Problems with Ubuntu

Published: April 01, 2008
Tags: linux ubuntu unix flash

Following on from my post about the unavoidability of Flash, maybe a week or two ago I took a plunge back into the world of Linux after a goodly 3 years or so using NetBSD as my main desktop operating system. I decided to check out this Ubuntu thing that everybody seems so very worked up about these days. More specifically, I tried the Xubuntu flavour, because I find Xfce to be less repugnant than the bloated giants that are Gnome and KDE.

Here's a list of things I've discovered about it so far which have bothered me. I consider all of them to be fairly serious flaws, at least from an idealistic stand point:

The "base" installation bares no resemblance to the conceptual ideal of a base installation - it contains many things which are in no reasonable way necessary for your system to work (including Perl and Python and Ruby!), yet misses out things that one would reasonably expect to be a part of any Unix installation and in many cases are necessary for the system to work, like NFS support (client or server).
By default, the root account is disabled (i.e. you cannot login as root from the console or use su from a shell) and you are forced to use sudo to do anything with root powers. At no point whatsoever during the installation process are you told that this is happening, even though no other Unix-like operating system on Earth behaves this way.
In a default installation, typing vi at a shell doesn't start vi, it starts vim. I don't like being lied to by my computer.
Third party software that you install via apt-get gets put in /usr/bin/, the exact same place as stuff that was installed as part of the system. /usr/local remains empty and there is no separation of system from extras, as is seen in the BSD systems and like I'm pretty sure was the norm when I last used Linux.
Whenever you install a piece of server software (like, for instance, the OpenSSH server, which, astonishingly, is not part of the titanic base install) Ubuntu immediately starts this server up, using the default configuration. You don't get asked if you'd like to start it now. You don't get a chance to change the default configuration to something that is appropriate for your environment. It just gets started. I think this one is particularly bad.

With all that said and done, having Flash working is pretty nice, and the package management has been an absolute dream so far, compared to pkgsrc. It doesn't have some of pkgsrc's cooler features, like license auditing or automated checking for security vulnerabilities, but the three simple facts that:

Everything you could ever want is in there,
Everything is available as a binary package,
Updating everything is easy,

make those little sacrifices entirely negligible. It's awesome, just a shame that the rest of the system has such severe deficiencies. I suppose the obvious thing to do based on this experience is to check out plain old Debian, although I also have my eye on Arch Linux. Hopefully I can find something out there that doesn't suck. I'm somewhat worried about the age old issue of Debian's packages being prehistoric, but I suppose that if it's so bad, I can live with Xubuntu - most of the issues above are things you only have to deal with once.

On an unrelated note, you've probably noticed the appearance of commenting on this blog - I think that this works, so feel free to have at it. The road to getting comments to work in pyBlosxom was winding and fraught with peril, and my next entry will probably be about that.

Oh, and the commencement of my PhD has been delayed by probably about a week due to various administrative complications. Sigh.

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