j-dawg wrote: I expect my tools to work. I don't want or have time to "put anything back into" my operating system to get basic functionality out of it.
I expect my car to work. I just want it to take me places. It's a tool. I don't want to have to learn all this junk about shifting, and messing with the different pedals, and getting oil and that other stuff changed. Octane? Psh. I just want to pull up to the station, grab, a handle, and pump gas. I don't want to have to care about whether it's that "diesel" stuff or whatever.
It is not unreasonable to expect that installing an OS might require some initial configuration past "put in a CD and click a shiny button". Just because Ubuntu hasn't required that of you does not make it any more immune to that sort of thing than most other desktop distros -- it just means that, in your particular case, you didn't encounter a specific need for manual configuration. It also means that extrapolating out to all Linux distros other than Ubuntu based on such anecdotal evidence is silly.
I'm not a car person, but I am a coffee person -- so let's take a quick coffee analogy. There are two sorts of beans that I've used recently: let's call them Brown and Black. I use an Aeropress to brew my coffee, and in my experience unless I grind Black beans extremely finely, the resulting brew is too weak. Brown beans don't require fine grinding. Therefore, I can conclude that Brown beans are inherently superior to Black, as they "just work", right? Erm... maybe not. You see while that's true for coffee made with the Aeropress, I get better results from a coarser grind of Black when I use a traditional drip pot; in that case, Brown is the odd one out. Different hardware, different requirements.
Yes, that's a silly example -- but the principle's the same. On my X61s, Ubuntu 9.04 frequently had issues with the i915 driver locking up and hard-locking the machine (and I mean *hard* -- X couldn't be restarted, the keyboard was completely dead, etc.). There was a fix available, but it required manual installation and configuration of a new set of xorg packages. Debian 5.0 had no such problem. Despite that, I didn't conclude that Ubuntu was inferior to Debian. Instead, I took it at face value: for my particular hardware setup, Debian required less work to configure than Ubuntu.
I'm happy you found a distro that you like. I'm happy it worked well for you. I merely disagree that Ubuntu's the best choice for people who want their machine to "just work". I disagree for two reasons: 1) what "just works" for you may not "just work" for someone else 2) it's not unreasonable to expect that a task as complex as installing and configuring a new operating system might require slightly more than clicking a couple buttons. Sadly, it's that sort of unrealistic expectation -- that a complex piece of software can magically configure itself into a perfect setup for each user -- that leads to the sort of locked-down, "our way or the highway" experience that Apple tends to produce nowadays.
Homepage
Forum
Drivers
HMM
MTM
Feed
As a long-time coffee-lover, I knew it was a bad analogy. Yes, you're right that there are a vast number of other factors at play. That wasn't really the point though.