UBUNTU: good and bad

[Puzzled Guy]

What are the pros and cons of your ubuntu installation?

[Puzzled Guy]

With the experience I had, I'll rate 8. The operating system itself rocks, it's just that I had quite a few problems at first, but now everything is running smoothly (besides the fact that the disk usage meter is at 35% even though I just had it for a month, oh well, maybe it's time for windows to bite the dust)

[Kevbert]

Bad points. New releases aren't always stable for a couple of months and not easy for new users (at least the forums are a great source of information and inspiration).
Good points. Loads of free software. Once the releases become stable, they're excellent. Loads of support. Compatible with old hardware, new hardware support improving. Free to modify and redistribute code without any fear of prosecution.

[ajgreeny]

9.04 is absolutely fabulous! No problems at all either on my desktop, quite old now, with a Sempron 2400+, ATI 9200SE graphics card, 2GB ram, nor any problems on my wife's Compaq CQ70 laptop with everything working brilliantly.

9.10 still has a few bugs on my desktop, with the display not working as well if I want to run compiz at high res and 24 bit colour, but just about OK either with 16 bit colour, or with compiz turned off. I like compiz, however, and it's a good thing to have to show windows users just how good linux is! Sound quality is not as good eother, though acceptable. I have not tried 9.10 yet on my wife's laptop, so can't comment on that.

[John Bean]

9.04 is absolutely fabulous! No problems at all [...]
9.10 still has a few bugs

Pretty much my opinion as well.

I'll just add that Karmic is rather ugly compared with Jaunty (IMO of course) so quite apart from bugs (which I'm sure will be fixed) I'm giving it a miss.

As for Ubuntu in general... well, not perfect of course, but I've yet to discover another OS that better meets my needs :-)

[Elaztic]

How good Ubuntu is depends on how you view it. If your point of view is if it has the applications needed to perform all your tasks then it is by far the best OS for me.
If you are a hard core gamer i would recommend MS Windows since games works out the box (in most cases) or if you bother then dual boot or virtual machine.
As a Linux user i experience challanges in my communication with other people and/or systems. I do not like MS Messenger but almost none of my friends have a Jabber account so they can use XMPP client. Some implementations of Java do not work with anything else than MS Windows and some websites are even set to reject non-IE browsers.
In Denmark digital signature is used at many public portals but are implemented so they only work with IE or only on Windows and serveral banks have cumbersome solutions for non-Windows users if at all.
Exchanging documents between MS Office and Open Office should be a piece of cake if you use .odt or .doc format and don't do anything too fance but it is not.

With regards to versions and upgrades then sometimes new problems arise but some are solved as well. This is not unique to Ubuntu but is the case with all software. I vote for fewer but more tested and thorough releases.

Even with these challanges I would still pick Ubuntu any day of the week.

[lightstream]

I gave it an 8; it's a very good distro, far exceeding my expectations, and for many people makes getting stuck into Linux a viable option.

As regards Linux vs a paid-for OS, such as Windows or Apple OS, that's a political decision. And in my view a no-brainer for any one with a modicum of technical understanding.

Surely any intelligent person would agree that it always has to be preferable to use software which is designed to accomplish technical goals first and foremost, rather than software which is focussed on increasing profitability for a company.

You can argue that a software company's profitability depends on how well its software accomplishes its technical aims, but MS demonstrates that in practice marketing concerns will always take precedence.

You'd have to be stupid to choose a paid-for OS over a FOSS one. However the world is full of stupid people, and milking that stupidity is a very profitable enterprise. Certainly neither MS nor Apple would ever be caught educating their users, their business model is built on user ignorance (less so for Apple, but it's still a fundamental principle to them).

[Shazaam]

I give Ubuntu a ten with these conditions...
Depends on the flavor of Ubuntu. Some are better than others.
Versions do improve with age (updates). New installs are fun!
How easy it is to configure/update.

For me Jaunty is still king. Karmic's gaining though. I have tried a lot of other distro's and keep coming back to Ubuntu.

[Rosver]

I rate 2. Sorry guys if my rating is low. Xubuntu Hardy is very great and work well but the new ones are giving me headaches. Its the performance problem that is common to some. Lagging while scrolling is really giving me eye strain.

Why not stay with Hardy then? Well Hardy has its own problems as well. If I rate Hardy it would be 8.

I think that I should not average my scores. After all previous versions are different from the new ones. You could say they are different OS. So this time my rating is low for all the hassles it gives. If time comes, when problems and kinks is solved, I would give a higher rating. It just that Ubuntu's quality does vary from time to time.

[megamania]

I voted 8.

I wonder what the results could be with such a poll in the UbuntuForums... :-)

[RJ12]

I voted "9" its almost perfect with me. I'm using 9.04 and I have had no problems except for Firefox will close sometimes by it self (rarely). Other than that I find Ubuntu very good. My brother who I think is trying to be a tech person like me but more of a football person, but he still likes Ubuntu perfectly. That proves that people are capable of liking it, instead every time they hear the word "Linux" they say "NO!". I bet if they had that Windows Mojave thing with Ubuntu people would love it!


P.S. I found a cool Christmas/Linux background http://www.dugnet.org/klown/wallpaper/show.php?id=_wallpaper/_linux/christmastux2k5

[Puzzled Guy]

Well looky here! It seems that 8 is the most common answer, followed by 10.

By the looks of it, it seems most people can install ubuntu and only get a few problems.:cool::KS

Now, if the developers would just wait a little longer to make the new releases more stable...which is the long term support release? Is that Lucid or is it the next one?

[Sin@Sin-Sacrifice]

I actually like the "problems". Forces me to learn more about the OS. I rated a 10 because it's the most diverse, stable, reliable, and fun OS I've ever used. Rock on Ubuntu Devs.

[FreezWay]

7 - had a lot of issues, all but one has been resolved (suspend/hibernation) including flash left click, bad intel drivers, the upgrade went bonkers with error, i did a clean install and still had to turn acpi off. im hoping the LTS fixes a lot of these.

[Khakilang]

Ubuntu really blow my mind. Easy to install, fast, stable and free of virus and spyware. It work on older computer. It had everything I need. I give a 8 cause its poor on the gaming side and multimedia is about average. Nevertheless it will be use in my notebook for a long time.

[u.b.u.n.t.u]

I give Ubuntu a 10. You didn't provide a context and so I supplied my own.

"On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the highest, how would you rate ubuntu?"

Was interpreted as:

On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the highest, how would you rate the essential character of Ubuntu?

[pwnst*r]

which version?

[BenAshton24]

I gave it a 9... it's perfect IMO only I don't like the direction that it's heading...

[Hetor]

I would give 9.04 8/10, I almost have no problems with it. I've tried upgrading to karmic but I couldn't stand it. Xfce4-terminal, which is my favorite terminal emulator, is screwed up, MPD lags, screen goes black if I set a resolution that's lower than 832x624 (I use it for games), applets in gnome-panel often crash, etc. etc. I tried to fix them with no success. I ended up with a completely unusable system. I'd give it 2/10 for nice tray icons.

[zg2pro]

Previous versions were 8 but Karmic is definitively goddam 10 :)
I always had a problem with ALSA on my laptop before, and now with gnome-volume-control I can check which applications I can grant the access to the sound and it works perfectly.
And Dolphin now is perfect, I found all the functionalities I previously used on Konqueror.
Obviously Windows and MacOS can't compete anymore !

[lethalfang]

I'd give it a 7 - 8.

Good:
For the most part, it works out of the box. Minimal effort needed to install the system.
It is quite newbie-friendly.
Due to its popularity, the community is big, and thus, helps are plentiful.

Bad:
The repo doesn't update major softwares, e.g., Firefox.
The repo ships with unstable softwares, e.g., Kile.
Ubuntu Stable ships with unstable components, e.g., grub2.
It is not as easy to re-configure as some other distros (e.g., Arch).

For me, the fact that it mostly works out of the box outweighs the bad.

[ali780]

Ubuntu 9.10 is very bad. Because the suspend resume does not work at all.
I would prefer ant other distro instead ubuntu.

[ok_dr]

I voted 7. I would have voted 9 or 10 if I were able to use the microphone. It's very important to me as I have to use Skype several times a day, so even though I'd love to work with Ubuntu I spend 90% of the time with Windows and can't say I've explored Ubuntu properly, though I've had it for a year.
It seems unreal to me that such an advanced OS hasn't dealt with such a simple basic issue which ia friend into trying Linux this acts as such a turn-off for them. From other threads I've seen that many others have the same problem.
When I first installed Ubuntu I thought this would certainly be addressed later but a year has passed and while previously I had trouble only with the laptop's internal mic, now with Koala suddenly the external one doesn't work either.

[Swagman]

I've given Karmic an 8/10 simply because of the hassle I had installing with multiple sata drives. For those that don't know you have to run


sudo apt-get remove dmraid

from the live disk then manual partition AND select advanced grub install (or grub fails... error 22).

Karmic works great. Couple of niggles in priority

1: mounting NTFS drives asks for permission every damn time after a reboot. 9:04 only ever asked for it the first time it was mounted....EVER.

2: Login... Someone'll fix that for sure though.

Otherwise... Nice job lads. Storing my pix and email addies on the cloud is handy too.

[SuperSonic4]

1: mounting NTFS drives asks for permission every damn time after a reboot. 9:04 only ever asked for it the first time it was mounted....EVER.


Then specify the NTFS drives in fstab to mount every time


I gave it a 3.

Good: It's not windows, easy to google due to popularity

Bad:

It's out of date
it's also unstable for a month or two after updating.
The default install is bloated (and don't mention the minimal install when many packages are mutually dependent


Bear in mind that apart from being out of date it's all my opinion

[Swagman]

Then specify the NTFS drives in fstab to mount every time


I gave it a 3.

Good: It's not windows, easy to google due to popularity

Bad:

It's out of date
it's also unstable for a month or two after updating.
The default install is bloated (and don't mention the minimal install when many packages are mutually dependent


Bear in mind that apart from being out of date it's all my opinion

I don't want it to mount every time.. Only when I access it.
In 9:04 the password was remembered.

[NoaHall]

Damn Pulseaudio. First thing I do in any future updates is to remove pulseaudio and use pure ALSA, like I am now.

[cookiecruncher]

Only irritating problem I have is that after booting up my internet is not usable, although Knemo says that it is (taskbar icons indicate so), and 'Ifconfig' says it is (ppp0).

I use pppoe to connect, and I have to 'poff dsl-provider' and then 'pon dsl-provider' to restore connectivity. Previous versions of Kubuntu that I used did not suffer with this problem. This problem is intermittent.

[Pogeymanz]

I actually had to vote fairly low: 4

Ubuntu is fine for me. But I know a lot about computers and Linux. Ubuntu is not that good for human beings, which is what it claims to be. I just did an upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 for my father-in-law and I had to change the Grub menu entry for Ubuntu and fix a sound problem. Of course, I could do it in five minutes, but could he? Probably not. Is it worth the hassle for him? Probably not. I've never had an Ubuntu upgrade go hitch-free. But if you want an up-to-date system and fairly up-to-date apps, you have to upgrade.

Basically Ubuntu is really improving, but it isn't bug-free enough for the public and not powerful enough for the "real nerds," like Slackware, Gentoo and Arch.

[stanca]

I voted 10 in comparison with other Linux distros I ever tried.In the end I always stick with Ubuntu,but followed shortly by Debian.;)

[fillintheblanks]

I voted 8

Ubuntu could be less bloated.

[quinnten83]

I've given Karmic an 8/10 simply because of the hassle I had installing with multiple sata drives. For those that don't know you have to run


sudo apt-get remove dmraid

from the live disk then manual partition AND select advanced grub install (or grub fails... error 22).

Karmic works great. Couple of niggles in priority

1: mounting NTFS drives asks for permission every damn time after a reboot. 9:04 only ever asked for it the first time it was mounted....EVER.

2: Login... Someone'll fix that for sure though.

Otherwise... Nice job lads. Storing my pix and email addies on the cloud is handy too.

You need to install ntfs-config.
once installed you can setup the ntfs partitions to be automatically started in a GUI. After this they will always be mounted and no permission asked.

[Ric_NYC]

I voted 8.
I think there is a lot to be done about Xorg, PulseAudio... and the way software is installed.

[ElSlunko]

Voted 8 -- being realistic! It ranks #1 as far as OS options go though.

[lightstream]

I actually had to vote fairly low: 4

Ubuntu is fine for me. But I know a lot about computers and Linux. Ubuntu is not that good for human beings, which is what it claims to be. I just did an upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 for my father-in-law and I had to change the Grub menu entry for Ubuntu and fix a sound problem. Of course, I could do it in five minutes, but could he?

You don't have to update - you can disable updates if you like, or set to security updates only, and then you get that MS Windows feel that your dad apparently likes, where you're stuck with old creaky code until you decide to install a brand new OS.

Windows updates don't of course do anything - or even know - about updates for whatever apps you have on the PC. Those have to be updated separately by whatever process the app developers have chosen.

So it's perhaps not fair to imply that Ubuntu is worse because it's not as crap as Windows.

[t0p]

I gave it 9 out of 10. Why so good? Because my Hardy desktop machine does almost* everything I want it to. And Jaunty Eeebuntu works great on my netbook. I tried vanilla Karmic in a live session on the netbook, and that seemed to work perfectly too: I shall install Karmic to the EeePC some time soon; I don't need to, but I do loads of stuff that I don't need to do.

[* I was given Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Windows, and of course it doesn't work on Ubuntu. If there was a Linux version, I would have exchanged it. But there is no Linux version. This isn't Ubuntu's fault, it's down to Adobe; but it's an issue nevertheless. Fortunately I can use Photoshop CS4 in a virtual XP in VirtualBox, so the gift hasn't gone to waste. But it would be nice if Photoshop came with a Linux flavour. So Ubuntu fails to score the perfect 10. Blame Adobe!]


Ubuntu is fine for me. But I know a lot about computers and Linux. Ubuntu is not that good for human beings, which is what it claims to be. I just did an upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 for my father-in-law and I had to change the Grub menu entry for Ubuntu and fix a sound problem. Of course, I could do it in five minutes, but could he? Probably not. Is it worth the hassle for him? Probably not.

No operating system is completely proof against potential problems like this. No software can be guaranteed to work on every possible combination of hardware. And the problems you cite are hardly massive: I'm sure your father-in-law could have worked out how to fix them himself if you weren't there to hold his hand. You say it isn't worth the hassle for him: so he'd rather have no computer? I think it's reasonable to expect a computer user to learn how to fix little problems. And that's what you described: little problems that you can fix in five minutes.



Basically Ubuntu is really improving, but it isn't bug-free enough for the public and not powerful enough for the "real nerds," like Slackware, Gentoo and Arch.

While not an uber-nerd, I'm certainly pretty tech-oriented: and I think that Ubuntu is plenty powerful enough. Sure, it has a point-and-click-friendly GUI; but under that pretty exterior it is just like any other Linux. It's a *nix that can be made to do whatever tasks one may wish a *nix to do. Just because it's easier to install and maintain, doesn't make it any less powerful than Slackware, Gentoo and Arch. Those distros require a greater investment of time and thought to install and maintain, but they're still Linuxes. Just like Ubuntu.

"Easy to use" != less powerful.