posted by Howard Fosdick on Mon 30th May 2011 22:04 UTC
IconCanonical Ltd., the company behind Ubuntu Linux, estimates that the product has over 12 million users worldwide. And why not? Ubuntu is free and it runs more than ten thousand applications. It has a vibrant user community, websites covering everything you might ever need to know, good tutorials, a paid support option, and more. Yet I often hear friends and co-workers casually criticize Ubuntu. Perhaps this the price of success. Or is it? In this article I'll analyze common criticisms and try to sort fact from fiction.

I should mention that I'm a big Ubuntu fan and have used it for five years. Even so, it pains me to see the obvious ways it could improve. As I'll explain, I believe Canonical's business model holds Ubuntu back from fulfilling its potential.

One obvious response to anyone who criticizes Ubuntu is to say to them: why don't you just run another operating system? There are so many competing Linux and BSD distros out there.

True. But there is a larger issue here. Ubuntu's great popularity means that it represents Linux to many people. It's the distro vendors pre-install. It's the distro the mainstream media always review. It's the one distro everybody's tried. It's been ranked #1 in DistroWatch's yearly popularity ratings for the past six years (1).

Fair or not, Ubuntu reflects on the Linux community as a whole. How well Ubuntu meets criticisms matters even to Linux users who don't use it.

So what are common Ubuntu criticisms? Here are those I often hear...

http://www.osnews.com/story/24803/The_Sins_of_Ubuntu

I didn't check the link but I have to bet my gripe is in there, somewhere;

Ubuntu has tried to winohsify gnu. While I don't mind what distros do to simplify, modify, spin etc what is offered in our software, I do get peeved when bloat finds it's way into MY distro. And I do blame canonical. In an effort to compete with canonical, MANY distros have adopted bloat. Debian hasn't been too bad but I still have seen a lot more silly dependencies show up. (If I didn't run minimalistic, I'm sure I would be more pissed)
And does anybody remember when canonical 'asked' debian for 6 month freezes? That was utter bull. Debian should have told them to take a hike. I'm sure some wallets were made happy. If debian weren't so great, I'd have been off like a prom dress. It's like a Springer episode- debian laid down with slime but I just love her so much...
I really did come this close || to moving back to slackware during that mess. I'm still content with that option. I've been kicking it around, actually.

That latest Slackware and Caos gave me the same trouble. I didn't know how to do get it to connect to my ISP. Everything else was awesome. http://www.slackware.com/
Its a 4.2 GB download. I was thinking of singing the old Hunt's catsup song 'anticipation' to it while I downloaded it.