Is Ubuntu a Serious Desktop Contender?

Exter-C asks: "2006 was the year that a large amount of people started to talk Ubuntu as a possible contender for the Enterprise Linux desktop. There are several key issues that have to be raised: Is Ubuntu/Canonical really capable of maintaining Dapper Drake (6.06 LTS) for 5 years? I know this is not a new question but the evidence after 6 months seems to be negative. A case in point is the 4-5+ day delay for critical updates to packages like Firefox. Given that such a large percentage of people use their desktop systems on the web critical, browser vulnerabilities seem to be one of the core pieces of a secure desktop environment (user stupidity excluded). Can Ubuntu/Canonical really compete with the likes of Red Hat, who had patches available (RHSA-2006:0758) the day that the updates came out?"

Comments

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[Blakey Rat]

My answer would be, "it's the best offering any Linux has ever had, but it's still far inferior to Windows XP or Mac OS X."

Whether it's a "serious desktop contender" depends on whether people can tolerate the shortcomings, and I think the answer is no.

The big headline about Linux is stability, it never crashes. Well, when people say that, they're only talking about the OS kernel. The sad fact of the matter is that most apps in Ubuntu crash ALL THE FREAKING TIME, and when they do crash, rarely do they ever give you any useful information on how to solve the problem. In fact, a lot of the time, they seem to either just not even run at all, or start up and then immediately crash with no debugging info. Who cares about how stable the kernel is when all your apps fail in mysterious ways?

Most of the software in Ubuntu's "Add/Remove" list still doesn't even create start menu items when it's installed. Or maybe the program that creates start menu items crashed silently and I didn't know about it. Either way.

Ubuntu still can't use the wireless card in Apple laptops. That's enough to be a complete deal-breaker for me-- I don't have wired Internet in my house at all, and all the instructions for setting up wireless on Ubuntu require (irony alert!) DOWNLOADING FILES! (And no, I'm not going to download files on my work computer to get my damned laptop to work. You'd think there would be enough Apple laptop users for them to include the needed files on the damned CD.)

Many pieces of "supported" hardware don't work at all. I'm referring to a Hauppauge WinPVR 250 card I bought for my old PC specifically because Linux users recommended it... after going through the (horrible, arcane) install process with two different Linux experts, I've come to the conclusion that the card simply doesn't work in Linux. Period. The best I got was a postage-stamp sized image with no sound. In other words, all those people recommending it either flat-out lied about the level of supported for this card, or had Hauppauge cards from heaven. I'm going with lied.

Linux apps still ask you to type in device names in a lot of places, which no user should be expected to know. Linux apps don't support OS-integrated spell-checking or drag&drop as well as OS X does. Linux apps (generally) don't support copy and paste for anything more complex than plain text. (Try copying some spreadsheet cells from Excel on OS X... if you paste it into an App (like Photoshop) that has no concept of spreadsheet cells, you end up with a bitmap of those cells. That's smart behavior. I've never seen anything close to that smart on Linux. And Mac OS did that in SYSTEM 6! Probably earlier. Windows did it in Window 95! Linux can't even do it in 2006.)

If Ubuntu had the features of Mac OS X with a better file browser (frankly, Finder sucks ass) and for cheaper than Windows, then it could make real in-roads. But it doesn't, and I don't forsee it having those features for a long, long time.

I see most of these Ubuntu problems as a failure of the QA process, if there even is one. Apple has many 8 different laptop configurations, the fact that wireless doesn't run on ANY of them out-of-the-box is pathetic. It's not like Dell that has 800 different laptop configurations, and somehow the Dell ones probably work better than the Apple ones.

Or how about this little gem: iBooks are designed to sleep when the lid closes because they use the keyboard for venting heat. This means that if your iBook doesn't go to sleep when you close the lid, it could quite possibly damage itself from overheat. Ubuntu doesn't by default sleep the iBook when you close the lid. I was actually kind of hoping that it would damage the laptop so I could sue their asses for creating software that damaged my computer. The fact that Ubuntu has *dangerous* defaults without even WARNING iBook owners is unacceptable, and you'd never see Apple or Microsoft doing it. And again, there's only like 4 models of iBook ever, how hard would it be to put in a "caution: don't close the lid without manually shutting down or sleeping first" warning somewhere?

Kind of turned into a rant, but ... yeah. There you go.