Hello All! It's my first post here on the Ubuntu forums, and I figured I'd start out by wearing out my welcome with some complaining! Which i'm very good at.
My experience with Linux is very limited, but I've been dabbling in Ubuntu since for about eight years or so. I believe I was 17 when I spent a good weekend trying to get my USB Wifi extender to work that had zero driver support, something about ndiswrapper yadda yadda I digress! I also spent a solid day getting compiz to work when it was in it's early beta stages so I could twirl my desktop around in a fancy cube state! All in all I was impressed with Ubuntu back then and I believed with proper setup it was very competitive with Windows XP and Vista. These days? Not really.
You see my expectations are higher now of Ubuntu. Microsoft had a great release with Windows 7 and I believe (if you forget about metro for a second) Windows 8 is just as impressive with the right tweaks *cough start menu reinstatement*. Windows is fast, fluid and has top notch driver support. Ubuntu 12.10? Not fast, not fluid, and the jury is still out on driver support. Top it off Ubuntu 12.10 is buggy and sloppy.
Removal of Unity 2d support? Terrible decision. Folks who use laptops typically are on integrated chips. 12.10 is really sluggish.
It's buggy! Can't change laptop backlight with NVidia drivers. Initial installation of drivers caused the resolution to blow up to the point where the desktop was inaccessible. An hour later with Google on my iPad, I was able to figure out it was an issue with the kernel headers. Followed some prompts to update them and it was fixed. One week leader I download and install new updates from the auto-updater...poof! Resolution gone again. Reinstall headers again. Very sloppy, and unreasonable expectations for a piece of software advertised to be easy and simple.
It's still buggy! Unity Web Apps wont work out of the box with Firefox and Chromium. Settings launches with a massive ten to twenty second lag. Boot up and shutdown animations are completely borked with the Nvidia driver.
Don't worry I place blame on Nvidia too. But the every day user isn't going to see it that way. The buck stops with Canonical and this release is just garbage. I've always had a special place in my heart for Linux because I've always had a fascination with software that was unique and different from the status quo. Linux and Ubuntu felt cutting edge all those years ago when I was wrapping my own driver to get wireless to work. Ubuntu just feels tired and slow in this iteration. And I feel like no matter what year it is, I'm always wrestling with something to just get everything to settle down properly.
Ubuntu 12.10 isn't cutting edge, it's the cutting edge of what NOT to do with a software release. And I hope they put a larger priority on stability, speed and real innovation in their next release. Those are my two cents, and I'm sure folks will be glad to challenge my arguments which I more than welcome. Thanks!
Edit: I also want to voice that I'm actually a pretty big fan of Unity as a whole. I find it to be a simpler version of the OSX dock and it's easy for people like my Mom to use. I think Ubuntu went in the right direction by controlling its user experience, I just simply fault using 3d acceleration exclusively in 12.10.
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Originally Posted by capncoad
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