Pricey Ubuntu… | Hackaday
Pricey Ubuntu,
I hope this letter finds you nicely. I wish to begin by saying that our time collectively has been considered one of creativity and leisure, a time during which you gave me the instruments to develop a brand new profession, to run a small electronics enterprise, make enjoyable issues, and to put in writing a number of thousand articles for Hackaday and different publications, however for all that it’s sadly time for our methods to half. The magic that after introduced us collectively has light, and what stays is in peril of changing into a frustration.
In our early days as an merchandise you gave me for the primary time a Linux distro that was full, quick, and simple to make use of with out spending an excessive amount of time on the CLI or enhancing config recordsdata to make issues occur; you gave me a desktop that was clean and uncluttered, and also you freed me from all these little utilities that had been required to make Home windows usable. You changed the opposite distros I’d been utilizing, you dual-booted with my Home windows machines, and fairly quickly you supplanted the Microsoft working system totally.
We’ve been collectively for near twenty years now, and in that point we’ve seemed one another within the eye throughout a wide range of desktop and laptop computer computer systems. My trusty Dell Inspiron 640 ran you for over a decade by means of a number of RAM, HDD, and SSD upgrades, and offered Hackaday readers with the primary few years of my writing. Even the Unity desktop couldn’t break our relationship, these Linux Mint individuals weren’t going to tear us asunder! You captured my textual content, edited my movies and pictures, created my PCBs and CAD tasks, and did numerous extra computing duties. Collectively we made lots of people comfortable, and for that I’ll all the time be grateful.
However over the previous few years, I’ve observed that our relationship has slowly turn out to be one much less of concord and extra of frustration. Like middle-aged unfold, you turned progressively extra bloated, your moments of freezing turned apparent and inconvenient, and the delays to open some indispensable items of software program turned too lengthy to easily clarify as the results of having different apps operating within the background. Our as soon as shut relationship has turn out to be strained by infinite ready for Snap packaged purposes to load, and by my USB peripherals mysteriously refusing to speak to purposes they’ve been used with for years.
I perceive that Snap is supposed to launch us from dependency hell and I do know why you’ve put each in its personal little sandbox, however actually, even ChromeOS operating a Linux software in its digital machine is quicker than this, and it doesn’t require every thing to come back from one distribution hub, or mess with entry to {hardware}. I would like my machine’s efficiency again, I would like utilizing a peripheral to cease being a lottery. I would like extra, Ubuntu, I would like a distro that understands me and works with me, not in opposition to me!
I’ve tried to work round my frustrations, tried to persuade myself that perhaps if I had a quicker laptop computer we might be comfortable collectively, however I can’t assist fascinated by the older era PC in my hackerspace operating Arch that Simply Works, and Simply Works with out having to attend a number of minutes for Prusa Slicer to load. I realise that I can’t go on dwelling a lie, I would like to maneuver on and discover a distro that offers me the efficiency and stability I crave.
I would like you to know that I didn’t bounce to this conclusion immediately. I saved the religion, I saved hoping each recent distribution replace would repair your shortcomings, and I even defended you when confronted with the opposite, leaner, distros my mates use. However I sense we’ve handed the purpose of no return, and a relationship constructed on frustration isn’t any strategy to dwell. Let’s keep in mind the great instances, writing an article mendacity in a hammock at BornHack, or cracking find out how to number-crunch thousands and thousands of phrases of corpus textual content on a secular laptop computer. We traveled a great distance collectively, and for that I’m grateful.
The transition can be painless sufficient, I gained’t even uninstall you. As a substitute I’ve a brand new SSD within the mail, and I’ll switch you in your drive to your individual caddy. We’ll nonetheless see one another once in a while, and perhaps in case you can Snap out of your midlife disaster sooner or later we’ll get again collectively. In the meantime, thanks for all the great belongings you allowed me to do over time, and I hope your maintainers can assist you thru your present difficulties.
Yours,
Jenny Listing