Ubuntu Precise makes Vista look like a sparkling, priceless jewel

For work reasons I looked at Ubuntu 12.04, Precise 32bit under VMWare Player.

From early reviews, etc., I was prepared for being underwhelmed by the Unity user interface. I was not prepared for a disaster.

Here are some tag lines that come to mind:

“Ubuntu Precise – for those who cannot figure out a mouse.”

“Ubuntu Precise – bringing the worst of bad phone UI design to a desktop frighteningly near you.”

“Ubuntu Precise – the most expensive free OS in existence.”

“Ubuntu Precise – for those who never ever want to resize or scroll a window.”

“Ubuntu Precise – with an immutable, ‘Halloween from Elm Street’ desktop theme loved by 32 year old boys in their mother’s basements worldwide.”

“Ubuntu Precise – breaking 10 years of software improvements to squeeze a whole ‘UI’ in to an icon-sized area at the top left corner of your bare-bones, dual 24″ 1080p monitor system.”

“Ubuntu Precise – the OS for people who struggle with only 500 icons on their desktops.”

“Ubuntu Precise – type partial app names to see icons that do nothing.”

The list goes on and on.

What’s truly unfortunate is that Precise, by all accounts, has many small but real improvements over Lucid in particular programs and sub-systems.

If Lucid ran Office, a normal person could probably drop Windows and deal with Linux USB and general non-Windows issues. Lucid has pluses over XP and even Win7 to balance the minuses. But I’d not point anyone to Precise. It’s simply not a working system.

And we may use it in a product, desktop-less.

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