Ubuntu To You, Too

At first, I wasn't too concerned when I read negative reviews about Ubuntu 11.04.  I've read some scathing reviews and been impressed all the same.  This time, however, they were right.  Ubuntu has brought a lot to the table with this revamp but they have lost the things that made them heroic.  No longer is it intuitive and thoughtful.  The controls are complicated and unnecessarily compartmentalized so that you have to hunt and pray if you wish to avoid the command line.  The hardware functionality took a big hit, as there is a rather intimidating problem with certain (and common) graphics cards.  Grub has issues, and that is scary as hell to a novice.  The graphics card issue prevents being able to log in, a paralyzing problem for someone who just moved over to try Ubuntu.  Worse yet, the graphics issue didn't exist in the generic drivers, so we had no reason to expect a problem until an update made booting up throw an error that for some just led to a flat black screen.

This is not the ideal version for a newbie. Previous versions are stable and delightful, this has a lot of growth and bugfixing required.  The graphics card issue can be resolved by booting into recovery mode and then selecting failsafe graphics mode.  This is a fancy way of saying your graphics card is considered out of date, with no fix date in sight.  I have not found a way to permanently set that, so each time you log in you will have to repeat the process.  The methods I found don't always stick, and may reset to the buggy default at random.  Not the worst thing in the world, but not great either.  The other bugs are significant and can make for a poor experience if one isn't used to tinkering around in Ubuntu.  Experienced users with better hardware will have a great time, everyone else will find it frustrating to navigate.

Ubuntu has been great for years.  I'm still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume with some time they can get this up and running.  These massive changes will require a certain amount of catching up while they get drivers and patches for older systems.  I have come to expect a high quality product, and I will continue to hope that the developers bring Ubuntu along to where it used to be.  But for now, I recommend staying with an older version and giving the a chance to get a grip on some pretty serious issues.  Just because I enjoy solving problems and learning doesn't mean I have time to do that for every single function I want to perform, and it sure has felt that way lately.

Which leads to a few things.  One, the new geekery tag will keep all my Ubuntu and other articles together, as I open up a on a wider variety of topics.  Two, I will be posting more geeky news and updates here, because the response has been good.  Three... after four years of faithful love, I have left Ubuntu.  Oh, it's just a trial separation and we're still on good terms for the kids sake, but I needed more.  I have just installed Linux Mint and it could be love.

More will follow.