, I found out that unlike Debian, Ubuntu includes the appropriate nvidia-glx packages on the distro CDROM itself. After an apt-get install I was happily trucking along in 3D.

I must concede points to Ubuntu on this because no other free distribution that I've tried offers this option (Xandros and Linspire are the non-free distros for this). That actually made me feel a *little* better about this whole ordeal... until I tried installing some of my games.

There was a dependency problem with libgtk that I couldn't solve using the packages available on the CDROM, which means although I had 3D acceleration working, I couldn't install any of my programs that USED it.

Software Selection:

Not much. Standard GNOME applications, Firefox and a few programs I'd never heard of, such as "Serpentine", which is apparently a CD burning application for audio CDs.

The default media player doesn't play MP3s, and since the handy little alien utility wasn't installed by default (though it was available off the CD) so until I installed that I couldn't install a real media player from my readily-available RPMs. It's a little thing, and I understand why they can't include MP3 support, but it's still annoying.

Not surprisingly, no sort of development packages were installed by default (or available on the CD, besides gcc/g++), making the out-of-the-box install pretty useless to a developer.

No development tools or IDEs whatsoever were included, but as I said before, this doesn't surprise me. Ubuntu is obviously a bad choice for developers anyway, since they should all know how to install a clean Debian system on their own.

Most Annoying Feature:

Aside from the same old problems I always have with Ubuntu (no root by default, slim package selection) Ubuntu's default sound scheme is downright headache-inducing.

Every time I'd move a file, select an option, open a file, or bring up a dialog box my speakers belched out something that almost sounded like bongos. It also almost sounded like my harddrive trying to bulimically purge this OS from itself in a last-minute act of self-preservation. Either one is plausible.

Who's it best for?

The text installer would scare some folks off, the lack of MP3 support and lack of ability to sync with official Debian repositories would scare others off, the terrible sound scheme and very bare selection of applications would scare yet more people off, and folks with no decent internet connection (who consequently are unable to download the needed packages with apt-get) will also want to avoid it... so yeah. No one.

The feeling that I got with Ubuntu was that although the installer was solid, and the OS it installed wasn't *completely* offensive, it was really just a "starter kit" for a real OS.

If my test rigs had internet connections that would allow me to download the dozens of files that I would need to get Ubuntu into just a passable working state, perhaps this rant would have gone better. As it is, it's a pretty way to install a useless shell of an OS.