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Greetings,
I want to share disastrous experience with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Thar. You can read about it on my blog at: http://www.deragon.info/ubuntu14.04.html
I wish to start a healthy discussion about the situation, in the hope that it will stir some constructive feedback. Do not hesitate to correct me if any information is wrong or if you have more details, workarounds and solutions about the issues I experience.
Best regards,
Hans Deragon
Moved to Ubuntu, Linux and OS Chat
Here are some really great ideas for constructive criticism:
Get a launchpad account and take part: https://launchpad.net/
Report and light fires under bugs, like this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...r/+bug/1424491
Share with the Forum volunteers who test development versions: http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=427
Spend some time on the Forums and work toward becoming an Ubuntu Member: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Forums/Membership
Get on this mailing list: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/lis...-devel-discuss (There are more lists here.)
This entire Forum is full of criticism: some constructive, some not so much. If you want to start a healthy dialogue, you may have arrived too late. There are many already in progress. They cover the gamut of things you have pointed out in your blog. Unfortunately, Canonical employees -- in particular the developers -- are rarely here. The Forums are certainly a good place to discuss among ourselves as users. But for any criticism here to be constructive, the message needs to be delivered to the right destination at the right time. Criticism after a release is not as effective as taking part in testing. Taking part in the community is likely to be the most effective form of constructive criticism.
Please remember that Canonical is a very small company. They have precious little time and resources. They aren't Microsoft with tens of thousands of employees and seemingly limitless resources. But they do have us. We see the bugs. We report the bugs. We get the developers' attention via Launchpad.
Better to help than hurl barbs from the sidelines.
I hate to say it, but from the sound of things, you want a free version of Windows.
Ubuntu (or, come to that, any other Linux distro) is not that. You have to understand, they all have one thing in common. They are free alternatives to Windows (or Macs, if they take your fancy). And, as QIII has just pointed out, most of the outfits developing Linux distros do not have the resources available to MicroSoft.
I suspect they treat their employees a wee bit better, though.....
Regards,
Mike.
The Ubuntu QA Team would certainly welcome the OP to join as a Tester or a Bug Triager.
Really. Not joking.
The OP clearly has skills, years of Ubuntu experience, and interest. Make some lemonade out that bad experience!
Geez, glancing through your blog post it seems that you got particularly unlucky. Perhaps your hardware is just extremely not ubuntu 14.04 friendly?
I can relate to seeing some bugs here and there, and that bug report window appearing probably more often than I would care, but nothing major. Overall I found 14.04 to be extremely stable on my laptop. I'm currently using kubuntu 15.04 which uses the extremely new plasma 5 and I've seen even less bugs than on unity (so far), which is crazy to say the least.
When using 14.04, I do occasionally get the annoying "apport" crash bug notice . . . doesn't seem to affect things negatively though it takes a couple tries to dismiss the window (and bug reporter crashes upon send attempt).
But, that's the ONLY issue that I've noticed, unlike the OP, network works flawlessly, nautilus works perfectly, apps run just fine (no crashes to speak of). I don't especially care for VLC as it is a giant memory hog lately, but there are a lot of media alternatives.
It makes a big difference also, if you obtain your PC with Ubuntu, in the same way you obtain a Windows PC . . . . you buy it with the OS pre-installed, and unless you're a gamer, choosing an all Intel system (wireless, graphics) prevents most problems.
Just my two-cents (been running Linux desktop since may of 2003.) and don't miss the major ANNOYING in your face crapware and updates from 1/2 dozen or more vendors all wanting to update OS or devices.
indeed, if i have to compare my overall linux experience with my windows experience, i'll take linux any day. neither is perfect, but linux is FAR less annoying
Greetings gentlemen,
OP here. We share the same goal, hoping for Linux to take a good share of the desktop and consumer market.
Some of you report that the problem might be the hardware. Lenovo (W510 laptop) is pretty much Linux friendly and many of the bugs I report are not related to hardware. Sure, I have a NVIDIA card with the proprietary drivers (because I want performance; kids are gamers), and an Intel card with the open source drivers would probably eliminate some of the bugs, but Bluetooth and MTP broken, read-only USB, double login, network manager failing after resume and all the others are, AFAIK, not hardware related.
I do suspect that many graphic problems are related to NVIDIA's proprietary drivers. However, maybe the drivers have been corrected since, but Canonical fails to upgrade them in the repository. I will see if I can upgrade it use the xorg-edgers ppa.
And yes, I am reporting bugs and help out, all within my limits. But as my blog states, I cannot recommend Ubuntu at this point as a general purpose computer where one can simply connect a phone, speaker or car via Bluetooth, download pictures using MTP, and simply having a stable system. It does work if you use it on a desktop, never suspend, never use Bluetooth or MTP, never play AAA games, etc...
Canonical's aim is to make it consumer friendly, but my experience shows that they have still a long way to go. Yes, I know, Canonical is small. I state in my blog that they have to make revenues and the desktop is not their priority at the moment.
What I am doing is reporting my struggle like thousands went through. The majority decided enough is enough, and moved to another platform. I know at least four persons who used to run Ubuntu/Linux that moved to Mac. I used to have colleagues running Linux, but now I am alone. I read about this a lot on the web. It is important to report what many experienced to understand why they left Linux. While many say that Ubuntu is buggy and unstable, they fail to go into details. I report all the bugs I suffer and try to link them to actual bug reports, in details.
My most pressing issues are the frequent desktop crashes after resume (started only a few weeks ago), double login and networking failure, which all prevent my family to login and use the laptop. The odd things is all these pressings issues never occurred in 12.04. There has been some regression since.
The good news is that regarding the networking issue, I found the following today: http://askubuntu.com/questions/45282...n-ubuntu-14-04 The user provides a solution. Nothing that a consumer could do, but at least I can.
Final thoughts: if the Bluetooth and MTP stack are broken, how does the Ubuntu phone work? If they have working Bluetooth and MTP stacks, why aren't they ported to the desktop? Can the Bluetooth and MTP stacks from Android be ported or are there licensing issues?
Best regards,
Hans Deragon
Well, on my 15.04 desktop, bluetooth and MTP aren't broken. For me they work well and reliably (two reported bugs notwithstanding), better and more reliably than 14.10.Quote:
Originally Posted by deragon
My experience is that when a developer or tester discovers a bug, they don't ignore it.
Perhaps no developer or tester experienced the bug(s) that affect you.