So I have been increasingly annoyed with the direction ubuntu has been taking recently: a vitriolic take here.

In addition to some odd fiscal choices while trying to figure out how to pay their bills, they are going whole-hog into their own window manager that looks completely disinteresting to me: Unity. I mean, the idea of a fully accelerated desktop makes sense but I don’t trust ubuntu to build it. My experience under lucid and then maverick with Ubuntu One was less than stellar: it utterly failed. Their own software in their own environment. Busted. The window manager and ubuntu one issues are just one small part: generally, it seems like I derive very little from ubuntu but annoyance.

An example: I upgraded from lucid to maverick and flash performance (which was never stellar anyway) TANKED. A page with a flash embed would take 30 seconds at least to render, with or without a plugin crash. Unfortunately, as a web developer that works with video a lot, performant flash is pretty important. I have no idea why it broke during the lucid – > maverick upgrade: bad QA is the only reason I can come up with.

So I’m back on debian stable for my laptops and desktops and I couldn’t be happier. Everything feels much faster (it could be the switch from ecryptfs to dm-crypt but I expect there is more to it, I didn’t feel io bound), everything works and I have rock solid kde terminals. My ideals just jibe better with debian, it feels like I am home again.