Ubuntu bye bye

I give up, I surrender. Once upon a time I might have had the energy or inclination to put up with all of this, but not now and not today. Maybe if I strike it rich and can spend a week or so tinkering with an operating system (ah, the days of old...sans riches, that is) I'll give it another go. But for now...

Bye bye, Ubuntu. Bye bye, Linux.

Obviously I'm more in love with the concept of Linux (in all its assorted flavors) than with the reality of living with Linux (in any of its assorted flavors). I frankly loved working with the WindowMaker interface (window manager, in technical terms), but that's all.

What brings me to this conclusion was Ubuntu Linux Dapper Drake, v6. I had previously tried Breezy Badger (v5) and was impressed but not won over. But with Dapper, Beta 2, I really got excited. Somewhere along the line I tried a live CD and everything just worked. Cool. I used Partition Magic to open up some room on my laptop and installed the beta. Everything just worked. Perfectly.

But then I hit the release candidates. I believe it was around Beta 5 or so. The Internet just went away. Mind you, I hadn't changed a thing on this machine. After that update (downloaded via the Internet, o' irony), poof, no Internet connection. Boot over to XP, seek help, try a flurry of suggestions, nothing works.

I relaxed, figured I'd just want for the actual release before trying again. I did and when v6.06LTS was released, I bit-torrented it onto a local drive, created an install CD, and started that sucker up. Installed perfectly. Everything worked again. Oh joy and happy day!

Day.

It installed v2.6.15-23-386 of the Linux kernel. A short while later there was an update to -25- of the kernel. Bye bye, Internet. Boot back to the -23- kernel. Works for a few minutes, then nada.

Boot back to XP, searched for answers, find a slight flurry of suggestions (enough to tell me I'm not the only one with the problem), and none of them work. For that matter, none appear to work for others who are having the same issue.

So Ubuntu, as of v6.06LTS, is a Linux dead end. It was far and away the best distro I had tried. Mandrake to Mandriva, Red Hat to Fedora Core, Knoppix, SUSE, Damn Small, and even the now-defunct Evil Entity (and oh, I really wanted that one to work; the name alone made it worth the effort).

So, sigh, in a few minutes I'll press the "back up now, damnit" button on my extenal HDD. When that's done, I'll run Partition Magic and recover the space I had created for Linux. Then I'll run the XP recovery console and zap the MBR. When I'm done (in less than an hour) I'll have a pure XP laptop again. And note that all of those steps will work and I can do them with my eyes closed.

So, adios, Linux. Next time I wander through the operating system jungle, it will be to visit Mac OS X, which I understand is the best Linux/Unix distro in the known universe. Sounds good to me!