Rants ...
11 09 06 - 11:42 Used tags: design, notebook, ubuntu, webshop
Recently my iBook was stolen (straight from my office, no less) and I took a look around if there's any notebook that I could replace it with. I'm looking for a light and small enough notebook to carry around that can run on its batteries for the longest possible time. I think I'd also like to have the ugliest notebook around (so no one would be tempted to steal it) and if it is in persoalised and unique in some obvious way, even better. Panasonic toughbook comes pretty close to that, but it is waaay too expensive.
But what I wanted to tell you is this. I checked web sites of all major notebook manufacturers and were shocked at how bad they were. I know what I want to buy, so I want the web site to let me input my requirements and then show me the products that match my requiremets best. None were even close to that. Shame.
Then, because I know how to translate my requirements to specific hardware configurations. I expected those web sites to select their models by the hardware. Again, no luck. All they do is offer you a list of their models (name + number) and then you have to dig the small print to get the hw specs. But I don't care about names and model numbers! I want a notebook with such and such configuration and I want a choice based on that.
Thinking over this again, I see a large business opportunity here :)
And there's more ...
Since Ubuntu caused such a buzz lately, I deceided to use it on my new primary home desktop. And so far it is a general dissapointment. Ok, I expected to hack a kernel to get it running on iRam, but I also expected that would be the most complex tweak I'll have to make. iRam is the most exotic piece of hardware in this machine, everything else is pretty common these days. And guess what:
sound doesn't work properly. It also doesn't shut down properly if I have any nfs shares mounted and doesn't even boot properly if /usr is on non-local file system. It also managed to mix up different versions of nvidia-glx and nvidia kernel module. There are numerous other annoyances that I don't remember right now, but make the whole Ubuntu expirience anoying. Especially when
you look at the kind of people Ubuntu is targeted at - I can't expect my mom to figure out such problems, much less to fix them. She would simply conclude that her pc is broken.
And that is what Ubuntu is - broken.
It will remain broken for as long as they'll be putting out such releases targeted for average folks ... Me on the other hand will go on promoting Debian, because it doesn't promise anything, forces you to learn about the system you're using and because you actually need to spend a week or two untill it all works as you want.
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