After my post when PCLOS made it to the top spot on distrowatch, I received a request to clarify my complaints about long time leader Ubuntu. What is it that I believer Ubuntu did so wrong ? I promised to think it through and try to clarify my complaints, this post is then that clarification. Now first of all, please realize that I have no personal animosity toward [tag]Ubuntu[/tag] (I have far more against [tag]Suse[tag] but that’s a different matter) - I simply feel that Ubuntu’s popularity is in excess to it’s actual quality.
It is true that Ubuntu fanboys have become the most obnoxious voice in the FOSS community today and deserve a bit of a back-to-earth, no system is that perfect for everybody. Microsoft has been saying it for years of windows and hearing Ubuntu’s rhetoric is no less ridiculous – even if the latter is free software.
This is a harshly written and in some cases somewhat personal point of view, but neither of those facts mean I’m wrong, or that anything I cite isn’t verifiable fact.You may argue about my conclusions – but the facts that led to them are easy to check up on.
That Ubuntu has caused needless division in the FOSS community by being the first member there-off to actively promote itself – not as good for a particular purpose but as outright better than everybody else at everything (a flamboyant lie of the worst order) is true. But this is a philosophical disagreement, I believe that Ubuntu built up it’s own community by hijacking a part of the FOSS community -and then set it at odds with the rest of that community, and I think that was bad form to say the least.
So that clarifies my biases I guess regarding Ubuntu’s most touted ‘feature’ -the ‘wonderful community’.
I would rather try to be pragmatic from here on in though, and list genuine technical issues with the OS, especially the design level, which I believe should be improved for the sake of Ubuntu’s users.
1) Ubuntu doesn’t care what real users care about.
Cases in point:
*Hoary Hedgehog shipped with a bug in SMB printing (a hugely common scenario especially for people who use a Linux machine in a Microsoft based shop), that bug survived not just one, but two subsequent releases. Edgy Eft shipped, still unable to print to a windows shared printer, finally the huge amount of bad reviews caught up and the complaints just too loud that bug fix was finally made available about 2 weeks after the Edgy release. For normal users, this is a fundamentally basic task, when a desktop operating system touted as being for normal users fails at it, and then ignores their please for two releases – it doesn’t deserve to retain it’s userbase.
*One of the number one tasks the average user today wants to do first of all is to play music and movies on his system. This includes youtube and mp3 files. Out of the box, neither will work on Ubuntu. Unless the user is lucky enough to discover automatix, getting them to work is a screaming nightmare. Users have long since complained of this, and been ignored. The reason here is legal – Ubuntu because of it’s Californian incorporation is bound by U.S. Laws about these things. They are following those laws, had Shuttleworth incorporated his company in his own country – these laws (particularly software patent laws) would not have applied – but I guess trying to sell a genuine African company’s products in the US was too much of a challenge – rather leave the users unable to play their music. PCLOS is also a US developed system, but it has taken a stand against what it sees as unethical laws, and continue to include media codecs – free implementations where possible – but non-free as well when not – for the sake of those users.
2) Ubuntu offers a false delusion of choice.
Nearly all of canonical’s efforts go into the main Ubuntu release with it’s gnome desktop. True there is Kubuntu on the platter, generally the world has been unanimous about kubuntu though -it’s far less stable than it’s gnome brother. Not because [tag]KDE[/tag] is less stable – because the effort on this version of the distro is simply not of the same standard. Either offer the same quality for all the spheres of the market you want to play in, or stay out of the ones where you are offering a hugely inferior product and then using the clout of your main product to push it – that’s microsofts way of doing things. I don’t like seeing Linux companies copying it. The even greater irony is that despite Ubuntu’s popularity KDE remains the desktop of choice for real users, nearly 65% of all Linux desktops run it rather than any other desktop (including Gnome). This figure of course puts massive doubts about how true Ubuntu’s user-number claims really are (the same claims Fedora recently pulled into question), but more importantly it shows another case of Ubuntu enforcing the developers will onto the users, instead of letting the users dictate the direction of the system in a democratic way.
3) Ubuntu is really hard to install.
Every distro that ever held the top spot for the desktop section of the Linux market has installed graphically since 1998. Even Corell Linux got that one right. Heck even Redhat was graphical since version 6.0 ! The first Ubuntu shipped with a (badly) modified Debian installer that was text based only, featured the ugliest partitioning tool since MS-Fdisk and was really hard to install, back then the LIVEcd was a seperate disk and not installable. How did that become the new desktop leading distro ? When the hardest part of using it (installation) had not been made easier ?
To this day, Ubuntu’s installation is the hardest, most annoying I have dealt with in recent years. I am a Linux professional with more than 15 years experience on the OS – and I found it hard to install Edgy when I needed to test some stuff on it recently. How must it be for a new user. Compare that to PCLOS’s true third-generation LIVEcd installer, which just runs you right through the process in record time. Or even to OpenLab’s (which granted was not as simple yet as PCLOS is today – but came close).
It is just stupid to imagine a distro that is really hard to install, as being desktop orientated.
4) Ubuntu is hard to use
In virtually every sense. It has stupid bugs in terrible places that break things which should be rock solid and are on other systems. The package repositories are confusing and split into dozens of different trees, enough to make any poor user get lost. The menu’s start out empty and then very soon become clunky and unusable – they may have bypassed a cluttered menu in the default install, but they didn’t solve the cluttered menu in the post-installed system ! Synaptic is a lovely tool for installing software, PClinuxOS also uses it -but on PCLOS it’s simple, the repo list is there, just ‘tick’ the nearest mirror – and they are all the same. In Ubuntu it’s hard, there are universes and multiverses and all sorts of weird concepts that must make any recent Windows convert say “All I wanted was to get solitaire… this is just too confusing”.
5) Ubuntu is too command line oriented.
To some extent an extension of the above but this goes beyond the system into that famous community. Go read a PCLinuxOS manual, or browse the Forums. When a user asks how to do something, in the PCLinuxOS world he is told “Go there on the menu, click this, click that, select such and such” – simple and familiar, especially for former windows users. Now read the Ubuntu forums. When a user asks “How do I do X” the answer is invariably a list of commands which must fill a newbie with paralyzing fear. I am pro-command line, I wrote a post about it the other day – but not for a newbie who just wants to do something simple ! Learning the command line can be very rewarding, but it should not be a requirement for even the simplest tasks !.
6) Ubuntu is difficult to configure
Ubuntu inherited from Gnome the worst fallacy in the computer world today. That dumbed down is easier. To protect users from the ‘confusion of too many options’ they removed from users the ability to do anything that seems slightly advanced. Without any consideration of the fact that to some user somewhere, it’s critical. The quintessential example is the Gnome Print Dialog which led to Linus’s now famous outcry – Linux can do double-sided printing, but Gnome users cannot, because Gnome wanted a simpler printer dialog – so they took the button away… in an office, double sided printing is of course the norm, not the exception – but you cannot do this on Gnome without a lot of effort. And Ubuntu is an entire operating system designed like that. When I was setting up a machine for a customer recently, it took me days to set up all the peripheral hardware- things that traditionally for me is something I finish in minutes after loading a distro – I had to google every one, because there were no obvious config tools, the ones I did find were incomplete and broken, the config files were all hidden in obscure places (it’s a rarity for one to be where it would be expected by an experienced sysadmin) and every time wanted to set up some hardware I had to have root privileges which Ubuntu goes to such extraordinary lengths to make unavailable. Oh you can sudo… if you know about xhost controls you can get the right privileges graphicaly in some cases. Alone among the distro’s on the market today, Ubuntu lacks a decent central configuration tool where you can configure stuff if you need to. And on Kubuntu it’s much, much worse. KDE was not designed by idiots, and it doesn’t take this stupid approach to design – so KDE just doesn’t fit well on a distro that is designed like this… try to set something up, break something else because the OS is so stupid that KDE’s config tools find themselves blocked from doing the basic tasks they do so well on every other distro .
My conclusion lies in that last one, but in the deeper underlying philosophical issue which leads to all of them. Ubuntu, like it’s buddies from Gnome treats users like idiots. I don’t mean by that, that they hand-hold them or make things easy – I mean it in the insulting way. They put users in straightjackets, in padded rooms and tell them “Anything we don’t choose to put in the room with you, that you cannot operate with your straightjacket on – you shouldn’t have”. Sure it’s easy to sit on the chair, or speak in the speakerphone. But the moment you want to do anything else – no matter how simple, Ubuntu actively tries to prevent you. It’s the worst example of technical elitism achieving the opposite of ease-of-use that I have ever encountered. Windows is actually easier to use than Ubuntu because setting up hardware, loading software and changing things to suit yourself are pretty obvious and standardized. But almost every other Linux distro that is truly making an effort in the desktop sphere is even better at that than windows – except the one that everybody recommends.
I do not define “easy to use” as “quick to browse the web, write a letter or read an email on” – which is Ubuntu’s list of all the things users should ever do. I define it as “whatever you want to do, if the system can do it, the system makes it as easy as possible for you to achieve it” – by that definition, Ubuntu scores a round zero. Granted, they score 100 on the other definition, and some people actually believe in that. Sorry, I have never and will never agree with those people.
