Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

Lionel reports that his fancy Ubuntu toy is starting to suck more and more. It won't surprise anyone that the words I told you so are on my lips.

As I've blogged before (at length!) Ubuntu is not a very good operating system. It completely ignores decades of proven Unixy technology (like the command line and the toolbox approach) and presents users with complicated experimental solutions to simple problems which have already been adequately fixed ages ago.

The predictable result is that in an overwhelming number of use-cases Ubuntu simply does not work. The only way to get it to do anything at all, is to forget everything you know about computers and to perform a lot of counterintuitive jumping-through-hoops. Hours of frustrating mouse-clicking and trying to figure out what fuzzy (friendly) messages and prompts actually mean.

Engineers have a very good description for software like this: the bleeding edge.

The price of the bleeding edge is blood. Engineers know this. They also know that if bleeding edge software breaks and extracts blood, they get to keep the pieces and they're on their own for restoring their blood volume.

Not-very-amusingly, Ubuntu targets their bleeding edge software to novice users. Weren't novices in particular best served with tried and trusted technology? Nobody in their right mind would throw bleeding edge software at novices!

I guess this says something about the Ubuntu mindset. Do they realize that the more they diverge from the path of tried and trusted technology, the more blood they will extract? I expect to see many more blogs like Lionel's in the coming months.

Play with fire. Get burnt.

The sad thing, of course, is that innocent novices who have been told that Ubuntu is Linux, will now blame Linux for all the suckage.