I want to share my experience with ubuntu, I am a user since 2010 and I have read many articles that try to answer the question: why does linux not dominate the desktop market, today I am here to give my opinion on this, in addition to talking about ubuntu and canonical in general.
I want to start by saying that for me Ubuntu is not a productive system for end users on desktop computers, but for servers but not for desktops. A desktop computer should have minimum usability requirements, even canonical has spoken about this indicating that they would focus more on users, but over time this has not happened.
For many years until today, users do not have a productive and native music player software:
At present, canonical does not have official software to play music, but if there are third-party players, the problem is that the most used ones, such as vlc and audacious, have very basic interface problems and do not integrate correctly with gnome. , especially with wayland since most still make compatible applications for xorg but not for the official technology proposed by canonical. Currently there is gnome music development which is beta and has multiple bugs and is almost impossible to use. Windows 98 have a better music player than ubuntu 22.04.
Ubuntu does not have a stable video display:
Totem or the default video viewer of ubuntu is very unstable and not very configurable, in many cases since ubuntu 22.04 with wayland the videos do not play, the software is very unstable and we return to the same problem of music playback, the only alternatives Viable are third-party software that have multiple basic interface and usability issues.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is not able to record screen at 60fps:
Unfortunately ubuntu 22.04 under wayland uses PipeWire for screen recording, as is the case with OBS, the problem is that Wayland and Pipewire do not have support yet for recording at 60fps under any conditions, I use an amd radeon gt 6800 xt video card but apparently it's not enough for a simple screen recording.
It is almost impossible and torture to connect a guitar to the pc:
It is almost impossible to use jackd with guitarrix or any other software because the audio interface is very complicated to configure to do a simple task: that the microphone is heard through the speakers. This simple task leads to an answer like: You must install an entire operating system like Ubuntu Studio to get a single setup working. This means that if you use Ubuntu to play and program you must have a second computer or another disk with another installation and close everything to be able to raise an operating system that allows you to do this audio configuration. Even windows xp allows you to make this configuration with a simple click using same hardware. Could it be that Ubuntu 22.04 is even more unstable or bad experience than windows xp?
Microphone jack not working in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on one of the most used motherboards for AMD:
It is not a strange case, the MSI x570 motherboard is the best known and used for new generation AMD processors, but apparently there is still no stable driver for it, despite the fact that almost 4 years have passed since its launch, soon New generations of AMD 7000 processors will come out with new motherboards and we still don't have a simple audio driver for the previous generation. A gaming user or streamer could not count on latest generation amd hardware using the latest version of ubuntu.
Lack of basic UI features:
It's ridiculous but Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for Desktop (default install using wayland) doesn't have a simple option to change screen brightness. In Windows 7 or Windows XP you can change the brightness no matter if the monitor supports backlight or not, in my case I suffer from headaches with high brightness and I have to move the monitor every day to press the back buttons to change the brightness. brightness and then in the morning turn them up a bit, instead of having a simple slider that allows me to change the brightness. This is ridiculously basic.
Another point against it is the elimination or discontinuation of compiz fusion effects, I think it was a very bad decision to keep only a few effects since many users tried ubuntu only to see fire effects or see how the desktop could rotate in 3d, but for some strange reason, when microsoft was intimidated by these features, the developer decided to end their support and canonical decided to omit these effects.
There is no stable and efficient application for office:
Most of my co-workers ask me: is there ms office for linux? I tell them: there is libreoffice, and they tell me that it is impossible to work with libreoffice, so they don't change the system. I have used Libreoffice for many years, the support is terrible, it has very basic bugs that are never fixed, the interface is terrible, the support of third-party extensions is bad. For example, if you open a document saved with a version of libreoffice from more than a few months ago, you will have multiple compatibility problems and manipulating tables is a nightmare. Everyone knows that libreoffice is the best option to msoffice on linux but everyone also knows that it sucks. I have tried multiple alternatives but none are really useful as a replacement. Is it impossible to make a document editor?: NO. Google Docs is a very efficient system that relies on html components to perfectly fit each object, so canonical could also spend time making a document editor based on electron and html, but it doesn't and probably never will and we'll stick with the same crap from libreoffice. Something similar happens with gedit, it doesn't support markdown and loading 2mb files ends up crashing.
Ubuntu doesn't have a decent store:
Currently the ubuntu package system is a mess, especially for a beginner. In the past you used aptitude and deb packages via apt-get, but today you have snap which has many official and unstable packages, which do not even have the basic configurations to work with external drives such as gimp and give many problems to access files of local configuration as is the case of libre office and the text fonts in ~/.fonts, in addition, flatpack has come to solve these things but canonical instead of using the best option for the end user continues to support a system outdated and poorly maintained to this day. The graphical application of applications is very unstable, the applications do not install well, it is not able to detect when you already have an application installed, it gives errors everywhere, sometimes it simply does not start, it does not have a reliable rating system, not even you know if the application that you will install works or not, it does not have a software quality process like play store, it has very few applications for the end user, it is a complete disaster. They could learn from the stores that already exist such as the play store (for me it is the best) and the app store. I would remove snap and focus on flatpak and deb packages.
The support is lousy:
I understand that there is a very large community working to make the system better and more stable, the base system and its kernel are very stable and appreciated, but the user experience in ubuntu desktop is terrible and is very neglected. It is very complicated to try to send feedback or report problems, many times I have had to wait more than 10 years for basic problems to be resolved. Open communities like these are official but not their members, which is why you only have community support but never official support and you can easily wait years for things as simple as the lack of a slider to control screen brightness to be heard, then you have to wait another long years for them to try to give you a solution.
Canonical does not help gamers or streamers:
Most decisions about configurations, drivers and packages do not help people who consume and use media content, we are still in the era of windows xp where audacity was the best option for professional audio editing, today packages and Drivers are oriented to stability and the avant-garde but not to usability, it is the case of the abandonment of audio and video configurations on wayland and little kernel optimization for low latency like as ubuntu studio.
If I can give thanks:
Many people help us with these problems every day without receiving money, others support professionally and it is greatly appreciated, it is also appreciated that canonical is supporting users without returning a direct benefit, but I think that many of canonical's decisions are not well-founded and much of its work team stayed in the past, we had to wait many years to have an interface that would compete in design with windows 7 and we have achieved it today 2022, now we will have to wait another 10 years to see a modern interface like osx or windows 11. The development environment of gnome is terrible, instead of using more flexible and open components like nodejs, rust, interface based on html and css instead of gtk, this would increase the number of developers, but for some strange reason they still maintain a scheme of little modern and little scalable work.
Ubuntu Desktop should not be called stable:
I think that ubuntu is still very far from having an orderly and efficient workflow, we are still fighting to have basic things like if you have windows xp, we don't even have an alternative to the old windows media player, much less with such a view nice as aero, until very recently we were able to have a decent settings app, even windows xp control panel was better than ubuntu 20.04. I consider that Ubuntu Desktop is alpha/beta but it is still very far from being stable, not even google dared to give a stable version to ubuntu studio despite how well it worked. It is only a matter of observing this forum, it has the design of a page from the 2000s, it is not even responsive, the libreoffice website seems to have been made by a 10-year-old boy who wanted to learn how to make web pages.
I have bought a new hardware of last generation, but the Operating System does not help me, i am a software developer, I work in cybersecurity, I like design, I use Krita a lot, I like to play guitar, I like to play, I have steam, on my PC I work, play and rest, and I have always done it with ubuntu, but for me the adaptation has been very difficult, not because I have personal adaptation problems, but because the canonical technology advances very slowly, what else awaits an inexperienced user.
I am making this post because I have had several compatibility problems and other basic problems that I have been having since I had the old hardware and today I felt overwhelmed and somewhat abandoned, I feel the support of people who enter the forum with all the good intentions to help, I read a lot of tutorials, I read a lot of the archlinux wiki (which is much better than the ubuntu documentation), but I still feel that the things that should be done canonical and the developers don't do it and prioritize other things leaving aside the users. I feel alone on this path, I would never go back to Windows, but I feel that I spend my time on modern technical knowledge and latest generation hardware, but I feel that the operating system is from many past generations and I cannot reflect that to the people I know. since I always try to show you how cool it is to use linux with ubuntu but I also recognize how difficult is this road.
I don't know if the people who will read this post are new or old, if it will be someone from canonical or not, what I do know is that I no longer have faith in changes, the only thing I hope is that over the years I can appear another entity that wants to maintain another distribution of linux and that does it better, I'm not saying that it does it perfect but that it does what it has to do correctly.