Hey /prog/, why does people (expecially debian people) hate ubuntu?
Name:
Anonymous2009-09-15 5:06
I dislike Ubuntu for entirely different reasons: It "works", but it doesn't work like it should. Ubuntu is very much like XML: the problem it solves is not hard, and it doesn't solve it very well. PulseAudio was added far too early in the game, and it continues to cause problems for people. SysV init is the most idiotic thing to happen to UNIX since Motif. Shipping broken open-source ATI drivers instead of half-decent closed source ones because of an overblown interpretation of Free Software ideology only serves to drive new users away from that ideology. Same with the decision not to ship decoding software for mp3 and AAC. Luckily Shuttleworth's head wasn't so far up his ass that he broke GIFs too. And while we're on the subject of making things wholly boring, the GNOME configuration Ubuntu ships is horrible, and nobody in their right mind would use such a configuration on purpose. I don't want to get started on the shit surrounding enabling non-free repositories.
MONO IS EVIL! MONO WILL KILL YOU! - no it fucking won't, ubuntu devs. If you're going to recommend GNOME, you might as well install all of it. Never mind that your default user interface is worthless trash without a Mono app called GNOME-Do. Moonlight isn't evil either, but it is generally pointless. The only good thing that can ever come out of Silverlight is the - God willing - death of that shitpile called Shockwave.
It's quiz time: which is easier to patch, a kernel or a userland program? If you're like 99% of the world, and have half a brain, you picked "userland program". If Ubuntu wants to introduce Linux to people, broken drivers isn't a very good first impression. The obvious approach here is to ship stable kernels and recent software, something that any moron would have figured out five years ago, but something that the only notable company ever to come out of South Africa still doesn't understand.
There's plenty of more shit that could fill this rant, mostly targeted at parts of Ubuntu which suck, like apt and OpenOffice, but it's not worth getting carpal tunnel syndrome over. In the meantime, valiant warriors like Linux Mint are trying to fix something fundamentally broken, and hippie idealists like MEPIS and sidux are trying to reinvent something fundamentally flawed.
Ubuntu really only has two flaws: the initial concept, and the implementation.