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And when there are visions set by the projects, the subprojects never step up to meet the requirements. Just look through GNOME where there are a list of projects still relying on deprecated components:

http://www.gnome.org/~fpeters/299.html

Evolution relies on LibGnomeCanvas, the bug notes that someone has worked on porting it to libfoocavas, but nothing has happened since then. It is sitting in limbo with no development happening - something that has been known about for over a year and still no work has been done to remove LibGnomeCanvas as a dependency. Then there is replacing HAL with libudev/gudev - again, many components are still relying on HAL and hardly any of the components have been updated.

So not only are you faced with, as you said, "falls on deaf ears" and even when the bug is acknowledged, no one is willing to work on the unsexy, behind the scenes but fundamentally important components. People talk about the millions of eyes but millions of eyes are useless if bugger all people are contributing anything to improve the situation. Millions of eyes don't get things done, programmers get things done when provided with strong leadership.

Oh you're right, there are millions of armchair critics, but bugger all people prepared to do any work, sexy or not.

Remind me how long has the transition from Carbon to Cocoa been taking? Your comment is simply dishonest, you're suggesting that this sort of transition would be any faster with proprietary software? Get a clue the reason why MS and to a lesser degree Apple keep all these deprecated APIs around is because these transitions are even slower for proprietary software.

Bah. Trolling again like a n00b, eh? No surprise there.

Supposedly Windows 7 (which is not too bad, for Windows) gives you so much more than Vista compared the change from Ubuntu 9.10 to 9.04? That sounds more one-eyed that an Aegean Cyclops. Although I'm yet to try it (about to) I think a stable Upstart will make a difference to Linux desktop users.

I'm not sure where the arrogance lies: in the supposedly haughty Linux developers that give up their free time to build stuff (and maybe don't get everything right), or someone who supposes they know what all users want. Do you think that Win7 best meets the needs of high-performance scientific users, internet-scale application developers, or cash-strapped students? really? Looking at the changelist I think that different users have different requirements and this version of Ubuntu has enough changes to represent value-for-money (can you say the same for your $500 version of Windows?).

Why not come up with some balanced criticism instead, we're prepared to listen to that.

Et tu. Windows cost me $82, Snow Leopard cost me $41, both very reasonable prices for an OS.

And how does Ubuntu meet the needs of scientific users and the like when it kernel panics when you use the wifi key toggle on an eee901?

Just to clarify... because in retrospect, I don't think I was very clear... it is not the criticism of Ubuntu that I disapprove of. It is the presumptuous title: "This will not be a popular comment", which effectively prejudges Ubuntu users, and OSNews readers, in general. If the comment turns out to be unpopular, then fine. But if you believe your viewpoint to have value, let the readers decide how they feel about it, rather than goading them with condescending assertions as to how your criticism will be received by them.

Declarations like "this will not be a popular comment" are not constructive.

Edited 2009-10-30 17:34 UTC

It's funny how you people always expect free software/linux to work as you expect it to, because you know "how it should be done". However if someone states reasons why linux is more productive for them because of several reasons and that MS/Apple don't implement this, the answer is always something along the lines of: "Why would anyone want this?", "Nobody needs this", "This is not the Apple/Windows way of doing things" ...

At the same time the same people will criticise every single bug in free software saying that this bug proves how immature the platform is, but have no problem excusing serious bugs in software they paid for.

A few examples why I use linux with e17 as a window manager and why I find myself extremely annoyed when sitting in front of Windows/OSX.

No sloppy focus. I don't think it's possible to do sloppy focus in either Windows or OSX and I don't want to search google for hours to find some program which might hacks around this and probably costs $20.

I find graphical filemanagers a pain to use, for anything but the simplest file operations. CLI file operations beat graphical ones by orders of magnitude in almost all cases. (I am aware that you can use the CLI on either OSX or Windows, but I find compared to Linux they feel more like they've been glued on instead of being part of the OS, although OSX is a lot better than Windows).

I do quite a bit of experimental analysis with python/numpy/scipy. Often I find myself trying to do something where I need another python module. I simply do "apt-cache search python [something], apt-get install python-[]" I do not want to waste my time searching google for the right package. I also don't want to need to look for updates manually, I have better things to do. On a similar note, almost all the install problems on the numpy/scipy lists are about installing on OSX, so stop giving me the crap about how software installation is so simple on OSX.

The other day we had a seminar at my department cancelled, because the laptop which was being used was doing a Windows update and apparently you can't Windows can't do that in the background. The Windows admin told us we had to wait (after 20min waiting the seminar was cancelled). I upgraded my office PC from ubuntu Jaunty to Karmic while continuing to work yesterday (until I had to do one reboot).

The laptops used to control on of my experiments is running Vista (most other PCs in our department are XP), it takes >2min from pressing the on button to login screen and another ~2min from login to actually being able use the computer. I'm amazed about how that is even possible. And no I don't want to clean up the registry tweak around to make the computer more usable, I don't have to do that with my office PC. (I do have admin rights for this PC, and maybe someday I get fed up with it enough that I will).


Bottom line, stop claiming how immature, unusable, buggy ... free software is. Proprietary software has as many quirks, problems. Some of the problems might be more relevant to you, making you prefer OSX/Windows/Linux over the other, but this is subjective and might be very different for other people.