My Two Biggest Ubuntu Gripes
Well, after a couple of posts revealing how much of an Ubuntu fan boy I really am, I’m throwing a couple of gripes down the chute. I have two complaints that have been pretty consistent throughout my Ubuntu experience. One involves dual monitors; the other involves the Evolution personal information manager (PIM).
First, since I use my laptop to administer a large network of Windows PCs and servers, the ability to use dual monitors is a great boon to work flow and troubleshooting. At any given time, I have open several RDP sessions, Evolution Mail, Firefox, Spark IM, Umit NMAP front end, etc. Using dual head setup combined with multiple virtual desktops, these many windows open at the same time are easily organized and manipulated.
However, the arduous road I had to take to get to the happiness of dual head setup is a rather sad tale. For many months, I just resigned to not having the ability, because I didn’t have the time to really bang it out. One day though, I got mad enough to sit down and curse my way through it.
I started here in a thread that has lots of great information on manually editing config files and how to work with various video cards (also with lots of links to other information).
After several hours a night for two or three days of trying various edits of my xorg.conf, different drivers, hitting my computer, I finally read a post in that thread that linked here:
- URandR homepage: http://albertomilone.com/index.html
- URandR download site: http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Administration/URandR-36967.shtml
I downloaded and installed the program and fired it up. URandR immediately got my dual head setup working without hassle and with no proprietary drivers installed.
Many of you probably have not had the level of difficulty that I did with this, and many more have probably known about RandR and its different front ends for some time.
But I do know that dual head setup in Ubuntu as well as Linux as a whole is something that needs a lot more polish. Especially for mobile users who tend to hook up external displays or projectors, this is a key issue. The “average user” that Ubuntu is going after will not do what I did to get this to work.
On the positive side though, this issue is continually improving both from Canonical’s side and from hardware vendors as evidenced by ATI recently releasing drivers for their newer cards. So while we’re not 100%, we’re making awesome headway.
Complaint Number 2
My second gripe involves Evolution, the personal information manager for Gnome. On the whole, it’s a good program. It is feature rich, well organized, pleasing to look at and easy to use.
However, it is slow, and since I am tethered to Exchange by my company, it is prone to crashes in the midst of looking up addresses, and checking for new mail. It also tends to leak memory throughout the day. I bypassed it completely for my personal email, since Thunderbird works quite well and issue-free with GMail, but as far as I am aware (and someone please inform me of otherwise if this is no longer true)
Evolution is the only PIM that can access Exchange email, calendar, and contacts. From a usability standpoint, this may be an issue. Myself, I use it and live with the random problem here or there. Because I want to. I want as many of the necessary tools and programs that I use daily as possible to be locally installed (and not in a VM).
But for the average user, especially business users, something that causes just as many problems as the program it replaces (Outlook in this case) is a hands-down no go. I understand that the Exchange/Outlook connector is the one piece that MS holds like gold to their chest in this arena, but we ought to be able to at least have a more stable usage of the Outlook Web Access door that Evolution goes through.
In fairness, there are more than 150 bugs (as of this writing) listed under an “Evolution Exchange” search on Launchpad.
So this is being worked on. For the business class user, this is a critical component- for that business user who works mostly in MS Office and uses Outlook to keep track of email and appointments and happens to be mobile- they could easily make a switch to Ubuntu. But only after small hiccups such as these are ironed out.
Works With U Contributing Blogger Toby Deemer runs Ubuntu 8.04 to manage a large law firm network.
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There are a bunch of hits in Google for KMail exchange. Seems if IMAP is enabled, KMail works just fine.
I find that a dual monitor configuration is mostly fine with proprietary Nvidia drivers and the Nvidia X Server Settings applet, but only mostly. Depending on the driver version certain external screens and projectors are not detected properly. As a business user you can’t take the risk that a client’s projector will work. After one embarrassing presentation, I make sure I have a Windows machine handy.
My other gripe is the poor support for 3G connections in GNOME. I’ve tried the Intrepid beta with NM 0.7 and while it looks like they are working on it, it isn’t working yet. Having applications like Firefox and Pidgin think you are offline when you are connected via wvdial is a pain.
That said I’m still running an Ubuntu only machine.
Evolution is a piece of crap especially when tied to exchange. I know this is blog where accuracy lags behind facts but Evolution is a gnome problem not an Ubuntu problem.
Hey Mikey: Accuracy is critical to us. You’ve got a point re: Evolution’s issues being GNOME rather than Ubuntu. Sorry we mixed words.
Hi all-
Thanks for the feedback-
To Scott- I definitely wouldn’t mind having KMail, if not for being in Gnome and not being crazy about the idea of a lot of coexisting libraries to run apps from either DE. I have been on the fence for a while though in looking at KDE. We’ll see…
Mikey- You’re right, Evolution is definitely a Gnome issue. It’s an issue that affects any distro that uses Gnome. Including Ubuntu, which uses it as the default desktop environment. So while not one directly, it translates to an Ubuntu issue because that’s the default face that new users see. Given Canonical’s recent commitment to working more with upstream development, perhaps enough Ubuntu Gnome users raising awareness of issues like these will help changes see light more quickly.
Thanks again for the thoughts.
-toby deemer
Dual monitor support… I couldn’t agree more. I fall in the category of those that just gave up and said forget it. But, I have read that Intrepid is supposed to support this better. I haven’t had a chance to tinker with it yet.
Evolution is developed by mostly by Novell. I would turn to them for any support questions. If something is not working right I would expect them to make sure it does.
Novell Evolution
http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/evolution.html
As far as the dual monitors, I had small issues in 7.10 but the Nvidia’s config program easily fixed that. Not sure about issues with it on ATI cards, this should get alot better now that their partially open.
In the office I use Evolution and using it with Exchange IS incredibly slow and buggy. My solution was to use IMAP and LDAP for the address book, there is no way for me to get the calender cleanly that I know of, plus nobody else in here uses it so its pointless.
Evolution is Ubuntu’s problem though, they could have chosen Thunderbird or something else, they don’t use Epiphany as their default browser or Abiword as the default word processor. Thats what distributions do, they pick the best of all different packages and the better distros test and patch them to make sure they work as expected. That said though I don’t think Ubuntu needs to waste their time on getting Evolution to work with a server that doesn’t want anything but its own client to communicate with. They need to continue their focus on making a server that will replace Exchange and play nice with many different clients. Linux in general is already king at this but Ubuntu just needs to continue making it easier for the small businesses. Evolution using standard protocols works great for me though.
Griping is healthy for you!
Though I believe 8.10 features better multi-monitor support.
Indeed I have been encouraged lately by big vendors, in particular- Broadcom and ATI- opening up more to Linux users. I think the ATI card in my laptop may be slightly too far ahead of the curve in terms of being supported though. It’s **slightly** too old- Radeon 200 Mobile. Eh, well…
Now if we just get Lexmark to write real drivers for Linux, then all my woes would be assuaged…
I am going to start messing more with Intrepid pretty soon. The first Live CD I burned of it was a few weeks ago, so it wasn’t a complete as it is now. I’ll be testing it more in the near future; I’m excited about some of the announced features.
I do have to say before I go- I was really pleased that I got dual-head working the way it did, because the ATI drivers that were available for my card invariably broke DVD playback… So I was happy to not have to resort to the proprietary drivers and lose DVD, or keep DVD and not have dual-head…