Fuck You Ubuntu...

The BBQ Pit
41

[QUOTE=Giraffe]
This is exactly right. Both of the OP’s main issues come down to poor Linux driver support by the manufacturer. Manufacturers can get away with skimping on Linux drivers, but they won’t sell a card if it doesn’t work with Windows. Yet that’s not because of Linux, per se – if Windows had the same market share Linux currently has, it would die in five minutes, because nothing would work and people would ditch it.

If enough people started using Linux, this would change, but right now hit or miss driver support comes with the territory. I’d advise anyone thinking of venturing into Linux to keep that in mind from the start, so they don’t end up all pissed off.
[/QUOTE]

Isn’t this basically admitting that Linux will never be more than a niche OS? You can’t get the driver support without the users, but you won’t get the users unless the hardware works.

42

[QUOTE=neutron star]
Isn’t this basically admitting that Linux will never be more than a niche OS? You can’t get the driver support without the users, but you won’t get the users unless the hardware works.
[/QUOTE]
Well, NVidia hasn’t always had Linux drivers, and now they do, working excellently. We’re getting there.

43

[QUOTE=Merkwurdigliebe]
I’m tired of fucking excuses. The proof is in the pudding. Linux’s problems are chiefly caused by it’s inability to have a coherent anything.
[/QUOTE]

Linux does not have coherent anything because nobody wants to pay for it. For all of the frothing that windows causes MS does eventually fix shit because people are paying $100-$200 a pop for the operating system to provide money for a consistent team of programmers to do so. Its not like Linux is a company or something its more like a gentlemans agreement among developers to play the same basic style of game even though some rules will vary from game to game.

44

[QUOTE=ushimitsudoki]
Right now, I am running Ubuntu 8.04 on 3 machines at home:

Laptop: Wi-Fi. Works with both the built-in and PCMCIA wireless adapters.
Wife Desktop/Media PC: Wi-Fi. Dual Monitors (VGA and HDMI) on ATI card.
Main Desktop: Three monitors on two nvidia cards. 64-bit OS.

I just wanted to put that out there because the thread is making it sound like dual monitors and wi-fi are an impossibility in Ubuntu or something.
[/QUOTE]

Word. 3 machines currently running Linux of some sort:

[ul]
[li]Office PC: Whitebox. Everything works. Ubuntu 7.10.[/li][li]Thinkpad X61: Wireless works. Docking station works. SD card reader works. Better battery life than Windows. Dual monitors work, but I have to bounce X if I dock/undock to get the external one to show up/go away. Boots in 20 seconds. Ubuntu 7.10.[/li][li]Home file server: Fanless Epia board with a generic PCI ATA-133 card. Everything works. Debian Etch.[/li][/ul]

I agree with the OP that dual monitor support is a much bigger pain in the ass than it needs to be, especially on laptops. I’ve resorted to writing my own bindings to xrandr.

However, unless you totally don’t know what you’re doing, there’s really no excuse for not having a working wireless card any more. Intel and Atheros chipsets are well supported and widely available from most system builders, and you don’t need to worry about any ndiswrapper nonsense.

With that said, I’ve seen enough people reporting serious bugs on 8.04 that I’m waiting for at least 8.04.1.

45

[QUOTE=black rabbit]
However, unless you totally don’t know what you’re doing, there’s really no excuse for not having a working wireless card any more.
[/QUOTE]
Or, y’know, unless you’ve got the wrong wifi card. I have a Masters in advanced computing and three-quarters of a PhD in robotics, yet for the life of me I cannot get my Ralink RT61-based card to fucking work, and it’s claimed as one of the ones that Ubuntu supports “out of the box.” Yeah, it autoconfigured it, and yeah, it found my network and connected to it, but then it repeatedly froze my machine as soon as it was used to download more than a webpage or two. Were I not sufficiently savvy to know where to go looking to diagnose the problem I would’ve been even more stuffed than I presently am.

You shouldn’t really have to go and buy new hardware because a completely vanilla wifi chipset freezes your entire machine, particularly when an OS claims to support what you’ve already got. Nor is it particularly sensible that if you can’t use the provided drivers (because they’re fucked), then you can’t use the autoconfig program and have to resort to editing config files as root. Sure, I know what the TxBurst parameter for my card ought to be, and I know what the WPAPSK is, but really, is this entry-level knowledge? Plainly not.

Now I am off down the shops because cocking hard disk manufacturers don’t include motherfucking cables with their motherfucking drives. What am I supposed to plug it in with, motherfucking string? Jesus, I hate computers.

46

[QUOTE=Merkwurdigliebe]
Vendors aren’t always able to release the source code for their drivers because they don’t always own all of the code.
[/QUOTE]

Fine. Then release the fucking documentation, and we’ll write the bloody drivers!

47

[QUOTE=Priceguy]
Well, NVidia hasn’t always had Linux drivers, and now they do, working excellently. We’re getting there.
[/QUOTE]
The Linux support Nvidia provides is really quite admirable. They’ve got people who actually listen to bug reports and release new builds in a timely manner.

There’s a lot more corporate interest in Linux than you might think, precisely because it is free. There’s a significant number of developers that get paid just to work on Linux to benefit their company, with the rest of the community benefiting as a side effect.

Sure, it’s not suitable for a layperson to use right now, but that doesn’t mean it never will be. It just means it’s not there yet. Ubuntu is quite frankly astounding in its user-friendliness compared to other Linux distros now and in the past; just because it’s still got problems and isn’t idiot-proof doesn’t change that.

48

Just thought I’d add that I’ve got no reason to hate Linux for pure spite. God knows I’ve wanted to like it. Hell, I downloaded my first version of linux (RedHat 4ish I think?) on a fucking modem about 12 years ago. That was a true pain in the ass, let me tell you. This was before CD-Rs were ubiquitous so you had to repartition your drive and install it from there. Also the partitioning was kinda screwed up.

But the point is that I end up trying linux every year and a half or so. Well, I did this before I got a Mac, because now I’m pretty happy with the OS. But up until about 3 years ago I would do this. So no, I have no reason to hate Linux other than the way I’ve been fucked over by it each time. And God help me, I so wanted it to work this time. I really did. I wanted to replicate my work environment at home. But in the end, I realized that I could also accomplish the same stuff in my terminal on a Mac, so really, who gives a shit?

But just so you know, I don’t want to hate Linux, I’m just forced to.

49

[QUOTE=Priceguy]
Because they’re used to it, and/or it came with their computer.

[/QUOTE]

Winner! I’ve been a Windows guy since it arrived, I like it, I’m comfortable with it and I both hate and understand it at the same time. Until IT arrived. By IT I mean the IBM server with AIX on it. Of course, they’re comPLETELY different OS’s but I didn’t get just how different until I tried to make some wholesale changes to the password attributes. Sure, AIX is IBM’s version of linux, so there are little differences here and there, but for the love of christ, unix, linux and it’s variants including ubuntu, (which after five attempts to install on an old laptop I just gave up on) are NEVER going to be, as stated here, for the casual computer user, free or not. It’s too complicated, not enough stuff works with it and most people don’t want to spend the time researching dozens of different configurations to find one that works when they can go to best buy and just get everything to ‘work’ at once.

Oh, and kudos to the OP. Truly a brilliant rant.

50

[QUOTE=buttonjockey308]
Oh, and kudos to the OP. Truly a brilliant rant.
[/QUOTE]

Wow :o

What can I say?

I can only say the secret to my success was an intense hatred spawned by an exhaustive search to end up at no conclusion. I did try to write a rant about 4 days earlier but I guess I felt it wasn’t quite ripe enough

:cool:

51

[QUOTE=Capt. Ridley’s Shooting Party]
How many times do you actually have to fiddle with all those files in Windows or OSX? Setting an environment variable in Linux requires you open .bashrc, edit the path using some arcane syntax, then source the new file. Windows lets you do the same thing with a single dialog box.
[/QUOTE]

Not often, since the OSX people try very hard to hide it all from you (Windows is not a unix system). Why is Ubuntu the evil one for making the underbelly of your operating system explicit. The main point is that OSX has all of the unix tools under its hood, so it’s not clear what the OP wants out of Ubuntu (a unix derivative that is not designed for his specific hardware) that isn’t being provided by OSX (a unix derivative that is designed for his specific hardware).

52

[QUOTE=Bosstone]
The Linux support Nvidia provides is really quite admirable. They’ve got people who actually listen to bug reports and release new builds in a timely manner.

There’s a lot more corporate interest in Linux than you might think, precisely because it is free. There’s a significant number of developers that get paid just to work on Linux to benefit their company, with the rest of the community benefiting as a side effect.

[/QUOTE]
People were saying that in '96 when I was trying to install RedHat, and they’re saying it now as I try to install Ubuntu.

Linux has gotten better since '96. Way better. But, so has windows.

For years I always felt like linux was just about to “lock it in”. Like, everyone would agree “this is a great distro, and let’s all start working from here” and, they’d cure the problems that have eternally plagued it – all the work on drivers and bugs would be for that distro. All the new software would be optimized for it.

But, the problem as I see it, was that they ran into the boring parts. Anyone who has done software development knows how fun the first 90% is. Designing, writing stuff every day. Then, you hit that point where you need to start documenting, unit testing, whatever it is that you might find boring.

So, Linux seemed to just keep getting broader, not more useful. But, I never did linux development, so I don’t know if that’s accurate. It’s just how it feels. I just hate seeing new versions come out when problems aren’t fixed in the old versions. It smacks of laziness.

It’s starting to dawn on me that it just won’t “catch Windows”. I always thought it would. Like finally, people would go “it’s just as good as windows AND it’s free!” But, it’s not going to happen. Even for things that you might think are perfect for linux – playing around with Python, Apache, mySQL – I enjoy doing more in Windows.

I once worked for a company that switched from linux to windows in midstream. It was all C++ development, so it wasn’t a big deal, but the company was formed out of a university. It’s fun in university to play around with linux all day. But, when you need to get. shit. done. Forget it.

53

[QUOTE=Trunk]
It’s fun in university to play around with linux all day. But, when you need to get. shit. done. Forget it.
[/QUOTE]

Horseshit.

Try running 120 Oracle instances that run just fine on an AIX box with 64GB of RAM on an equivalent Windows machine, for the same money.

Try putting together a base image for VMware guests using a modern Windows base with a memory footprint of less than 64MB.

Try securely administering a Windows box over a 14k modem link using nothing but standard command line tools.

Try writing a 20 line BAT file, using the base tools from the Windows distribution, for monitoring the status of HTTP servers that matches the capability and flexibility of a similarly-sized shell script a competent Linux admin could bang out in ten minutes.

There’s a reason Microsoft is releasing a stripped down version of Server 2008 without all the purty Windows and there’s a reason Microsoft has spent years trying to develop a command line shell that matches the power and flexibility of vanilla Bourne shell, let alone ksh or bash.

Redmond makes some sweet enterprise software. Exchange is a pretty kickass groupware platform, and AD has revolutionized attitudes toward authentication integration (though eDirectory is probably more scalable). But it terms of getting. shit. done., in both large scale systems and single server appliances, Microsoft is the unwieldy, inflexible behemoth here.

54

[QUOTE=Merkwurdigliebe]
This guy says it better than I’d ever be able to.

[/QUOTE]
Yeah. That’s pretty good.

He definitely draws the distinction between using it as a desktop app, and having it run servers.
I like this

That’s sort of what I was trying to say. You can never seem to get your ahead around the current state of linux.

Different desktops, distros, versions. . .it might all make sense to someone who has their head in linux 16 hours a days, but it’s a clusterfuck for people trying to write for it.

I think that’s why linux guys like python so much. Because they hop people will write good shit for windows using it, and then they can use that same app in linux.

black rabbit. . .as you can see, I’m amending here a little. You’re pretty much talking server, server, server, server, server. . .we’re primarily talking “user” in this thread.

55

This whole thread reminds me of the poster a Windows-hating sys admin guy had pinned up over his desk:

“Unix is user friendly, just picky about who its friends are!”

Some office wag scrawled underneath:

“… and it gets upset if it’s not your only friend!”

56

[QUOTE=Trunk]

Different desktops, distros, versions. . .it might all make sense to someone who has their head in linux 16 hours a days, but it’s a clusterfuck for people trying to write for it.

[/quote]

I’m not a developer, so I can’t speak to many of the details, but most application developers seem to pick a single toolkit, and let the downstream distributors handle the actual integration.

It’s a completely different mindset from the typical Windows software distribution model, and (IMNSHO) provides a far more integrated experience than the shotgun mess that’s the typical Windows power user’s workstation.

For some reason, I assumed that the company you mentioned was targeting Windows for some kind of service-level offering. Bad assumption on my part.

I don’t disagree that there’s a great selection of heavy-duty application software for Windows. I’m at the point in my career where I spend more time twiddling Gantt charts than thumping servers, and the PM application offerings for Linux are pitiful when compared to MS Project. Which is why I’m typing this on XP and about to send another thousand bucks to Redmond.

57

Just to answer the question at the top of this page:

I mainly wanted to install linux in order to get experience on it. It is my work environment, and I wanted to replicate it at home. I realize that I can do what I need to do on OSX, but still…

So anyone want to tell me how I can get my python scripts going? In linux I just type xxxx.py and off it goes, while in OSX I need to type “python xxx.py” minor quibble. I get the feeling that it’s some kind of shell customization…

58

Anytime I need to make a Python script executable I open the script with


#!/usr/bin/env python

and give the file execute permissions. If there’s another way to do it I don’t know about it.

ETA: Some websites indicate that


#!/usr/bin/python

will also work.

59

Okay, my python files are preceeded by
#!/usr/bin/python2.5

which is okay since that is what I have. I just needed to add execute flags to it. So they work when I type ./xxxx.py

Why do I not need to do that on my linux box? Is this something peculiar about Darwin? I seem to remember being unable to understand how to execute files on Linux way back when as I was always used to the DOS method of just typing the name.

60

Glad to hear that it works now.

I don’t know why you don’t have to do that in Linux, since I certainly do. Is it possible that whatever editor you’re using makes the files executable by default (or is configured to do so)? Are the python files stored in a non-linux partition? For example, my flashdrive is formatted as fat16, which doesn’t support unix-style permissions. Linux seems to respond to this by giving everything execute permissions by default*. Mybe something similar is happening with your system? Try writting a simple python script and putting it in your home directory, then see if it is executable.

*Come to think of it, this is probably a pretty bad thing to happen…