UserFriendly and everything related to it copyrighted and trademarked by J.D. Frazer. Used with permission.

Since before the dawn of time, Linux users have argued over which distribution to use. Me, I’m a Slackware man. But by far, Ubuntu, a massively popular[1] Debian-based distribution, is the one most recommended by everybody. Even I recommend it for newbie users simply because it’s easy to use. But under that famous shiny orange surgery coating, I believe lie some annoying problems. And so I will give an outline of why exactly it may not be the best choice for at least some users.

• Package manager. Ubuntu, as with its father distribution, Debian, uses the dpkg package manager. Of course, people tend to use apt-get or Synaptic as a frontend to it. But I believe that it has one problem: interactive package installation. This is one problem that, for a wonder, the RPM developers dodged. When I’m installing a truckload of packages, and suddenly a sparse and somewhat ugly dialog interrupts whatever I’m doing and halts the installation just to ask me what services should be restarted for the installation of package X, am I going to be happy? Quite simply, I don’t care. I just accept the defaults And a more newbie-ish user is definitely not going to care. All in all, this makes package installation sometimes look annoying and unpolished. If I want to configure something, give me a post-installation summary of what needs to be done, and I’ll handle it myself, thank you very much. Either that, or I’ll ignore it. But that’s my choice to make, not some packager’s.
  
  EDIT: The author of the seemingly excellent PackageKit remarked on linux.com on what’s wrong with debconf, agreeing with me on the pointlessness of asking most users for things they don’t care about.
• Package Documentation. This is related to the above. Basically, Ubuntu/Debian splits every library into three packages: the shared library, the development headers, and the documentation. As a software developer, I think I can say that this is incredibly annoying. I can deal with the splitting of development headers; that makes sense. But if you want the development headers, generally you want the API documentation with them. For the life of me, I can’t find what package contains the man pages for POSIX functions. This was never a problem on Slackware.
  I certainly can see why this would be done; but sometimes, it just causes more hassle than it’s worth.
• Package Naming. I’m really beating the package manager horse, aren’t I? Finding a library in Ubuntu/Debian is all too often a somewhat hit-or-miss proposition. Hmm, I want to install GTK+. Every other distribution names it gtk+2.0, or something along those lines. Makes sense; that’s the LSB recommendation. But Ubuntu/Debian just has to be different and name it libgtk2.0-0. Small issue, but is kind of annoying. What black magic do they use for figuring that one out? I don’t know, nor should I have to know. It’s fairly common to see seemingly random integers added to the end of package names; probably it’s some sort of transitional thing, but it’s still annoying. And against the LSB standard.
• Bootsplash. Ubuntu uses USplash as its graphical boot system currently. However, this choice has been critisized, and for good reason. First of all, I have never seen a computer on which it doesn’t have visual glitches. Either the throbber flickers, stuff gets repeated and mistiled, or it just doesn’t show up. Furthermore, creating themes is quite simply a headache. As a poster on the above forum thread pointed out, when you need a makefile and C programming experience to make a theme, something is wrong. That’s right; themes are written in C, and therefore must be recompiled for every target platform. Lastly, themes are capped at 8-bit color. Compared to the likes of Splashy (a brother to USplash that supports 24-bit color), this is downright 90s-esque.I will grant that bootsplash is kind of a trivial thing; however, trivial things do matter. And does this represent a flaw in the Ubuntu developers’ mindsets?

All in all, when I come down to it, some of my more major complaints are somewhat illogical; Ubuntu seems slower than Slackware, but how much of that is just GNOME’s bloat? I recall running Xubuntu and Slackware/Xfce on an old 400mhz system, and while Slackware was a bit faster as I recall, both crawled. And upstart isn’t actually too bad, when I look at it. Sure, it seems like change for the sake of change to some degree, but it does offer some interesting advantages (although I’m not sure any of them other than parallel startup are being taken advantage of currently). My other traditional problem of stability also seems somewhat unfounded when I come down to it; since I stopped using Kubuntu, I’ve only had one real “crash”. And booting problems seem to be specific to 7.04 Gutsy Gibbon. There are some annoying problems with Ubuntu, but the ones that actually irritate me are general to Debian/Ubuntu.

It seems that I’ve been unfair to Ubuntu to some degree. I’m sure that it’s slower than Slackware, but it does seem to have fewer issues on this whiny laptop. It’s still not my favorite distro, mind you, but I will be less likely to veto it when planning an installation.

[1]: 2346 hits per day according to DistroWatch as of June 7th, 2008.