This is goodbye, linux. As much as I wanted to stay with linux and Ubuntu I
finally ran out of patience with the amateurish approach to software development
I found almost everywhere I looked. Importantly for me, there is no
comprehensive video application for 32-bit systems. Kdenlive was, perhaps, the
best but it was seriously limited in the file formats it would deal with, and
none of the other format conversion software packages could deal with a 16:9
aspect, even though virtually every video camera prodcued today uses it. When I
tried to solve the problem with wine I found that none of the usual Windows
video conversion software packages would run with it. In fact, even the copy of
Internet Explorer that came with wine refused to run! And all this was happening
on Ubuntu 9.04! Neither 9.04 nor wine are brand new programs; these problems
should have been dealt with before the programs were released for general use.
The amount of tinkering and fiddling around just to get a normal response from
ordinary software has become intolerable. There should not be any need to go to
a command line to complete the simple installation of a common software
application, yet almost every package required resorting to the command line to
fix problems that should have been dealt with by the software developer. And
Canonical should not be endorsing software like wine when not even the software
that comes with it will function properly on Canonical's latest version of
the OS.
I came to Ubuntu because I was disgusted with Vista and thought that the 17th or
18th version of Ubuntu linux might have sorted out the sort of basic problem
I've found with almost every application I tried, including wine. Even the
much-vaunted Open Office Word Processor could not keep track of the boundaries
of a simple table from one editing session to the next. Good grief! These are
basic and obvious problems! Yet, after all the years of software development
that went into producing the packages I've tried the problems remain.
I've had enough. Good luck and goodbye, linux. Thankfully, when my copy of
Windows 7 arrives for my desktop I can move my copy of XP to my laptop and be
finished with software that doesn't even manage the most basic of software
systems