Common problems with Ubuntu

[geoffrey mendelson]

On May 10, 2010, at 5:05 PM, Elazar Leibovich wrote:

> I remeber a few times where users of this mailing list were arguing  
> that ubuntu is a very problematic distribution.
> I'm evaluating a distribution for developer desktop.
> Ubuntu seems fitting mainly due to the hardware detection and the  
> ease of configuration. Also, it has up to date versions of many  
> desktop packages.
> I'll be happy to know which problems did you have with the Ubuntu  
> distribution.
> Googling with Ubuntu problems etc, did not help me find any  
> informative list of problems.


You need to go to the UBUNTU site and look at their problem databases.  
They are very good at tracking problems, less good at fixing them.

The problems I think you will encounter are:

1.	They have a very strict release cycle with deadlines. Problems  
found after the "freeze" date for a distribution are not fixed until  
after the distribution.
	This meant in 9.04 IDE optical drives did not work, ATOM processors  
did not boot and a lot of minor bugs.

	The ATOM problem was fixed with the netbook respin, but AFAIK a new  
boot disk of the regular version was never released.

2.	They take about a month after a release to to fix things and then  
often break them. For example, I have a system where gnome stopped  
working, and I have tried reinstalling gnome, deleting prefs, etc and  
it still does not work. It's too involved to reinstall from scratch.

3, 	They moved things around and are not like any UNIX or Linux based  
distro. While it's debian based, they forked off a long time ago, and  
debian packages often won't work, nor will any of the administration  
things you know.

4. 	They set things up the way they want them and it's darned near  
impossible to make them work properly if it is not what they wanted.  
Ask anyone with a Mac running MacOS 10.5 or 10.6 who wanted to use  
netatalk.

5.	Long term support is a relative term. Fixes that you would think  
are applied are not carried back. Only the obvious critical ones.

6.	Packages are not updated. Many of them are never updated, some are  
updated daily. I'm still faced with the same bugs in the UBUNTU  
version of Asterisk that were there since the original one that came  
with the release.

In short a great desktop system for simple users, not a good one for  
someone to maintain or do anything beyond it.

Geoff.

-- 
geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem Israel geoffreymendelson at gmail.com
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge  
or understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the  
situation. i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found  
in the Wikipedia.