Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I'm utterly convinced that Ubuntu's premature release of 8.04 was a terrible decision.  The 6 month release cycle has produced a distribution that gets untested results.  Sadly enough, people are buying this distribution as the best desktop distribution out there.  I'm not inclined to disagree, but I'm quite disappointed with the current release.

My laptop is an old Dell Inspiron 600M with the ATI graphics card option.

• Firefox 3b5 should NOT have been packaged in the distribution.  You're sacrificing a lot of previous usability with this upgrade in losing the capabilities with many plugins.  Worse yet, it's BETA software.
• KDE 4 was not packaged as part of the distribution.  That's probably a good decision considering that I've read a lot of bugs are springing up left and right.
• I can't tell if my ATI driver is working appropriately with this distribution.  I'm getting numerous crashes, both with Skype, Flash and Firefox.  It's hard to say what the root cause was.
• You lose XMMS to XMMS2 and will be missing all the playlist capabilities associated with that system.
• For a "mature" release, they still can't get something simple as dual monitors working with a simple checkbox/detection.  EXTREMELY disappointing.
• Synaptic needs a major overhaul as does all the other visual package management systems.  Scrolling through that overloaded list is just insane.  There's too many packages that overlap with each other and it can potentially confuse users.

I left Fedora in the dust a while back when it became clear that the Fedora distribution was nothing but bloat ware.  Even if the base distribution for Ubuntu is slim at one CD, the number of packages and lack of testing does not produce a better distribution than what Fedora has.

I feel that all the hype that Ubuntu has received is unjustified.  It is clearly NOT a distribution that works out of the box, but more like a Mac that works with a limited range of hardware with iffy results at best.

People keep clamoring about the coming of Linux as being ready for the desktop.  Truthfully, I doubt that the mentality of the greater Linux community will ever understand what makes a decent desktop: simple usability.  The Linux community does not nor probably will ever develop just for the average joe, instead opting for the average geek by providing a confusing number of options that blend together in some meaningless fashion.  Choice?  Certainly.  Making a good decision?  That's something left to be desired.

Right now, I'm truly regreting my decision in upgrading my desktop back in Tokyo and even using anything above 7.04 for my laptop.  This experience has been excruciating.  Right now, my feeling is that until the Linux community (or distributions) like Ubuntu get major support from the hardware manufacturers to provide better QA and just describing flat out the support of their stuff that they have no chance of making any headways at the desktop level.  That's the raw truth.