It’s Ubuntu Day (1 of 2) for 2011. Praise your local Linux guru, and go download Ubuntu 11.04 . I have to say, I don’t like unity… at all. I went back to the classic desktop as soon as I figured out how to do it! This isn’t actually my first experience with the unity desktop, either. When I got my netbook back in October, I attempted to install the Ubuntu netbook remix. I was quick to wipe and install plain Ubuntu upon the precious system.
I was actually very close to reinstalling Ubuntu 10.10 this evening. There’s always an issue when installing/upgrading and this time, as it always seems to be, there was a problem with the sound. At first I didn’t even think it was the sound though! Upon loading Firefox 4 (so that I could download Google Chrome), I saw a youtube video on my homepage. I figured I should check it out quickly since flash is also a sore spot with Ubuntu every once in a while. It played, which was a good sign, but it seemed to play is super fast forward no matter what I did.
So I sharpened up my google-fu, and started trying to figure out why this was happening to no avail, including several re-installs of the flash plugin. With that hitting a sore spot, I decided I should try some music. It happened to do the same thing! Finally, after what seemed like forever, I was able to find a vague post on launchpad discussing hardware selections. A-HA, I said to myself. I remember this from the days when I had a Creative Soundblaster Live! card, and the motherboard also had onboard sound.
I fiddled with settings for a few minutes and managed to get things going, but this dilemma really drives me crazy. I don’t understand why these types of issues are so darn hard to figure out. Ubuntu seemed to think I wanted sound going out from my video card over DVI… but when that didn’t work, it didn’t ever consider another option for sound at all. Nope, it just decided to not work. I have the patience, albeit just enough of it, to try and figure these issues out, but I would never, not in a million years, expect an every day user to try to figure an issue like this out.
So… Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu Developer alike. I ask you, why can’t things like this be EASY?! I installed Windows 7 last night on the same PC, there wasn’t a single issue (other than wiping out the MBR… but that’s a gripe for another day). I won’t say that Linux hasn’t come a long way in the last 5 or 6 years, but I still think there’s a long, long way to go.
Also… why the heck do you have to change the default applications every damn release. It’s driving me insane!