What Do You Dislike or Hate About Ubuntu?

[allquixotic]

Everything Michael posted in the article, I agree with. I'll tack on to that:

-Ubuntu Developers (people with an @ubuntu.com or @canonical.com email) don't take enough interest in helping new developers or "outsiders" to learn the processes needed to contribute new software to Ubuntu, even if that software is already written, tested and functional

-Impossible to get a mentor to help you get a piece of software integrated into Ubuntu

-Cloistered "we do things our way" approach, ignoring the advancements and contributions of other distros, even when other distros are clearly developing what will become standard software across the entire GNU/Linux ecosystem (systemd, gnome3 and gnome-shell, pulseaudio at first, KMS at first, etc)

-The implementations Ubuntu developers come up with are often, frankly, sub-par on a technical level, and are shot down on legitimate concerns by developers elsewhere in the Linux community. Launchpad is perhaps one notable exception, as it doesn't suck nearly as badly as you might expect from Canonical.

-The inflexible, time-based release cycle is completely untenable. Software is late. It will always be late. Always. You have to build flexibility into your release schedule in order to fix the most important bugs (or to detect them in the first place). You can't just pick a time and randomly release whatever you have. You have to demonstrate software quality, not hope for it.

-There is a tendency for the developers to be way too conservative about the package versions they are willing to include in non-LTS releases, and way too liberal about the package versions they're willing to include in an LTS. In other words, I think non-LTS releases should be significantly more unstable and bleeding-edge (about equivalent to a Fedora Beta), and the LTS should be significantly more stable and tested (about equivalent to Debian Stable or RHEL). Non-LTS Ubuntu releases are usually about in the middle of the two extremes: they are not too bleeding-edge, but the packages are just stale enough to be ho-hum boring, while also being chock full of bugs due to the short time-based release cycle and low community involvement in testing.

-Will the latest kernel or Mesa be in the next Ubuntu release? No, you have to wait 6 more months (and by then there will be even newer kernel and mesa, defeating the purpose). Will the kernel and Mesa that are included in Ubuntu be more stable than using git master? No, because they're feature-incomplete to begin with, and intentionally using an old version just means you don't get the latest features and bugfixes.

-So instead of hitting a "new" crash from code just committed, instead you get to hit a crash, and then see that somebody else already reported it on launchpad, and the bug is marked as "NEW", and no developer has even looked at it. By the time they look at it, it's already fixed upstream and being pulled into the next release. This happens almost every time, unless the software is something that (a) Canonical wrote, and/or (b) brings Canonical revenue directly (such as Ubuntu One). In those cases, you get a response within a few minutes from some overzealous Australian developer who works from home for Canonical, trying to make his product perfect, but can't seem to nail down the 100,000 different places where a runtime Python equivalent of a null pointer exception or type cast error shows up. (Did I mention I hate Python with a passion and wish that I could run my system without a python interpreter even installed?)

-They maintain huge patch-sets against certain packages (Rhythmbox, for example), and there is no toolchain to maintain or enhance the patchset, much less to make it work with a new version of the upstream package.

-While they do seem willing to include plugins and functionality not found in upstream packages (this is good), they don't have clear guidelines for whether a given enhancement should be (a) upstreamed, (b) included in the hackset (my new term for the sprawling patchset they maintain against certain packages), or (c) included in its own package entirely. Nor do they document where on launchpad you have to go to check out the latest hackset sources if you want to contribute something.

-Nothing to match Delta RPMs as far as reducing updates download size. And DPKG doesn't use LZMA2 (Xz) compression yet -- unacceptable. Switching to LZMA2 would save thousands of terabytes (or more) each year of public mirror bandwidth, by having package updates and distro updates being distributed with significantly better compression. Throw in Delta RPMs (well the DPKG equivalent) and you'd shave off another 50% bandwidth.

-It might be due to the particular timing of the release cycle itself, but it seems to me that Fedora is able to release newer packages (kernel, mesa, xorg, etc) and kick out a more stable and reliable distribution at the same time. They definitely have Ubuntu beat as far as the timing of their releases; they always ship with the latest stable packages (unless they are released in the last 2-3 weeks before distro release), and manage to stabilize them quickly (or not do anything funky as far as configuration that might screw them up).

-Remember that time someone initialized some pointer to 0 in OpenSSL to fix a Coverity bug, and Debian took the patch, causing everyone's generated private keys to lose a significant number of bits of encryption? Ubuntu does things like that, too. They accepted a patch against libshout a few years ago (and it went into Hardy IIRC) that basically broke all libshout encoding except for MP2. Nobody even bothered to test it, but the gist of it was that the guy who said the patch "worked for him" really wanted MP2 support, which was broken, so he did exactly the wrong thing and completely broke MP3 and Ogg/Vorbis support instead. This stuff makes it into a release how?

-Their automatic bug reporting tool makes bug workflow on launchpad impossible. Newbies always report crashes, even if the crash is their fault (example: switching out a library underneath Firefox during an upgrade, then opening a new tab without restarting the browser, and Firefox crashes. Big surprise; that's unavoidable.) There are way too many false positives, where users report bugs on software they've custom installed (or someone else custom installed for them, or they followed some online tutorial/script to install it, etc). Apport basically encourages false positives so much that most of the developers skip over apport reports as soon as they see them. The standard response is a 6-month followup of "if this bug is no longer reproducible, please mark it as resolved" or something like that. Completely unhelpful.

[johnc]

No easy way to get newly-released versions of software until the next release. Want the latest version of, say, firefox? Wait six months. Yes, I know about PPAs, but not everyone does. Rolling release FTW! (Yes, I know about the related problems, and I know many people would disagree, but this is about what *I* don't like about Ubuntu :-P)

Seconded. Adding a new PPA for every piece of software to get updates is getting a bit out of hand... and I'm deathly afraid that if I "upgrade" to the next version I'm going to have most of my stuff wiped out. A separate repo that has the latest of all software would be nice for those of us who like to live on the edge.

Also agree about the absolutely awful puke color schemes. Graphics artistry is not one of the things one should skimp on. They need to get somebody in there and polish things up. Or the GNOME people should do it at least. Get some nice, modern, cool-looking themes going.

[Vadi]

Also agree about the absolutely awful puke color schemes. Graphics artistry is not one of the things one should skimp on. They need to get somebody in there and polish things up. Or the GNOME people should do it at least. Get some nice, modern, cool-looking themes going.

See, this is where arguing personal preferences becomes a failure, because Canonical has been hiring some of the best designers in the open-source world, like Dan Rabbit of the Elementary team, which is often praised for it's new design directions.

[johnc]

See, this is where arguing personal preferences becomes a failure, because Canonical has been hiring some of the best designers in the open-source world, like Dan Rabbit of the Elementary team, which is often praised for it's new design directions.

You have to consider personal preferences of a population as a whole... if this is what they came up with for the default desktop wallpaper, I can't say that I have a lot of confidence in their taste... and they are probably way out of touch with what most people find appealing.

The Ambiance theme is acceptable. The rest of the themes are mediocre at best. And they have a couple themes in there that no person that has an ounce of shame should have ever signed off on.

[Awesomeness]

How can people stand to use ALSA without PulseAudio in this day and time? It's awful. I had nothing but trouble in my recent KDE tests (low sound quality, high CPU usage, applications bypassing kmix) that were magically solved as soon as I installed Pulse.

How can Pulse solve Alsa problems when in fact Pulse itself is using Alsa?
Plain Alsa runs better for me, btw.

[Vadi]

I honestly don't give a much about the default wallpaper, and it sounds like a pretty silly thing to be arguing about.

(oh, yes, that XP one was amazing! state of the art, used by millions computers everywhere! it should get a once-in-a-decade wallpaper award... really?)

[Awesomeness]

Unlike most people here Unity is the reason I switched back to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu isn't the only distro with Unity. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikiped...9#Availability

[89c51]

See, this is where arguing personal preferences becomes a failure, because Canonical has been hiring some of the best designers in the open-source world, like Dan Rabbit of the Elementary team, which is often praised for it's new design directions.

New design direction != copying mac os x

The problem with the canonical design team is that they all wanted to be designers at Apple but they couldn't. And instead of someone punching them in the side of their head for their incompetence and plagiarism they let them design interfaces.

Also since it was mentioned. All the Gnome people responsible for the design have the aesthetic ability of a flatfish.

[scottishduck]

Unity is awful. Between Unity and GNOME 3 we are going to see a huge KDE/XFCE migration.

[madjr]

unity is good start, but way too buggy still, so i dont recommend it yet till ubuntu 12.04 LTS is out.

unity is exclusive default for ubuntu (like the android ui is for android), so thats good because it makes them unique and not just another "gnome-shell distro".

and the space saving is really a plus. Gnome-shell and default gnome 3 wastes way too much space.

as for the list thats totally true, specially the short release cycle has to change. Ubuntu has to stop shipping so much damn bugs because of the short cycle.