About to give up(again) with Linux!

[Matt Morgan]

On 10/27/05, Michael Shergold <michaelshergold at btconnect.com> wrote:
> About three months ago I decided to give Linux yet another try, this time
> with Ubunutu..
> The Hoary distrib disk worked fairly well but it was a struggle to get some
> of the applications I use regularly to work but eventually I did and my
> DVDs and CDs played, Skype worked and I even managed to get the BBC website
> radioplayer (RealPlayer) to work and I could print to my Windows networked
> Canon printer..  Then I thought I would look at the KDE interface and since
> I preferred that, decided to stick with it and tried to update to Breezy..
> After the upgrade almost nothing worked so I decided to cut the Breezy
> level Kubuntu disk and do a clean re-install from that..  Once again most
> of the things that I had spent time getting going with Hoary failed
> miserably and lots of the applications seemed to be missing (what happened
> to Kynaptic).
> Going backwards at every update might present challenges but is not good
> for Linux..  I know now that probably if I am prepared to fool around using
> the root terminal and a lot of knowledge acquired from these groups I can
> probably get it all working again but it really should not be like this..
> What are beta tests for?  Surely the official release should not put you
> back to square one.  I'm just about to wipe it all off and re-install
> MSWindows. There at least most things work without having to delve into
> newsgroups and console level manipulations.  It's like going back 45
> years!!
> Michael (an old timer who remembers booting computers by operating binary
> switches and is still not afraid to try but thinks the Linux distros should
> have
> moved on. What a mess!)..

Sounds like you shouldn't have switched gears just when you had
everything working :-).

This list really works better when you have a specific question to
ask. It seems like you're just frustrated and letting off steam. We've
all been there. But seriously, try again if you want, and when you
have trouble getting something specific working, send that in to the
list.

I can say, as will probably lots of other people, that I basically
don't have any trouble with Linux any more. Fedora Core 3/4 and the
recent Ubuntus, as well as (probably, I haven't tried them) the most
recent Madrakes/Mandriva, are all pretty good out of the box (with
some exceptions, clearly). Definitely not a mess.

Good luck,
Matt