Sunday, April 09, 2006

Love Letter to Dapper Flight 6 team

Preface: this distro is supposed to be finalized in less than sixty days. Were this further in the future, my comments would be less barbed.
  1. A liveCD which can't manage to load the most common wireless chipset on the PPC platform (Broadcom aka Airport) is a lousy demonstration of "it just works."
  2. While the default behavior of the trackpad being a click device in Flight 5 was difficult for some iBook users, at least the tracking was comparable to OS X/Windows. Flight 6's tracking on PPC is ridiculously slow and inexplicable compared to the x86 Flight 6 Ubuntu release. Knock it off.
  3. Kubuntu's default text rendering is the blockiest possible for LCD displays; replace it with regular aliased bitmaps or get a clue.
  4. The Kubuntu wireless configurator fails on both platforms (x86/Intel Pro chipsets, iBook/Broadcom); it momentarily enables eth1 and then disables it immediately afterward.
  5. If you can't get Espresso out of the gate for Kubuntu, put a more informative message at startup that this isn't even fractionally functional compared to the same app in the Ubuntu release, not a copy of the same message (FYI the Ubuntu Espresso is fully functional on x86).
The above can be summed up thusly:
  • The most common hardware for a platform should be anticipated and implemented first, not promised later.
  • A distro release's interface using the same libraries should behave the same on two different platforms.
  • Linus was right about Gnome. Implementing Kubuntu in a half-assed way years after Slax, Knoppix and others finessed KDE live distros says more about Ubuntu's politics/technical skills than KDE's relative merits as a windowing environment.

Either buy into the idea of "the customer's always right" re: platforms and windowing managers or stop paying lip service to the idea of Ubuntu as something other than an x86/Gnome distro.