What Do You Dislike or Hate About Ubuntu?

[crazycheese]

NetworkMisManager:

There have been far better rants written on that than what I can write. But if you really haven't read any of them, the main points are that it gets in the way, can't handle static IPs, and you can't make it ignore some interfaces.

Try setting an IP yourself, I dare you. NMM will reset it for you in a couple of minutes.

Its right app - for newbies or for simple networks. It allows do things quick. Issues you mentioned are straight bugs. But you should be able to disable or remove NM if you need all linux networking functionality, its just that most people wont have to read manuals and go into terminal to setup network. It makes linux accessible, for them.

[deanjo]

Its right app - for newbies or for simple networks. It allows do things quick. Issues you mentioned are straight bugs. But you should be able to disable or remove NM if you need all linux networking functionality, its just that most people wont have to read manuals and go into terminal to setup network. It makes linux accessible, for them.

I can't remember the last time I had to drop to terminal for network setup. There is a beautiful YaST module for that.

[Zapitron]

upstart+ureadahead

I haven't looked at any of the versions later than 10.04, but I have a 10.04 server and I have a major gripe about it. It boots quickly but is incredibly fragile and if any filesystem fails to mount (or if you naively want /var or anything underneath /var to be a different filesystem than root) there is a good chance that your machine won't even boot. It'll die during init and you won't even get the opportunity to fix anything in single-user mode or over ssh or anything. Any other distribution would just keep on going, and at worst, fail to start some services. This one thing, speedy boots with ureadahead at the expense of being robust, makes Ubuntu Server 10.04 the least reliable Linux distro I have ever used.

Why even bother with trying to boot fast on a machine that hardly ever needs to be rebooted? They shouldn't have made using this mandatory (or even enabled by default) for the "server" distro. That was just plain a bad decision.

As for why I would use Ubuntu Server (I know, it sounds stupid of me on the face of it), that's more of a MythTV rant. MythTV is sensitive to frontend and backend version numbers matching (lame!!), and I actually like Mythbuntu for the frontend. Mythbuntu kicks ass. (See? This post isn't just Ubuntu-hate.) But short of compiling both sides of MythTV myself, if I want to keep using binary packages, I need both computers using the same repositories, so my frontend OS determines my backend OS. That is very lame, but not really Ubuntu's fault. Sometimes I wonder if I would be better off running mythbackend inside a virtualized Ubuntu just so that the rest of the server could be "normal" (i.e. pretty much any other distro, but probably Debian 6) and I wouldn't always be worrying if the machine will still work after a reboot. I shouldn't ever be scared my server will fail like that; that is so un-Linux that it's not funny.

Whether ureadahead is garbage or it's really an upstart problem, I don't know; I just know that to use Ubuntu Server 10.04 is to live in fear, and I would strongly recommend against anyone using it. If you do it anyway, have bootable rescue media nearby, because you're sometimes going to need it, just so that you can take things out of your /etc/fstab to make your Ubuntu system bootable again.

[curaga]

Its right app - for newbies or for simple networks. It allows do things quick. Issues you mentioned are straight bugs. But you should be able to disable or remove NM if you need all linux networking functionality, its just that most people wont have to read manuals and go into terminal to setup network. It makes linux accessible, for them.

You're right there, NM is still easy to remove. It being there by default is my gripe.

[crazycheese]

I can't remember the last time I had to drop to terminal for network setup. There is a beautiful YaST module for that.

Yast is suse-only and its not a separate program. Yast also does not cover all networking possibilities.

[locovaca]

Like:
* LiveCDs are easily converted to PXEBoot/NFSRoot
* Install process has reasonable defaults and takes 5 minutes
* 10.04 boot process is very quick, faster than a fresh Fedora 15 install (on my hardware)
* First distro to make Compiz useable for me. I struggled for months to get it working 100% on Gentoo, switched to 7.04 and the ease was a welcome relief.

Dislikes:
* Anything not LTS is a crapshoot. Regressions are common and not fixed, the solution is to upgrade to the next non-LTS. After 10.04 I gave up.
* Last LTS had major issues for -server that were not resolved for months and some are still not.
* No point in using Launchpad because most the issues are outright ignored by developers... until the next release comes around and the blanket "Upgrade and see if it fixed itself" statement gets plastered on every issue

[kayosiii]

It really bugs me that there are "-dev" versions of packages. That is a Debian feature, of course, and other distros have the same. While not a violation of the letter of the GPL, it seems to me to be a violation of the spirit.

Here's why it bugs me: I work on an free game derived from Quake2 GPL'd code. Like many open source projects, for Linux, we distribute a tarball with an Autotools build, and have a Subversion repository with read-only public access. I would guess that most of our Linux user base are Ubuntu users and, it is a good (even great) thing that Ubuntu makes Linux more accessible. However, it is a pain that the user cannot build an open source program with the default library install; they have to make a special effort to get build tools and the "-dev" versions of libraries. Like many open source projects, we do not have a lot of resources for pre-release testing; we really depend on our regular user base for this. The "-dev" version thing just makes that a little harder.

Some would, and have, pointed out that it would be a dangerous thing for regular users to be able to build programs. But, isn't that what the GPL is about? I concede that there are environments where that restriction would be needed. However, seems to me the default should be the other way around with "non-dev" packaging being the special case.

No doubt this is not going to change, but, having ranted, I feel better now.

For most packages included in Ubuntu the magic incantation is sudo apt-get build-dep (packagename) This will find the package names of the dev packages and tools needed to build the application.

eg if your application was sdl based then sudo apt-get build-dep libsdl-1.2 would download everything you need to build libsdl from source.

For end users on Ubuntu I would strongly reccomend setting up a ppa on Launchpad. It takes a little bit of time to learn how to build source debian packages but once you have this nutted out you send the source
deb to Launchpad and it compiles for all supported architectures and generates application and dev packages. Updates can be installed using the normal package management system.

[yogi_berra]

Yes, and like many other open source projects yours seems to fall in the same kind of disconnection with final users, if not reality. What on earth do you want me to do with your svn repository? I don't want to have anything to do with it, at all. I just want to play your game, not looking up how to fetch source code, how to build it, witness errors running down a terminal and chase libraries, only to find out that sound doesn't work or that it crashes at the menu screen.

Just for shits and giggles you should Install "Doom 3" in CentOS 5.6 and then try to run either the "Hexen: Edge Of Chaos" or "Dark Mod" mods.

Just do it. Then tell us how great linux binaries are.

[yogi_berra]

Not even close. The build service is capable of being used by many different distros. It is not limited to building packages just for openSUSE.

The build service is so awesome, it even builds RPMs for windows.

[bwat47]

Its slow. On my machines I've found it slower than windows 7...

Its also generally pretty unpolished, besides the lts releases. For example the compiz version in natty is HORRIBLE. So slow compared to compiz 0.8.x. And unity was not ready for release IMO.

If they really want to make it on the desktop they need a stable, polished experience.