This is a rant. You have been warned.
About a month ago, Alex upgraded her netbook to Ubuntu Lucid, and the results have been quite disappointing.
The main issue of the previous version was fixed (poor pulseaudio support), but fresh and new problems appeared, resulting in a worse experience.
Canonical people changed some aspects of the UI in the Ubuntu Netbook Edition, that forced Alex to change her way of doing things in different day-to-day tasks (for example, removing the left quick access to bookmarked directories it’s a small failure, if you’re a teacher and you can’t afford the extra clicks to move to different directories with a class of year 7 kids waiting any kind of distraction to make noise and take over your lesson).
It may sound like overreaction, but it’s important when the computer it’s just a tool in your work and you have to suffer changes that (apparently) are just for the sake of change, and you can’t change this new behaviour back to the old that works for you!
Anyway, I was willing to talk about OpenOffice.org 3.2 release, that is the one that comes packaged with Lucid.
The main problem seems some kind of incompatibility with the Ubuntu Netbook Edition desktop, that makes the mouse buttons to stop working randomly, and we haven’t figured out how to workaround it (besides restarting the desktop session); so we had to fall back to the “classic” Gnome desktop.
Although the problem happens in the Gnome desktop too, we can workaround it (sometimes pressing ESC will fix it, other times you have to open a Nautilus browser and then go back to Writer, there’s not a clear pattern).
Needless to say this makes Alex work harder and painful, and added to the other changes in Lucid, she’s almost convinced that upgrading was a mistake.
And finally, to make things even worse, she’s filling job applications for next year, and all of them are Microsoft Word documents. Guess what: OpenOffice.org crashes with most of them.
OK, I think we can live with visualization problems. After all, I expect this kind of problem between different Microsoft Office versions (I guess so, I’m not Microsoft user). But crashing constantly it’s frustrating, and crashing on save with data loss it’s a nightmare.
So we’re thinking about moving to another distribution. Filling a bug report now with Ubuntu it’s useless now, because the problem will be fixed most likely in next release, and… who can afford a system that doesn’t work for 6 months?
I don’t know what happened in Lucid, but from my experience, that’s the worst Ubuntu release so far. We’re suffering bugs that make feel unpolished and low quality, with an unpleasant user experience, and that’s the first time ever I have that feeling with Ubuntu.
