Debian-News has assembled a lot of Ubuntu Dapper Drake reviews in one post. “This news post contains the many reviews of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu 6.06 LTS. Currently screenshot tour at OSDir and two reviews at TuxMachines, LinuxForums, ReviewLinux, Linux-watch, DesktopLinux, Nuxified, Linux.com, Tectonic, LinuxInsider, Linux.org, xbit64.net and videos at OSVids.”
I love Ubuntu and I’m using it now. Nevertheless, I just can’t fathom how all these fawning reviewers didn’t notice the serious bugs in Dapper. True, most of these bugs are hardware dependent and one could, theoretically, not run into them. But there are just too many disturbing reports to ignore, and I’ve had issues myself. The biggest problem is with the live CD which will not boot (or boots very slooooowly) on many machines (hint: use the “alternate” CD with its text-mode installer). A serious printing bug causes all Gnome-based apps to print only in draft mode. And there is a bad bug with the ATI driver, causing screen distortion and crashes (hint: use the vesa driver).
These bugs are serious enough that Ubuntu should consider releasing a Dapper-II, rather than making users wait until Edgy Eft is released this winter.
The problem is that if you have fanboys reviewing their favourite distro, they can gloss over the bad things about it.
And there is a bad bug with the ATI driver, causing screen distortion and crashes
Must depend on more than just the driver, as I’ve got two systems running dapper with ATI cards and neither of them has distortions or crashing. Is there a thread in the forums on this?
Ditto, I have a laptop with an ATI mobility card and a desktop with an ATI 9xxx card, no distortion or crashes here. I followed the short tutorial on how to install binary drivers and everything was fine.
rehdon
I remember when breezy came out. A lot of people were screaming how awfully unstable and buggy breezy is and how stable and great hoary was.
Now dapper is out and everything repeats. Some people have problems and you can hear the mob yell again how unstable dapper is.
I promise this will repeat when edgy releases. The n dapper will be the “rock solid choice”.
Before I start, I will just say that when it is released, no version of Ubuntu is 100% stable, thats why you keep Update Manager running……
Now then,
I honestly think most of the moaning is coming from the Ubuntu target market. Let me explain.
Ubuntu is essentially a distro that has been put together to aid people in their move from Windows.
According to some sites, (but no actual prove), it is the most used/downloaded/gave away version of Linux in existance.
Now, most Linux users started with another version, and when they tried Ubuntu, liked the simplicity, and recommended it for their friends and family.
These new users got Ubuntu installed, tried it as their first taste of Linux, but when something goes wrong, they go online and moan.
Usually, they do not post a report to the devs to fix the error, as this is not something in their experience.
With Windows, a glaring arror that causes untold amounts of crashes will have to wait until Microsoft get around to fixing it.
With Linux, just notify the program authors or distro makers, and it is usually fixed in no time.
So, in conclusion….
Most of the moans about Ubuntu being unstable, crashing, unuseable etc are all coming from ex-Windows users.
Hopefully we hear a bit more moaning in the future.
but when something goes wrong, they go online and moan
One could argue that if something goes wrong, they have every right to moan. After all, a lot of Linux users tout stability as one of its advantages: but if your USB stick doesn’t work, the installer crashes, or some other software that’s a part of the overall system doesn’t work, well then people are going to be pissed.
As for reporting things to the devs: why isn’t there a bug-reporting facility built-in? And why should they have to track down a developer at all: surely software should just work. Since when did kinda working, most of the time, become acceptable?
I’m not flaming Ubuntu here (I’m a Debian user myself), but if things go wrong, people have a right to complain, and they shouldn’t be expected to do in-depth reproduction tests and so forth for a developer: that stuff is meant to have been done for them before they get the operating system to begin with.
Answer is quite simple:
they shouldn’t be expected to do in-depth reproduction tests – they shouldn’t expect that devs will fix a bug – if it is rare and specific one – in no time. I _bug_ and _stalk_ bug team almost every week with my entries and comments. But I do that with lot of info, I answer to question they are asking – and in the end, bug is fixed, I am happy and they are happy.
And there goes grand dilusion of IT – no simple user can report bug. He can moan, but still he has to be quite specific in details so qualified support specialist could query him, try to reproduce or try to find someone to reproduce, triage and finally, fix a bug.
In fact, all is needed is qualifed – in human and technical field – techie who can report feedback futher with lot of additional information. In fact, it is second thing what Ubuntu is trying to achieve with creating commercial/community support network. You can access them very easily – System => Help => Community/Commercial support or documentation.
And as side note – I think it is really time to say “no” to people who simply can’t think stright. There is people who should get help and I personally trying not to miss them; and there are trolls who will moan about everything, so I say ignore them until they find the way to ask help in polite way. I think we need clever people in our community. And I don’t much care that we will be minority in brainshare and market. As long I can do my job and have desktop which actually helps me in everyday’s work.
“As for reporting things to the devs: why isn’t there a bug-reporting facility built-in?”
I’ve got a bug reporting tool here in Breezy, or is this just a leftover from the upgrade from the preview last year? If it isn’t, then hard to believe they left it out of a new release.
Well, given how short a time Dapper has been out, it’s not really possible to give it a fair review one way or another, but the snap-judgement new-product evaluation seems to be the most common form of “review” these days.
I’d rather they just called them previews, myself.
It’s hard to find an honest review. I use Dapper, and it is my favorite distro – but it’s hardly bug free. Most of the problems I’ve come across are gnome specific, in particular, nautilus. I’ve had zero driver issues, including installing the proprietary nvidia drivers. Still far more stable than windows.
What I find most interesting is you can tell, before hand, what their bias is towards the OS. It’s either a crashtastic failure, or a solid top performer linux dream distro. Where’s the professionalism?
They just released a significantly huge update (127MB) last friday. What’s up with that? Are they going to update all dapper-release downloads to incorporate that 127MB worth of files? One should not have to go through that much download (all at once, especially on dialup connection) after just a few weeks of the release date. Seems like they should have made it 6.07.
Ubuntu’s latest 6.06 is child’s play compared to Tomahawk Desktop.
See following for Ubuntu’s report card:
1. QoS is pfifo_fast (the default, No rules to prioritize traffic)
2. Every thing one partition except swap!
3. Does not recognize Windows exists
4. Internet browsing by Firefox is crawl to maximum on a high speed LAN!!!
5. No mechanism like Tomahawk’s /home/common to share files
6. Very funny routing table on machines with LAN and wireless cards!!!
Note: above appeared in slashdot earlier (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/14/0323239).
I agree about the printing bugs. On two systems I have installed it on, the printer config tool did horribly. It almost ‘just worked’, I just plugged the printer in and I could print. But… changing the paper size from A4 to Letter screwed all the margins up. (The page would print about 1cm to the right and 3cm down.)
I eventually had to reset the configuration and just use the cups browser interface.
It seems that none of the testers use printers
My only other grip with it is that they took out base-config. I guess most people never see it, but when installing from scratch it sure made things easier.
… other than that, it’s been great! Although, I’m sticking with arch for myself
MWM
I have a ATI Mobility Radeon X700, and I can confirm that the Live CD does not launch X, resulting in a black screen. If you install it in Graphics Safe Mode, it starts bitching that X can’t find a, b, and c.
It’s a TravelMate 8104 latop.
IMHO another problem with this kind of reviews is the fact that the reviewers are usually quite experienced Linux users, or even developers, so if there is some sort of glitch they can quickly resolve it without considering the impact it would have had on “normal” users or, even worse, total Linux newbies.
Ubuntu 6.06 is great, works flawlessly here, and I am not going back to the distro I used before, BUT it is surely lacking in some areas. I am still amazed at the sorry status the Gnome configuration tools are in, for instance, how can a newbie configure easily the graphic card + monitor combo? There was a simple and effective util under Mandriva, no such thing with Dapper Drake…
rehdon
System => Preferences => Screen resolution?
What else do you need?
Believe me, newbie don’t want to mess with settings of graphic card, it just want it to work.
Dapper Drake is a huge step forward for Desktop Linux as we know it. The way that the package manager is so well integrated into the core of the desktop is what sets it apart from operating systems like Windows XP (and even Vista) in my opinion. I am changing my time and decide it is a good idea to sync my clock every so often. I open up the clock configuration, and click “Periodically synchronize with internet servers”, it informs me that ntp isn’t installed and asks if I would like to install it. A few clicks away and ntp along with it’s dependencies are downloaded + installed. I also love the gnome-app-install (Add Applications) love that is shown by default on administrative accounts. It really makes it easy for someone to install software that has no idea about how to do it.
This is the main reason why I like Ubuntu.
I’ve been running the 6.06 release for a few weeks now and I have to say I will go back to the 5.x branch.
on the same box (Athlon 650 w/ 348MB ram) 6.06 runs much slower than 5.x…both running the default install and services. 6.06 boot up time is almost 2x as long as compared to 5.x
I do have to say I like the improvements in the networking tools of 6.06, but honestly, I’d prefer the faster 5.x that I have to do a little work to see/login my other boxes than the slower but more network friendly 6.06
My dapper installation is quite a bit faster than breezy ever was.
At the risk of repeating myself … ditto
But this is not my experience only, 6.06 is generally acknowledged to be faster than good old 5.10.
rehdon
I’m a Windows user, but decided to give Ubuntu 6.06 a try …
I downloaded it, burned the .ISO. It installed on my laptop in about an hour (I guess it took so long, because it installed from the “live” CD session?).
Anyway … everything seemed to work on reboot, which was cool.
But …
1.) internet browsing speed was cut by about 60%, versus my Windows XP install … I assume this is because of the drivers for my (four-year-old) D-Link Airplus Wireless card built with TI hardware. STill …veeery annoying. Rebooting to XP, and download speeds were as fast as normal.
2.) Dialog boxes showed artifacts … maybe due to my ATi graphics card? I’ve heard nVidia is supported better under Linux … still, annoying, and a turn-off. Sometimes the “OK” “Apply” or “cancel” icons were so hard to see, I had to guess which was the correct one to click. Annoying. Again.
3.) Apparently, Ubuntu is installed “lean-n-mean” … no DVD codecs installed, MP3 support wasn’t there. I guess it’s not a big deal to download that stuff, but those things “just worked” under XP — yes, I realize that I *PAID* for it to “just work” under XP … but it’s worth it, in my opinion.
4.) Opening some Excel spreadsheets in Gnumeric (after downloading it (took forever, due to #2) via Synaptic Package Manager) resulted in botched formulas and strange formatting screw-ups that I had to re-create.
5. Word docs opened, but lost all “Track changes” information.
6. Flash plug-in for Firefox wouldn’t install (without going through the tedious instructions to do it manually.)
All to say … I admit I was kind of impressed at the fact that Ubuntu installed OK, and recognized my hardware … but I do believe I’d have a lot of work to do, to bring it up the standards I need with XP … so, for me, it’s not quite worth switching.
Yet.
3.) Apparently, Ubuntu is installed “lean-n-mean” … no DVD codecs installed, MP3 support wasn’t there. I guess it’s not a big deal to download that stuff, but those things “just worked” under XP — yes, I realize that I *PAID* for it to “just work” under XP … but it’s worth it, in my opinion.
AAAARG….this is the one thing that makes me scream everytime I read it.
XP didn’t come with those codecs; your PC manufacturer installed them with other multimedia software. If you were to do a “clean” XP install, neither one of these would be working.
Stop expecting MP3 and DVD support from Linux when it isn’t integrated directly into Windows either.
Stop expecting MP3 and DVD support from Linux when it isn’t integrated directly into Windows either.
Wait a tic. XP does have MP3 support out of the box (Windows Media Player 9). At least the versions that include Service Pack One or Two do. I’m pretty sure the original 2001 release did as well.
DVD support on the other hand requires that you download a plugin or upgrade to version 11 (10 needs the plugin too I think). I don’t think thats too tough of a task to accomplish.
I don’t particularilly enjoy Windows Media Player so having it work out of the box isn’t particularily useful in the first place.
//Stop expecting MP3 and DVD support from Linux when it isn’t integrated directly into Windows either.//
Actually (as has been posted) MP3 support *does* work OOTB on XP.
And, of all the points I listed, that was probably the least annoying.
How about the others?
“How about the others?”
I’ll take a swing.
1.) Perhaps it’s time to update your hardware, or get a newer PCMCIA card. You can also search online for others having the same problem as you, and find a solution that way. My wireless PCMCIA card works just as quickly under Ubuntu as it does WinXP. I honestly can’t tell any difference in my speed. My card is about 4 years old. Might be worth looking into ndiswrapper?
2.) What video driver are you using? Did you install the ATI drivers for your laptop, or are you using vesa?
3.) Very easy, and automated fix. Just grab Automatix, run it, and you’re all set.
4.) Why didn’t you use OpenOffice Calc instead?
5. Never tried that feature. Sorry.
6. Again, run Automatix, and your problem is solved. You had to install it under XP, and this makes it easy for new comers to install in Ubuntu.
I hope that helped.
//1.) Perhaps it’s time to update your hardware, or get a newer PCMCIA card//
Oy. How come I hear this suggestion, every time I run into hardware issues with Linux? It’s a frustrating response, given the glowing promises of “linux will run great on your current PC!”
There needs to be an addendum: “(providing all your hardware is rightly supported)”
2.)//What video driver are you using?//
Erm … the one Ubuntu installed, without any noticeable choice? What one was I *supposed* to install? Where’s the dialog box giving me options install a different one during setup?
3.) //Just grab Automatix, run it, and you’re all set.//
Maybe that would work … why not suggest that, somewhere in the install process, though? It would be cool if there were simply an icon on the desktop, somehow informing users of Automatix … unless … there’s something weird about Automatix. DOes it really work?
4.) //didn’t you use OpenOffice Calc instead?//
Uh, because OOC jacked up the formulas even worse than Gnumeric did? And a quick search revelaed that Gnumeric was “the way to go” for Linux-based spreadsheet programs? I didn’t expect it to flawlessly convert Excel files, but it really messed things up. Perhaps for kindergarten spreadsheets, this wouldn’t be an issue, though.
I’ll try Automatix, and see what happens.
1. “How come I hear this suggestion, every time I run into hardware issues with Linux? ”
Perhaps because it’s the real answer to your problem. You can either do a search to figure out the problem, or try to install the Windows driver under ndiswrapper to fix it. You had to install a driver under Windows to get it to work, did you not?
2. “Erm … the one Ubuntu installed, without any noticeable choice? What one was I *supposed* to install? Where’s the dialog box giving me options install a different one during setup?”
When you install MS Windows, did it give you an option on which video driver to use during the setup? No, it didn’t. Surely you installed the latest ATI drivers under Windows for your video card, did you not? Why wouldn’t you want to do the same with Linux?
3. “why not suggest that, somewhere in the install process, though?”
Because Automatix is not officially supported by Ubuntu, and it installs alot of proprietary drivers and codecs that are unlicensed, and would be considered illegal in countries like the US. Did Windows suggest the divx codecs, etc., for you to install during the Windows setup? Again, no it didn’t.
4. “Uh, because OOC jacked up the formulas even worse than Gnumeric did? And a quick search revelaed that Gnumeric was “the way to go” for Linux-based spreadsheet programs?”
So, the main problem is you’r wanting Microsoft Office, correct? You can get CrossOver Office if you’re wanting Microsoft Office. I’ve never used Gnumeric, so I can’t offer any suggestions for that. I know that I’ve used OO Calc at work for years now with very “non-kindergarten spreadsheets”, and haven’t had problems with any of the formulas. Of course, I wrote the spreadsheets with OO Calc originally.
I’m not a zealot that’s gonna say that Linux is perfect. It’s not. But, from what I’m seeing is that you’ve got the following impressions about Linux:
1. You will never have to install any driver like you would in Windows. That’s not sure. Just as you had to install drivers in Windows, the same would be required in Linux in some cases.
2. Linux is Windows. It’s not Windows. If you’re really wanting something that acts like Windows, and the applications work seamlessly with Microsoft’s closed-source documents, then I wouldn’t recommend Linux for you. I’d recommend you stick with Windows. If you’re wanting to get away from the horrible insecurity, vendor lock in, spyware/adware magnet, beast that Windows is, then I’d recommend Linux. Make no mistake, there is a learning curve. Just as you had to learn how to use Windows when you went from DOS to 3.1, 95, 2000, XP, etc.., there will be a learning curve required for Linux. If you’re using Ubuntu, I recommend using the following site as a resource:
ttp://www.ubuntuforums.org/
Take a look at it, and the tips and tricks that are listed there. That is probably the best and most helpful forum that I’ve come across among all of the distros. If you’ve got a problem with something, make a post, and someone will answer it for ya.
Good luck.
How many of you which are having problems with Ubuntu have spent some time reporting them during the development phase ? If you did report important problems which weren’t fixed so just keep reporting. It is sad but yes there are still a lot of problems mostly with not so usual hw configurations and the ubuntu devs do not have enough resources to address them. Also don’t forget that probably most of the bugs are upstream so that means there are a some applications lacking proper follow-up from the core developers, but well it is much easier to point the finger to Ubuntu for packaging it up for you.
Dapper is great but not perfect, remember that it is up to you to make sure the developers will know about your problems *BEFORE* the next release.
Is there an equivalent to fedorafaq.org for Ubuntu. The forums have a ton of traffic making it difficult to get all of the essential info, tips and trick, etc… at a glance.
Just go to ubuntuforums.org. Very noobie friendly forum.
I have not had the opportunity to attempt Drapper yet, but if Breezy is any indication of the “just working” Ubuntu distro that everyone is in love with….I like being unloved. I hope that the defaults in Drapper have been changed so that a CD can be used as a repository for new programs…not download only. The screen shots I have seen do not show a magnificent change in gnome either…kinda dull. I have used SUSE, Xandros, RedHat 7, Mepis, and have settled on Kanotix, mostly due to its willingness to accept new packages without extreme measures. I seldom have to go to the CLI to solve problems. I went on the Ubuntu forums to learn what all the hype is about and I must tell you that I didn’t find them as welcoming and understanding of newbies as Xandros, as patient as those of Kanotix, nor as well organized as those of Mepis.
I truly am finding that Distrowatch is not the best judge of a distros true abilities. I like the fact that they attempt to keep track, but it doesn’t measure the effectiveness of the distro.
Further, I do appreciate the fact that Ubuntu is drawing more people into the fold. I appreciate the fact that many are finding it to be wonderful. But, lets not forget that it has not proven to be the Killer Distro that will supplant XP nor all other Distros.