Bad experience with Ubuntu

[Adam Dingle]

Ravi,
thanks for your message.  I don't work for Canonical (I'm just a 
longtime Ubuntu user) but here are some thoughts.
First, making Ubuntu (or any Linux-based OS) work well on the vast 
variety of hardware that exists is a tremendously hard problem.  Ubuntu 
and others have made great progress in this area, but, still, lots of 
hardware devices (especially graphics cards and networking chips) are 
not friendly to free software: their specifications are not open.  So 
supporting these devices, when possible at all, requires challenging 
and expensive reverse engineering.
By contrast, most hardware manufacturers actively work to make sure 
that their devices work well with Windows and other commercial 
operating systems, which have a much larger market share.
So if you install Ubuntu (or any Linux-based OS) on a machine 
containing an arbitrary set of hardware and expect it to work as 
smoothly as Windows, honestly I think you're setting your expectations 
too high.  There are two paths you could take:
1. You could buy or build a machine with hardware that is known to work 
with Ubuntu.  Here in the US, for example, System76 (system76.com) and 
ZaReason (zareason.com) sell laptop and desktop machines which have 
Ubuntu preinstalled.  I've bought many computers from both those 
companies and Ubuntu has always worked fine there.  If you want to 
build your own machine, you'll need to check that all the components 
you're using are known to work with Ubuntu; obviously that's more work. 
 You might also want to make sure that the graphics card you're using 
has a completely open source driver.  This is more likely with a chip 
from Intel than from ATI.
2. You could continue to use a machine where Ubuntu does not work well, 
but join in the battle to improve Ubuntu there.  To do that, you'll 
want to find or file Launchpad tickets for each of the issues you're 
seeing and/or actually find and fix those bugs if you have the 
programming skills to do driver-level debugging and development.  
Obviously this is a much harder path, so I think path 1 is the way to 
go unless you particularly enjoy this kind of activity.  cheers -
adam

On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 5:00 AM, Ravi Kumar <ra21vi at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Comminity,
> Its just feedback, please do not get jumping. I had a concern.
> Day by day, Hardware is getting better and powerful, windows os is 
> getting better and better UX and functionality. Linux based mobile 
> platform (ie. Android) is getting better and amazing.
> 
> 
> Why Linux based Desktop distros then have persistent problems and 
> affecting UX. Just an example, almost 3 yrs ago, I bought Dell XPS 
> 15z. Installed Ubuntu, something worked, something didn't. Wireless 
> connectivity then also was pain.
> 
> 1 year ago, I assembled myself a powerful workstation with Core i7, 
> 16GB RAM, ATI GFX, SSD+HDD, ASUS Wireless Card with Logitech G300 
> mouse, just to have my Ubuntu workstation for development work. 
> Installed Ubuntu 12.04, it was disappointing.
> 
> Wifi was slow, internet was breaking a lot. I followed some 
> articles/answers from Ubuntu forums and askubutu. Nothing 
> worked.Dropped the idea, installed Windows 7, bought necessary 
> software, AV etc, and spent my half year without any issue. For 
> development I had to use Vagrant+VirtualBox+Ubuntu minimal without 
> GUI.
> 
> With Ubuntu 12.10 release, I thought to give it a try and see if that 
> works. Well, it failed, and had some new issues. I again switched 
> back to Windows + VirtualBox + Vagrant.With 13.04, again nothing 
> better. Wifi not performing better, graphics on ATI lagging. Does not 
> feel like I am on high end workstation. Logitech mouse is not working 
> smoothly, accuracy and acceleration is bad. Mouse extra keys are not 
> working, as expected. I tried tweaking all aspects of it.
> 
> On Windows, I don't have to do anything literally. Installed, tested 
> and started my development work.
> My one question is, why Ubuntu is not really focusing in solving the 
> issues in the core in Desktop versions. Why so many tricks and tweaks 
> exists and may or may not work. Years and years passed, so many 
> contributors are involved, still fails to few or many, I don't have 
> idea.
> 
> 
> P.S - I didn't mean anything negative, its a valid concern. If you 
> are taking it in negative perspective, just delete it.
> 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/attachments/20130908/711dd46f/attachment.html>