basic

[Tero Pesonen]

On Wed, 2010-02-03 at 17:00 +0000, David Gerard wrote:
> On 3 February 2010 12:57, q0k <q0k.character at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > 1) I have been using Windows for 5 years. Why should I choose Ubuntu?
> 
> 
> GNU/Linux in general is good because it's ridiculously more stable,

Not necessarily. I do agree the kernel is stable, and one can always log
in remotely and kill whatever caused X to freeze all means of input. But
from the user's point of view, especially one who is less experienced
with the OS, GNU/Linux is not always stable. I've been using 9.04 at
work since May, and had I not had nine years of earlier experience from
SUSE Linux, I would have sworn Linux is a devil of an OS. Whether Ubuntu
stability issues are due to Gnome or Ubuntu itself, I do not know. But i
have experienced the following, amongst others:

- The shut down, log out, suspend etc. quick menu item suddenly
disappearing from the panel and never coming back. (No, I did not remove
it.)
- The whole darned panel missing after a reboot caused by security
updates (apt-get install gnome-panel from a terminal window that had,
due to sheer luck, been left running helped after the first pang of
panic of alt+f2 not working, like nothing else either, subsided.)
- Evolution freezing at startup. Fixed by deleting all local IMAP cache
and account settings. This has happened a few times. I miss KMail.
- Preferences->Encryption and Keyrings complaining there's no supported
passphrase memory caching agent running even though both gpg-agent and
sea-horse daemon are running. 
- KMail, if launched from Gonme, crashing after having asked the
passwords for the two configured IMAP accounts.
- Ships with an unstable version of OpenOffice.org --> has to be
replaced with a manually installed 3.1.1 version.
- Ships with an ancient (early 2000?) version of NetPBM, which had to be
replaced by a newer version compiled from source.
- Allows no way to configure KDE3 colour schemes for KDE3/Qt3 apps by
not offering KControl (replaced by KDE4 system settings.) The desktop
hence only partially adheres to the set accessibility colour scheme.
(Affects Opera, Scribus, Kaffeine, etc.)
- Claws Mail dying randomly on one's trying to alter some of the colour
settings.
- Evolution forces obsolete SHA1 signatures against one's gpg.conf
personal-digest-preferences (luckily I do not need to adhere to a
company-wide security policy or something, so I need not install a yet
another distro for this.) 
- Most of the above issues are, according to Google, known to Ubuntu
users.
- This is not the Linux I've grown to love over the years. 

However:
- Gnome itself feels solid while running. The occasional reboot caused
by security updates is always an exciting moment, though... whether
everything turns up as expected, or whether a random piece of desktop is
missing...
- Evolution runs stable when indeed running, even if it feels slow (a
lot of disk I/O when browsing an IMAP folder). It also insists on
loading the attachments instantly, not on request, which slows things
down considerably.
- After a manual upgrade, OOo is fast and stable.

These are my experiences. My home system will, therefore, keep on
running an old variant of SUSE and KDE 3.5 for the time being, and will
likely be upgraded to the Enterprise Desktop version at some point
(costs a bit -- not relevant). I like that things just work from day to
day.

Tero Pesonen

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