Pardon me if I rant!

[hazel]

I've drifted away from my local computer club as they're all Windows users. But a couple of days ago I learned by email that one of the weekly talks would be on Ubuntu, so I went along. Turns out the man in charge of the club computer has done a fresh Windows installation and set it up to dual-boot with Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

It booted up nicely - alright, it was still a brown desktop but there was a nice stylised heron on it. I haven't used Ubuntu for a long time now and I'd forgotten how obtrusive it is in doing everything for you. There's a graphical tool for just about everything - more of them than I remember from Dapper. You really could be in Windows. But the flip side of that kind of "user-friendly" system is that if it doesn't do what it says on the box, it's very difficult to find out what's going wrong.

One of my friends wanted to see if OpenOffice would handle a Powerpoint presentation of his. We hot-plugged his USB pen drive and it should have mounted automagically but, when I looked in "Places", it wasn't there. So I looked under "Computer". There was a drive labelled "USB Storage" but when you tried to mount it, nothing happened. And when you right-clicked and looked under "properties" it didn't have any. Oops!

After fooling around a good bit and getting nowhere, I finally opened a terminal, found out what the kernel called the drive and mounted it by hand. And under "Computer" there was now a second drive labelled "4 GB Storage". This was it. We navigated down to the presentation, double-clicked, and OpenOffice loaded and handled it superbly. My friend was impressed by OO but no-one was much impressed by the mounting glitch.

It made me realise again why I don't like Ubuntu. I think that the more the OS does for you, the less power and understanding you have. Some people are perfectly happy with that, but it makes me feel insecure and frustrated. Well, at least with Ubuntu being Linux, you can get behind all the flim-flam and do it yourself if you know how. With Windows you can't even do that; you're a complete hostage to the system.

[gerard4143]

Or...The Visual Basic programmer who programmed his own web browser...click, click choose color click and done...

[techieMoe]

Interesting. I've never had issues with automount on a USB drive using Ubuntu.

[reed9]

I'm totally with you Hazel. That's why I appreciate Arch so much. I found it a complete pain in the you know what to troubleshoot problems in Ubuntu and other "user friendly" distros. With Arch, I have less problems to begin with, and like Gentoo or Crux, the system doesn't do much that you don't explicitly ask it to. After the initial learning curve, I find it so much easier to maintain. Plus I never have to worry about upgrading to the new release every 6 months.

[elija]

Interesting. I've never had issues with automount on a USB drive using Ubuntu.

I have. It started with an update and went away with another update. It was a 4GB UISB stick also.

[Freston]

To tell you the truth, my XP box at work is giving me loads of trouble when I try to 'mount' a USB stick. I can get the 'safely remove' dialog, but I cannot access the files on the stick.

And with no dmesg|less to fall back on, I sometimes really don't know what to do. A reboot solves it


But my main annoyance has to be that when I google for '$someissue linux' I often get a lot of hits for Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu howto's read just like the Windows howto's. Left click here, right click there, check this box, select that box. Click apply. Useless for anything beyond changing your desktop theme.

[bigtomrodney]

To tell you the truth, my XP box at work is giving me loads of trouble when I try to 'mount' a USB stick. I can get the 'safely remove' dialog, but I cannot access the files on the stick.

And with no dmesg|less to fall back on, I sometimes really don't know what to do. A reboot solves it

This sounds familiar - have you at any point assigned a drive letter to the device in diskmanager (diskmgr.msc) ? I've found that it will insist on trying to use that drive letter even if it's assigned to another removable drive, basically leaving you with no way to access the USB drive.

[D-cat]

I felt the same way in the Windows world. If you understand and know how to use DOS, you can relatively safely handle Windows. If you have no understanding of the command line, the GUI just becomes a potential tool of accidental mass destruction and the user left with no idea how to fix it.

Having at least a basic understanding of what's going on behind the pretty graphics makes computer usage overall easier, safer, and more productive on any OS, IMO anyway.

[Mattchicago]

speaking of ubuntu we installed unbuntu ultimate on a old Compaq Laptop have not rebooted it for over 3 weeks now. The wireless for that laptop sucks but the OS Seems to run pretty good and its a ultimate edition.

My roomate goes to school for internet security and other things IT related he gets all sorts of killer programs i use on my computer @ home. i am starting to love linux more and more even thou command lines are brutal to learn.

Matt

[Tarthen]

I've never had a problem with Ubuntu, IMO. And if I have issues with autoconfig things, I just remove them. For example, all of my wired boxes/VM's don't have NetworkManager.