This week I felt especially unproductive and part of the reason was because my current KDE ArchLinux configuration felt over the top buggy and unpleasant. FireFox does not know what applications to open on downloads or dolphin's theme has the address bar overlapping with toolbar icon or HAL's permissions just would not work properly and let me mount other partitions without using sudo. This is mostly due to me not taking enough time to configure every thing properly as expected in the Arch way. So this morning I thought I would go back to my old style about 4 years ago when I used Kubuntu and for the most part accepted what was given by mainstream packagers. Only this time I went extreme and went for Ubuntu with Gnome so everything is predefined for me by mainstream. I know Ubuntu is very customizable, but for this experiment I wanted to stick as much as possible to the applications given and not modify anything. I wanted to see how well Canonical folks learned to get the desktop right out of the box for average user who needs to do business with minimal configuration time.
One aspect I really do not appreciate about other reviews is extensive description of installation process and little to nothing about overall usage. So I will not say a word about installing. Contradicting myself, I only used the distro for one day so I have not explored it deeply enough either but I think what I have so far before using it further is a good start.
The first thing I found very strange is extremely slow installation of deb packages. I do not think 18 packages of about 30Mb should take over 25 minutes on an i7-920 with 6Gb RAM. Updates took forever to install and so did simple apps like netbeans, thunderbird etc. But I can easily forgive that because other than that installing packages is extremely simple. New Software Center makes finding what you need, even if you do not know name of the application that does required task, very simple. Although, I would still like to see the list of dependencies being installed without having to switch over to regular package manager but then maybe its for the better to not confuse new users with weird names.
Prior to moving Flash player to 10.1, Adobe supported 64bit plugin fairly well (at least in Arch) and it works even better than 32bit (which gave me some strange sound issues). Therefore I was fairly dissatisfied with Ubuntu installing a load of 32bit libs. On the contrary, I was relieved that the Firefox plugin finder is well integrated with package manager so the plugin wizard got everything necessary in literally 2 clicks ("Next", and "Finish"). What did puzzle me at first and made me question the success of installation is having to restart Firefox. I never had to restart it after flash plugin so I was lost for a minute there. No problem afterwards.
So far, the issues have little to now impact on the quality of usability so I will get to that next.
I've seen a lot of advertisement about how Ubuntu is ready for social network addicts. Having acquired accounts from Facebook, Buzz, and Twitter as well as chatting over IRC, Gtalk and MSN simultaneously I felt eligible enough to have a go at the features. Unfortunately my experience was not pleasant at all.
First up, the position of social buttons on the top bar is very awkward. Access to social applications (Evolution for email, Empathy for chat and Gwibber for social sites) is under one button while configuration and status setting is under another with a long date in between. Took me nearly 5 minutes to figure out why nothing happens after adding all my accounts until I saw that the applications to use them is completely elsewhere. Why can't it all be under one menu with 3 sections separated, for the apps, configs and status?? This part is not very friendly.
Neither is the ability to change default applications. As we will see later, Gwibber and Evolution really did not get anywhere so I had to do some file system hacks to change the apps in that menu. So for the unenlightened, social networking halts to a stop if one is unaware that there is a way to use other clients if features in the default ones are insufficient. What's worse is how the social application menu does not update properly. After setting up accounts in the other config menu Gwibber, I believe it was, back in its social apps menu still had "configure" next to its name after I clicked on it for the first time. First I was not sure if I made a mistake in the main configuration set so I went back and checked everything twice. After a while I was like "what the heck" and click on Gwibber with "configure" still next to it. Only then did the title go away.
While on the topic of Gwibber, I must say its completely useless. On first glance I was very impressed with its ability to pull statuses from all accounts into one seamless timeline. I could then drill into separate modes (twitter reply, twitter direct, facebook posts, facebook replies, facebook images, etc.) to get detailed info and thats where it started to break. Regular posts on facebook were just fine. However, it could not pick up replies to my posts more recent than a month no matter how many times I reloaded. Even worse for images. It picked up a random friend and only displayed all the images from that one contact alone, again, from a month ago. So images and replies are useless. Unfortunately, so was posting. Gwibber does not differentiate post length between different accounts. It limited me to 140 characters regardless of whether I was trying to post to twitter or not. Settings were extremely minimal to check if there is a misconfiguration. There was also no Buzz account support (although I guess thats expected since its API only came out a week or so ago). In the end the whole app became a useless waste of screen space. I'd love to know if others had a similar experience.
Empathy, on the other hand, worked beautifully. All accounts entered in the config menu were picked up without any strange errors and the overall interface layout works well. It is compact and does not get in the way, yet does not compromise on the contact's info. Regretfully, it is often difficult to say a lot about good products rather than bad ones so I will leave Empathy to its glory in a short paragraph.
Evolution appeared to be a great product, however it does not work for me personally because of the lack of IMAP IDLE. Getting email notifications as close as possible to real time is very important and lack of IDLE proved to be a real problem wile I was trying to give some hardware advice to a friend of mine, sometimes not noticing his replies 15 minutes later (he could not use messenger at work). Back to thunderbird for that one, but if this is not important Evolution does a great job with clean interface. Well, there is one perk. I could not find a way to get all email accounts display under single "inbox" entry the way I can in thunderbird. So I have 2 accounts I must constantly click between and third one, labeled local computer or something similar, which always stays empty and I must ignore it. Maybe I just did not notice an option somewhere for it to work.
Since Gwibber failed, I went ahead to try something I really was itching to find out. I cannot get Adobe Air to work under Arch for anything. Installed every 32bit lib suggested but tweetdeck would bring up only blank screens with incomprehensible errors in console and pages with Air apps installation links crash the browser. Awesomely enough both Air installer and apps work as smoothly as on windows. Although 32bit deb as expected fail on 64bit, running a bin installer from terminal got there just fine. Not only that, I did not have to do any weird hacks described in many forums to get tweetdeck installed: going to tweetdeck website and clicking install was plenty enough. After the installation there are no errors or warnings at all, everything works wonderfully and interface is not out of place even though it is a foreign toolkit. Whatever Canonical did there with browser integration and run-time dependencies to get it all working so seamlessly is alone worth using Ubuntu on daily basis because otherwise getting these GTK and Air apps to at least startup in a foreign environment has been a massive undertake in Arch (and still got no where past the startup).
It's a little sad to be having to use a non-free environment like Air in an OSS environment, especially for the purpose of replacing failed attempts like Gwibber.
By then I started to miss my not so well configured KDE back in Arch, especially because I was spending the same amount of time and energy configuring what should already be configured (eg. Gwibber with tweetdeck). Then I had to replace even more apps. Although I found totem player to be a good enough replacement of smplayer (although it does lack the ability to resuming any movie at the last position), rhythmbox and transmition did not fit the bill. Transmition has no ability to prioritize torrents or files within a multi-file torrent the way ktorrent does and rhythmbox cannot bookmark positions in mp3 files the way amarok does. So at the end of the day I was doing essentially the same thing I was doing at Arch. The final point which made me reboot back into Arch was how unreadable the menu fonts were in netbeans and I was not going to waste anymore time finding out why when I had coding to do.
I will definitely do some more hours inside ubuntu to try to do more daily tasks in it to give it a fair judgment because regardless of above issues it does give a very good head start. For today, however, its back to "the Arch way".
| Next > |
|---|
