Ubuntu and Linux are NOT consumer ready

Let me just qualify “consumer” as home user with mild-fair Windows knowledge. Not sysadmins that know everything inside-out, back-to-front, etc.

Oh my god. I go through two cycles with my gradual migration towards Linux:

Virtualisation of the latest builds on my main computer from inside Windows. These runs really enthuse me towards it and it makes me want to install (even migrate fully) on my main computer.
I do various installs of Ubuntu on low-end old computers and they also go really well but they make me want to install it on a better PC (like my main one) so I can see all the newer features.

So its coming up to the crossover between those two cycles. Ubuntu’s Edgy has me crying in my pants from all the slick graphics and having installed it successfully on a laptop (where none of the graphics work) and in VMWare (where some do but it lags like a monkey) I’ve reached my limits for how much I can be teased.

I went about installing it today, and in the optimism that builds up at the beginning of an install of Linux, I started a post titled “Moving to Ubuntu - Part 1” envisaging a 4-part thriller of non-stop bells and whistles.

Well how wrong can someone be? Quite wrong, it turns out. Ubuntu failed pretty much at the first real hurdle: hard disc detection.

Now I know Ubuntu has excellent hardware support. You can plug in a random HP all-in-one printer and it’ll set everything up so scanning, printing, copying and faxing all works within about 20 seconds.

So why won’t one of the most fundamental systems work on a 18month old motherboard?

There have been 3 major releases of Ubuntu since my motherboard hit the shelves and still no (working) support for nforce4 nvraid. The SATA support was fine but I had a feeling that installing over 1/2 of my RAID0 may have borked the whole thing.

I even went through all the steps to install dmraid and still nothing. Just all my RAID drives as individual volumes.

This might not be so damning but I’m not the only person that’s had serious issues with Ubuntu and the sad thing is neither of is are particularly retarded with computers. Both devs even we can’t do it on our main systems.

Steve’s accounts can be found on Seopher.com:

What I’m getting at is if two different devs can’t get it of the ground on their respective computers, what hope has Joe Public? Well probably better than me because most have standard hardware… Ok ok I bring it upon myself, but why should someone bend over backwards to let Ubuntu in? I’m willing, I just don’t know how.