Bye to Unbuntu

[Eberhard Roloff]

Kristian Rink wrote:

> [Eberhard Roloff <tuxebi at gmx.de> @ Sun, 07 Jan 2007 20:34:12 +0100]
> 
>> Ubuntu might be great but I would need to buy different hardware to
>> use it as I like it to be used and this is not what I am going to do.
> 
> Why? Can you go into details on that?
> Cheers,
> Kristian
> 
OK. You asked for it ;-))
I am owning a Thinkpad T21 and a Dell C610. These Notebooks do very good
services to me but theyare to old to have an internal network card so that
I am forced to use pcmcia cards to connect to my ethernet. Now I have a
couple of them from 3com/xircom/dlink. They are all 16bit 10/100 Cards and
I have used them for more than three years, never having any trouble. The
trouble started with Ubuntu 5.04. From then on there was no way left for me
to connect to the network. This is most probably due to a mayor
modification of the pcmcia subsystem, but somehow, other distros like
kde/opensuse/fedora/damnssmall linus continued to work easilywhile with
those ethernet cards.
You might imagine how difficult it is to use a computer without network.

The second thing that finally made be switch is that on my desktop
(P4/2800/2GB) i was using a cheap pci sound card named "creative Labs SB
Audigy LS" to drive my two tiny loudspeakers. Now with edgy, this card
SUDDENLY did not have sound anymore and for the life of it I could not
figure out how to cure this, despite reading and posting and trying for
days. Very strangely the ubuntu Live DVD played sound, but this did not
help either. 
Personally I do not need sound, but my children use Linux for games and
educational plays. You might imagine how successful this works when you do
not have sound. And I did not want them to switch to Windows more than
absolutely needed.

Finally I felt I had to decide to buy new hardware, maybe 32bit cardbus
pcmcia for ethernet or newer notebooks and a "real" Soundcard for my
desktop or doing something else. 

As I always wondered why other Linux OSses had worked without any glitch, I
gave OpenSUSE 10.2 a try. You will guess that the things that most
disturbed me, worked right out of the box without any (mayor) intervention
from my side. 

That's it. Again, I like Ubuntu, the community and its spirit but honestly,
I cannot afford to have very basic things like network or sound to block my
productivity for hours, days and weeks, anything to no avail. 

And let's face it, Guys: While Ubuntu is excellent, SuSE is not worse. There
are pro and cons for both and I simply chose what worked for me.