Dear Ubuntu,
I hope this letter finds you well. I want to start by saying that our time together was a very creative and entertaining time, a time when you gave me the tools to develop a new career, run a small electronics business, make fun of things, and write many thousands of articles for Hackaday and other publications, but unfortunately it’s time for our parted ways. . The magic that once held us together has faded, and what remains is in danger of becoming frustration.
In our early days as an item you first gave me a Linux distro that was complete, fast and easy to use without spending a lot of time on the CLI or editing configuration files to make things happen; It gave me a desktop that was smooth and tidy, and freed me from all those little gadgets that were required to make Windows usable. I’ve replaced other distributions I’ve been using, dual booted my Windows machines, and soon replaced Microsoft’s OS entirely.
We’ve been together for nearly two decades, and in that time we’ve looked at each other across a variety of desktops and laptops. The trusty Dell Inspiron 640 has kept you going for over a decade with numerous RAM, HDD, and SSD upgrades, and provided Hackaday readers for the first few years of my writing. Even the Unity desktop couldn’t break our relationship, those people at Linux Mint wouldn’t tear us apart! I’ve captured my text, edited my videos and photos, created PCB and CAD projects, and done countless computing tasks. Together, we made many people happy, and for that I will always be grateful.
But over the past few years, I’ve noticed that our relationship has gradually become less harmonious and more frustrating. Like a middle-aged prevalence, it became progressively more bloated, moments of freezes became obvious and uncomfortable, and delays in opening some indispensable parts of software became too long to be explained simply as a result of other applications running in the background. Our once close relationship became strained by the endless waiting for Snap-packed apps to load, and by my USB peripherals mysteriously refusing to talk to the apps I’d used with them for years.
I understand that Snap is meant to free us from dependency hell and I know why it puts each one in its own little sandbox, but honestly, even ChromeOS running a Linux app in its virtual machine is faster than this, and it just doesn’t. require getting everything from a single distribution center, or messing with access to hardware. I need to restore my device’s performance, and I need to use a terminal to stop being a lottery. I need more, Ubuntu, I need a distro that understands me and works with me, not against me!
I’ve tried to work through my frustrations, I’ve tried to convince myself that maybe if I had a faster laptop we could be happy together, but I can’t help thinking about the older generation of computers in my hacking space running Arch that Just Works, and It just works without you having to wait several minutes for Prusa Slicer to load. I realize that I can’t keep living a lie, I need to move on and find a distro that will give me the performance and stability I crave.
I want you to know that I didn’t jump to that conclusion in a moment. I kept my faith, kept hoping that each new distribution update would fix your shortcomings, and I stood up for you when faced with other, slimmer distributions my friends use. But I feel like we’ve passed the point of no return, and a relationship built on frustration is no way to live. Let’s remember the good times, write an article lying in a hammock at BornHack, or solve the problem of how to solve millions of words of group texts on an ordinary laptop. We’ve come a long way together, and for that I’m grateful.
The transition would be painless enough, and I wouldn’t even uninstall you. Instead, I have a new SSD in the mail, and I’ll transfer you in your drive to your enclosure. We’ll still see each other from time to time, and maybe if I can get out of my midlife crisis one day, we’ll get back together. In the meantime, thanks for all the good things you have allowed me to do over the years, and I hope the moderators will help you through the present difficulties.
yours,
Jenny is not
#Dear #Ubuntu..