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Comment by themstheones | Hacker News Reader

They're determined to move away from what made them a cool distro in the first place.

I don't think that's necessarily fair to say. I've been using Ubuntu since it first came out for probably the same reasons as most other people - aptitude was dead simple and generally seemed to "just work". It probably also won me over initially because out of the box my audio and NIC drivers all worked. Most other features of your average linux system could be found on other distros, so these were the main drivers of me sticking with Ubuntu. Prior to Ubuntu I generally went with Slackware or FreeBSD.

I don't think that they're making any sort of direct choice to stop doing those things. I just think that their current desktop manager choices have been bad. I tried installing the latest Ubuntu on my main desktop PC this past weekend and it was a failure. I did get all my drivers working, but they didn't work out of the box anymore. Even once I had them all working, Unity seemed very unstable and in general the experience was very disappointing. It appeared to me that they were positioning themselves so that they could start throwing money making ad software and garbage onto my desktop. Now with the recent blog announcements that they might be enabling direct-from-desktop 1 click purchases and stuff, I doubt I'll ever consider installing it as a desktop, again. At least without xwindows, all of the original reasons for why Ubuntu was awesome still shine.

After using pacman and presto, I really don't like debian commandline package management system.

You mean taking care of driver issues, taking slightly better care of newbies, making it easier to install useful nonfree stuff and releasing reasonably fresh packages in a Debian-based distro?

As a long time Ubuntu user the new "Software Center" is a huge disappointment. Just browsing it is enough to freeze and sometimes crash my computer; Installing packages is difficult and the UI is slow and unresponsive. Unity also frequently crashed on me for seemingly no reason.

Also, drivers are just as bad as they were back in 8.04. I still can't watch a fullscreen YouTube video without terrible stuttering, screen tearing or audio lagging. And before you say so, no, it's not my computer hardware that's causing these problems.

My point is that Ubuntu's main job is and always has been as a package curator on top of Debian.

If you are a long-time Linux user then you should not have a problem using apt-get or synaptic, or installing xubuntu-desktop or whatever you want. You should also be familiar with the concept that some hardware does not come with good Linux drivers. Ho hum.

Any popular linux distro lets you choose your desktop and almost everything else, the main reason to choose one distro over another is your faith in their package curation

Yeah I totally agree. In two years, Ubuntu has gone from one of my favorite distros to one of my least favorite. I'm on 11.04 and I'll probably stay here until it's EOL'ed then move to Mint.

I'm on 11.04 as well. I'm still trying to find a good desktop alternative. So far there is not much and KDE certainly isn't an option. I'm keeping an eye on Mint as well but I'm not sure if that's going to be it..

Why are you still on 11.04? 12.04 is the LTS release and nearly everyone should be running that this point.

You're kinda unclear as to what the LTS stands for, aren't you?

If you didn't get it from my previous comment, the reason I;m still on 11.04 is because it's the last version of Ubuntu shipped with GNOME 2, i.e. the last decent desktop environment...

I was on Ubuntu from 6.10 to 11.04. Then switched to Mint Cinnamon Maya (based off Ubuntu 12.04) recently. Cinnamon looks a lot more like Gnome 2, and loving it. I'm back to installing whatever applets I want! Maya being an LTS, all the better! I recommend you try it

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