First of all, let me put this in perspective. I’ve been using Linux on workstations and laptops since Red Hat Linux 6.2. I stayed with Red Hat all the way through Red Hat Linux 9. When Red Hat split the distribution into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Core in 2003, I switched to Debian. I ran Debian for about six months, then switched to Gentoo Linux. In the summer of 2008, I switched to openSUSE Linux and I’ve been on openSUSE since then.
Every time one of the major community Linux distributions ships a new stable release, I try it out. So far, none of the Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu or Mint releases has come out significantly better than openSUSE, so I’ve stuck with it. And that remains true for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin”. If that were the end of the story, I could close this blog post now. But it’s not.
If you’ve been following this blog and my Twitter stream and Github account, you’ll know that I’ve been collecting tools for computational journalism and packaging them as appliances. And I’m moving on towards a Platform as a Service. One of the requirements I’ve put on that is that the tools should be distribution-agnostic as much as possible. Up to now, everything has been on openSUSE because of the SUSE Studio appliance construction tools and to a lesser extent the openSUSE Build Service package repositories. But I’ve come to the point where I need to make things work on Fedora and Ubuntu.
So I’ve quad-booted my laptop (Windows, openSUSE, Fedora 16 and Ubuntu 12.04). And I’m trying to triple-boot my workstation with openSUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu. Which brings us to the first problem – openSUSE and Fedora installed cleanly on the workstation, but Ubuntu 12.04 didn’t. In particular, the Ubuntu desktop doesn’t even come up on a 1024×768 monitor!
I can understand Linux not coming up on a wireless card that’s relatively new. I can understand Linux having trouble with a touchpad or with audio. After all, the hardware makers design for Windows and Apple, not Linux desktops / laptops. But a 1024×768 monitor that’s run everything from Gentoo / WindowMaker to KDE 3.5 to KDE 4 to GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 and LXDE and Cinnamon on openSUSE? A 1024×768 monitor that runs Fedora 16 without any problems? That’s just plain wrong!
I did get the Ubuntu desktop working on the laptop, which is a much newer configuration. I’m not going to spend a great deal of time on how ugly the desktop actually is when it works. That’s been covered in numerous places and desktops are
- A matter of personal taste, and
- Customized to the user’s workflow.
But for someone who, like me, is used to the GNOME 2 desktop as delivered in previous versions of Ubuntu and Fedora, the openSUSE customization of GNOME 2 and the current clean implementations of GNOME 3 on openSUSE and Fedora, Ubuntu’s Unity desktop is jarring. And it’s really hard to figure out how to do things, where stuff is, and so on.
Moreover, the whole distribution is “pushy” – it’s hawking subscriptions to Ubuntu One cloud music, for example. The software installer has favorite apps, and so on. It’s like having a Kindle Fire or an iPad or visiting the Chrome Web Store or Google Play – the Ubuntu desktop is trying to sell you something every time you move your mouse. Ubuntu has turned the Linux desktop into just another media consumption device!
That’s two strikes – annoyances but not deal-breakers. But what I want to do with Fedora and Ubuntu is use them as hosts for virtual appliances, just like I use openSUSE and Windows / VirtualBox now.. In openSUSE and Fedora, I can go into the software installer and select a “pattern” and get everything I need to do that. If Ubuntu has that, it’s well hidden under the games and the productivity suites and the media apps. Sure, I can go find how to do that on Ubuntu on the web, but it seems to be going against the grain of the distribution. It only took me two minutes to find it on Fedora after almost four years of working daily on openSUSE!
I’m sure “Precise Pangolin” is a fine distribution “under the hood.” The previous long-term support version, 10.04, is an acknowledged workhorse in servers along with Debian, RHEL/CentOS/Scientific Linux and SLES. I have to test on it, and I’ll figure out how to be productive at it. But if Canonical can’t come up with a desktop built for Linux professionals like me, they’re going to lose us.
