Goodbye Ubuntu.... For Now....

Firstly, I am a strong believer that we should not be to attached to the technology around us, be it a new phone, a laptop, the OS running on the laptop or even a programming language. Things changes all the time and those "stuff" that are no longer useful to the general public would definitely go out of trend.

Ubuntu, was a great distro that I am proud to say was the first distro I laid my hands on. This was back in 2005 when I was just beginning my collage journey and first heard of this 'thing' called linux. Back then, it was a great experience using Ubuntu which was then using GNOME 2 whereby things just works. This was a time when I have zero experience on kernel and device drivers. 

Today, I am equally pleased to announce that I have moved from Ubuntu to its father, Debian (nooooo!). It was based on two key detrimental factors from Ubuntu and several recent updates of Debian.

No 1 No No : Sending user's search results to Amazon and other e-commence sites

This is outdoing even Windows and most other distros, web browser, which sends search results to their own servers. The most piss off issue with Ubuntu's kind initiative as compared with others, is that the others at the very least seek your permission with this logging feature. Look the truth is most of us has no idea what was sent across to some faraway servers but our opinion matters.

Yet, Ubuntu felt obliged to assist us without seeking our permission and felt perfectly fine in feeding us with e-commence results from Amazon. At this moment, my only question for Ubuntu aka canoical is that why had you know go further. Why not include results from google or wikipedia instead? A clarification is that I have nothing against Amazon but if I would like to shop at Amazon I would go to their site and use their search box. The fact is that Ubuntu's linkage with Amazon is on a pure commercial basis and adds little value to solving user's needs. This is the part which I am deeply dissatisfied with in that I hold no qualms in letting software company's earn their keep but there should be an exchange of value. 

Ironically, if they have incorporate a whole host of web results in addition to Amazon, I would have believe that this feature was done truly in view of user's needs to find things fast.

No 2 No No : Unity of course.

Yes, some people liked it, other's hated it. I am not concern with the artistic value of Unity if it does not freeze or double clicked when I clicked once on the icon most of the time. This is extremely frustrating when you are using a older system and you do not want to dwell back into a command line interface. The main reason here is that productivity dramatically decreases with Unity. 

It is not that it is non-intuitive, I believe it is quite good in terms of usability. However, the data structures and algorithms behind it seems to be unsuitable even for the most critical feature. Looking at No No 1., the user would like to find things fast, yet the search space on the top left took a lot of computation to appear. Furthermore, every double click on multiple windows of a single application display all windows for the user to select. This is visually confusing and also computation intensive. 

Now, one may argue "haha that's because you are using an old system, get a better hardware". This does not solve the usability of the multi-window snippet or quick searches, especially if you are through a network. The network communication of the searches are the most severe bottleneck regardless of your hardware. 

Debian Yes Yes:

Debian has been around a looooooong time and their manifesto has always been about quality first above all else. Although I must admit it has pretty outdated driver support, although most of the hardware interface has no issues. GNOME is actually pretty good on debian with smooth reaction time for applications on the same hardware as above (KDE version was unusable flat out). It is community supported and no they do not even have a search feature in-built, which I can live with.

I have been using Debian for a year now, and on one computer I have not shut it down for over a year. The stability is something I crave and to each its own, you may or may not like Debian. My message is that if things changes on your beloved IT stuff that you do not agree to, think of it as a soul-less entity and move on to a better option when avaliable.

Let's not have flame wars but peace and we would all progress with better technology.