Maybe I was just not lucky, but my experiences with Ubuntu were pretty bad ( this was in 2008 ). Overall it worked just fine except that wireless networking would simply not work. I wasted several days of hair pulling and stress reading, researching and trying everything I could to get it to work, but it simply would not. I even tried several different wireless devices to see if it was a hardware compatibility issue.
At this point I was ready to give up, but the project I was working on required Linux so I forked over I think it was $200 for a year's worth of support ( really I only wanted to pay for the 1 incident, but they didn't have that as an option ). The first thing they told me was try different wireless hardware. I said I had. They said try a Linux compatible one. I said great, which one is compatible? They said, we can't tell / don't know, you just need to try it out yourself! I said, you mean I need to go to the store, buy a card, see if it works, if not, return it and repeat until I find one (if I do at all) that works? They said yes! I said are you crazy, who's got that kind of time (and money since you have to pay restock fees these days for opened hardware), just give me a list of cards that are known to work, they said they would if they had one! In frustration I googled for such a list, and what little I found only pointed to cards that had chipsets which were no longer available. After what seemed like weeks back and forth with them, we finally got the wireless card to work sporadically. I had to run a Beta version of Ubuntu just to achieve that. Then I found out the software I was working with would not run with some of the libraries that come installed in that newer version of Ubuntu. Trying to manuall downgrade never worked right no matter what. So in the end, we used the older version, and ignored the fact that wireless wouldn't work at all, and I had to run a large ethernet cable to my basement where I needed internet access. Overall it was a disaster in my opinion. In the meantime, while waiting for help from the Ubuntu support I paid for, I was playing with many other distros. All of them had different issues, printers wouldn't work, monitor would not work, networking would not work. It was a total mess. In the end, I found Ubuntu to be "the best" of the linux crowd that I had tried, but after that experience I was very turned off to Linux as a reasonable alternative to Microsoft, which for me, has *always* worked just fine ( with only the occasional hiccup ). I really wanted Linux to be everything it was touted as being, and perhaps if you have exactly the right hardware it is, but for me, I won't bother looking at it again until it's matured further / or gets far better hardware support. PS - I still hope that Linux will be a huge success someday, but unless I've got lots of time to waste or I get new hardware, I'm not touching it again any time soon. FWIW - It works great in a virtual machine, and that's where I ended up doing a lot of the development for that project on. Also Linux is great for anything other than a Desktop OS, ie, for servers, embedded devices where the hardware is far more controlled. I'll put on my fire retardant clothing now for all the Linux lover flames that are coming! :) -Steve >As for your Ubuntu experience, mine is considerably different. > >Jeff Johnson >[email protected] >SanDC, Inc. >623-582-0323 >Fax 623-869-0675 > > [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
