Ubuntu's lost its shine

by Tim Faircloth on Aug 21, 2007, 10:07 am

People are getting into linux more, which is a reaction to Dell selling computers with Ubuntu pre-loaded. Geeks everywhere are talking about how Ubuntu is so awesome, but lately I’ve been thinking about switching back to Debian or even switching over to Saybayon, a Gentoo-based distro. All my distaste for Ubuntu lies with the one thing that gives it strength — that “ubuntu-desktop” package. Let me explain.

The “ubuntu-desktop” package is a dummy package (in and of itself, it contains no programs) that depends on several “operation critical” packages, like xorg or gnome. The good thing about this package is that it gives you all the essential tools for a working desktop in one package, but the problem is that it’s not very modular.

Here’s a list of dependencies for the ubuntu-desktop package. Is it just me, or does that seem a bit extreme? If I uninstall any one of these packages, I am forced to remove the mother package… and suddenly every other package on that list is marked as “no longer needed”, so every time I use apt it tells me I’ve got several packages I don’t need (when in fact I do need some of them).

Well shit. I don’t want to have to download the newest openoffice package set (at about 100 MB each update) when I barely use it, but I don’t want to uninstall it because I do like so many of the other tools which would be “no longer needed”.

I have an idea for the Ubuntu team (if they’re listening). Split that package up. No one package should have fifty dependencies (actually much more than fifty, but I stopped counting). It’s just absurd.