Often, I’ll click “Reboot” and it will begin to shut down. The window decorations and toolbars will disappear, but then it will just stop, with decorationless windows still open and nothing happening. Eventually I’ll do a Ctrl+Alt+1, login, and sudo reboot now.
No, I don’t know why, either.
My experience is totally the opposite. Ubuntu is unstable and unreliable (crashes, lock ups, CPU being ground to a halt, booting problems, blue screen of X, etc.), while Windows 7 has been stable and reliable.
After my experiences, I don’t understand how anyone can claim that Linux is stable, and I have to wonder if they’re lying. But maybe experiences just differ.
1. Because rabid freetards on the Internet misled me by telling me it’s the Best OS Ever. It’s clearly not, so I’m trying to do my part to counteract the forces of evil and dispel this ongoing deception.
As I said in my first post, I tried other Linux distros before I found Ubuntu, and they drove me mad. Ubuntu’s the best Linux distro there is (as evidenced by it kicking all the others’ asses overnight in market share) but it still sucks by any objective standard. I’ve spent the last few years waiting for it to stop sucking, but it hasn’t. I’ve wasted far too much time on this experiment. Life is too short. I know many others feel the same way. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the download numbers decreasing over the last few years. Google Trends seems to show interest in Ubuntu is dropping off.
2. I’m looking for a new computer and it will probably be Windows 7, since that’s been working much more stably and reliably on my work computer, but I have so much invested in Ubuntu that it’s hard to switch.
Like an abusive relationship, I recognize on a rational level that Ubuntu is cruel to me and I should abandon it, but my brain still has this irrational emotional attachment to the “movement” associated with it. So I have to actively fight against my self-destructive tendencies by documenting my frustrations, so I can’t forget them.
In fact, I’d really like to continue using Ubuntu. It has some good qualities, and it’s free, and open source still seems like a good idea to me (the Kool-Aid must be very strong). But… as much as I would like it to stop sucking, I don’t see any evidence that it will happen any time soon, if ever. Canonical’s priorities appear to be:
1. Make it look like a Mac
2. Change default apps, realize this was a mistake, change them to something else with the next release, realize this was a mistake…
3. Improved boot time!
4. Shove it out the door on the release date, bugs or not
5. ???
I’m complaining and complaining everywhere I can, in the hopes that it helps open people’s eyes and influence their priorities, but it hasn’t had much effect. Bug reports just sit untouched for years. About a third of Ubuntu Forum’s members have “major problems” with every release, but there’s no improvement. Ubuntu sucks.
3. Those instructions are not “simple”. “Easy” has a meaning, you know.
My complaints are not at all unreasonable.
NTFS drivers are hogging the CPU, preventing me from doing anything
I’ve been “upgrading” to Lucid for the last few hours. It’s not finished and I’m already worried.
I like how the installer asks you incomprehensible questions and completely pauses the installation process while it waits for your answer. >:(
You’d think that since people were complaining about this YEARS AGO that it would be fixed by now. My guess is that Ubuntu is so fundamentally broken that it can’t be fixed. They have to install in a specific consecutive order, and they have to interrupt you with questions in the middle of it.
And now there are SIX kernels in the grub list. Hopefully one of them boots.
And the window management icons have been moved to the left-hand side. I guess they’re trying to make it easier for us to transition to a Mac…
The Disk Usage Analyzer crashes if I try to view /root
Desktop Search used to work fine, but now it can’t find any of my files. I can’t think of anything I’ve done that would make it stop working. This process is familiar to anyone who has used Ubuntu. Something works great for a few weeks/months, and then inexplicably stops, and I have to spend a few days trying to figure out how to fix it.
“Upgraded” my desktop to Lucid.
“An error occurred while mounting /proc/bus/usb”.
And the Bluetooth keyboard is no longer recognized, so my computer is unusable until I find an old-school keyboard.
The last three kernel upgrades have all caused my computer to stop booting correctly. In different ways. Re-installing the kernel package fixes it. Awesome.
After an update with a new kernel, my computer got stuck in a reboot loop. Reinstalling the kernel fixed it.
Seriously? This can happen?
beagled-helper is hogging the CPU.
When I try to play 10 seconds of audio in Audacity, it plays a bunch of noise for 1.5 seconds and then stops.
Why is my mouse pointer frozen???
File creation date.
When you use Nautilus to copy multiple things to multiple places, is it just me or does it do all the operations concurrently, slowing them all down as it scrubs back and forth between disk locations?
And why doesn’t it have a Pause button?
And why does every other program have a different file chooser?
Huh. The hacky kludge that Ubuntu used to allow us to run Firefox 3.5 in Jaunty (sorry, I mean “Shiretoko”) has left a redundant folder called firefox.3.0-replaced in my home directory. But don’t worry, it’s only wasting 600 MB of space.
Windows’ directory chooser is better than Gnome’s.
I love how you have to left-click on the PulseAudio control to get the menu to display, while every other icon in the universe uses the right-click. Oh wait, no; I hate that.
I finally got video chat working!
After rebooting into Windows for a few weeks, because Pidgin and Skype don’t do video chat in Linux, I discovered that if you run Empathy (which is shit), you can video chat with people on Gmail. In 2 out of 3 calls, one person can’t see the other, and you have to hang up and try again. It crashes, the video locks up permanently, and while working correctly, it uses 100% of the CPU, but it works!
Take that, capitalist pigs!
Why don’t SSH bookmarks ever work when I try to open them with Gnome Do?
If I edit my Wine menu entry for “Mozilla Firefox” to “Mozilla Firefox Wine”, it remembers the change, but it’s still not displayed in the menu. This is because
Name[en_US]= value in the .desktop file.Name= value, which does not change when you edit it.In Sound Preferences, if you turn the volume down to the bottom, it mutes automatically. Ok. OS X does this, too.
But then if you drag the volume slider back up again… it stays muted.
>:0
Why does the .deb package installer have to ask me for my password every time? Just remember it for several minutes, like every other program does.
Ubuntu: “Your laptop battery is low. I’m going to shut down in 3 minutes.”
Me: “3 minutes?? Isn’t that a bit… last minute?”
*plugs in computer within 10 seconds*
Ubuntu (plugged in, charging the battery, less than 30 seconds after the last warning): “Battery is critically low, shutting down.”
Me: “FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU”
I can’t even play a .wav file in Audacity anymore without it skipping constantly, on a 2 GHz machine with 2 GiB of memory. Works fine in Windows. I find it very hard to believe that anyone has ever used Ubuntu to produce music.
When you switch the “fallback” from one audio output device to another, and then push the hardware volume buttons, it adjusts the new default device’s volume, as it should.
Instead of adjusting relative to the new device’s current volume, though, it starts adjusting at the old device’s previous volume, resulting in a sudden, deafening increase if the previous device was at full volume.
Thanks, guys.
Apparently PulseAudio mixer cannot control the entire volume range of my USB audio interface. alsamixer can, but PulseAudio cannot.
Of course, after increasing the volume with alsamixer and then closing the entire Terminal, my CPU usage starts maxing out. The culprit? alsamixer.