July 10, 2007
Linux Sucks!
Okay, so if you’ve read some of my blog posts you’ll notice that I started blogging to get back to my roots of discovery, exploration, and education after many years in the startup community and building and selling WebRaiser Technologies.
Well, this weekend I was writing a bit on the heated debate that crops up over platforms: Apple, Linux, Windows. I was writing about my experience administering all, that I preferred Microsoft as a development platform, and that I’m in a place to start exploring technologies again because I’m not pigeon-holed by business needs.
So, last week I install Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on one of my laptops. Installation goes very well, I’m initially impressed. It re-sized my partitions and setup a dual boot into Vista; it seems to have recognized all my hardware; and the out of box GUI looks nice enough.
And here’s where things go so wrong. On first boot the following happens:
- Can’t connect to the network, even though wireless configuration tool has discovered my home wifi.
- The audio doesn’t work correctly, even when you mute the master audio, audio still plays! At MAX volume!
Okay, two issues that should be easy enough, I figure they are probably wrong drivers (hopefully) and not just poorly written ones (probably). So, I call my brother, who is a Linux and Apple enthusiast and who offers to get me setup with all the latest and greatest apps, enable the visual effects, and see if he can get the drivers working.
And what happens while he works on it! It locks up! Are you kidding me? I haven’t had a lockup since Win9x! With the exception of doing driver development.
He doesn’t get the audio going, but does get the network going. At least for a while, the network abruptly stopped while other computers were able to still access it, so it looks like it’s an off and on thing. Very strange behavior indeed.
Anyway, I’ve got the network back now, audio is still bad. I guess it’ll just make me more familiar with the platform when I fix it. Haven’t seen another lockup, hopefully it was a fluke.
It does remind me of the old Red Hat days in 1998 and 1999 when I was a systems admin over a set of Linux servers for an ISP doing web, mail, and dial-up. The GUI would crash regularly so I got rid of it! Hopefully this GUI doesn’t constantly crash and force me to use lynx again.
Anyway, is Linux really that stable now? Has it come far since the late 90’s? I know my one experience can’t be extrapolated to the general case, but dang!, this is kinda lame so far. Also, do the current Windows complaints really exist about the Win2000, XP, or Vista kernels or is it mainly a remembrance of the painful Win9x days?
I just got back into my computer. Feisty Fawn is being pretty feisty right now.
I had firefox open with 3 tabs: for my blog, for gmail, and for oooforum.org. I then started tried to start a terminal session. I got the terminal button on my taskbar, but no terminal window.
The system became non-responsive except for the mouse. Couldn’t even change sessions. This was after about 4-5 hours of usage this morning. Hopefully this freezing thing doesn’t continue with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn!
By the way, it was the visual effects that were causing random crashes. Switched to beryl with better luck. After a week of stability it crashed again so beryl is now gone.