Ubuntu Wiki

Some thoughts about thoughts (of other people) about Ubuntu

( does it seems strange? well, also listening everyday people bothering about how Ubuntu sucks is strange... )

So, I need to make order in the mess of all that I listened.

Mdz Vs. Gkh

I follow the discussion about how much canonical has given back at opensource community. I mainly (that's obvious?) agree with Matt, Greg's point of view is IMHO completely useless, unconstructive and biased. That's ok, canonical doesn't give the same contributes of Novell and RedHat , but no one tells the opposite... and at a first glance, Ubuntu has much few 'payed' developers than Redhat and Novell

The post on Mdz's blog is: http://mdzlog.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/greg-kh-linux-ecosystem/

I was scared by the worst slide i've seen.. I, as payed developer, have contributed with only one patch in the last two(?) years... So, dear Greg, should I give forfait and have no job? (here there's too few societies that contribute on opensource...)

Ubuntu annoyance

Orig: j.engelh'ss site

1. xterm is configured with the bare upstream defaults (*XTerm*metaSendsEscape: false), meaning that all Alt- combinations are essentialy broken because they produce accented characters instead of the key sequences mcedit depends so heavily on (like Alt-? in Midnight Commander to run a search, for example).

2. The less pager is not configured to use lesspipe by default, meaning that trying to run less /proc/config.gz gets you gibberish instead of, well, your configuration file. Systems as old as RHEL5 have this feature.

3. There is no obvious way to start SCIM and have its environment variables set by a system mechanism before the window manager starts. In openSUSE, all you do is set INPUT_METHOD="scim" in /etc/sysconfig/language and be done with it. No fiddling with window-manager-specific startup scripts that often get executed from a late subprocess and as such, the important environment variable XMODIFIERS would not propagate to where it is needed.
4. It took them incredibly long to do a 64-bit userland right whereas other distros had it for years.
5. No distro way to set up bridges (in /etc/sysconfig/network), you are stuck with the bare brctl commands.

Replies:

2. The answer is simple, less sucks in Ubuntu as it sucks in Debian. We had lesspipe enabled by default until someone prove that lesspipe has weird behaviors (i.e.: it's based on file extensions instead of MAGIC numbers). Actually I don't know how Suse and Redhat handle lesspipe, but if it's the same of the bug above, they sucks much more than Ubuntu and Debian.

Update: I saw on a Suse10, that less doens't behave like Debian one (i.e: behave like should be).

Older Annoyances

Orig: j.engelh'ss site

My flames ;)

Pluto - installing a 'normal' BSDinit on Ubuntu takes three weeks.