Fighting with Ubuntu
Monday, 7. December 2009, 18:29:30
Today I thought I'd get up to date with my Ubuntu installation, which has been more or less defunct since I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 in October. Ubuntu has always been a pain in the ass to set up, except the upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 which went smoothly. I had a hope that 9.10 would keep the stability from 9.04, but... No. It's bad.
Don't get me wrong, Ubuntu has done plenty of stuff that I like. For instance the new loading screen - it's great. But... It fails. When I try to log into the box. When I'm logging into my user, it just flashes and occupies only 1/4 of the screen, and looks severely bugged.
The problem is apparently that I have an ATi HD Radeon 2XXX XT (don't recall the number), and ATi's drivers is baaad. I mean, baaaaaaad. How come I can get 15000 images / 5 seconds in glxgears while it lags when I do simple things such as moving windows and minimizing/maximizing. But still... It worked close to perfect in 9.04.
I figured that I got some better responses when disabling Xinerama, which is needed for two screens, but then I got two distinct window managers on the different screens, and I hate that. That means that if I get a link passed on one screen and I click it, it opens a new browser there instead of passing it to the browser window already open in the other screen. It sucks.
Then I figured, “Hey, perhaps it will work better in KDE?”. I can't believe I even thought that. Of course it wouldn't work. It's KDE, it doesn't work per definition. It's also bloated and ... meh. I feel that GNOME is turning that way as well... More bloated than I'd like it. Why doesn't gnome-light have a meta package in Ubuntu? It's great, lightweight and awesome, just as it should be.
So I quickly uninstalled KDE and tried Xfce 4.6, and to my astonishment... It worked nicely. It loaded like 10 times faster than GNOME (which again loaded at least 10 times faster than KDE), and it had slick themes that complemented its lightweight feel.
Why is it that Ubuntu seems to be getting worse and worse? When I started using it way back, it actually worked and did what I expected it to. Now it's supposedly getting more and more generic, but for me it seems it's just losing more and more support for the hardware on the computers I use. The work computer is even a well-known generic brand, so there's no excuse for it not to work.
You might consider me a Mac fan for saying so, but I don't find any of the other operative systems on par with Mac OS X. Well, Windows has the slight advantage of games being mainly developed for it, but other than that, I think Mac OS X is the best operative system of them all.
Don't get me wrong, Ubuntu has done plenty of stuff that I like. For instance the new loading screen - it's great. But... It fails. When I try to log into the box. When I'm logging into my user, it just flashes and occupies only 1/4 of the screen, and looks severely bugged.
The problem is apparently that I have an ATi HD Radeon 2XXX XT (don't recall the number), and ATi's drivers is baaad. I mean, baaaaaaad. How come I can get 15000 images / 5 seconds in glxgears while it lags when I do simple things such as moving windows and minimizing/maximizing. But still... It worked close to perfect in 9.04.
I figured that I got some better responses when disabling Xinerama, which is needed for two screens, but then I got two distinct window managers on the different screens, and I hate that. That means that if I get a link passed on one screen and I click it, it opens a new browser there instead of passing it to the browser window already open in the other screen. It sucks.
Then I figured, “Hey, perhaps it will work better in KDE?”. I can't believe I even thought that. Of course it wouldn't work. It's KDE, it doesn't work per definition. It's also bloated and ... meh. I feel that GNOME is turning that way as well... More bloated than I'd like it. Why doesn't gnome-light have a meta package in Ubuntu? It's great, lightweight and awesome, just as it should be.
So I quickly uninstalled KDE and tried Xfce 4.6, and to my astonishment... It worked nicely. It loaded like 10 times faster than GNOME (which again loaded at least 10 times faster than KDE), and it had slick themes that complemented its lightweight feel.
Why is it that Ubuntu seems to be getting worse and worse? When I started using it way back, it actually worked and did what I expected it to. Now it's supposedly getting more and more generic, but for me it seems it's just losing more and more support for the hardware on the computers I use. The work computer is even a well-known generic brand, so there's no excuse for it not to work.
You might consider me a Mac fan for saying so, but I don't find any of the other operative systems on par with Mac OS X. Well, Windows has the slight advantage of games being mainly developed for it, but other than that, I think Mac OS X is the best operative system of them all.
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