i think i know what's wrong with Ubuntu/Linux on the desktop. It was mostly written by amateurs.
Over the past day or two i've been trying my best to setup and configure Kubuntu as my primary desktop. It's not gone well. For various reasons, i've had to do five system reinstalls. i've started with Kubuntu Heron 8.04b and quickly discovered that pretty much everything out there for Ubuntu was built for Intel rather than AMD (e.g. flash, adobe, quicktime, etc.). That's actually far more important than it sounds, mostly because when you actually start using things and playing with things, those crop up. Yes, there are "substitutes" but they don't work correctly. This is because they were written by amateurs, folks not paid to work on it and therefore have minimal interest in making sure it works.
That's actually pretty true of darn near everything i've encountered, and it's far more fractional, others are broken in just strange ways. Take Firefox 2 on AMD64 HH 8.04 (ok, even the fact that i have to say that identifies another problem, but let's stick with it). i couldn't save an image. i mean, i could try, and Firefox would act like it did, but no file containing the appropriate bits would actually appear in the requested directory. i know that this is a problem with that particular version of Firefox, because the Wine Version (which was able to run Flash, quicktime and other apps) had no such problem.
In fact, i found that a good deal of my problems went away when i used Wine versions of things.
That, really isn't a good option. It's like running Cygwin and saying "i'm running a Unix System!"
Frankly, i can't help but compare it against it's competition. Windows is damn easy to setup and configure. Frankly so are macs. Mostly because things are fairly simple and since folks real livelihood is at stake, they do things like build drivers, test the hell out of them and other things that kinda keep things like blowing a day working on this from happening.
So, is Linux ready for the desktop? No. Frankly, there's too much that can go wrong with it still. There's too many hidden, very sharp, very pointy bits that don't really make sense why they're there. i think a LOT of folks tend to be very forgiving about it because it's effectively built by nice guys working in their free time to make something. It's like petting a kid on the head because they made a very nice potato gun, but it's not like that's going to replace Smith & Wesson any time soon.
Oddly, i still hold that as a server system, Unix (and by extension Linux) is far superior to anything else. i'm also not really willing to say "Well, they have to come up with all the innovation" because developers have a few very strong existing models to work from, whether or not they are willing to admit it. They've got a running start and a grade to judge against.
Perhaps that explains why Macs are so damn popular. They're mostly open source with a well crafted, professional front end. A great many of the stupid, pointy bits have been found and removed.
So, what am i going to do? Well, i'm on the seventh full reinstall. (Kubuntu GG 7.10 i386).
Here's what i've got so far, and it's reasonably stable. Oddly, most of what i've learned comes from dealing with windows, so make of that as you will:
- Avoid the edge Yes, that new OS version sure is spiffy. Stick with the previous one if you want stability
- Give root it's own home. Seriously. Install the system to a dedicated 60+ GB drive. The rest gets /home. Feel free to do tricks like softlinking /tmp to /home/tmp or whatever but when it does come time to reinstall/upgrade and things go boom, you'll thank me.
- Avoid risky drivers In my case, it's the restricted ATI drivers which completely wedge the box.
- Remember: X is a house of cards i really dislike X because it forces you to learn things you never wanted to. It's FAR easier to reinstall the system if X blows up than it is to try and figure out what just went wrong.
i've got things mostly working now and am just kinda waiting for the next thing to break. i still can't figure out how to get the second monitor working without screwing up the first, and i'm not going to touch the whizzy crap like 3D rotational stuff (and sadly, most of the MySQL IDEs demand to use socket connections instead of TCP so tunneling them is a bit of a challenge) but mostly things appear to be working ok.
Well, 32bit Ubuntu is FAR less likely to wedge itself than 64bit from what I've been able to see. I thought about running Suse as well, and even loaded it up, but the problem was that there were even less available drivers for things than Ubuntu had, so I switched back.
Macs are not easy to set up in my experience of trying to install OSX with it dying randomly during the installation process with cryptic error messages and no help on their support site. Buying a new one from Apple is easy, reinstalling OSX is a gigantic pain in the ass.
Try installing OSX on PC parts (actually posting this comment from such a box). The only problem I've ever had with the OSX installer is installing a boot loader (because that isn't neccesary on real Apple hardware that has real EFI). *shrug*
As for linux, you might want to try debian stable instead of k?ubuntu. Debian errs on the side of being not bleeding edge, and in my experience the amd64 experience is the same as the i386 32 bit support (just make sure to use the amd64 install iso). Both seem to fit your bullet points.
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I'm on an AMD machine (32 bit, though), and OpenSuse 10.2 works very nicely indeed. I expect 10.3 would be even better, but eh, don't want to mess with a working system …