5 Things I hate about Ubuntu

I believe some of you have already read my blog and will summarize that I’m an Ubuntu user and advocator.

However, having said that doesn’t mean that I dont have things that I hate about Ubuntu, and they are :

  1. Windows manager (GNOME) is damn too slow compared with other distro
  2. Eats a lot of memory in desktop mode
  3. It has defective or near unusable packages (ie ffmpeg, scribus)
  4. Depends too much on internet connection for package installations and management
  5. Default installation does not include applications and codecs that I use most. I had to rely to the *internet* to get those apps installed (read above) (a small issue but an issue nevertheless)

Those are the 5 things that crossed my mind when I switched on my computer and use Ubuntu everyday. What’s yours?

[tags]ubuntu,debian,linux,opensource,distro[/tags]

18 Replies to “5 Things I hate about Ubuntu”

  1. 4- not completelly true, since you can download the .deb packages into some 5 or 6 DVDs, and making them synaptic-compatible, even knowing it’s not a very easy task to do, since they are more than 25000 packages, and you have to run a script to create the Packages files…

  2. I am in the same shoes as you. I’ve been complaining (and praising) Ubuntu for a little while now.

    1: Yes it is a bit slow, but I don’t really like KDE that much, xfce seems to have a lot less functionality that I’ve grown accustomed to using, and the others like enlightenment are just too different to struggle with when I have other stuff to do.
    2: Not really. Maybe compared to some more compact Linux distros, but RAM is dirt cheap. A 1GB stick of RAM will do you just fine with Ubuntu, and they don’t cost all that much. I just picked up 4GB for about $100.
    3: Totally agree here.
    4: Again, totally agree. coralsaw: it IS the 21st century, so why don’t my network card drivers work with the default install?
    5. Totally agree here. All this GNU-freedom stuff seems to be taken too far. Can we at least have some MP3 support out of the box?

  3. hello, i’m a newbie… from italy, forgive me my poor english

    the article is very interesting for me…

    please… let’s pretend for a while that this is an help-forum…
    i can’t understand…

    – gnome is the main x-window gui-interface for unix-like system? isn’t it? isn’t kde something similar, as xfce is?

    – then why some apps are “optimized” for a simple gui (gnome), others for another gui (kde)?
    but i downloaded tons of apps whose name starts with “k_something-incredible_etc..”;
    i noticed that sometimes (not always, i stress this) these apps are better that the standard ubuntu version… for example the pdf reader, and many other ones.. but i use them under gnome… how can that happens?

    – i tried kubuntu: it didn’t recognized most of the hardware on my hp amd64 notebook, while the only problem with ubuntu is the screen resolution: he does not understand that it is 1440(fourty)x1050, not 1400(double zero)x1050: nothing to do…

    – i can say this about speed: kde on opensuse is really horribly fast! stunning! but same problem of kubuntu: the hardware is never recognized…
    kde on ubuntu is horribly slow!!!! i have to wait 20 second for a tooltip to show…
    i mean same machine… how can this be happen?

    – i agree for the always-on-internet-connection: kubuntu has minor problems under this point of view, the dvd version has such a number of apps that i didn’t know what install or not, and i would never have time to try all that stuff in my life…
    i actually prefer to get a point: “i need to do this o that”… ok… –> google, wiki, forum, … –> there are actually one or two good apps for that precise task! all the rest is waste of time and pieces of life…

    – gnome (ubuntu) is a little harder than kde (kubuntu) (not as debian is like, ok): as a professional who want to learn bash and other stuff, to give consulting, that is better…

    – what about if i install xcfe x-window on ubuntu? will the machine be faster? would i have new hardware incompatibility? could i continue to download and use “kde apps”?

    – am i dreaming or vista copied a lot from gnome? why not so much from kde according to you?

    – …and talking about windows: should someone suggest me something about partitioning?
    my aims:
    – 4 users (3 plus a guest)
    – install windows xp professional inside ubuntu with qemu
    i have 50/50/55/5 gb partition, all primary, /; /home; /usr; /swap as the text based install suggested me
    –> does that make sense?
    –> should/could i have a partition for each user?
    –> should i have 2 partitions (sys+data) for qemu-win?

    thank you guys… my skype: sir_luke_73
    i would be glad to hear from (collaborate with) you…

    Looka

  4. Maybe your blog is intel centric. The downsides:
    1. Canonical reclassify PPC architecture as unofficial.. aaargh.Dapper runs so well on my mac but edgy broke a few things…i am now thinking of reintalling Dapper. Anyway i’ll wait and see how Ben Collins who leads the PPC community support makes progress. Ben Collins is Ubuntu linux kernel maintainer who runs Ubuntu on both Intel/PPC .
    2. Flash+java+w32 codecs
    3. I think i’ll switch to Kubuntu after playing with KDE desktop for a while.Not so much for eye candy but UI.

  5. Fluxbox! It is lightweight! As I use gnome apps in fluxbox, I getting more frustrated… no doubt KDE apps is more stable.

    Ubuntu Edgy changed a little bit … kernel is generic and !!!

    I can’t find my inittab, where is it? /etc/inittab

  6. Haven’t had any problems with scribus or gnome so far, though I wished I could view quicktime videos with sound more reliably. Generally I agree KDE is the better interface, that’s why I have both.

    Or maybe it’s time Malaysians have their own Ubuntu…like BolehlahTu, entirely in bahasa pasar with RTI (roti telur interface)!

  7. You can download a dvd release or download the entire repositories and install all the packages from the dvd or local disck.

    I think the only point that you have is with multimedia codecs, windows and macosx doesn’t come with them either but thats because the US laws, we can use Automatix to do this anyway =)

  8. Catchy title. Have to partially disagree.

    1. My machine is 4y old and Gnome is fast enough for me. In any case, since this is a personal issue, try Xubuntu (XFCE4), it’s faster/lighter than anything i’ve tried lately.

    2. Yep, although 1G will leave you lots of free RAM.

    3. It takes about 3 minutes to compile a fully functional ffmpeg, even for near-real noobs, google it.

    4. Thank God it does, this is the 21st century. :)

    5. See 4.

  9. KDE is much faster, but overally ubuntu use too much memory even when using xfce, wonder why?

    the most annoying thing probably is that they didnt do quality checkup on some of the applications in their default repository, the most notorious example is scribus which is not up to quality compared with packages from other distro.

    Another package example is speex, which can’t even encode standard riff file :p

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