- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 61 reviews Back to product review
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
1.0 stars
"A fine promise undelivered on"
Pros: Easy installation and setup, nice design
Cons: Buggy, inferior graphics rendering, support model inadequate
Summary: The support forums tell the true story. There are a few basic applications that work well. Otherwise, there are just too many glitches that are beyond the standard solutions on the support pages. My initial euphoria wore off when I realized the system had no sound. None of the standard fixes worked. After drilling deep into the forums, I stumbled on a hack to the sound stack to get it to recognize my driver. It worked, but it was not encouraging. Then there are the situations where applications and functionalities like wireless get broken by routine updates. Even less encouraging. Too many hacks are required just to keep things working. Is there any QA procedure or standardization to prevent these situations? It seems that the integration of problems and solutions into the support knowledge base is haphazard at best.
It seems that the effort spent on cool desktop effects would have been better spent on developing some utilities for installing and compiling drivers and such. Are priorities being set by needs or by developers' egos? All the desktop effects do is show the limitations of the graphics rendering, which looks downright primitive when compared to Windows or Mac OS.
I experienced some of the well-known power management bugs: failure to sleep/suspend, failure to wake, and inadequate processor power control. With Gutsy Gibbon I hoped for deliverance......NOT! Click response for window resizing/restoring and within applications became extremely erratic. Then shutdown failed, freezing on a text screen. Showstopper. Either there's a complete turnaround with Hardy Heron of Ubuntu will be gone from this machine.
- 2 replies to this review
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everyone who has run linux feels your pain. You are correct in saying that it may not be for the average user. Especially since demographics are expanding and now 50-90 year olds are trying to stay connected to family etc. They would have a heck of a time trying to figure this out. But this is open source. i.e. trial and error is how things are fixed. With over 1,000,000,000 people online in the world, and most running windows or apple, this is opensource OS is still not getting enough attention to get that HUGE helpful firmware/debug software it deserves. But it'll get there. Used to be only the uber-geeks in dusty basements running linux unix.
if you work with it enough you love it. it is however seemingly an uphill battle sometimes -
I did a fresh install on a raw hard drive and had the same problems using Ubuntu 7.04. It worked okay at first, but updates and software installations eventually led to system freezes. I never could get the sleep and suspend to work. I even bought a book to help with trying to get everything to work, only to have an update cause more trouble. I finally uninstalled it and went back to WinXP.
