Ubuntu 8.10 gripes

Now that I have been working with Ubuntu 8.10 for a while, I still cannot say this is an operating system suitable for novices.

After a fresh install of 8.10, I noticed that Firefox was not working properly. None of the toolbars seemed right and icons were missing. As it turns out, the extension Ubuntu Firefox Modifications 0.6 is installed by default. Disabling this extension and restarting Firefox fixed the problem.

After each and every boot, my Bluetooth mouse needs to be set up again because it does not seem to connect by itself. There are work-arounds involving scripting but it is annoying.

Frequently, there are updates to download. In itself this is a good thing. But the download speeds are terrible. I have Ubuntu installed on an external USB drive and I only use it occasionally. The last time I ran update manager was 5 days ago and this morning there were already 42 files to download, with the largest file being around 4 Megabytes. It took around thirty minutes on business grade ADSL. Either the servers at Canonical are slow or are lacking bandwidth. Then, when I thought it was finally done, there were 13 more updates to download. This took another 45 minutes at around 6 to 8kB/s. These long downloads with terrible throughput are not an exception.

My conclusion is that Ubuntu is still only for hardcore geeks.