No Ubuntu for Christmas

Bye Bye Ubuntu (Desktop)

Yesterday, after evangelizing Ubuntu for years and running Ubuntu on my
parents desktop since 2009, I finally "relieved" them by giving them
Windows 7 as a gift.

For years I had the hope that every Ubuntu release would get better
than the previous edition. That the vision of Canonical aligned with my
vision of openness and where user rights are put central. I took the
fact that some proprietary things didn't work for granted and thought
we could fight it best by adding weight to the open source movement and
use open source software while demanding open codecs, standards etc.

I praised Unity, and really think this is a bold and strong move in the
right direction that has to be taken in order to realize the ambitious
goals Ubuntu has set for the open desktop [1].

Harder it was to cope with software that used to work, but broke in a
new release. E.g. it's really frustrating if your webcam always worked
with Skype but suddenly after an upgrade it doesn't (and release after
release, a year later, it still isn't fixed [2]), or if you can't do
simple things like red eye removal, because the new version of the
software you are using is broken [3]. My parents often encountered
these seemingly little problems that completely put a halt on the
things they wanted and were used to do. Regressions are much more
irritating than bugs in new sofware.

Since the news of sending search terms to Amazon by default I'm through
with it. No longer do I feel Canonical puts my rights and liberties as a
user central. No longer can I pull energy from the hope that the next
release will be better. We don't move in the same direction anymore.

Ubuntu, I hope someday we meet again.


[1] http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/05/mark-shuttleworth-delivers-uds-keynote-address-sets-goal-for-200-million-ubuntu-users-in-4-years
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/884210
[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shotwell/+bug/652158

Please update on how this goes after a few upgrades. My parents have been plagued by these problems for the past 10 years or so (on Windows, currently Windows 7), and I had considered switching them to Ubuntu to resolve them. Hardware will suddenly stop working with no upgrades (possibly aside from automatic windows upgrades) and I'll get a call saying that the printer or cam stopped working, or suddenly they could not play DVDs. Surprisingly (they're non-technical), few of their issues have been user error. I've had relatively high levels of success with Ubuntu and hardware, on the other hand. The only thing stopping me from switching them is concern that they'd have trouble finding and installing new software that either might need for work. Your post made me rethink that though. Let me know if windows is actually that much better for you, because it hasn't been on their relatively low-end hardware PCs so far (all Dell, Toshiba, HP).

@jxn: Now that the machine has been running for a couple of months I can tell you the migration has been a success. The installation of Windows 7 went painless. I've installed all the software needed (drivers were already in the OS, since it's 4 year old hardware) and created some non-admin accounts for daily usage.

The only thing I still have to do is install cwrsync for backups. I already have this running on some office desktops with Windows XP so this should not be a big pain.

Best thing is, now that everything works, I don't have to upgrade anytime soon :)