"It's out love for Ubuntu that I'm being so harsh in this review. Look where we're at -- 7.04, a number of significant releases since 4.10 Warty three years ago -- and it still can't manage the display properly. I had great expectations for 7.04, and unfortunately they're not all met. If you're a fanboy, don't read on, because I'll shatter your fragile world." More at APCMag.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
I doubt it's "just" the widescreen bit. IIRC, Ubuntu worked just fine on at least one of the three widescreen monitors I've owned.
The bigger problem is that PC hardware uniformly blows. Even when there are specs, nobody implements them properly. Mode-setting monitors on PCs is a bitch --- in the Radeon driver it's reportedly hundreds of KBs of code. And ACPI is just never-ending piles of shit.
I think one of the best things Canonical could do is gang up with some other desktop folks and released lists of "tested, working" hardware. Hardware on Linux will never work as well as it does on Windows, simply because hardware manufacturers won't do the job of making sure their products work with Linux. The best thing to preserve the user experience is to basically do what Apple does and say "this hardware works; if your shitty hardware doesn't, no soup for you!" Obviously, that wouldn't stop people from trying to install on their existing machines, and that's fine, it just clearly separates "we tested this and it works" configurations from "this might work, but we can't make any promises" configurations.
Edited 2007-04-30 06:07
Member since:2005-07-08
Every time you install a Linux distribution and find that this or that hardware isn't detected and configured properly, send an email to the hardware manufacturer. Ask them why their hardware doesn't work properly with distro X while their competitors' products do. Write a blog post about their unsupported hardware and provide a link in the email. Also provide forum links that show other users having similar problems with their hardware.
Yeah, these hardware companies probably don't support Linux, and they definitely don't support anything other than Red Hat and Novell, but they are beholden to their customers, and they have to protect their image. The Web is a powerful tool for consumers to drag a vendor's reputation through the mud if necessary. We should use this to our advantage. The Linux community might be small enough to ignore if we quietly accept and work around the status quo as individuals. But we can be a vocal minority with a sprawling Web presence if we band together. The hardware vendors can't hide from that.
Member since:2005-07-22
Member since:2006-12-16
Member since:
2007-03-06
Damn it man, changing to a widescreen resolution has to be done via the command line and text file (conf) editing. Really, I expect a more ""polished"" product that from all that hype about what's ""supposedly"" the most user friendly distro.
Someone really needs to come up with a way of providing a high quality QC to distros before they call it "final".
Edited 2007-04-30 05:49