A fun post by our friend Ivanka who recently joined Canonical to head up the User Experience side, a role which will no doubt prove challenging but has huge potential. Those who’ve already used Ubuntu, myself included, have something of a love/hate relationship with it; likely this is because we hardcore techies are no longer their target market.
In the spirit of eating dogfood Ivanka steeled herself and installed it as her mother’s primary OS FTW!
1 | Ivanka
Hey!
She is doing very well with it too! We had a minor drama when the printer decided to only print in pink – but I managed to sort it by installing HPLIP. Problem I have is that I keep forgetting that I don’t need to trawl the Interwebular when on tech support duties: Applications>Add/Remove seems to have all the answers!
Tell me more about the hate part of the love/hate relationship? The researcher in me is desperate to understand!
Hope all is splendid,
I.
2 | j pimmel
Ahh.. the love/hate… The most recent issues have involved audio/video especially when concerning Skype on Ubuntu.
My colleague and friend Gus Power has an especially dim view of the Ubuntu Fail in this area (Skype + webcam all works fine for him on his Gentoo laptop). Also bemoaning this is Tim Ottinger.
From a techy point of view the install disk is dumbed down, so a case of install everything and then leave it to users to try remove the crap. Thats a kind of ‘Ubuntu-for-the-masses’ which makes techies fume. It’s not big deal really.. we should know better and go to the server disk and then build up our app stack with care and apply our fussiness in the right place (or switch to Fedora/Gentoo/etc).
Otherwise yes, all is splendid thanks! How are you?
We’ve just found a phenomenal usability bug in our house following a visit from the contractors – the action of flushing the toilet in the master bedroom en-suite sets off the fire alarm from precisely when you flush to when the cistern has refilled! Hilarious, but annoying at 4am.
