I’ve used Ubuntu for some time, and have a complex set up, like you. With 9.04, I stuck to an internet upgrade, although I waited a few days after release to give the servers a chance. My experience has shown this to be the quickest approach by far. Over many upgrades, I’ve had an occasional problem, like using the System:ControlPanel menu to choose the nVidia non-open source driver. That’s why a new install comes like that. Ubuntu, being free and open source, also free as in not costing anything, are being responsible about software licences and proprietry software. At first, your system is completely licence free, then you choose to accept non-licence-free systems, and then it becomes your legal responsibility, not Ubuntu’s. That is Ubuntu being responsible, and the additional time to install the driver is a small price to pay for the absence of any purchase price for the whole operating system and all the associated complex software you have downloaded.

If you can’t find Tracker, then Beagle will be supplied as an alternative. Beagle has been faster in my experience and just as useful at file finding.

You mentioned how would any ordinary user deal with this. The ordinary user would use the standard install disc, not the alternate version you used which is more manual. The ordinary user wouldn’t have complex video editing software and complex graphics setups with Compiz, multiple printers, networked computers etc. I suspect that with any operating system, it will always take more time to set up a complex system. Maybe your technical orientation leads you to think of your computer system as ordinary, but from what you have said, compared to the average end user, you have a very complex system, and even with Windows or MacOS, that would take a long time to set up.

I can’t help but feel from the tone of your comments that you are upset that Ubuntu is not as good as the commercial alternatives. I can understand the loss of time, time is short these days, but you also weren’t charged any money for the what you were gifted, nor were any promises of quality made.

I do wish that complaints about Ubuntu would be tempered with some recognition that it is made by volunteers for the love of it. I won’t argue about how long it took to set up, other systems would also take time. But, if you add up the software you have, including OpenOffice, video editing etc, pdf creation, you would have to pay a thousand dollars or more for commercial equivalents! You got a total bargain, and yet your comments sounded whiney. I simply don’t understand. Why not be thankful for the generousity of so many thousands of man hours given to you out of love? Does not the gift of this software to your family resemble in some small way the love that your religious beliefs admire? Colin

When a new version of Ubuntu comes out, you have two things to expect:
1) Ubuntu servers will be overloaded – you can speed up your upgrade by using a mirror. You can choose a different mirror by going into Synaptic, going to Settings->Repositories and choosing a different server from “Download from”. It would probably be nice if Ubuntu automatically picked a good one for you when you installed, but whatever. After doing this my distribution upgrades only take like an hour or two to upgrade over 1000 packages. The speed depends on which server you pick.
2) There will probably be a couple bugs – this is ALWAYS the case when upgrading in ANY OS for PCs, Windows included. I’ve been using Ubuntu since Edgy (6.10) and the only upgrade that didn’t break things was Feisty (7.04). The only way to get around this is either to wait a little bit as bugs come in, or to just upgrade and then google for how to fix your bugs. Usually other people will also have the same problem and you can usually fix the problem yourself pretty quickly by just following what they did.

> How would mom or dad ever deal with something like this?

Mom or dad don’t spend much time installing OSes or setting up networks and printers I know my mom would be completely lost trying to install XP or Vista (at least if they didn’t have their restore disks, which are perfectly tailored to their computer – I’m sure if Ubuntu had something like this, there wouldn’t be problems), especially since XP doesn’t auto-detect devices written in the last 5 or so years. Same goes for most of the people I know. If Windows breaks, they don’t try and fix it themselves, they take it to a professional who fixes it for them for a bunch of cash. You can’t say that an OS is not ready for the masses because it isn’t perfect when it is first installed.

> Also, many “Gurus” will tell you that you should always do a fresh install when there is a distribution upgrade. How ridiculous is that?

When XP came out, I recommended people upgrade from Win98 by doing a fresh install. I still recommend that every six months or so you should do a fresh install of XP, because the OS bogs down over time. How ridiculous is that?

If you want something that “just works”, use a Mac. The vast diversity of hardware configurations available for PCs make it very difficult, if not impossible, to have things work perfectly right away for every setup.