This post originated from an RSS feed registered with PHP Buzz
by Jim Reverend.
Original Post: Ubuntu Breezy Review
Feed Title: revjim.net: PHP Section
Feed URL: http://www.contegix.com/xml/rss20/feed.xml
Feed Description: because a Reverend can't be wrong. Rants, raves, code reviews and programming practice discussions regarding all things PHP.
By suggestion from friends and with promises of “everything just works” I decided to replace my 4 year old (though continuously upgraded) Debian installation with Ubuntu Breezy. This is my review from the standpoint of a Debian user.
First and foremost, you lied. All of you. Sound does not “Just Work” in Ubuntu. Well… it does, but, only as much as it did for me with Debian. All of the applications do not automatically just work together in harmony.
You don’t believe me? Okay… try this. First, start beep-media-player. In case you’ve tweaked yours ever, you may want to double check your output plugin. The default setting is “OSS” which is where mine is set now. You should set yours there too. Now, play an MP3. It doesn’t matter which. Got it? Okay. Now… do anything else that involves playing sound. Pull up audacity. Load the Gnome Sound Recorder. Anything. It won’t work. Now, stop your MP3 from playing and your other application of choice has no problem. Now, let’s say that you choose the Gnome Sound Recorder as your other application. Well, that would be a mistake. When you rin it, it fires up the eSound daemon and, with it running, beep-media-player won’t play music anymore. Fun isn’t it? Don’t worry. Wait about 30 seconds and eSound will time out and release the sound card again, and then beep-media-player will start functioning again. I’m sure there is some magical set of settings, and drivers, and audio subsystems that I could link together to make everything work, and I’m sure that same forumla would have worked in Debian as well. The point is, it doesn’t “Just Work”, so fuck you.
Now that I’ve gone through all of this trouble, I’m no closer to perfection on that front than I was before and that was really the “big problem” that Ubuntu was going to fix. The other issues I raised with Linux weren’t going to be fixed by an Ubuntu installation.
What else did I get with my Ubuntu installation? Well, Firefox 1.5 doesn’t come with Ubuntu Breezy. On top of that, the “Breezy backport” of it requires that I uninstall an entire host of other packages (including OpenOffice) in order for it to go into place.
Of course, without Firefox 1.5, that means that GreaseMonkey is really slow and not all of my old scripts work. Spellbound (my spell checker of choice) doesn’t want to install into Firefox either so, forgive the mispellings plesae.
My Nautilus version is older and uglier than I had before. I don’t know which version I was on or which version I have now, but I can tell this is older because it feels like my desktop used to feel before I upgraded many, many times ago. I don’t seem to have a gVim icon in my menu any more even though I know it’s installed.
There are a few good things. The installer was easier than the last time I installed Debian. I still had to run the installer three times because I didn’t understand that it was allowing me to make a really silly mistake when it came to LVM setup that made the machine not boot after the install was finished.
There’s a pretty, graphical splashscreen that displays when Linux starts up too. That’s nice to look at. I don’t really reboot all that often but, now, when I do, I’ll be all excited about it. I had a graphical boot up screen before, but, this one is prettier.
All in all, it just feels like an older, although more stable version of Debian. I don’t have things that work now that didn’t work before. Compared to where I was, the only benefit I can see is that it made me backup my data and clean our my home directory.
If you’re just starting with Linux, or you’ve come from something that isn’t “apt” enabled I’m sure Ubuntu will be a very welcome upgrade. The software seems stable and is easy to use (relative to other Linux software). But, it’s not the miracle everyone says it is. If anyone tells you that upgrading from Debian to Ubuntu is worth the trouble. Or maybe these people just don’t know how to tweak Debian as well I do. But, I don’t see any improvement at all. In fact, I’m just about ready to switch back so I can have Firefox 1.5 and my gVim icon back.
Previous Topic
