I’ve been a huge fan of Ubuntu. I use it on almost all my computers even when I have to keep Windows installed on some of them. Virtualbox definitely helps make this livable. However, with the introduction of Ubuntu 11.04 which I’ve been using on my Dell Precision M4300 since the day of its release I feel I’m living a nightmare scenario – egads – it’s worse than Windows 7. No seriously. While I understand every distribution is complex, I simply can’t live with the 64-bit problems Ubuntu introduced. I’m in the middle of writing email or whatever and voila – the gui crashes. Yes, it restarts reasonably fast but everything is always lost. Unacceptable! And this is on top of the fact that the new Unity desktop added no functionality and just makes longtime users try to (re)figure out where all the options went. Apparently I must generally drag my mouse to the left side of the screen but even after configuring it to be the upper left I manage to get in the way of myself. Why not offer me the bottom like Macs? I felt the same way when Microsoft Office “upgraded” to their toolbar strips versus the standard menu metaphor.I’ve previously blogged about the joys of Vista but I have to say my Win7 Alienware core i7 / 8GB M11x laptop runs flawlessly for weeks at a time without crashing. Better than Ubuntu! Sigh.
Ironically, on my older machines when upgrading to 11.04 it told me my machines didn’t have enough performance to run unity and dropped them back to gnome. Yes, I know I can still run Gnome or KDE under Ubuntu on newer machines but fundamentally if the distro is willing to release when they know it will crash 64-bit machines and dramatically reorganize the user interface then perhaps its time to move on (or retrograde). And yet there is the issue that both Gnome3 and KDE have dramatically rearchitected their internals breaking many programs.
In the early 90’s I used Slackware. Late 90’s Red Hat (I did attend UNC after all!). Then Ubuntu came along and life seemed joyous. Now what? My OST colleague left Ubuntu for Fedora. I’m thinking Slackware/KDE again. This is a real struggle.
Suggestions?
Cheers,
John
excuse me for using the Italian language: I had similar problems… We must hope in the next release? such as happened with a view -> Seven? you say?
I had similar problems… dobbiamo sperare nella prossima release? tipo come è successo con vista ->Seven?
Hi John,
you should stick on UBUNTU LTS version (10.04 64 bits in this case).
Use the latest UBUNTU for serious work is a well planned suicide. This is true also for other distros, but UBUNTU dev team like to handle the users as guinea pigs.
Use one years old distro is the absolute minimum safety margin. There is only one negative side: if you have a very recent hardware (e.g. a brand new laptop) some device could be not recognised by an old kernel.
If you think that the situation will improve in the future… think again: with the imminent release of Win8, desktop-oriented distros like Ubuntu will become more and more aggressive (e.g. very unstable).
Conclusion: stay with Windows 7 and LTS (long time support) Linux distros.
One last suggestion: try Red Hat 5.x or 6.x. I have seen Red Hat used in many real applications where failure is not an option and (for the moment) Red Hat has never failed.
Simone Mannori
Humm, I spoke to quickly. It just reverted to the older nVidia driver. From what I’ve seen I must run the nVidia proprietary driver for Unity to run.
Thanks for the tip. I have an nVidia graphics card but I am using the proprietary driver. I’ve turned it off to see if the problem goes away. I’m still not sure I’ll ever like Unity but I’m trying.
I had similar issues, but it turned out that it was a bad ATI driver. I had the same problem in Windows 7, and had to tweak the settings to overclock the card in order to stabilize it. In Ubuntu, I just turned off proprietary drivers. Now, Ubuntu runs for weeks on end while Windows starts to stutter after a day.