Ubuntu: Linux for lusers?

I have never liked Linux. Or, I should say, I have never liked Unix in general, and Linux in particular. Most open software people will at this statement open their eyes widely and look at me as if I'm E.T. In short, it is my opinion that Unix is a capable application server, at least if you use OpenBSD, but a rather crappy file server, especially if you try to use NFS, and a complete and utter unusable disaster as a desktop client.

Of course, here at Nuxeo we use open software, and I got a Debian installation to use for development, as a consistent development environment would help me be more efficient, and the experience did nothing to change my opinion. I found Gnome confusing, and GNUstep completely incomprehensible, and so settled on KDE. It still felt "clunky", just like Novells UnixWare felt ten years ago (I think they used CDE), but I could live with that.

KDE is nice because it has such a huge set of nice applications, like Kate, a text editor that is perfectly usable as a development editor, and so on. And the K-people churn out more and more applications all the time. Pretty amazing, I'd say.

Unkool Desktop environment

But, of course, few things "just worked", which is what you expect from a modern OS. Installing an application means going to debians website to search for packages, and then run apt-get as root. Not exactly end-user friendly. Sometimes the newly installed apps would end up on the application menu, but often not. And when they did, they end up under "debian", not under where you would expect them, as "internet" or "development".

Mounting a floppy or a flash drive was a major task, while in windows fo course, you just plunk it in. Printers in the printing manager came and went randomly. We also have set up four different printer queues to our color printer, for choosing between black and white, color and single side or double side printing. Of course, I could print to any of those, and I would get color output. Often I could not print at all. Debians idea of "stable" means "we haven't fixed any bugs for a long time", a concept of stability I don't wholly understand. Kate, being good in general, crashes if you paste something into the end of the file. After one debian upgrade, the menus suddenly were in french. The next update, they were back to english. Suddenly, setting a break point in python would have no effect. After trying to figure out why for a week, I did another debian upgrade, and then it worked again. Applications (especially Mozilla) would crash left and right.

I was not impressed. In fact, the only difference in usability between Unixware ten years ago, and Debian today, is that Debian doesn't skin you of any money.

Ubuntu: Not quite as bad

However, things get better. Not quickly, but slowly and surely even the Linux desktop gets better. The last attempt is Ubuntu. Seeing a good reason to reinstall my computer from scratch, I'm now trying out Ubuntu. And it's an improvement.

The installation was very simple, most things works out of the box, and as expected. There are a couple of quirks:

To get mp3 support for the default music player, you need to add the so called "universe repositories" to the list of repositories used for packages. Luckily, Ubuntu comes default with Synaptic. I nice graphical package manager with search. No more going to debiasn web page and searching for packages, I just start Synaptic. Much nicer. And in the settings, the universe repositories are there, and you select them and refresh. Not too difficult.

Again, installing products does not add them to the Applications menu. In fact, it's almost impossible to figure out how to add things to the applications menu. This I think is the biggest drawback of Ubuntu, from a user-point of view. It again makes it impossible for an end-user to use the computer without having an expert nearby. Sure, it's easy to install the products, but what is the use of that if you can't find them? I hope this will be better soon. Ubuntu uses Gnome 2.8.1, and Gnome 2.9 have moved to freedesktop.org's new standard for menus, so that KDE and Gnome will be able to share menus, making it easier for packages to create the menu items. That this happens in Unix some 13-14 years after you got a standard for how applications install themselves in a program manager on Windows should give everybody a good idea of why Linux is such a complete disaster as a desktop,

Also, I can not for my life understand why the default settings for Nautilus are so useless. The default settings have no directory tree, and opens each new folder in a new window. After ten seconds, your desktop is full of folder windows! And that you solve this by clicking the "Always open in browser Windows" setting is not particularily obvious either.

And yeah, it crashes. It's the gnome-applets that go kaput from time to time. Gnome recognizes this and restarts them, so that's good. And you get this little neat crash-manager that sends a bug report to the Ubuntu developers.

But this time I didn't find Gnome confusing, and I'll continue with it. The gedit editor is useless for development, but I'm trying out some Python-IDEs instead, something I also have wanted to do for some time now. I'll probably write something on that soon as well. Also, when I put in my Flash-drive, it actually gets mounted and opened automatically! And the printing works. OK, I had to edit the CUPS configuration manually, but then, this is only something you do in a network, where you expect to have a network manager that knows these things.

All in all, things are moving forward. Compared to Windows, the wierdness and quirks still make Ubuntu less useful for an end-user. No, lets be honest, it still makes it useless. I would not ask any relative that do not live within five minutes of me (and nobody do) to run Ubuntu. On the other hand then, my Windows problems have been increasing too. So, I have to agree with a close friend of mine, that says "When people ask me what computer they should buy, I always recommend a Macintosh. I haven't used one for years, but it can't be worse than the alternatives". Only problem is of course that you can't play Grant Theft Auto on it.