Ubuntu Linux losing popularity fast. New Unity interface to blame? | Royal Pingdom

[Michael Butash]

I've used every version of ubuntu since 6.04 on the desktop (and 
extensive server) full-time, and while it's always been a bit cranky, it 
was always the most together and solid linux.  Packaging was simply 
never a problem, nor were dependencies (ahem, redhat and spawn).

It became quite literally perfect for me with 8.04, that everything just 
worked.  At 8.10, it began going downhill, getting more bugs and system 
problems than ever in prior perfect stable configs.  Natty was the first 
that simply pissed me off, with unity being utterly broken and unusable 
out of the box.

There were some rumblings on list about Unity that got me thinking, and 
needing to replace a failing ssd and reinstalling, I would need to deal 
with it going to 11.10.  Dealing with Oneiric has been a disaster over 
the past 4 days.  Unity was just as broken out of box for me on it as it 
was on natty to the point I literally installed KDE to be rid of it. 
Even Gnome3 installed unlaunchably broken and wouldn't work on my 
hardware.  I gave up on KDE after a day and went back to conquer Unity, 
and after 2 days of hacking and digging, I've gotten it to reboot (which 
it does often) perfectly.  When it doesn't rearrange my md raid devices 
randomly and fall to initrd prompts to manually assemble the crypto disk 
at least.

I really have no clue what most people would do having to face these 
problems as I've literally had to debug xwindows (thanks ati), compiz, 
unity, nautilus, mdadm, initrd, crypto subsystems, which are just things 
someone shouldn't have to do to get this working where I have had 
like-configs running for years perfectly before.  ATI and Compiz is the 
worst of it.  I also had to write scripts to start/stop compiz and 
dockbars between windows reliably, disable as much unity as possible 
because it simply doesn't work, and still minecraft and virtualbox crash 
my system hard if I resize them it in random ways.  I loves me some 
ubuntu right about now, instability sucks.

Is Ubuntu slipping in popularity?  Regardless of the pain, my next 
system update absolutely won't be ubuntu after natty and oneiric.  It 
actually saddens me a bit to say it after 6 years of loyalty too.

-mb


On 11/30/2011 11:30 AM, Kevin Fries wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-11-30 at 11:20 -0700, Eric Shubert wrote:
>> I'm using Ubuntu LTS (10.4) on my workstation. That's due to be upgraded
>> with 12.4, at which time I'll need to make a decision. I'll evaluate
>> that version of Unity, but expect I might be going with GUbuntu, or else
>> go back to Fedora. I really don't want to be upgrading my workstation
>> every 6 months though.
>
> Take a serious look at PinguyOS.  Its based upon Gnome Shell, and adds
> some very awesome software back in that Ubuntu has either not included
> (Gloobus-preview&  Gloobus-sushi, Docky, etc) or Ubuntu has discontinued
> (Synaptic).
>
> Kevin
>
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