22 April 2007

Thoughts on Ubuntu 7.04

Here are some of the issues I have with 7.04:

Support screen resolutions are not automatically detected
This problem is not limited to Ubuntu, but to every distro that uses xorg. This issue annoys the hell out of me. I've recently tried Ubuntu on my Macbook and it booted directly in 1024x768, and there was no option to set the correct resolution. I've tried Ubuntu (and other distros) on my Samsung 32" TV and again it was unable to detect the correct resolution. Now, when I use Windows or OSX, they are both able to correctly detect the resolutions. Mac OSX works even better than Windows and seems to know what the native resolution is and use it!
I'm tired tired tired of editing xorg.conf and adding modelines each and every time I install Linux. Also, dual head? Mac OS X just works. Windows might need a little configuration, but easy enough. Linux? Forget about it.

User interface
If "Pretty is a feature", then where the hell is it? Ubuntu's fonts still look *awful*, they are absolutely horrible. The spacing and layout of widgets and text look terribe, just load Evolution to see what I mean. KDE is a little better in but still suffers from terrible looking fonts.

File sharing

I want to share a particular folder. I guessed that Ubuntu was going to use Samba for the job. I navigated to the preferences menu and select sharing and setup my share. I tried to connect from my Windows machine, and wasn't able to authenticate by typing in my Ubuntu username and password. Grrrrr. I guessed that Ubuntu hadn't setup a Samba username and password for me. I opened a terminal and typed $ smbpasswd -a username, this allowed me to setup myself as a user and specify a password. Now when I connected from my Windows machine it worked.
I'm reasonably familiar with Samba to know how to setup a user, but how on earth would your average user figure this out?

Overall
Ubuntu makes a great server, but I'm not sure about it being a good desktop system. I've grown tired of experiencing the sames problems over over again. I don't find being my own sysadmin and being much fun.