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View Full Version : Ubuntu Lucid Lynx was the worst Ubuntu ever to me...



Djzn.BR
August 21st, 2010, 07:38 PM
I have always admired on how Ubuntu took over, but seriously, last release Lucid Lynx (ironically a LTS release), made me remember the Mandrake Linux days - a very bleeding edge & unpolished distro.

Fact is that, because of the increase of some silly desktop bugs, it turned out the light that was on Ubuntu for this season, to me.

For example, the Compiz cursor bug, where you can't resize the DMZ cursors when Compiz is enabled. Another misterious bug I have never thought I would hit, that was a sticky on the Karmic release notes for a while: downloaded torrents from Transmission get corrupted in ext4, some times, some times. I miraculously hit this bug past week. Note: the bug is set to invalid in launchpad.

The plymouth horrible logo vs. proprietary vga drivers. That makes me think: If you don't want thousands of users going through this bug, don't ship proprietary drivers in the first place! Ok, ok, I there is a workaround and I fixed it. But will I have to do that for Maverick? What about a corporate network with 20 machines?

But I am a comprehensive person. I understand that 64-bit is not effective in any OS. I know that Flash sucks in 64-bit Ubuntu. Sucks big time. A champion record for killing any browser. That is not Ubuntu's fault. Never been.

But I will never undertand why in the world we still CAN'T LASSO FILES in list view within Nautilus, which is ironically, the default GNOME desktop and default shipped file manager. I guess people can be considered too stupid and dumb to use ony "icons view". But I know power users turn that crap off in favour of list view very quickly. Any power user which manages a FLAC collection for example, with 3000 songs. And Nautilus can't even do it. Windows 7 and Mac can, Thunar can, Dolphin can... but not Nautilus.

And this time around with Lucid, several desktop bugs were experienced by me and the community. Applets placed on top of other applets, applets going funny... All sorts of little patchy things that I did not see in Karmic Koala, which was more stable and solid.

I have to praise greatly the artwork theme in Lucid, which is the finest theme and I've ever seen. (Even though I also have to agree that the titlebar buttons shouldn't go anywhere but right side).

I do hope that in the near future, issues like those are terminated. Ubuntu needs to fly higher. It's a quality distro, and should encorage Windows 7 users to make a move. Not encourage Windows 7 users to be relieved when they're using Windows. With the desktop usability being a struggle to both GNOME and KDE, I guess Windows 7 users are going to be really confortable for a long time in Windows.

As a IT manager, I would say that right now, you shouldn't keep Windows XP. Between Windows XP and Ubuntu, you go straight with Ubuntu, no second thought. Vastly superior.

But digging Windows 7 for a coupld of weeks, I would think that Ubuntu has still to catch up some things. Win7 is heavier, I know, but in terms of usability, if I were a KDE or GNOME developer, I would worry about how good is to use Windows 7 UI (or MacOS for that matter).

darrenn
August 22nd, 2010, 05:39 AM
YMMV one day maybe we will get a near perfect desktop.

kaldor
August 22nd, 2010, 12:06 PM
Yep, worst for me also. I've given up using it on my main PC (using Mint right now, since it's basically a fixed Ubuntu and OpenSUSE kept giving me package management issues) because of too many issues that should NOT be in a modern OS, especially not an LTS release. Karmic was bad, but Lucid just broke it all. Lucid's still a great server platform, just not what Ubuntu is supposed to be for a Desktop OS.

richs-lxh
August 22nd, 2010, 12:29 PM
Over the years i've seen a lot of these types of posts for various distros, and it's true that some releases do have their quirks. I use Debian at work, and as super-stable and over-tested it is, even Lenny gives us a few problems every now and then.

There are two main points I usually look at when commenting on a distro:

Computers and OS's in general are not 100% perfect all the time. Not Mac, not Unix, not Windows and not any flavour of Linux.
The second point is to see if the problem is with the distro base, or the 3rd party apps/desktop that comes with it. I helped develop a couple of distros, and had to deal with a few complaints which weren't the distro's fault, but the 3rd party apps we had chosen to include which weren't playing nicely.

As Kaldor said, Lucid is a great server platform, which tells me Ubuntu is actually ok, but maybe the Gnome desktop and 3rd party apps are a problem.

I put Ubuntu Lucid (Gnome) on our family PC and my daughter's laptop.

Personally, I use OpenBox as the default desktop on my computers as I need speed and functionality over GUI's, and I never have any problems on our Ubuntu Lucid desktop. I wish I could say the same for those of my wife and daughter.

I have also recently seen some annoying problems on Xubuntu which didn't happen with Gnome.

So I guess my point is, to try a different desktop, different applications, and see if it is the distro base that is causing the problems, or the desktop/wm and choice of apps.

Whatsmore, regarding Ext4, I need a consistent, stable environment, and although Ext4 was celebrated everywhere, myself and work colleagues use Xfs for servers and good old Ext3 for our desktops. Sometimes cutting edge isn't worth the hassle until it is 100% stable.

As Debian/Crunchbang user, I am quite impressed with Lucid as an easy to use desktop for the family, but then they do have me around to fix Gnome's little surprises :D

BlazeFire247
August 22nd, 2010, 12:40 PM
For example, the Compiz cursor bug, where you can't resize the DMZ cursors when Compiz is enabled.

And this is the reason why I dislike using Compiz. I still use it though, with a workaround for the cursor, but I want Ubuntu to actually fix even the smallest bugs like this one.

Using 34-bit Ubuntu and Flash absolutely sucks. Viewing YouTube videos is okay, but some Flash websites just flicker annoyingly.

I agree with you on the artwork. I, to be honest (really honest. I'll duck somewhere before you throw rocks at me), love the default Ubuntu wallpaper and the other backgrounds that come with Lucid. It's a shame though, because I normally don't stick with the default theme. I do sometimes, but I download some other theme and change the window icons back to the right.

Sometimes, I just couldn't find a fix for some of the tiniest problems either because of the internet connection or I've given up. If I can't do something, I'll go back to Windows. Even the alternative programs don't work for me sometimes. But I'm mostly on the internet so I don't use OpenOffice or play the games.

I do a lot of customizing in Ubuntu. I wish you could change more icons and font color more easily (I'm mostly talking about the panel in here. The main menu icon could use an option for it to be changed without using gconf-editor or backing up and replacing your icon theme, etc. and the font color of the panel should be easily changed without editing the gtkrc file or using an external program to do it).

I just ignore these though, because it's either I'll wait for a fix, report it or just have to deal with it.

richs-lxh
August 22nd, 2010, 12:43 PM
Using 34-bit Ubuntu and Flash absolutely sucks. Viewing YouTube videos is okay, but some Flash websites just flicker annoyingly.



As an alternative, I use Google Chrome and the Html5 beta on Youtube. Loads fast, no flicker, no problems.

http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=linux
http://www.youtube.com/html5

Djzn.BR
August 23rd, 2010, 02:49 AM
Thanks for the tips regarding YouTube and HTML5. I keep using Ubuntu as my primary system. I have another disk with Win7, but only for applications like MS Project, etc, that is, essentially Win-only apps. I am crossing my fingers that Maverick will be a breeze. Certainly it will be an improvement, and I do hope a stable improvement before GNOME Shell breaks everything apart. ;)

mastablasta
August 23rd, 2010, 07:47 AM
well for me it seems my sound issue might be fixed for now (haven't tried using it with this programme i have), so i think i will stay with this LTS for a while. So far it appears to work.
hopefully the release will get some improvements&bug fixes and will become a bit more stable.

If 3rd party apps are to be blamed, then why are they included by default if they are not working as they should?!

Jazzy_Jeff
August 23rd, 2010, 03:35 PM
well for me it seems my sound issue might be fixed for now (haven't tried using it with this programme i have), so i think i will stay with this LTS for a while. So far it appears to work.
hopefully the release will get some improvements&bug fixes and will become a bit more stable.

If 3rd party apps are to be blamed, then why are they included by default if they are not working as they should?!

Just because they are not working on your system does not mean they are not working for the majority of the people. I have had Windows programs in the past that I would have troubles on one system to make work yet worked great on another system.

Gaygerbil
August 23rd, 2010, 04:44 PM
I dunno bout y'all but I like 10.04 and you're complaining but what I think are really small things, there's like two DMZ cursors bro and the default size isn't bad. All other cursors can be resized.

And if Transmission is buggy for you, it's the app not really the OS IMO, there's other Bitclients out there that are just as efficient, if you're running a 64 bit process you don't need to be running such a light bitclient anyway. I run Deluge on my netbook and it works fine.

I mean in my personal opinion 10.04 is the best Distro Ubuntu has released. The majority of things work out of box in this distro. This is a first. All my keyboard shortcuts custom and default are still working after 2 months of using it, I've never had that with any of the previous distros which would just mess up shortcuts or not work at all.

Flash and Java work beautifully in 10.04 for my personal experience, for me Flash was working out of box on Chrome, and getting Java to work for Chrome was a lil bit more tricky but it wasn't too bad.

Djzn.BR
August 23rd, 2010, 07:23 PM
@Gaygerbil

It may be not all users who feel the way I feel. There are users that don't deal with any customization on the system, and for those, Ubuntu-current is just fine & perfect.

I am talking about a small nich of devoted, linux-only users, who once found peace on Ubuntu's shore, but got some heavy smashing tides from latest release season.

I come from the RedHat 5.2 Apollo days, and back then I couldn't lasso files in list view later when Nautilus came out :-)

Gaygerbil
August 25th, 2010, 12:00 AM
I guess the bugs on here must be incredible compared to previous Ubuntu bugs before then. <_____________________________<

Good luck with whatever other distro you're using.

Djzn.BR
August 30th, 2010, 12:26 AM
I am not keen to distro fragmentation. I keep using Ubuntu. If you wanted to wish any luck to me, that would be towards Ubuntu. I messed with ArchLinux in a VM. Even though it was cool, I see Ubuntu as a real Windows replacement for any user. It's just unfortunate the latest release was not as stable as Karmic.