Things I already hate about Kubuntu - geekdom

[Anders Karlsson]

On 12/21/05, Terry North <terrencenorth at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> I filed this originally as feedback.  Maybe it was the wrong place.

No, it is the right place.

> I came to Ubuntu with an open mind.  I believe it's currently of interest
> to many people because it's relatively new.  I have doubts about whether
> that interest will be sustained because, as my experience shows, the
> system is NOT user-friendly.  I'm just an ordinary user who has had to
> learn more than I wanted to know just because of the shortcomings of
> various systems, beginning with the claimant to 90 odd % of the market.

Unfortunately, you are not alone in finding just that about a lot of
systems out there. They all have their own idiosyncrasies that
irritate and you learn how to live with or work around.

I, personally, believe you are wrong about Ubuntu being
un-user-friendly and that interest will vane. I believe that while
Ubuntu is one of the slickest installs and easiest installs out there,
I think it has some way to go until grandma or the housewife with
three kids under the age of five can pick it up and "just use it".

> To get things into perspective, a small share of computer users have
> adopted Linux.  A small share of that small share are using Ubuntu, and
> good luck to them.

Thanks. :)

> I like Ubuntu's independence.  The commercial distros, from what I've seen,
> do a better job.  I was hoping Ubuntu could give them a run for their money.
> Right now, judging from a lot of the comments, it looks as though it's in
> the hands of an elite who are content to exclude the great bulk of users and
> resent anyone telling them there are better ways of doing things.  I'm
> willing to work with it but I doubt that I'm typical.

I've tried and used some of the commercial alternatives and found them
frustrating at best. Some, coloured headgear style, more than most. My
journey through Linux has not always been plain sailing, but not once
have I been tempted to sell my soul to Redmond.

You may be correct about Linux users (not all by a long chalk) having
an elitist attitude, but that goes for users of *BSD, OSX, Windows etc
etc.

You will find that people bite back, perhaps more venomously than
required, when there is someone that in the process of saying how to
better do things comes across as trolling and just in general
complaining because they either have nothing else to do or they rather
complain than attempt to ask intelligent questions or have a google
for an answer that half the time is in the first ten links.

I irritated the heck out of people a while back when my system kept
crashing, and I first believed it to be the network driver (had not
used the wired network for yonks, when I plugged it in and did a big
scp - hard lockup straight away) and then I progressed to blame the
ide layer, md driver and C compiler. In the end, and it took me over a
month to get there, it turned out to be a dodgy stick of RAM, same
stick that had been in the box for over a year and memcheck would not
spot it.

> I think a lot of people like to set things up the way that suits them.  They
> have colour and font preferences and like different styles.  They want to
> install different software.  Not many people want to spend hours researching
> man pages (finding them at all can be time-consuming), experimenting with
> commands, getting them wrong and playing around until they're right.  I'm glad
> to have tools that simplify the process and reduce the time required.  I've
> got a system that's a pleasure to work with.  I hate it when I have to go back
> to Windoze to access an old file.  I'd like to find a non-commercial system
> that measures up to or even surpasses what I've got.

People tweak their system to fit with how they work, that is only fair
to expect. I think the MenuRevisited ideas make sense. Redmond may be
detestable because of dodgy business practices and code, but the
initial threshold to get started using their OS is low. That is not a
bad target to aim for.

These last few days there has been a lot of dissent about how Ubuntu
does things. From my perspective, and I would not class myself a
newbie, I like the ease of install and use of Ubuntu, all that
tweakability and power right at my fingertips and still, if I want it
to, so easy to get the simple things done like setting up a
spreadsheet or writing documentation.

I think people would find the Linux crowd less hostile and elitist if
they gave constructive criticism rather than being very vocal "it
don't work the way I expected it to and I can't be arsed to read the
docs as I can't be arsed to install them nor google for the
HOWTO's"...

Just my two cents..

--
Anders Karlsson <trudheim at gmail.com>