10 years of Linux

Asked by Greg Hyman

I had intended on sending this directly to Canonical, but they do not seem to have a real "contact us" link (with the exception of sales or server support), and I really did not feel like calling them or sending snail mail. So this will have to be the forum for this posting.

I have been using Linux for 10 years. I should clarify - I have been using Ubuntu for 10 years. Mandrake / Mandriva was my first attempt, but I seem to recall requesting, and receiving, several Ubuntu installation CDs in the mail that installed a much nicer OS.
Since then, I spent 2 years dual booting, and the past 8 using Ubuntu as my primary (or only) OS on 3 laptops and no fewer than 6 home (tower) systems.

It has been very educational.

I have become very adept at the CLI, I can troubleshoot and (usually) resolve most login / non-booting / grub problems without needing to go online, and troubleshooting sound, graphics, and wifi issues has become almost second nature for me.
I have been a vocal proponent of Unix on reddit, digg, and several other public forums, as well as to my coworkers - to the point I am generally labelled a 'fanboi'.

My family have become used to a new desktop or launcher or password every 6 months; our son (now 12) cringes any time he wants to play a windows-only game because he knows that the single dual-boot system we have will take at least 15 minutes to restart and (finally!) be ready for crysis, spore, portal, or rct3 (yes, I still have that one!)

Today, however, and for the duration of the upcoming weekend, I am dumping all Linux systems, and switching everything we own over to Windows. Exclusively.

I would like to explain my reasoning - this is what I had intended to send to Canonical directly, rather than post it here and be subjected to a hundred 'flame' posts; perhaps mentioning my decade-long history of being a supporter of Ubuntu will prevent that, but probably not.

Last night, I installed the latest handful of updates that showed up on our main computer (XUbuntu 13.10) and rebooted. Understand - this was for me a 'background' task; I intended on moving our living room around to make room for our new furniture, and playing some music on the computer while we worked.

Six hours later, I was still sitting in front of the computer trying to get it working.

I had done a clean install about 2 weeks ago; the prior installation of Ubuntu 13.10 had started acting up - programs that had been closed would not launch again, because they were still running - I could launch system monitor and close them that way, but only once - because then system monitor would not re-open because it was still running without a visible window. My guess is that gnome was closing just the window, but not closing the program itself. This behaviour was across the board - software center, chrome, nautilus, etc. No error messages, they were just opening without a window.

After struggling with that for several weeks, and finding no definite answers anywhere online, I finally gave up, wiped the system, and did a fresh install from a new Xubuntu 13.10 cd. My feeling was that gnome had developed a problem with my mobo or video card, and I seem to remember the update from 13.04 to 13.10 resulted in my spending an entire Saturday trying to coax ccsm to give me back my windows' menu bars and borders (fortunately I had been through this multiple times over the years on several machines, so it wasn't a new thing for me - as I said, I've gotten good at fixing things on my linux machines over the years), and reset the nvidia screensize to fit on my overscanning tv which does not have a menu option to disable overscanning, dealing with the video player crashing if I disabled the subtitles, an error log which now has invisible time and date stamps, and so on...)

So a fresh install of XUbuntu seemed like a viable option; I had grown weary of having to constantly question the stability of gnome after years of various quirks - perhaps xfce would be a little easier to maintain.

I had to go through the usual dance after a fresh install so I could watch a DVD, listen to an MP3, etc. but all in all, it was a fairly typical installation.
Well, the default video player wouldn't synch the picture and the audio (an hour of messing with it, and I finally went to VNC which works fine.)
... and the latest nvidia drivers seems to have an overscan option, but now we're back to needing xorg.conf (except last week, an update package dumped the overscan settings and I had to re-create them.)
... and tumblerd crashes every time I open thunar
... and on and on - which, as I said, is a fairly typical installation.

Yesterday, I installed the daily round of available updates as I said.
When I rebooted, it came up with a new one for me... I tried to open the drive that has all of my music on it so we could listen to something while rearranging the living room. But for some reason, the drive would not mount - I do not have permission to do that (internal hdd, no special partition, never had to manually mount it to open it before.)
I tried installing palimpsest, but the software center told me I was not authorized to install software.
I tried mounting it via the cli, but was repeatedly told that I do not have permission to do that.
I tired it as root, but was told I did not have any rights in sudoers.
I tried looking at my rights in users/groups, but I had no functionality there other than to change my name.
I tried rebooting my machine, but apparently now the reboot option only does a logoff, and there is no way of actually rebooting short of hitting the power button.
After cycling the power button, now my machine comes up to a terminal-style login: prompt for about 10 seconds, then goes on to the gui. (I had seen that in Ubuntu as well, I seem to recall having to reinstall cups, or my specific printer to make it go away.) (Yet I have not tried messing with my printer on this new installation; I never could get the scanner to work properly in Ubuntu, except on the remaining windows installation on my son's machine, so I have not yet even considered messing with it on Xubuntu - so who knows where the glitch is this time.)
But rebooting changed nothing.
Oh, and the overscan settings are gone again, so now I'm doing everything half-blind since everything from the launcher takes place at the top left of the screen, out of visibility.
Advanced options / root prompt at a power-button reboot would not allow me to delete the user, and the only new user I could create had the same rights and privileges as a guest account, even though I made certain to give it admin rights.

I ultimately booted up to the live CD and tried to fix things that way, but all I get from that is a nice message telling me that my primary hard drive is now a "read-only file system."

I said a few unkind words at that point; I still have 2 non-working sansa mp3 players and a microsd card that were bricked a few years ago as a result of an issue with nautilus - multiple files being copied over the usb cable go slower and slower until it finally stops altogether and then reports "read only file system" which, after a few days of fsck, dosfsck, and attempted reformatting yields nothing except "read only file system.) (I have 2, because the first one I assumed was actually corrupted memory in the device, the second one and the new microsd card were from trying it again and being reminded that 'linux just can't do some things')

I ran fsck -c which found nothing.

I ran fsck -cc which also found nothing, which is a surprise, because trying to change the user rights immediately came back with "read only file system" - so how could fsck to a write test?

It was at that point, after six hours of working on the computer rather than spending the evening with my family (again) that I finally had an epiphany.

It is not worth it.

That was my moment of clarity. I have spent years learning how to troubleshoot linux problems. And a decade after starting, I am still getting better at troubleshooting, but I have finally seen that linux is not improving - rather, it is finding new ways to not work that require me to spend even more time learning how to troubleshoot.

I want to turn on my computer, watch a youtube video with my son, listen to some music, keep in touch with my sister in Germany, maybe plug in my phone and GPS and update them, watch a little porn, and play a few games. Nothing special.
Linux is able to do all of these things, but only after patiently adjusting and tweaking and caressing more settings than a person should have to.

I have a 6-year old 24" monitor that never would work correctly until I spent an entire weekend learning about edid, and the proper way to set timings for every single mode and color depth in xorg. All of which quit working the second the driver was updated.
My 5.1 speakers sit in the closet unused because I got fed up with trying to get the system to output proper 5.1 channels, only to have to go through it several times over the years whenever an update would break it again.
I have never plugged my phone, tablet, gps, camera, or my son's media player into the computer for fear of having it turn them into a read-only systems (or worse)
I cannot count the number of hours I have spent stuck in front of my computer trying to make it work correctly, only to be rewarded with yet another round of updates that undo everything I have fixed, along with some new issues that start the cycle all over again.

Meanwhile, my wife's windows laptop is kept out of my reach, because she has suffered through a decade of watching me spend more and more time struggling to make linux work correctly.
And the thing that makes me sad, is that for all of my years of defending linux as the greatest thing since sliced bread, is that every time she turns on her laptop, it just works.
No constant tweaking, no cli, no limitations, no user permission errors... it just works.

I want a system that just works.

And for ten years, I have gathered enough data to prove to me that linux cannot provide that. It is not ready for the home user, because it rarely "just works."

So thank you, canonical, for the education.

But the fact that a casual user has to have a ten-year education to find out that they are still not able to point, click, and listen to music, is a sign that the OS you have made available is not ready for the masses.

I bid you good luck, but I sincerely hope that you do a reality check from time to time to see if you are developing a system that is user-friendly enough to be made available for someone to use out-of-the-box without jumping through the hoops that seem to be accepted by the community.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said :
#1

What is the question here?

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Greg Hyman (gregmhyman) said :
#2

No question... just a post that will hopefully catch the attention of someone at canonical and provide them with what I feel is a valuable data point as far as feedback from their users.
If the only way they monitor the success of their OS is by the number of downloads, or the number of problems marked as 'solved' in the forums, then they are missing an important piece of feedback - the number of people who give up after actually doing as much as possible to make it work.

So, this is not a question, and perhaps does not belong here. But there is really no other way that I can find to bring my sob story to the support staff that may actually care to hear it.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said :
#3

This is a questions forum. The ubuntuforums may be more suited to your needs.

FWIW, I started on Mandrake too, back in 7. Great days when KDE was good.

You may want to try reinstalling with Ubuntu 12.04, it is rock solid and supported til 2017. May be the ticket. Trusty is out in a few weeks. Give that a go :)

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michael (yellupcm-gmail) said :
#4

Greg
I know your pain. Ubuntu 13.10 is giving me way to much trouble, can't wait for 14.04 to come out. That said, I have XP and 7 Windows. I spend too much time updateing programs and running virus and malware checks. Just updating XP last week, I got five warnings about malware. What is your secret, about productive time on Windows?

In way of an answer, be aware of downtime chasing viruses, malware, and costs of Windows. Good luck whatever you do.

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Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131) said :
#5

"But there is really no other way that I can find to bring my sob story to the support staff that may actually care to hear it."

They don't want to hear generic, dime a dozen rants (and neither do the few people that actually answer questions on this answer tracker). If you want the best chance to improve things, then focus on specific issues, provide information, etc.

Otherwise, your "sob story" belongs in Recurring Discussions subforums on Ubuntuforums: http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=302

(Sorry if that's blunt, but I'm not big on sugar-coating the truth.)

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Warren Hill (warren-hill) said :
#6

Post on Ubuntu Forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/

or Ubuntu Discourse: http://discourse.ubuntu.com/

Both are primarily end users like you and I but they are monitored by Ubuntu staff as well. This will also have the advantage that since they are both Forums other users can add their "Me toos" and "+1"s So that the powers that be can see the strength of opinion. Try to be positive though: we need to recognise Ubuntu's failings so we can concentrate on improving it but as pointed out by Daniel nobody wants to read a general moan. It's not constructive.

Alternatively if you have time help out we are always looking for help and you don't necessarily need to be a developer to help, though if you you are we need more developers too.

If your interested in helping you can learn more here:
http://community.ubuntu.com/contribute/

I agree with Actionparsnip here reinstall 12.04 and eventually upgrade to 14.04 no rush 12.04 is supported till 2017 so you can let other users find (and fix) the problems in it before you upgrade.

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