Suckered by Ubuntu's Advertising

This week I decided to give Ubuntu 10.10 with GNOME a whirl, tempted by a brief glimpse of it on a friends' computer looking much prettier than my Debian desktop running KDE. I've been using Linux for a long time now and while it works well for me both as a server OS and on the desktop I've become very cautious about recommending it to non technically minded friends, could Ubuntu change my mind? It's advertising seems to think so and according to various websites (accuracy unknown) it is now the most popular desktop distribution. I'm also curious about the current state of GNOME since although I use KDE, over the years I've been using ever fewer KDE applications, steadily replacing them with GNOME (or GTK at least) ones.

“a revolution in small screen computing”

I'm testing it out on an Eee PC 901 netbook and so first tried the netbook edition of Ubuntu, didn't like it so ditched it and started again with the normal desktop edition. The installation went very smoothly from a USB flash drive, their graphical installer was both attractive and easy to use. After installing and on the first boot I got a bunch of weird messages related to the graphical boot screen not getting launched properly, it's a known but unfixed bug. This is typical for Linux, every time I've ever seen any attempt, and there have been many, to hide the boot-up messages they always poke out again somewhere and shatter the whole illusion. An unrelated problem produced the same effect on shut down, where I saw the normal start of a Linux text mode shut down for a few seconds before it got covered up with the graphical screen.

The default desktop install gives you two panels one on the top, one on the bottom, for me that's one too many and takes up too much space so I ditched the bottom one and installed docky instead, then the AppMenu Indicator, made the fonts smaller, made the top panel smaller, made the toolbar icons smaller, installed a different icon set, ditched the triple menu space waster and installed the Main Menu icon and window list. Got to something I was happier with on my relatively small netbook screen.

After a few hours of using Ubuntu, mostly trying out apps, checking my email and web browsing I ran in to a few too many problems. The first was that the default and best integrated mail client is Evolution, unfortunately it's setup and main window are too big to fit on my screen. I thought at first it might have been a mistake to pick the desktop edition and that I should have given the netbook edition a fairer try out but I checked and Evolution is also the default on the netbook edition, despite it being unusable on any netbook. I'm a bit stunned by this, their advertising for the netbook edition promotes Evolution alongside claims like, "an innovative user interface super-optimised for smaller screens", and, "a revolution in small screen computing".

Next problem was bluetooth, after setting up (pairing) my phone I tried to send it a file. I got a dialogue box saying the device wants to pair with the computer, well it already is! So I tried putting a number in the box, at which point my phone tells me a device wants to pair with it, I enter the number and the file transferred. I have to go through that for every file, browse or net connect. Clearly Ubuntu's bluetooth support is broken.

The Application Menu Indicator crashes regularly and while it is working flickers annoyingly every time a different window is selected, looks like it is erasing the previous menu to grey before drawing the new menu. Totem, the default video player, freaks out when trying to play a video, it puts up a whole bunch of error windows, all on top of each other. The "me" menu works sometimes, all greyed out other times, haven't yet spotted the pattern to this behaviour. After coping some music off a usb stick I did the "safely remove" thing, the icon for the mounted drive disappeared, I waited a few seconds then, assuming all was good, unplugged the stick, then a window popped up telling me "failed to eject medium". The notification area is particularly ugly, the icons there don't match the indicators, are too big and badly spaced, the overall effect is like a beautiful model with a huge wart. I got a window that told me "assertion failed", no idea what that related to.

“an innovative user interface
super-optimised for smaller screens”

Most of the problems I've described are not much of an issue to me but I'm a Linux nerd, programmer and web developer, I'm happy to ditch the default apps, install new ones or fix bugs that really bother me. If I was I normal user who'd seen Ubuntu's advertising and thought I'd give it a try then I imagine I'd feel totally lied to. The ideas in the advertising are ok, perhaps they'll achieve them one day but they're not there yet and I have my doubts that they will be any time soon. I feel a bit sad that the open source world appears to be getting good at marketing hype, I preferred it when things were perhaps not as pretty but a bit more honest. I'm also trying to square my Ubuntu experience with the reviews I've seen, all of which sing nothing but praise, have those reviewers actually done anything more than just copy and paste the advertising?

OK so that's quite a lot of complaining, I think my annoyance is mostly about the advertising and an attempt to counterbalance all the glowing reviews out there. I think users shouldn't notice when things are done right, they just work. Users do notice the gremlins so what's the use of a review which doesn't mention them? Generally though I'm quite impressed and a bit confused, to answer my original question, would I recommend Ubuntu to non-technically minded people? Well that's easy, no way, unless it's in a setting where technical support staff can look after things, I could imagine it working well in offices or schools. It would also work if the person trying it out was quite dedicated to learning about Linux and so was more forgiving about it's shortcomings, lets not forget that the alternatives, including Windows, OSX and other Linux distros, all have problems of their own.

For my own use it's a harder question, I'm finding that I really missing some features of KDE, Klipper being a good example. Klipper extends the normal cut and paste with a history, it's hard to explain to non-KDE users how incredibly useful that is. With some hassle I've found Pastie as a replacement but I'm amazed that something so basic isn't part a GNOME or even Ubuntu, I had to get it from an unsupported ppa then dig up an icon for it which fitted the theme. That's just one example, KDE simply has many more features, partly that's a design choice by GNOME to simplify things but they've gone way too far with it, there's nothing wrong with keeping things simple by default but having an "advanced" button giving access to extra goodies. GNOME does has one very nice app, gconf-editor, which allows tinkering with all sorts of application settings, KDE has nothing comparable. I'm still undecided, don't think I've yet given it enough time, I'll stick with it for another week.