Ubuntu: A Blunt and Hostile Introduction

If you’re like most people, you’ve probably heard of Ubuntu, usually from people who sneer at your computer because you didn’t make it yourself, and who mock Apple as making a toy-like system that can’t support all the incredibly powerful applications that are absolutely the same as applications available for the Mac except shitty.

For those unfamiliar, Ubuntu is an operating system, just like Windows or Mac OSX, with the crucial difference that those are programmed by professionals who are paid to write all the boring stuff and spend their time figuring out how to make it easier on people who don’t want to spend all their time rewriting code.  Ubuntu, on the other hand, is programmed largely by hippies who only want to do what computer nerds think is the “fun” part and don’t understand anybody who doesn’t find computer code to be the most intrinsically fun thing ever.

Well, I recently tried Ubuntu, and guess what?  The hippies are wrong.  Ubuntu blows.  Here’s why…

It’s the Preferred Operating System of Smug Assholes

The version of  Ubuntu I downloaded was called Easy Peasy.  This is the text that greets you on the first page:

“Right a Wrong: Why did your awesome netbook get shipped with that terrible OS?”

This was my first hint that Ubuntu users live in a world unlike our own, a world where “I need to have programs that are compatible with everyone else’s” and “I don’t care what OS I use on my computer as long as it works” don’t exist, a world where you are defined by whether or not you run the one true OS, Ubuntu.  All others are heathens, heathens who enjoy alcoholic beverages and the attentions of women and must be burned for their heresy.

This attitude is pretty consistent: it doesn’t matter if you want to talk obscure functions of code or just want to finally get porn working on your computer.  The approach will be “Welcome, brother, join us as we bask in the glow of the Great OS.  Later we will pretend we are Night Elves and post jokes about the iPad sounding like a feminine hyigene product.”  It’s like getting in line for a steak sandwich at Subway and being mistaken by a busload of vegans for one of their own.

Everything You’ve Heard About Ubuntu Being Easy to Use Is a Lie

Pretty much everything about Ubuntu said needs to have important codifiers added to it.

“Ubuntu works right out of the box…after you download all the programs we have deemed frivolous to real computing that 99% of the real world uses!”

“The transition will be seamless…if you’ve done postgraduate work in computer science!”

In my experience, the biggest crock is the idea that everything works right out of the box.  This isn’t me misreading their site.  They actually say this, up front.

So how well does it work “right out of the box?”  I had to download an upgrade to listen to mp3s.  My fucking alarm clock plays mp3′s.  Right out of the box!

After getting that advanced feature in place, Ubuntu froze right the hell up while performing the Herculean task of…going to sleep.  But nothing a simple upgrade couldn’t fix.  An upgrade that ended up breaking the internet forcing me to reinstall the entire OS again while contemplating whether I could just get by with a WebTV box or something instead.

So, yeah, it’s just a little incomplete when you install it.

Ubuntu is A Time Machine That Brings You Back to Personal Computing Circa 1995

If you’re really lucky, you’ve never used Windows 3.1.  If you’re unlucky, right now you’re having PTSD flashbacks that make a ‘Nam vet’s hallucinations look like a Teletubbies episode.  For those who didn’t break their souls on that wheel, a quick recap:

Windows 3.1 is the source of every joke you’ve ever heard about Windows.  It was outrageously busted.  Imagine a world where every time you had to install something, change something on the computer, or basically do anything you young punks with your Windows 7 and your Automatic Software Updates can’t even imagine doing now, you had to open an archaic monster called “DOS” and actually type whatever you wanted your computer to do on something called “the command line.”  Instead of the computer being able to figure out fairly quickly what you wanted to do, and doing it for you, so you could concentrate on porn, you had to hold its hand every step of the way.  Also, it would often shit itself for no reason.  It was a lot like trying to herd Gary Busey.

Clearly, this is something that the Ubuntu community just loved and looks back on with misty eyes, because on Ubuntu, that shit is back with a vengeance.  You will discover the command line, and it will break you.  It wants your tears.  It drinks them and grows fat and happy on your pain.  And you will keep coming back to it because…

Ubuntu is Constantly Looking for New and Unique Things To Break and Flip On and Off at Random, and Messing with the Code is the Only Way to Fix It.

When I first installed Ubuntu, I used a USB stick because a netbook with a CD drive is rarer than photos of Lady GaGa’s penis (FunnyCrave has those, by the way, and we’re not sharing).  So, I assumed that it’d just load a USB stick with no problem!

Why would I think that?  Just because the OS was installed from a USB stick?  Ha!  Clearly Windows has made me stupid and prone to logic!

It turns out to make the USB stick install work, you need to trick your computer into thinking its a CD-ROM drive, and then later you have to open up the code, not a little window, the actual code itself of the operating system that you are running, to fix it on the fly.  This is akin to being used to driving an automatic transmission car and, suddenly, you find yourself not only driving a manual transmission, but you actually have to climb under the hood while the car is moving to shift gears.  As stone cold awesome as doing that would be (provided you caught it on video), it’s impractical as shit.

It’s the same thing with the wireless card, with making YouTube work, with anything that comes broken in Ubuntu.  Unless you just turn the system off, turn it back on, and magically it starts working, which happened to me about five different times.

That’s if you’re lucky.  The rest of the time, it’s a bit like performing open-heart surgery on the back of a truck taking the most potholed road in Gaza.

And how did I learn about this problem?  Not from the documentation!

Ubuntu Documentation Is Written By People Who Want You To Bleed

This is how you solve a problem in Windows:

– Go to the support site.

– Type in the error code.

– Maybe have to Google some stuff.

– Leave with an answer.

This is how you solve a problem in Ubuntu:

– Stumble across a problem that magically appears out of nowhere.

– Try to solve it using what you know about computers, which won’t work.

– Hit whatever half-assed wiki the hippies have put together that pretends to be a user’s manual.

– Come up completely dry, usually with your search term not yielding a damn thing.

– Hit the forums designed to support the wiki and search them.  Come up dry.

– Begin scrolling through the forums at random, looking for any advice.

– Find a thread tangentially related to your problem.

– Discover the solution to your problem.

– Spend fifteen minutes trying to implement it because somebody left a space out of the code.

– Stumble across the correct sequence of words.

On the upside, this gives you an incredible sense of achievement.  On the downside, the above process takes approximately fifteen hours of your life that you will never get back.

Ubuntu is Everything People Hate About Computers and Computer Nerds

I’m not going to lie: I’ve still got Ubuntu, and I’m keeping it.  I’m typing this article up on it right now.  But that’s because I’m cheap, determined, and only mildly functionally retarded when it comes to computers.

Open source nerds gripe about Windows and Mac all the time, baffled as to why people don’t all join the open source revolution.  Well, that question has two answers:

First, people who wonder this are usually major fucksticks.

Second, their software is everything normal people want desperately not to have to do with computers.  They don’t care if it’s open source, or if it’s free or not, or if it backs up some obscure political point only hackers care about.  They just want it to fucking work.  That’s what they pay for.  And Ubuntu does not work as well as even Windows XP.

Basically, Ubuntu is proof that Communism doesn’t work.  You get a bunch of hippies and nerds together and tell them to program an OS for free, it’ll take them twenty years and be basically the same thing as what the capitalists cranked out ten years ago.  Also, only the parts they want to do will get done, and nobody will give a shit about the rest.

In short, it’s not that Ubuntu sucks.  It’s just that really, somebody should have started exploiting these hippies earlier.