Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04
by Ryan Smith on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
The User Experience
Now that we’ve had a chance to go over the various features of Ubuntu and its included applications, we can get to the burning question: how is it?
In a nutshell, my own experience with Ubuntu has been that it’s capable of meeting 95% of my daily needs, and 75% of my weekly needs. Outside of the lack of the ability to sync my iPhone (which again is Apple’s fault), on any given day I did not need to boot up Windows. However in any given week I would need to boot in to Windows upwards of several times to run various Windows programs that don’t work under Wine or have a doppelganger for Ubuntu, not counting Windows games which also required booting back in to Windows. The result was that there was more dual booting than I would have liked, but it was acceptable.
What worked best for me under Ubuntu were the most common tasks, which makes sense given Ubuntu’s focus. We’ve already hit on how great Firefox is under Ubuntu, but also music playback, email, and word processing worked well. There was never any point where I felt like I could absolutely not accomplish something related to these tasks when using Ubuntu. However with that I will put the disclaimer that I didn’t find Ubuntu to be significantly better at any of these tasks – it was merely good enough.
If this sounds boring, it is. There’s not a lot to be said about otherwise mundane things that work well. Windows and Mac OS X could do these things, and so could Ubuntu. The distinguishing factor here really isn’t functionality; it’s that all of this was free.
In many situations Windows would still offer a better experience than Ubuntu. Sometimes this is a more polished GUI, as it is Ubuntu often looks like an orange version of Mac OS 9 (the bad Mac OS). Other times this would come down to professionally developed programs having an extra feature or two that while not critical, were nice to have. There are numerous little things like these that still keep Ubuntu well-separated from Windows and Mac OS X.
One item where I feel Ubuntu failed in particular is CLI use, which was a condition I outlined earlier. I wasn’t able to avoid using the CLI under Ubuntu, in fact I didn’t even come close. Some of this comes down to the fact that user generated support often uses CLI commands in lieu of instructions for dealing with the GUI, and in other situations such as mounting ISOs and installing video card drivers the situation was completely unavoidable. These are correctable problems.
Along those lines the default configuration of Ubuntu leaves me scratching my head. For example, Ubuntu has a file indexer and search system ala Windows Search and Spotlight. For whatever reason this indexer is not enabled by default and as a result it’s quite easy to miss. By the same token Compiz defaults to not using v-sync, which means windows will tear when moved. This is something hardware accelerated compositing specifically exists to solve. These items, along with finding a way (any way) to install the Microsoft Core Fonts by default so that the font disparity no longer exists would make the initial experience a better one.
The biggest negative influences in the Ubuntu experience were the items we listed under Things That Went Wrong. It’s easy to pick at things that don’t work, but these also happen to be the things that drove me out of Ubuntu for that moment. Meanwhile the biggest positive influences come down to Firefox and Totem. Neither is perfect, but as I discussed in their respective sections they’re great programs that are much better than the default programs found with Windows and Mac OS X.
Overall I found the Ubuntu experience to be decent, but not spectacular. Next to any issues listed out above, there’s a general lack of killer applications. As a result unless you specifically value the fact that it’s free (in either sense of the word) or the security benefits of it not being Windows, then there’s really nothing there that makes Ubuntu compelling compared to Windows or Mac OS X.
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fepple - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
That is exactly how the usability tests are performed. Developer asks Mom "can you change the background" then records what they dofepple - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
So i tried to find some links about this relating to gnome, but only got some pretty old ones. There are other methods they are using as well, like the 100 paper cuts idea. honestly have a look around and you'll see how much of a focus it is, particularly with ubuntuap90033 - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
Face it, Linux is still back in Windows 2000 days. Try getting SLI working, 1080P working right, games working. IT IS Way to much trouble and damn near impossible for regular users. In Windows or Mac its next to no work and very little issue. Wake up guys, Linux has Potential but thats it. BECAUSE those who advocate it spend so much energy defending what is "easy" to them when they ought to use that energy making it ACTUALLY easy and USER USER USER USER (DO YOU UNDERSTAND THIS WORD?) FRIENDLY... NOT PROGRAMMER FRIENDLY...newend - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - link
All of the things you mention are probably not that easy for grandma to do either. People thrive on saying it's so hard to do things in Linux, but I think it's generally not intuitive to use most computer systems. Imagine if you had no exposure to computers how difficult any system would be. A few years ago a friend of mine wanted me to install some software on her Mac. I had no idea how to do it. I've been using computers since I was 5 years old, but had to google for information on installing software.I actually think that Yum/Apt repos actually make it significantly easier to install software. The other day I wanted an application to take a photo with my webcam. I simply did a search "yum search webcam" and looked at the descriptions of included software and found Cheese which did exactly what I wanted.
When you know exactly what you want, and it's not available in the repos you use, I agree it is more difficult to get it installed. Still with both Red Hat/Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu, you can do an install by downloading a package file. This doesn't get you the benefit of automatic updates, but it's just as easy to install as an MSI file.
fepple - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
Well maybe they would want '1080p' but I'm not sure how that could be a problem unless you have some strange hardware that requires a specific driver... like another OS sometime needs you to go to a manufacturers website ;)Penti - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Installing nVidia drivers and XBMC or mplayer isn't that hard.But keep in mind there is only homebrew codecs on Linux which OEMs like Dell can never ship with there computers and has limited support of proprietary formats such as BD. It's the same codecs as ffdshow, or as in XBMC or VLC on Windows. What's lacking is a PowerDVD with BD support. w32codecs is also available for gstreamer, giving alternative support for WMV and such. Installing ubuntu-restricted-extras is essentially the only thing you need for it to work in Totem if you don't need/have VDPAU support. XBMC is definitively a decent platform to playback warez. You need to rip blurays to be able to play them back at all though. But an Ion is definitively powerful enough for 1080p h264 under linux. But because all that software contains unlicensed patented codecs Canonical don't officially support any of it. So it won't work on ubuntu OOB. Codecs aren't free.
fepple - Friday, August 28, 2009 - link
Thing is, 'regular users' dont care about SLI, 1080P and Windows Games... "where is the browser/word processor/email?" :)CastleFox - Friday, April 9, 2010 - link
Great review. Thank you for reviewing 8.04 LTS Please review 10.04 when it comes out. I am interested to see if they software center has changed the authors opinions.tiffanyrose - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 - link
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