tufkakf
January 25th, 2006, 09:59 AM
Reading through these forums can be a very frustrating experience.
One gets the impression that on the one hand there are a lot of posters who don't have a lot of experience with Linux, which doesn't and probably shouldn't stop them from making posts where they tell us what Linux needs. The funny thing is thoughthat in a lot of cases they mention things that are not Linux specific, but Ubuntu specific, that is, they mention functionality that is provided by most other distros targeted at the desktop, but not yet by ubuntu.
On the other hand there are a lot of posters who'll instantly flame anyone daring to make a suggestion about how to improve Ubuntu. Very often you'll read the little gem that linux is not windows, which is of course true, but of course also doesn't mean that things could not be improved.
Now, I think it is pretty obvious that there are areas in which Ubuntu can and should improve and reading the mailing lists and the wiki should make it obvious to anyone that the Ubuntu devs themselves agree on this. After all, that's why there are improvements in every new release of Ubuntu.
So I thought it would be a fun little exercise to discuss where Ubuntu could and should improve. And before anyone jumps at my throat, telling me that this alone will not help, let me tell you, I'm aware of this, but so what?
So, let's start, shall we?
* DSL
One of my pet peeves with Ubuntu is the lack of an easy and consistant way to configure and manage *dsl connections. While sudo pppoeconf sure isn't hard, this is something that clearly should be integrated into the gui, just like other network related settings are. Add to this that there is no easy, integrated way to start your connection by hand or to configure it to start automatically on demand and I think it's pretty obvious that there is room for improvement. Which leads me to my next point.
* Lack of gui tools
Everybody who ever ran other desktop oriented linux distributions should be aware of the fact that Ubuntu does provide a lot less gui config tools than other distributions. Now, I would absolutely agree that there doesn't have to be a tool for every possible task, at least not installed by default, but I still think that some more nice config tools would be a good thing.
For example, what is really missing from Ubuntu is a nice and easy way to configure X. If you look around this forum, you'll find dozens of threads by people having problems with this and while on other distributions they'd just have to start a graphical config tool and make the changes reguired there, on Ubuntu they either have to use dpkg-reconfigure, or mess around with xorg.conf manually.
* Desktop interoperability (sp?)
Finally, one of my absolute pet peeves with desktop linux in general, desktop interoperability between gnome and kde sucks. This is of course not so much an Ubuntu problem, as it is a general problem, but other distros at least make sure that there is a common theme for kde and gnome or that kde and gnome apps at least use the same font settings, which isn't the case in Ubuntu.
Again, this is very much an upstream problem, which seems to finally be addressed by project portland (one of the most exciting recent developments for the free desktop, imho), but Ubuntu doesn't even do the little things that can be done right now.
Comments?
One gets the impression that on the one hand there are a lot of posters who don't have a lot of experience with Linux, which doesn't and probably shouldn't stop them from making posts where they tell us what Linux needs. The funny thing is thoughthat in a lot of cases they mention things that are not Linux specific, but Ubuntu specific, that is, they mention functionality that is provided by most other distros targeted at the desktop, but not yet by ubuntu.
On the other hand there are a lot of posters who'll instantly flame anyone daring to make a suggestion about how to improve Ubuntu. Very often you'll read the little gem that linux is not windows, which is of course true, but of course also doesn't mean that things could not be improved.
Now, I think it is pretty obvious that there are areas in which Ubuntu can and should improve and reading the mailing lists and the wiki should make it obvious to anyone that the Ubuntu devs themselves agree on this. After all, that's why there are improvements in every new release of Ubuntu.
So I thought it would be a fun little exercise to discuss where Ubuntu could and should improve. And before anyone jumps at my throat, telling me that this alone will not help, let me tell you, I'm aware of this, but so what?
So, let's start, shall we?
* DSL
One of my pet peeves with Ubuntu is the lack of an easy and consistant way to configure and manage *dsl connections. While sudo pppoeconf sure isn't hard, this is something that clearly should be integrated into the gui, just like other network related settings are. Add to this that there is no easy, integrated way to start your connection by hand or to configure it to start automatically on demand and I think it's pretty obvious that there is room for improvement. Which leads me to my next point.
* Lack of gui tools
Everybody who ever ran other desktop oriented linux distributions should be aware of the fact that Ubuntu does provide a lot less gui config tools than other distributions. Now, I would absolutely agree that there doesn't have to be a tool for every possible task, at least not installed by default, but I still think that some more nice config tools would be a good thing.
For example, what is really missing from Ubuntu is a nice and easy way to configure X. If you look around this forum, you'll find dozens of threads by people having problems with this and while on other distributions they'd just have to start a graphical config tool and make the changes reguired there, on Ubuntu they either have to use dpkg-reconfigure, or mess around with xorg.conf manually.
* Desktop interoperability (sp?)
Finally, one of my absolute pet peeves with desktop linux in general, desktop interoperability between gnome and kde sucks. This is of course not so much an Ubuntu problem, as it is a general problem, but other distros at least make sure that there is a common theme for kde and gnome or that kde and gnome apps at least use the same font settings, which isn't the case in Ubuntu.
Again, this is very much an upstream problem, which seems to finally be addressed by project portland (one of the most exciting recent developments for the free desktop, imho), but Ubuntu doesn't even do the little things that can be done right now.
Comments?