Warning to those who want to install ubuntu…
The following details the worst experience I've had in my 13 years of computing. The culprit? Linux, particularly, ubuntu. The purpose of this piece is to serve as a warning to the newbie who wants to experiment with linux and for those who currently struggle with it. Throughout this article you will repeatedly come across the words “struggle” and “slow” as my mantra describing my sad experience.

Why I installed ubuntu...
It all started 10 months ago when an idiot geek named ronald suggested I install ubuntu. He persuaded me into believing that ubuntu was superior to XP given the apparent flaws I experienced with XP at the time, like, program crashes and startup issues. However, looks were very deceiving. These problems actually arouse through my fault, not from XP itself (more on this later). At first, installing ubuntu was fast and without a hitch on my fast Gateway laptop. I felt confident that it would be a better o/s than XP. I was dead wrong!

Problems I experienced with ubuntu…
Flashplayer - Problems ensued after installing needed packages. One program, flashplayer, gave me a huge headache. I couldn’t get the browser to recognize it. For a week I scoured the net for help, which I finally found. But even after fixing it, it didn’t work as well as it does in XP. Youtube clips in full screen is as choppy as hell. Also, it crashed Opera, prompting me to force-close the app.

Reformatting Issues - I had to reformat my computer 5 times before getting ubuntu to work right within the 10 months. I had blamed myself for this, not ubuntu, which was the guilty party. When dire problems arise in XP, I’d reformat it no more than once every 2 years. With an o/s like ubuntu, why would anyone want it?

Openoffice - Openoffice poses itself as a substitute for MS Office… are you kidding me? I can’t begin to describe the problems and stupidity associated with it. For example, the biggest issue was the SLOW scrolling in Writer. It was so slow that I had to lower my color depth to 16 bits to help it improve scrolling. Even then it was still too slow. Word in Windows ‘95, believe it or not, scrolls lightening fast. Windows ’95 is an outdated 13 year old o/s that ubuntu in its recent release shouldn’t have to compete with in performance.

Loading a doc in Writer takes 14 seconds. Loading a Word doc on XP takes me 3 seconds! Wow!

Writer bullets blank lines in between a list of sentences with spaces. Why the hell does it do this? Word NEVER does this. Why would the “genius” at Sun purposefully allow this? I’d have to go back CONSTANTLY in my doc to unbullet spaces. Another struggle.

Writer fails to save formatting in doc form in the way I want it. Again, I had to go back and somehow make the changes stick. Finally, I installed Word through Wine. But, because of ubuntu’s slow nature, the scrolling improved but was still slow in Word. One the other hand, Word in XP is a speed demon.

Another big struggle was loss of data. When I save my Word docs (through Wine), all my changes were lost and unrecoverable. This was the point where I decided I had enough of this piece of s*** and installed XP. Moreover, one of my fave features in XP is copy and paste clipboard after you close an app like Word, where it remembers what you copied so you can paste it somewhere else. Ubuntu lacks this and annoyed me as I have to open and close my word processor alot.

Boot up speed - This is a joke. Despite disabling an incredible 47 services, it’d take me a minute and a half to boot up ubuntu. In XP, it takes me 27 seconds WITHOUT DISABLING ANY SERVICE! Apps load much faster in XP, also. Opera in XP loads up in 2 secs. Opera in ubuntu loads up in 8 secs.

Bloatware - Ubuntu has so many unneeded programs it ain’t funny. Why so much for a system that’s purported to be better than XP? At one point, I had uninstalled 1.5 GB of fluff. But that still didn’t speed up boot up time. It was still snail slow.

Video and sound - When I’d play an mp3 through banshee or songbird, the app would take 11 secs to load. And even then it didn’t play automatically. In XP, I click on a song and the app loads in 2 secs. Xine and Vlc are good players in ubuntu, admittingly. But, configuring them is a pain in the ass. I had to configure my xorg settings to lower color depth to get the videos to play correctly WITHOUT gridlines which creeped up. Why this happens is beyond me. And, I shouldn’t have to lower color depth just to play movies. In this case, I had no choice.

Wireless/Dial-up - On occasion I use dialup for security reasons that wireless cannot safeguard. The dialup speed on ubuntu is so damn slow. On XP, the speed is relatively fast. However, the wireless and browing speed in ubuntu is way ahead of XP, hands down. I believe this is ubuntu’s only strength and it does a good damn job of it, better than XP.

Printing - Printing in ubuntu is an insult to intelligence. It uses the CUPS system and employs generic drivers that create print quality that is sub par and gross. Configuring the print settings is a pain. The printer takes a long while to recognize your print job before it prints - annoying! Also, your printer may not be compatible with ubuntu - another headache - and you might have to spend money on one that is.

Faxing - Faxing is not easy to set up in ubuntu. You got to go through many steps to set up and find the right info for it online which isn’t easy to gather. I used eFax and 2 other fax apps and was highly disappointed.

Desktop and window manager - Ubuntu is better than XP when it comes to customizing it the way you want it to look. But, certain themes and icons are not installable - another limit. Window managing through Nautilus is disappointing. It’s so much slower than XP in opening a directory of many files that you wonder what the developers were thinking when they put ubuntu together. In XP, opening a folder with more than 300 files is quick and effortless.

Upgrades - Ubuntu sports the option to upgrade to a new release every half year. In my last upgrade to 8.10 (Ibex), I had to struggle to uninstall all the programs that had come with the release that I had uninstalled in the previous one. Why the hell does it do this? Ubuntu should be intuitive enough to know that you had uninstalled prior programs and prevent the same old ones from installing in newer releases. Going back and noting what app and dependency to remove without corrupting the entire system was time consuming and dangerous. More frustration, time, and energy expended for nothing.

For whom ubuntu is made…
Ubuntu should NOT be the primary o/s for the curious. Personally, I'm convinced that it’s made for developers with years of computing experience who tinker with it as a hobby to improve upon an alternative o/s. If you're new to linux and want to experiment, I strongly suggest you install it on a totally separate system, like an old, unused computer.

Don’t even dual-boot it - you may run into problems you’ll later regret. If you want to virtualize your computer with ubuntu that’s fine, PROVIDED that it's used ONLY as a guest, NOT as a host o/s. Be prepared to look for needles in haystacks when it comes to finding the right info in getting your system to work at least half decent. Also, your system won’t work the way you want it to most of the time; ubuntu is not user friendly.

Remember that ubuntu is a never ending work-in-progress. It ain’t XP.

Why all the hoopla about ubuntu?...
Ubuntu is supported and toyed by linux fan boys and admirers who see Microsoft as this 1984 Big Brother giant ready to take over the world. They see linux as world messiah and savior. This makes for a good sci-fi flick, by the way. These geeks are so taken up with an “evil” corporate giant that it’s now cool to be anti-M$ in the underground computing world. As they hop on the anti-M$ bandwagon with a fervor that makes them feel like freedom fighters, these geeks defend an o/s that constantly gives them problems. And they cover up these weaknesses, fooling themselves and blinding others in the process. Microsoft is not the Darth Vader of the world. Actually, it’s its savior.

Now, at this point you may be thinking that I sound like a Microsoft fan myself. On the contrary, I’m not fan, foe, or defender of any o/s. To me, an o/s is an o/s regardless of origin. If ubuntu had given me what XP failed to provide me, I’d have written ubuntu in a good light and bashed XP to the hilt. However, this is not the case.

Once you struggle with ubuntu, you'll be screaming to get XP back! Vista may be bloated and somewhat problematic. But, it’s a much, much better option than ubuntu without a doubt!

Why I finally switched back to XP (thank god!)...
Did you read the above? This huge leap of faith in ubuntu fell short of expectations. I finally made the switch back to XP when noticing that boot up time was embarrassingly slow - despite new releases promising faster boot up - and when Writer and Word through Wine failed to adequately save my docs, among the other aforementioned issues. After months of frustration and self torture, I had had it.

The reason why I had mentioned in the beginning of this article that problems in XP were my fault is due to my stubbornness in removing unnecessary programs and downloading a plethora of files that had accumulated in my hard drive. The hard drive can only take so much garbage before it crashes under its own weight with tons of apps and stacks of files. Had I been more careful, I wouldn’t have been suckered into ubuntu as its victim.

I strongly urge all of you reading this article to avoid ubuntu at all cost. The migraines are not worth it. Take it from a guy who’s spent nights awake into the wee hours of the morning struggling (there’s that word again) with getting a system without solution to work. If you want stability, stick with XP or Mac. XP is still an awesome and fast system. Vista is bloated and not issue-less. But, it’s better than ubuntu. When it boils down to efficiency and performance, ubuntu leaves much to be desired. Stick with peace of mind, stay with XP. Trust me!

Ubuntu’s future...
Realistically speaking, I doubt if ubuntu will ever compete with Windows. Some say it'll take another 10 years. Whatever the time frame, I highly doubt it'll replace Windows. Ubuntu is both GUI and command-based, a bit too complicated for beginners.

Ubuntu developers don’t use a good model in improving a product. They fail to make an o/s that matches or exceeds XP. They should be competing with XP, not with other linux distros. In adding more bloat to ubuntu in every release, they actually make it more like “enemy” Windows, not better. At this pace, ubuntu’s future is bleak. The only attractive feature of ubuntu is compiz-fusion, that’s all. Beyond the cute desktop effects, however, is not a strong system. Many state that ubuntu is just good for servers, not for the desktop; for now and for the future. I highly agree.

Ubuntu SUCKS!!!

By the way, OBAMA WON !!!! My support is for all the black, hispanic, italian, indian and muslim brothers and sisters. There is hope for us!!!

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You post will serve as fair warning to the tens of millions of people who voluntarily use Ubuntu and it's numerous variations successfully on a regular basis.

Thank you for your comment, auroraCA. I hope that many will read my warning and avoid ubuntu like the plague. However, I got to correct you. There aren't tens of millions of ubuntu users out there. I think the figure is more like 7 million from a website I found this year. Thanks for your added support.

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You are welcome. I must correct you. There are tens of millions of Ubuntu users including all the Ubuntu variations from a website that I read.

I personally don't like Ubuntu because it does not have what i was looking for.
linux is about choices and finding what works for you; hence all the various distros



Here are some counter-points to what you wrote

Well in this s[quote]ection i have to ask why didnt you use adobe flash? Adobe is the current standard for flash.

yea it sucks b/c it uses java. it is heavy and oh yea it uses java. But there are other options. i like goffice (gnome office)

IDK there is no hoopla. it is a beginner linux OS so more people use it before moving on...


PS
shorter posts would be better :-)

I agree that Ubuntu sucks, but I don't go around hollering about it. Move on and use something else.

My own experience with Ubuntu is pretty much the opposite of yours :-). Admittedly I am not a 'full-time' user as I dual boot with slackware but I can see that all computer needs should be satisfied by the latest incarnation: Intrepid Ibex. Installation was very, very easy and from booting on the installation cd to browsing the Internet only 45 minutes passed. Easy to use and administer and in my case totally trouble free.

But of course there are choices and I guess you have chosen XP, I note that you have not mentioned Vista but I guess nobody likes to :-).

Andrew

So your post is really just an ill-mannered parting troll, then.

Most of the things you described could be easily fixed. Seriously, do some searching before saying 'IT SUX IMA GUNNA GO BAK 2 XP'.

edit: and you can blame hardware companies for not providing any (or decent) drivers. It's not linux's fault.

I don't use ubuntu, but a few days ago I installed Intrepid Ibox on my neighbour's computer (dualboot with XP). Although the guy knows very little about computers, I asked him to do it without my help (I helped him with partitioning). I spoke to him yesterday and he seems very happy. He even said that configuring his wireless connection was much easier than on XP. His wife just loves it. But then again, there will be as many ubuntu/linux stories as there are people.
btw, you must be very frustrated that you took the time to write such a long post

I am not a big fan of Ubuntu, however, I think it does a great service for many people and there's really no base for some of your claims.

Well, flash a an Adobe product, not related to linux. Complain to them, there's nothing we can do to fix it since it's closed source.

In linux, reformating is not the way to fix things. We actually fix things and make them work. This only shows your inexperience, we all have been there at some point.

OO is a product by Sun, and it also works under Windows. Try it under windows, if the scrolling problem persists then blame sun, if it doesn't then we might assume that something else needs attention. But the way to help is to report the thing on the bug trackers. Complaining here is not going to help on improving it. I could blame your video driver, since you seem to be having issues with color depth as well. If that's the case and the driver is closed source there's nothing we can do to fix it either. Complain the the hardware manufacturer in that case.

Use a preloader that there's around. That's what msoffice does, only then the comparison would be fair.

This is a nonsense. Of course that win95 runs a lot faster. It's a program from, well, 1995 and it was designed to run on a 486 at 33mhz. It will run at the speed of light on a quad core 3000+ mhz. No mystery there.

I don't know which problem did you have with wine, but in any case, if you are going to stick to ms programs and don't want to bother learning to use oowriter, then you should stick to windows.

Ubuntu is not going to be the distro with the fastest boot time. It's a generic desktop OS. However there's also another separate issue. Windows doesn't boot that fast either, it continues loading stuff from many seconds to many minutes before you are presented your desktop. You can easily check that it doesn't perform that good until a certain time has passed since you see your desktop for first time. A smaller and fastest distro and a custom kernel can help you there, though.

Uninstalling things doesn't make your machine faster. That's only true in windows, where every single progralm add a few thousand keys to your registry and adds something to be preloaded at startup (i.e. msoffice).

There are lots of players available. If you choose a heavy player you can't expect it to react as quick as the windows media players, that's tightly embedded into your OS. A simpler media player should be faster, though it all depends. A playlist manager with support for databases will never be the fastest thing to load. It should perform very efficiently once loaded though.

I think that you are just using the wrong tools for your purposes. It's just inexperience.

I'll answer with a question. If you buy a printer for a mac (with mac-only drivers), would you complain if it doesn't work in windows or it works only with some generic driver?

Hint: check that your hardware is compatible with your os before buying it. You need to check compatibility: yes. Is that the linux problem? No. Linux has no control about the decisions of the hardware manufacturers/driver makers. How can you blame Linux for that?

Don't know what do you mean at all. There are lots of themes for gtk, metacity (the gnome wm) and to tune up almost anything. If you wan't more customizability you might want to try kde instead. Gnome certainly is not the most configurable thing, since the gnome devs seem to think that having options is a bad thing. But this is unrelated to linux as well. Gnome is gnome under solaris, bsd or any other os, not just linux.

I can't comment on that. I don't use nautilus since many years ago and I never liked it. There are lots of alternative file managers (pcmanfm, thunar, konqueror, krusader, mc, xfe and a long list of others). However, I can tell you that xp used to lock when I was opening something with many thousands of files (thousands, not just 300), and I can handle that in linux without problems.

Something that you can't ever doubt is that any linux filesystem is far superior to fat32. I have no objective info about ntfs though.

As a developer, believe me, Ubuntu would be my last choice. And even then, I would prefer to build my own OS before sticking to Ubuntu. If I wanted a shinny OS which is based on assistants and dumbed down to the bone, I would be using Windows. I don't think that Ubuntu does a good developing platform. It's a distro that's oriented to the regular user and that aims towards simplicity. And it works surprisingly well for thousands of -happy I might add- users. That it didn't work for you doesn't make it any worse.

Windows has also it's own assortment of problems, and some people can't install it on certain combinations of hardware. It fails inexplicably under many random circumstances. That means that no OS is perfect, and no OS works for everyone. Believe it or not.

No. Just learn how to do it. Dual booting poses no problem at all. Just because you don't know how to drive an hellicopter you shouldn't be advising everyone not to do it. Millions of persons dual boot linux, windows and many other oses without a problem.

Funny sentence, considering that each version of windows I test is unusable and completely insecure until service pack I arrives a couple of years later. No disrespect intended, but the only difference is that MS maintains everything closed so you can't see it, while in linux everything is open to the public.

Believe it or not, the sci-fi tale was made up by you. I am not particularly happy about any foundation having such a big amount of power, might it be MS or whatever other foundation. But that doesn't mean I feel that paranoid about it. However, the fact that ms has the potential to have spyware watching your finances and private documents (and that's not sci-fi, but something perfectly possible) is not appealing. I am not the enemy of MS, but I really can't tell you that I am happy when I see a closed source product managing our data. That's far worse when we talk about machines from official organisms and state institutions. Since no one can review the code, you have absolutely no guarantee that these machines are not compromised. You have no way to tell for sure that nothing is being sent out without our consent, and you can no way to ensure that no back door is open.

It's something that any programmer that know a bit about nerworking could do. It's not like MS guys are diabolical geniouses, there's absolutely no sci-fi on this. It's like driving a car, a perfectly possible thing to do.

But I have absolutely no problem with you using windows if you want to do so. I just want to be free to use whatever I want as well. I hope no one feels bad about that (not that I would care anyway).

The MS policies are unrelated to the topic really. I have my opinions about them, but they are entirely unrelated to this thread. Linux exist independently of MS, and not as a reaction to MS or any other company. We aim for a good OS, not an OS that better than XP or whatever. I'm not particularly interested in comparing products that are intrinsically different. At least, that's my view. Of course that there are maniacs around, but there are also maniacs using windows, aren't there?

I use linux because it's the os that does what I need. Windows can't do it since a long long time ago, simple to understand. No mystery nor sci-fi behind my choice. There aren't saviors nor vaders here, I never though of any OS on such a metaphysical way like you seem to do.

I think that you really think that way, and that's a good thing. You really have my respect whatever your OS of choice is. However you have a little problem of bias. You expect everything to be done in linux like it's done in windows, and that's not the way it works. Linux doesn't have to work like windows. That would be as absurd as .... well, asking windows to work like linux, wouldn't it?

Such is the beauty of freedom. That's an opinion, lots of people seem to think the contrary however.

As I said, I am not an Ubuntu fan, so I don't know what would my category be there.

I understand your frustration. But really, do you think that the many thousands of happy ubuntu users are either lying or lobotomized? Do you think that anyone is going to pay attention to such advice? It's just an opinion. Again, I dislike Ubuntu for many reasons, but I don't think it deserves an horrible death.

That comment is derived of the inexperience I was talking before, and the -wrong- assumption that everything should work like the only OS you know. Remember: linux is not windows, it doesn't need to. It works in a different way and there's no reason why it should be like windows. There's not a reason why a plane should work like a car, and that would be a crazy idea indeed. This is the same. We are talking about different OSes.

MSDOS was completely command line based, and millions of persons without any previous experience in PC's used it all around the world without a problem. You are just scared of the unknown, such is the human condition. If you are interested in learning, you learn, if not, stick to whatever you know and leave the others continue their way.

I don't feel like I must compete with anyone. I use whatever OS fits my needs. Linux does, windows doesn't.

Mmmm? If you say so. Ubuntu should stick to what they are doing. Assemble an OS that's good looking, accessible and easy to use. Nothing else. I don't think they ever meant to compete with anyone. That's another assumption you make there that doesn't necessarily reflect the reality.

Cheers and be happy whatever your choice is.

Well, quite frankly, I swear by Ubuntu, and I'll tell you why. For me, it's much more stable than any version of Windows that I've ever used, including XP, and it's the only Linux distro that I could get to work properly on both my computers. Personally, I believe hardware may be a big reason for such conflicts with distros. i.e. Some swear by Slackware. I couldn't even get that to install. Knoppix couldn't find half my hardware. And DSL? What a joke. It was no faster than Ubuntu, and the colors were screwed up. What I'm saying there is that when I went to my Yahoo homepage, black was red, blue was green, yellow was pink, etc. Ubuntu has been the only one that worked properly 'out of the box'. But then again, I only use the LTS versions. I started with 6.06 in Sept 06, and didn't upgrade until 8.04.1 was released.

You can go back to Windows if you want. Linux really isn't for everyone, nor does it serve all of everyone's needs. That is why so many Linux users either dual-boot or run one OS inside the other in a VM. But personally, I've been MS-free for more than two years now, and I'm still damn happy with my Ubuntu, thank you...

Cheers

This is fairly bizarre: OP has been with us just over 3 weeks, and now appears to be a seasoned authority on all the shortcomings of Linux and Ubuntu. I'm not sure how much longer he will last without having some sort of breakdown.

Oh--I almost forgot: I'm writing this from an install of LinuxMint (A Ubuntu spinoff)---one of the best distros I have seen.

I also have a delusion that OpenOffice is far more rationally organized than MSOffice.

No, actually, there are + 8 million users, NOT tens of millions as you've incorrectly stated. That would be impossible. Here's the link:

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Ubuntu_Li...wing_with_Ibex

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i92guboj

That was a very well written and reasoned response. You show a great depth of knowledge and understanding with your comments. It's quite obvious you have a broad experience with Linux and Windows products and have presented very objective comments.

Thanks. I enjoyed reading it.