Some observations

[Martin Alderson]

1) First and foremost there is a real problem in that mp3 support
doesn't work out of the box. I was under the impression that you
didn't have to pay the patent fees if it was software and a decoder
(as opposed to hardware and a decoder for example). Have I got the
wrong end of the stick here?

Without mp3 support out of the box it's pretty much useless as a
desktop distro for those who can't understand apt-get (ie: 95% of
people). Please persaude me why Mandrake can have out of the box mp3
and ubuntu and fedora can't. Also, why isn't the gstreamer plugin in
synaptic?

Also, why on earth is bug 2691 marked NOTABUG. Fine, so we can't have
mp3 support. However, crashing rythmnbox because of it defnitley _is_
a bug. I'm Mr Joe First Time Linux user. I double click on
some-crappy-band.mp3. My mp3 player crashes. I have no idea what is
wrong. I put a pirated copy of Windows on and it works fine.
Therefore, I assume Linux is buggy and crappy, basically.

If it can't play mp3 support, it should just say 'mp3 support is
disabled. Please visit [link] to enable it' or something. Also, why
are the radio stations in the default install using mp3? Basically
it's a bit like going on firefox and the default home page crashes it.
It's bad bad behaviour.

2) Why can't Ubuntu please please please recognize my all five (or
seven if you include the mousewheel) of my mouse buttons. We have had
5 buttoned mice for ages, yet it never works out of the box. My mouse
is a Microsoft Intellimouse.

/endofrant.

It's a very good distro but I do think lack of multimedia is going to
be a big problem for it to become a good desktop distro that I can
hand out to less techincally able friends and collegues.