I am a refugee from Windows 11. To my shock and horror, Ubuntu has some of the worst bugs I’ve ever encountered in any piece of software essentially ever.
cursor goes missing in some programs
cursor icon doesn’t correctly change depending on context in some programs
app center will not open, opens as a plain black window and crashes after 5-10 seconds
can’t uninstall any program (likely related to App Center being broken)
Nvidia graphics card not being used selectively in some programs, such as OBS screen recording
system will crash unexpectedly when using some programs
random libs missing when trying to do things in Visual Studio Code (specifically dotnet related, and other distros don’t have these missing libs I found out)
random programs will appear in the “Show Apps” area and there doesn’t seem to be any way to organize them or put them in any way
the tutorial on how to install Ubuntu omits critical information
I read that Ubuntu was founded in 2004. I understand hardware changes but it’s simply wrong that there could be this many issues given the amount of time available to fix them. Perhaps new features or large refactors are pushed out without adequate QA? Or they were pushed out buggy but no devs were available to fix the bugs?
Other distros don’t have bugs as numerous or critical as these. And I’m sure there are many more bugs that I just haven’t personally seen myself. The bottom line is that if the Ubuntu team cannot do their job, then they need to step aside and let the better distros shine over them.
I see people making posts like this trying to be nice, and I certainly don’t want to be rude either, but in the open source community, where contributor’s egos are at stake and people are hyper-sensitive to criticism, nice posts usually get ignored, brushed under the rug and forgotten about because the maintainers don’t want to look at it. If one is direct and not soft-spoken, at least some people might reply angrily and defensively, which is better than getting no reply at all.
Please report bugs using the bug tracker.
Ubuntu Discourse is not the bug tracker.
There is no “customer service” desk to direct your various complaints to the right people. You have tools available to help you find the right way to report each problem you described.
Please use them. Or ask how.
We had a good, hard laugh at this.
Please use whatever distro meets your needs and makes you happy. Ubuntu gets zero revenue from your use of it.
Curious how exactly “step aside” would work. Are you asking Ubuntu to cease it’s (non-existent) advertising? End it’s (non-existent) vendor lock-in? Layoff (somehow) the volunteers?
We have a whole section here for constructive criticism…from folks who want to help contribute and help solve problems.
If folks DON’T want to contribute, it’s unclear why anybody should listen to them.
A good bug report is an effective and welcome contribution. A useless report or misdirected complaint is not.
I want that you consider that Ubuntu is the most popular FOSS operating system in the world. There is good reason(s) for that distinction.
In your case if the operating system were at fault, we (the support community) would be hammered with support request. As that is not the case and no one else reports a myriad of issues - guess now where the finger points ?
I can tell you - the truth- I have used Ubuntu in one flavor or another since release 9.04; the only problems I have ever encountered I caused myself! (back in my formative years I broke my system many times)
And a final observation: This site is also a Work environment. If you went into a do-nut shop and was so disparaging of their wares as you propound for our operating system - would you get good service and welcomed to return to that shop ?
-So what do you want to do about your hosed up install-
I am pretty sure I have seen those issues come up in the Support and Help category, yet I haven’t seen any constructive contribution from you in the respective threads. I am also fairly confident that this has something to do with it:
(pruned the unimportant bits and added emphasis)
As sort of echo of @bashing-om’s comment, I can tell you, the “broke it myself” includes messing with Nvidia graphics drivers on upstream Debian, which does not offer any assistance from the likes of ubuntu-drivers. Whenever I read problem descriptions like yours, I only scroll down to find the one and only usual suspect: Nvidia graphics. Your beef is most likely with that company. Ubuntu does go above and beyond to deliver a decent experience for the poor users who didn’t know about the former’s total lack of genuine driver support in the upstream kernel, when buying their hardware — some W11 refugees probably never imagined they’d want to run Linux on it someday, for that matter. Just for fun and giggles, you can open Logs (Activities → (type) Logs) and search for taint. As long as you are running a tainted kernel — oops, belated spoiler alert — you are not getting a genuine Linux experience. All Ubuntu can do is to make the experience as painless as possible (importantly, that implies some residual pain).
To counter your experience, let me give you a crash tour through my own, for I only switched to Ubuntu from Debian in the fall of 2019:
Bought myself my first own Thinkpad[1] (E495)
1.a made it a point to go pure AMD, never going to touch Nvidia graphics ever again.
installed Ubuntu 19.10, because I couldn’t be bothered to bootstrap Debian unstable — as per usual, I could not convince the Debian stable installer to even boot, because of the old kernel — and I wanted to see how Ubuntu fared.
still here
You’re like a dog with a bone on that one, as it seems. When I read your OP in this thread, I went looking for your contribution to the docs and found this:
That’s your second to last comment there and you seem to be hung up on the fact that the tutorial on how to write the downloaded ISO to a USB thumb drive isn’t included on the front page of the installation guide and merely referenced in a link:
So you’re essentially making a mountain out of mole hill. The other side of that same coin are people, who know how to do that stuff off-hand, being forced to scroll past all that boilerplate text, which never really changes from one release to the next, so it can well be maintained in the different document, at an appropriate pace of (non-)development (maintenance, really).
See above for one very prominent (recurring) reason. Hardware vendors who are downright hostile to the open source nature of Linux, who keep insisting on hiding the inner workings of their drivers — because somehow they believe that protect their hardware from being copied, or something along those lines — make it impossible for the Linux developers to fix their bugs.
That’s where I had a long hard laugh. Every distro has loads of bugs — it’s all just software, duh! — and, given your apparent propensity for hyperbole (see “tutorial on how to install Ubuntu omits critical information”), I question your standard of measurement.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that looks like a non-disclaiming disclaimer. You don’t have to smother Discourse in feel-good language, but you don’t get to call the whole of Ubuntu “incompetent amateurs” in so many words, either:
And now, to answer the question in the topic title, let me quote from the book of Debian tropes: “When it’s done!” And you’re not helping.
they are the benchmark when it comes to Linux support ↩︎
I suggest you meander over to the support forums for other distros, Fedora for example. You will see a multitude of topics opened about bugs/issues.
But what you will also see are volunteer community users who help by reporting/tracking bugs, commiting pull requests or fixes upstream or offering to help in any way they can.
Same goes for Ubuntu, Arch, you name it. People are what make the distro.
This is the essence of open source, the communities strive for improvements.
If you thought Linux was supposed to be perfect, then either you are very naive, severely misinformed or deliberately trolling.
What exactly is your definition of a better distro? What is the baseline?
Again, Linux and open source is about choice. If you decide Ubuntu is too buggy for you, then you are free to move on to something else.
This is all fine and well except for one, major point: you have not provided ONE single bit of troubleshooting evidence for all these problems you mention.
Random statements that “this doesn’t work, this is buggy” etc. won’t get the attention because developers/maintainers need logs, error messages and the like to actually do something about the problem.
You’ve had your say, you’ve been heard loud and clear.
I suggest next time you have an issue, open a topic and report it with relevant system information, relevant troubleshooting steps, and relevant logs.
— you are not getting a genuine Linux experience. All Ubuntu can do is to make the experience as painless as possible (importantly, that implies some residual pain).
You don’t have to smother Discourse in feel-good language, but you don’t get to call the whole of Ubuntu “incompetent amateurs” in so many words, either:
And you’re not helping.