How Linux has failed me.

[Slavedriver]

First of all, a little disclaimer.
1) I am not trying to start a flamewar. Merely pointing out what I didn't like in a system being pushed so hard in my face (yes Slashdot, I am talking about you)
2) I am NOT trying to start a flamewar. No, really. I may be overly critical, ironic, maybe a bit offending to some people, heck, I know I WILL offend someone, but that's how I am. Not a troll. Not as green as a troll at least.
3) I am programmer by trade who works with both Windows and Mac OS a lot and has to use console in his daily work more than GUI. That means I am really OK with the console, not afraid of it and sometimes even prefer it to GUI.
4) While I prefer Windows XP to all OSes I tried a lot of other OSes out there to form an opinion of what a perfect OS should be (and that were all flavors of Win starting from 3.11, all flavors of Mac OS X starting from 10.1 and a few flavors of Linux).
5) This is my opinion, biased, subjective, but mine. If you can't cope with somebody expressing a different opinion from your own - please deal with it in a civil manner.

So let's start...

Truth be told I had to try Linux recently because my few-years-old XP install is going haywire (you know like it becomes after a few years of extensive use) and all movies I tried to watch started to lag like hell. So, after reading another portion of "Linux is superior to everything" on Slashdot (really, guys, at lest try to be less biased) I decided to install latest version of Kubuntu (I had 6.06 installed prior to that just to try it out but I haven't used it a lot).

Seeing that 7.04 was supposed to come with a nifty app to install the drivers I was quite please because the horror of trying to get my NVidia to work on 6.06 was still fresh. First thing I noticed when booted to LiveCD is that my external USB HDD wasn't visible. Oh well, I though, I'll browse the web without listening to music while waiting it to install. So I fired up the installation app, sniped my town from the world map (really guys add the zoom feature from Ubuntu's installer) to select the timezone and moved on with the installation. Meanwhile I tried looking for this driver install app because I remember seeing it on one of Ubuntu screenshots (not Kubuntu one though). Haven't found it. Oh well, maybe it'll become available after I boot into the real system.

So after trying to break my CD drive rack once more (still don't understand why the system requires me to eject the CD when I reboot\shutdown. I have a door which closes the part where my CD drive is so it will simply won't open if the door is closed damaging the fragile plastic gears used in the tray mechanism.) I rebooted into the real system. First thing - my USB HDD still wasn't there. Nowhere to be found and mounter manually. Second, driver install app wasn't there too. No external HDD basically meant a useless system to me because I store all my media files and documents there. So goobye Kubuntu, hello Ubuntu.
Boot to LiveCD, find my USB HDD already discovered, find driver install app, install the system, reboot. Sigh, HDD is still there. Install drivers, download 100+ updates including new kernel, reboot.

Try playing a movie. Alert appears saying codecs are not installed. OK, let's install some codecs then. And here's the part I don't like - the scary "Restricted app" message. While I don't really care about it I know 100% that any average user will be. And that will be an end for the media playback for him if some geek won't come and set it up for him.
Next stop - install Amarok, it being quite good media player. After installing it and building my collection I tried playing some MP3 files knowing what to expect - a pop-up asking to install MP3 codec because it's "restricted'. Boo, scary. Instead Amarok hanged... Restart, select a track, click play, boom, hang again. This time I actually see the pop-up but without any text or buttons. After a few seconds I am told that KNotify crashed.

Oh well, no music for now, let's actually watch a movie. And now here comes another bad thing - movies that played fine on Win on Linux play with huge amount of artifacts and, sometimes, don't play at all looking corrupted. Reboot to Win - plays OK, reboot to Linux - artifacts and corruption.

The rest of the concerns won't come up in a long, unreadable lame story-like way but more in a way of a nicely organized, but still unreadable, list:

1) Kubuntu doesn't offer the same functionality only in KDE like Ubuntu does. And I mean core functionality like USB HDD support
2) An average user WILL be scared by "restricted" stuff no matter what. "Restricted" means dangerous. And dangerous means bad.
3) There is no centralized place to set up a system to your liking. In Mac OS there's System Preferences, in Win there's Control Panel, in Ubuntu there are dozen of little apps scattered through whole menu structure. NOT intuitive, NOT easy to use, NOT good.
4) You absolutely canNOT set your system up without using the console. And console is what an average user is afraid of. Installed drivers ? Cool. But desktop resolution is still 1024x768. Now here comes two options: one of the involve editing xorg.conf manually and another launching nvidia-settings with sudo. Obviously both ways are NOT acceptable to an average user.
5) The system itself is tuned up for terminals of the 80s. If I am using a modern graphical card and LCD display I will have to cope up with extreme ugliness. Heck, even Win2k looked better than modern GNOME and KDE environments. Remember what made Vista and Mac OS successful ? Beautiful GUI, not scary word like "secure".
6) While I already told it I think it deserves it's own number - use of console. It is completely NOT acceptable to the average user. If at least ONCE Joe Smith must use the console to get some basic (and basic involve installing drivers and configuring the system) thing = BAD, very BAD.
7) Some settings are sometimes illogically placed, hard to find and navigate to.
8) Scary way to install apps. While it really beats anything on Win (because Win doesn't have anything like that) for an experienced user, an average Joe will be shocked when he sees Synaptics screen. "Add\Remove" is a definite step forward but still it is not enough. For example I would personally like to see some codec packs (like CCCP or K-Lite or Vista Codec Pack on Win) being installable from there. Basically a metapackage but what an easy and simple way to add all needed codecs to enjoy the music and video.
9) OS structure is scary. While personally I don't care about all /etc/ /var/ and the rest it can scare the living poo out of an average Joe while he's just trying to find his D: drive (especially if he never bothered to give any labels to his partitions because hdc1 is NOT intuitive (not that I can thing of a better way to represent an unnamed partition)). I suggest to do what Mac OS does - hide all scary folders. I understand it's not possible to put them all in one neat and tidy System folder but at least hide them. Live only the ones user will use on daily basis (like home folder and media folder), the rest are just confusing.

While that's really not the whole list of my concerns those presented here are the ones I think the end user will benefit from. And if anything - read the disclaimer again :)

[tenn]

I feel the fact that you feel you needed to post this post is an indicator of how little you know about Ubuntu but what ever turns you on, this is the Ubuntu forums.

[seshomaru samma]

with respect , I think the talk of an 'average Joe' is inappropriate here.
the 'average Joe' will never install Linux , if he does then he will cease to be average
the 'average Joe' never installs Windows and certainly wouldn't know how to install drivers when Windows fails to detect them and if you ever installed Windows , that often happens. Is right clicking 'my computer' choosing properties and looking for the 'device manger' intuitive?
I think people who install Ubuntu should expect it to be different from Windows , so should you.
The aim of Ubuntu is not to be an OS for idiots , this niche is already taken , it aims to give an easy well supported cutting edge version of Linux and that involves the dreaded terminal.
I think the average Joe can buy an Ubuntu laptop from Dell and would probably never need to use the terminal. I don't know if that's is such a good thing.

[GerryB]

If Ubuntu is not what you want, there are a lot of Linux OS's out there. You can install over what you have anytime. Try Mint, or Mepis, or Slackware. I'm posting from Sabayon Live DVD - awsome - recognizes everything. (If you want to try this one, download it from an Australian mirror). I sincerely wish you all the luck in the world. Installing an operating system is a challenge but not insurmountable - witness the thousands on this forum.

[coffeecat]

You say that you are not a troll and that you're not trying to start a flamewar, but your post comes over as whiny and very negative. It will be no surprise if other forum members respond in a negative manner.

So I will attempt to be positive and state that you make a number of points that could be the foundation for a constructive and interesting debate. It is a pity, therefore, that your manner is unlikely to be conducive to such a debate.

Let me give but one example.

Originally Posted by Slavedriver 9) OS structure is scary. While personally I don't care about all /etc/ /var/ and the rest it can scare the living poo out of an average Joe while he's just trying to find his D: drive (especially if he never bothered to give any labels to his partitions because hdc1 is NOT intuitive (not that I can thing of a better way to represent an unnamed partition)). I suggest to do what Mac OS does - hide all scary folders. I understand it's not possible to put them all in one neat and tidy System folder but at least hide them. Live only the ones user will use on daily basis (like home folder and media folder), the rest are just confusing.

I have a Mac. I like the OS very much and have much respect for it, but the one thing that really irritates me about MacOS is the way it obfuscates the directory structure. I like to use the GUI as much as possible, but I also like to know what is going on and if I want to dive into the directory structure I want to see it presented the way it is. Linux does this for me.

By the way - let the average Joe speak for himself. You speak for yourself. Trying to run other people's lives for them always leads to trouble. Is there a hidden significance to your username?

[M$LOL]

Originally Posted by Slavedriver First of all, a little disclaimer. 1) I am not trying to start a flamewar. Merely pointing out what I didn't like in a system being pushed so hard in my face (yes Slashdot, I am talking about you) 2) I am NOT trying to start a flamewar. No, really. I may be overly critical, ironic, maybe a bit offending to some people, heck, I know I WILL offend someone, but that's how I am. Not a troll. Not as green as a troll at least. 3) I am programmer by trade who works with both Windows and Mac OS a lot and has to use console in his daily work more than GUI. That means I am really OK with the console, not afraid of it and sometimes even prefer it to GUI. 4) While I prefer Windows XP to all OSes I tried a lot of other OSes out there to form an opinion of what a perfect OS should be (and that were all flavors of Win starting from 3.11, all flavors of Mac OS X starting from 10.1 and a few flavors of Linux). 5) This is my opinion, biased, subjective, but mine. If you can't cope with somebody expressing a different opinion from your own - please deal with it in a civil manner. So let's start... Truth be told I had to try Linux recently because my few-years-old XP install is going haywire (you know like it becomes after a few years of extensive use) and all movies I tried to watch started to lag like hell. So, after reading another portion of "Linux is superior to everything" on Slashdot (really, guys, at lest try to be less biased) I decided to install latest version of Kubuntu (I had 6.06 installed prior to that just to try it out but I haven't used it a lot). Seeing that 7.04 was supposed to come with a nifty app to install the drivers I was quite please because the horror of trying to get my NVidia to work on 6.06 was still fresh. First thing I noticed when booted to LiveCD is that my external USB HDD wasn't visible. Oh well, I though, I'll browse the web without listening to music while waiting it to install. So I fired up the installation app, sniped my town from the world map (really guys add the zoom feature from Ubuntu's installer) to select the timezone and moved on with the installation. Meanwhile I tried looking for this driver install app because I remember seeing it on one of Ubuntu screenshots (not Kubuntu one though). Haven't found it. Oh well, maybe it'll become available after I boot into the real system. So after trying to break my CD drive rack once more (still don't understand why the system requires me to eject the CD when I reboot\shutdown. I have a door which closes the part where my CD drive is so it will simply won't open if the door is closed damaging the fragile plastic gears used in the tray mechanism.) I rebooted into the real system. First thing - my USB HDD still wasn't there. Nowhere to be found and mounter manually. Second, driver install app wasn't there too. No external HDD basically meant a useless system to me because I store all my media files and documents there. So goobye Kubuntu, hello Ubuntu. Boot to LiveCD, find my USB HDD already discovered, find driver install app, install the system, reboot. Sigh, HDD is still there. Install drivers, download 100+ updates including new kernel, reboot. Try playing a movie. Alert appears saying codecs are not installed. OK, let's install some codecs then. And here's the part I don't like - the scary "Restricted app" message. While I don't really care about it I know 100% that any average user will be. And that will be an end for the media playback for him if some geek won't come and set it up for him. Next stop - install Amarok, it being quite good media player. After installing it and building my collection I tried playing some MP3 files knowing what to expect - a pop-up asking to install MP3 codec because it's "restricted'. Boo, scary. Instead Amarok hanged... Restart, select a track, click play, boom, hang again. This time I actually see the pop-up but without any text or buttons. After a few seconds I am told that KNotify crashed. Oh well, no music for now, let's actually watch a movie. And now here comes another bad thing - movies that played fine on Win on Linux play with huge amount of artifacts and, sometimes, don't play at all looking corrupted. Reboot to Win - plays OK, reboot to Linux - artifacts and corruption. The rest of the concerns won't come up in a long, unreadable lame story-like way but more in a way of a nicely organized, but still unreadable, list: 1) Kubuntu doesn't offer the same functionality only in KDE like Ubuntu does. And I mean core functionality like USB HDD support 2) An average user WILL be scared by "restricted" stuff no matter what. "Restricted" means dangerous. And dangerous means bad. 3) There is no centralized place to set up a system to your liking. In Mac OS there's System Preferences, in Win there's Control Panel, in Ubuntu there are dozen of little apps scattered through whole menu structure. NOT intuitive, NOT easy to use, NOT good. 4) You absolutely canNOT set your system up without using the console. And console is what an average user is afraid of. Installed drivers ? Cool. But desktop resolution is still 1024x768. Now here comes two options: one of the involve editing xorg.conf manually and another launching nvidia-settings with sudo. Obviously both ways are NOT acceptable to an average user. 5) The system itself is tuned up for terminals of the 80s. If I am using a modern graphical card and LCD display I will have to cope up with extreme ugliness. Heck, even Win2k looked better than modern GNOME and KDE environments. Remember what made Vista and Mac OS successful ? Beautiful GUI, not scary word like "secure". 6) While I already told it I think it deserves it's own number - use of console. It is completely NOT acceptable to the average user. If at least ONCE Joe Smith must use the console to get some basic (and basic involve installing drivers and configuring the system) thing = BAD, very BAD. 7) Some settings are sometimes illogically placed, hard to find and navigate to. Scary way to install apps. While it really beats anything on Win (because Win doesn't have anything like that) for an experienced user, an average Joe will be shocked when he sees Synaptics screen. "Add\Remove" is a definite step forward but still it is not enough. For example I would personally like to see some codec packs (like CCCP or K-Lite or Vista Codec Pack on Win) being installable from there. Basically a metapackage but what an easy and simple way to add all needed codecs to enjoy the music and video. 9) OS structure is scary. While personally I don't care about all /etc/ /var/ and the rest it can scare the living poo out of an average Joe while he's just trying to find his D: drive (especially if he never bothered to give any labels to his partitions because hdc1 is NOT intuitive (not that I can thing of a better way to represent an unnamed partition)). I suggest to do what Mac OS does - hide all scary folders. I understand it's not possible to put them all in one neat and tidy System folder but at least hide them. Live only the ones user will use on daily basis (like home folder and media folder), the rest are just confusing. While that's really not the whole list of my concerns those presented here are the ones I think the end user will benefit from. And if anything - read the disclaimer again

I'm going to reply in a negative way, because that list is a just opinionated moaning, not really something I'm going to respond in a nice manner to.

Get it into your head that Linux isn't designed to be a "just click and go" affair for n00bs, if you want that then go and buy Vista. Ubuntu is a million times more user friendly and intuitive than, say, BSD, so just because you expect everything to be sitting on a plate for you and you don't want to learn a new system doesn't meant that the OS is at fault.

If you want to troll - and that's exactly what you're doing - about how scary a message box saying "Restricted" is, then go to somewhere with other trolls, don't come to the Ubuntu forums. We'll help you with your problems if you're polite about it, and we'll encourage you to learn about the OS if you're open minded, but if you come along on a big rant about how crap you think Ubuntu is, you're not exactly going to get a great response.

[Warren Watts]

It has more or less been said already in the previous replies, but I want to throw in my two cents anyway.

It sounds to me like what you want Ubuntu to be is "The Perfect OS". There is no such thing. It looks to me like you set your expectations pretty high when you installed Ubuntu, and now that it doesn't meet your expectations, all you see is flaws.

Ubuntu isn't "Linux for Dummies". The console and CLI are an integral part of any Linux OS, and offer the user easy access to all of its internal workings. As a seasoned programmer, you have never opened the console in Windows?

It is obvious from reading threads posted by Ubuntu Newbies that yes, LOTS of people new to Ubuntu and Linux struggle with the console, but the vast majority of them WANT TO learn to use it and the power that lies within. That's why they tried Ubuntu in the first place; they wanted something different, something they could learn and grow from.

You are a programmer, right? Use your programming skills to FIX some of the flaws you see in Ubuntu. It's all Open Source.. In the spirit of the Ubuntu Community, help make Ubuntu better for everyone.

Ok, I'll step down off my soapbox now...

Warren

[Steveway]

Works fine here thanks for asking.
There seems to be a Userproblem on your side.

[ticopelp]

If an "average user" is "afraid" to learn even the most basic functions of a new OS, he shouldn't bother learning a new OS.

Switching to a new operating system requires informing oneself. Period. You seem to be blaming the operating system for your fundamentally wrongheaded assumption that an end user should never have to learn or acquire new knowledge.

[Nekiruhs]

Originally Posted by Steveway Works fine here thanks for asking. There seems to be a Userproblem on your side.

XD! BEST POST EVER!