- The boot menu has a strange font, reminds me of some old Lucas Arts adventures.
- The boot splash could need a higher resolution
- The sound that plays during startup skips. Should be fully loaded before an attempt is made to play it (unless it's a bug in the audio subsystem)
Chapter 2: Playing around with the LiveCD
- I like that button in the panel for the network configuration. But what's this "Roaming mode"? It's not DHCP, that has its own option.
- Optimal display resolution detected automatically. Windows always failed at that.
- Nice, some games on the CD. But solitaire sucks, no dancing cards if you win.
- Don't like their choice of audio player on the CD. It's not directory based, requires good tags to be usable. Directories + filenames > tags imho.
- All my files on all my partitions are available, even NTFS write support out-of-the-box
Chapter 3: Installation
- Many languages in lots of different scripts, not necessary to install some extra font packs like on Windows.
- RTL support isn't optimal if choosing Arabic or Hebrew.
- Text wrapping could be better, lots of free space to the right of the language selection dialog
- Timezone selection dialog is hard to use. The icons on the map are very small unlabeled and the selection choicebox has a HUGE, slow scrolling list. Two choiceboxes, one for continent and then one for the country in the selected continent would be better.
- Time is off by two hours. But that's because Windows stores local time in RTC whereas Linux stores the time as UTC in the RTC.
- Partitioning was a bit complex, there should be an option between "Guided - Use entire disk" and "Manual", namely "Select partition".
- Installer can import my profile from my Gentoo installation. I'll skip that though, don't think Ubuntu will like my custom stuff
- After collecting all the options, starting the installation resets the master audio volume. Almost blew off my ears.
- Looks like my DVD burner has problems reading the CD it just burned a couple of minutes ago. I really hope I'll be able to install next Ubuntu from a bootable flash drive in my USB port. Discs are a dying technology anyhow. Bulky, fragile and in the latest versions plagued with DRM.
Chapter 3: Booting the new installation
- It did overwrite my bootloader. Guess it's too hard to see that I have been using the very same bootloader before but just with a different config. Would be simple to just copy the settings, but no....
- I like the notification that there are some more drivers for my hardware available. But why does installing the proprietary ATI drivers require a reboot? On Gentoo it was enough to emerge the package, load the module, update xorg.conf and then restart X. But no reboot.
- But where's the eye candy? I'll do that later
Chapter 4: Installing new software
- Naturally, the first thing I'm missing is FileZilla. Installing that was easy through Applications -> Add/Remove... I had to select All Open Source applications first though.
- The description of FileZilla is inaccurate in Ubuntu with a feature list of FZ2 rather than of FZ3.
- Noticed the first bug: The buttons at the bottom of the site manager have unequal heights. Looks ugly. Some other dialogs have this as well.
- Why did nobody report this before? Surely there have to be some other users of Gutsy + FileZilla?
- Gutsy could use an updated wxWidgets version
- Installed Adblock
Chapter 5: Multimedia
- I want to play some of my MP3 files. Need to install a Codec. Hmm, legal requirements. I think reviewing Ubuntu counts as research. One click and several moments later and the system knows about my files.
- But where's the audio? I can't hear anything. It worked on the LiveCD but not after installing. Turns out that it was using the wrong soundcard (LiveCD did choose the right card though)
- Mixer settings are all wrong and dumbed down. Using alsamixer in a terminal is more comfortable than the mixer applet of gnome.
- Video playback. I do see a movie but with very odd colors. Red and blue channels are swapped. A blue fire burning under a red sky. Looks like a bug in Totem. I wish I could change to a different movie player, but mplayer has no sound output, neither has vlc. And on top, the video stutters in vlc.
Chapter 6: Final verdict
Ubuntu is not yet ready for Joe Average. Nothing works out of the box. At least for me, using Gentoo is a lot easier.