[munchhausen]

Are you nuts?

Ubuntu 12.04 is the best distribution of a Linux-based OS by such a huge margin that it's, as they say, not even funny. Even if I take into account the fact that many users seem to nurse a rather passionate dislike of Unity, I don't see how anyone can claim that Canonical is "botching, killing and burning" anything. Ubuntu is in the long term most definitely on a steady path of continuous improvement, and is currently at a level where the "it just works" factor is present in surprisingly huge amounts. (I am saying this from the perspective of both the desktop and the server versions - the server version is ridiculously hassle-free to run compared to what I am used to with supposedly superior "enterprise" distros the likes of RHEL and SLES.)

To be honest, your comment is so bizarre that I now wonder if it was supposed to be a wind-up.

[macavity23]

Agreed 100%. I recently picked up a little thinkpad laptop as a take-everywhere-don't-mind-too-much-if-it-dies machine. Ubuntu 12.04 supported absolutely every bit of hardware on it out of the box, with the exception of the fingerprint reader, which needed a single package install, and nary a cfg file edit in sight (fingerprint auth for login and sudo is awesome!). This includes:

* Hardware accelerated graphics

* Suspend and resume when closing/opening lid

* All the non-standard thinkpad buttons - external monitor, volume etc

* USB bluetooth adaptor

* External bluetooth trackpad (Apple)

* 3G dongle - this was not only autodetected, but popped up a wizard that asked me to identify my carrier, and then proceeded to configure everything and just magically brought up the internets

Anyone who doesn't think this is a big deal has not been running linux for very long :-P

Personally, I still replace Unity with Gnome3, but that's a single add-repo and package install, taking about 2 minutes. Unity is significantly better with each release, if that continues I'll probably go back to it in a few versions.

I don't get the vitriol either. Slackware and Debian are still around if Ubuntu is too n00bish for you; personally I'm old and I want shit to just work. Haters gonna hate I suppose.

[abc_lisper]

Yeah. How do i know. I upgraded my work machine to ubuntu 12, and here is what happened. Unity flat-out does not get rendered. Dual monitor setup wont work. So i had to switch to fluxbox and use xrndr to make the screen visible on both the desktops. I have been using linux for almost 12 years now, and somehow it does not seem like an improvement. So much for it just works.