I know it’s supposed to be a big improvement. I know it’s all about security. It reminds me of the old joke about “real” librarians who’d like to bind the books on both sides so the users can’t mess them up. I run a single user linux system. I don’t have security issues. I have HUGE gvfs issues.

1) Taking away root’s ultimate control of filesystems. Backup scripts no longer run right. Often times I have to use rsync with –ignore-errors. I hate that. But I have no choice because some doofus has decided I need to be safer than safe. I also can’t, for instance, unmount a phantom corrupted SD card, because root can’t touch it and the user no longer exists.

2) The way it plays badly with programs like Simple Backup. The first time I used SB, gvfs decided the whole backup was also somehow part of my root directory, which filled it, which made my computer dead in the water. I managed to climb back out of that disaster by booting off CD, deleting the backup as root, and deleting every .gvfs directory on the system. But for many users that would have been a rather serious “usability issue.”

3) The Absolutely Asinine naming conventions for removable media mounted to the desktop. Do you have any idea how many “8.0GB Media” I have? Thumbdrives, SD cards, pcmcia cards, the list goes on. It’s totally useless, but — and this is the thing that has me spitting nails — there is no way at all for me to name those drives what *I* want. I’m stuck with the aforementioned doofus’s ideas! (Sure, I could use tune2fs to rename the volumes, but a) that is again not something some users will want to do, and b) I want to give it a name relevant to my current work. I don’t want to have to change the volume name every time, just to get a useful desktop name.)

I guess I’ll quit there. I could go on. Really, I could.

I love Ubuntu, and have since I started using it somewhere back before Dapper. I convert people to it every chance I get, and it’s not difficult. It’s really an absolutely beautiful work. It was pretty much a straight line improvement all the way through Gutsy. And then this gvfs crap hit, and I wish I hadn’t been so trusting that I just hit the upgrade button! Please, Mark. Please, please, please! use your clout to make those upstream doofuses think about the user as well as their precious security and elegant code and whatever else they have on their tiny minds.

In spite of this, these are not really software bugs, so much as management and marketing “bugs” that deal with basic questions that don’t appear to have been asked:

1. Can users easily install/upgrade free killer apps (skype)?
2. Can users install/upgrade the hardware that can be upgraded (RAM)?
3. Can users reliably use all of the available hardware (webcam)?

In the short-term, however, Canonical and Ubuntu are dropping the ball. The Dell Mini 9 release is indicative of serious problems. Not sure if it’s an issue of priorities or resources or lack of marketing awareness or lack of awareness of the importance of good user experiences, but consider the following:

Although users can buy an Ubuntu Mini 9 direct from Dell, they can’t install Skype because of LPIA vs. i386 architecture issues. Yes, I know you can repackage the DEBs manually or force install via dpkg. The point is that point-and-click doesn’t work for something very common and popular; what can be reasonably expected for “average” user tasks and expectations.

Webcam doesn’t work. Driver hangs and crashes out-of-the-box.

For users that upgraded to 2GB of RAM only 1 GB shows up because of an oversight in the compilation of the kernel for highmem support.

The Mini 9 was released in the 1st week of September. The above feedback was available in the 2nd week of September. It’s now almost December and nothing has been done. Nothing for any of the above critical issues.

Meanwhile first time Linux and Ubuntu users who buy the Mini 9 continue to be puzzled by the problems and wonder why so many basic things don’t work. See the Ubuntu and other forums to see what I mean.

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/dell-mini to see the lack of attention and effort on what is likely the most public and readily available release of Ubuntu to the general public to date.