On 07/28/2014 08:15 AM, Kevin Fries wrote:

Ubuntu has made themselves the self appointed champion of the stupid IMHO.

Someone has to adopt the windoze refugees as they flee 20 years of perpetual infection.  Friends don't let friends get sucked into apple's walled garden.  I dislike the ui and function (and company), I don't really get it...

Sad part is, it really was fairly pure before Canonical tried to reinvent the wheel with Unity, and moved their platform around it. People didn't want a touch-y ui then, windows 8 users hate it forced upon them now.  Canonical just made some bad core decisions how to advance the os as a distribution, where breaking it off from d-i began to destabilize repeatable process for upgrade and sanity control.  No upgrade was ever the same or sane after 10.10-ish.

But...

If you are to the point of wanting your system your way, its time to upgrade your distro to something a little more professional.

I put Arch on my asus laptop, which between the crazy 2880x1800 display and nvidia gpu, freaked the heck out of ubuntu to the point even the desktop installer was unstable to use.  Why?  Ubuntu team trying to composite everything even in the live desktop caused the oss nvidia driver to freak.  Having to dissect ubuntu installer to make raid/crypto/lvm go for years made Arch a walk in the park, but it was a raring pain.

Automating the process would be an issue I think, where things like d-i make pretty sane assumptions to launch systems.  This is where redhat, cent, anything deb-based with a solid repo, shine for use in enterprise and infrastructure.  Not sure Arch will be there until some folks can script the install and make it flexible for disk-based recipes and types of installs.  Might as well use rh/deb...

But Arch is not for amateurs.  I would never put my mom on Arch for example.  This distro expects that you know what you are doing.  But, if you have the skill, you will completely avoid the decision making of Red Hat/Suse/Canonical/etc.  This distro for the most part keeps things very clean, and expects that YOU will tweak things as you desire.

I got kde installed on Arch as a quick win via the setup howto, but everything was a little jacked up, unfinished, and in general missing a lot of key packages and setup that I sort of expect from Kubuntu.  I then went to install gnome for a base of gtk (most all of the kde was broken using anything that required gtk-base, like most everything else), and really couldn't figure out how to add a new login option easily to switch between (bad lightdm setup?), and it didn't fix entirely the kde using gtk apps issue.  This frustrated me immensely, ended up back at ubuntu hacking until it sorta worked.

I also wasn't sure how well things like video upgrades ala dkms worked, if steam would work on Arch, other mainline things from deb/ubuntu-based systems.  Experiences with Arch here are welcome and encouraged.

My last straw of ubuntu was trying to install 14.04 on my rebuilt desktop recently.  I ended up spending half a day playing peek a boo trying to figure out where the console was spawning on the system between the integrated intel and my 6-head card.  Bios would spawn to external, console would cling to igfx with a monitor or not, and display would eventually work somewhere between both, totally screwing up everything else.  ATI drivers refused to behave with the i915 active, and I couldn't seem to kill it even with a grub flag.

Then another half a day giving up trying to make my raid, crypto, and lvm setup work.  It didn't, and I started burning Mint cd's, ending up with Mint Debian Edition with Mate.

The obscenities borne toward ubuntu that day shall never be repeated.

Just my $0.02
Kevin Fries

---------------------------------------------------
PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss