[Leaplist] Ubuntu rant

[Dan Cherry]

Hi,
Thought I'd let off a little steam about Ubuntu;-)

A couple days ago, I set up a webDAV server on my home intra net to 
share bookmarks, calendars, and address books between desktop, laptop 
and wife's computers. 

Bookmarks from Firefox, calendars from Sunbird were a breeze to set up 
and took maybe 15 minutes each to get working, and another 15 to share 
and tweak the configs.  Thunderbird took the rest of 2 days, and still 
didn't work. 

Long story -> short... download Thunderbird from Mozilla website and it 
took 15 minutes to set up etc. etc. and success.

The problem - The Ubuntu development team apparently made changes to the 
thunderbird packages they distribute to enhance security (I gather this 
from comments and faq's found on various lists regarding problems with 
thunderbird and quite a bit of other software used on Ubuntu systems - 
not from identifying the changes).  This philosophy is fine, if the end 
user has at least of fighting chance of finding out what's been changed. 

A similar fiasco was found in a minuscule one line warning on the CUPS 
admin page indicating something disabled.  Then all subsequent CUPS 
admin pages work and display as normal CUPS, but simply don't do 
anything.  There was a major waste of troubleshooting time.  If they're 
going to make changes, make them really APPARENT, and explain how to 
return them to normal.

Ubuntu is not ALWAYS to blame for problems, but they sure do add an 
inordinate amount of troubleshooting time by quietly making changes and 
not taking the time to adequately document the changes!  Anything that 
behaves in a quirky manner now makes me take the knee-jerk reaction to 
remove the Ubuntu flavor, and install the original flavor.  
Unfortunately, if you want the benefit of repositories, you have to 
troubleshoot both flavors to determine the real problem.  Mega waste of 
time.

There... I feel better ;-)

I guess the real purpose for this rant (the constructive one) is to 
suggest anyone using Ubuntu only put a minimal amount of time into 
dealing with quirky software behavior.  At that point, try downloading a 
copy of the vendor version and seeing if the quirks remain.  May save 
you a lot of time debugging intentionally disabled software.

Dan