Thursday, May 28, 2009

3 Things I hate about Ubuntu 9.04 and How to Fix Them

I should make this very clear right away: I love Ubuntu. No, really. I'm not kidding. It's a good thing I can't marry it. But as a daily user of Ubuntu as both a home and business user I have found that my favorite OS is often found wanting in ways that are profound, especially as other Linux distros have got this stuff right on a regular basis. Below is my nitpick list.

1) For goodness sake fix snmp: Ubuntu makes so many server configurations a snap. Why can't they get snmp right? It's kind of annoying when the Redhat servers work pretty much out of the box -- even AIX's weirdness can be accounted for, but if you want to get a software inventory via SNMP in Ubuntu, download and compile snmpd yourself. Then cross your fingers.
BTW, if you came to this blog looking for the fix to this problem, heres a link for ya:

Ubuntu SNMP hrSWInstalled OID fix.

2) Decreasing video performance in a new Ubuntu version is not a "stability feature": Look, I know Intel video cards are awful, so does everyone else. They just straight up suck. They do however make up a substantial percentage of the video hardware for low-end laptops that run Ubuntu. It is insane that a game that ran at 50FPS under 8.04 now runs at 15FPS in 9.04. Who thought this was acceptable? Madness I say:

Fix video performance here.

3) The sound doesn't work: Sound worked great in 8.04, but it was overly complicated. Between OSS and Alsa there was way too much complication to the sound system for Ubuntu users. The solution: keep OSS and ALSA and make a totally confused monkey mess by adding Pulse to the linux sound trainwreck. That'll teach us. The link below also covers the whole "no sound in flash" problem as well.

Fix your sound system

As I said I really love Ubuntu, and there is a whole lot of great features in the 9.04 release. I just hope that in future releases the first-time Ubuntu experience reflects the "It Just Works" mentality that made Ubuntu great in the first place.

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