- No audio. No idea why. If Ubuntu could not install a driver it should tell me.

-I tried to install a JAVA Web Start App. I could not do it, because it had no intergation to ff. I had search on forums for 3 hours to solve it. On windows i got the app working in 5 mins.

-The UI feels slow compared to Win7/XP. For example if i drag around a window fast i can see how it redraws the background. I never saw this on Win7, and in XP only when an app crashed.

…

Don’t think so.

Seriously now, I totally agree with the general idea, but putting the spotlight on GNOME and the window manager is too little. People choose OS’s because of their real applications. Zhuiguang Liu’s comment is a good example.

For me, the greatest pain is with OpenOffice. It has some papercuts in the UI (e.g. In OO-Writer: unable to select a picture and graphic shapes together; Unclear behavior when moving graphics; Lame formula editor; Resets the times of comments that people previously created in MS Word; and don’t get me started with OO-Presentation..). But most important (for me) – even the fact that doc files don’t look exactly the same in OO & M$Word caused me some trouble.

I can’t recommend to non-experts to use Ubuntu because what if they
stumble on an Office files that looks well only in MSOffice, or IE-only websites, or simply an .exe with a game from their friends. (I hope it contains a virus!)
I’ll be happy to hear better news…

C’mon ppl where is the originality from the uber-amateur Linux community? Apple should be sueing Linux for stealing their ‘look and feel’. Can’t we come up with something original for once?

I can’t agree more with this article. For one, no new user should have to “research” or even dig around to adjust to Ubuntu – especially for multimedia purposes.

For example, I was repelled for the longest time when I installed Ubuntu to find that none of my MP3s worked. Why won’t they work?! They play perfectly in Windows! EVERYONE uses MP3s!

Then a little “research” told me that I had to install something called Ubuntu restricted extras. So more clicking, more typing, more fiddling around trying to figure out what “sudo” was, etc. If Ubuntu really desires to be the popular desktop OS that stands out to regular users, they would have to make the restricted extras part of the OS by default. Period.

This is exactly the opposite of Windows – where I can just install the OS, open Windows Media Player, and play most of the media standards used today (except for things like DivX, XVid, VP6, etc). Still, to the average desktop user (and I’m NOT talking about working professionals who need to get precise professional video/audio editing done – I’m talking about the regular users who browse the net, listen to music, download movies, go on YouTube), ease of multimedia accessibility is number 1 in this new age.

Now while I’m on that point, let’s say that Ubuntu’s repository of multimedia players is vast and broad – and many to specific purposes…but that’s exactly what undermines usability!

I still remember learning in psychology that if a person is given many choices as opposed to just a few, he/she is likely to be frustrated and lost and unable to pick out what he/she wants in a given period of time. Same with Ubuntu and its huge repository of programs. Which one to use? Which is the best? These are top searches on Google once I start typing in the first few key words.

Really, I’m sure we would like a unified media player (I have no idea why VLC Media Player is not default in Ubuntu) instead of 2-4+ different programs with 2-4+ different interfaces to learn – just to play conventional movies and musics – and sometimes, different formats requiring different players. For example, I cannot play .m4a files with VLC, but I can with Totem. Yet, VLC plays just about everything else I have better than Totem, and with far more customizability options.

And even then, I still have not found a single player on Ubuntu that can match Media Player Classic in terms of functionality and performance. I have a 1080dp compressed Matroska Blu-Ray rip movie. Windows Media Player/Media Player Classic play it flawlessly, while Ubuntu’s VLC Media Player lag and frame skip at many various fast/highly animated scenes – even with the latest NVidia drivers (ver. 195).

Now I realize that this is not necessarily something to blame Ubuntu on in terms of performance due to NVidia’s proprietary policies. However, I believe this kind of problem (as well as the other ones mentioned) is something that Ubuntu would have to overcome if it wants to come out on top over OSX and Windows.

Here’s one I’d like to add. I’m not sure if should be called a paper cut or not, but anyway it’s a simple annoying problem. What I’m talking about are the user’s permissions regarding hard drives. As long as I have used Ubuntu (from the first day it was available for download), I have had to struggle with permissions to use drives – especially hard drives – in many situations. For example recently, when I created a new partition onto one of my hard drives, I wasn’t able to save anything into it, because the drive was now owned by root. It’s not possible to change permissions in this situation from the GUI, so I had to use the terminal (and search for the right command, which I don’t remember by heart, and scratch my head for a while to use the command right) to change the permission.

Another problem with permissions came up when I moved my torrent downloads to another hard drive. At least in Karmic (had a different drive set-up before), I have to give my password to be able to use my “secondary” hard drives. If I haven’t done this, and start Transmission, it won’t see the unfinished files, because the drive they are placed on is not mounted. When I mount the drive, Transmission checks all data that has been downloaded so far. It takes quite a while if I happen to have 30 GB of unfinished files. If I find the time, I’ll make a bug report (it’s surprisingly time consuming to make a good bug report).