My PC runs Windows 7 Ultimate and Ubuntu 9.10. Windows for Adobe software and gaming, Ubuntu for development. Recently my Nvidia graphics card started playing up, so I removed it. Thankfully, my motherboard has a fairly adequate ATI card built in. I removed the card, restarted Windows and continued as normal. Windows detected the card, installed appropriate drivers. All I had to do was reselect my resolution.

Later the same evening, I restarted into Ubuntu.

Ubuntu greeted me with it’s cute little white logo, all is well. Then the problems started. I’m notified the proprietary Nvidia drivers aren’t functioning and asked if I’d like to reconfigure my graphics settings. Yes please! Apparently I’m not allowed, it can’t save the new settings. I ask nicely to edit the configuration manually, and restart. Success! No. Apparently my ATI X1250 and 21″ CRT can’t support more than 1152×768. I try “vesa”, “ati”, “radeon”, “radeonhd” with no success, and finally move on to the ATI website to get official drivers.

I’m not going to rant about ATI, but suffice to say: If they can’t be bothered to make an installation that requires less than an hour of my time, requiring steps 99% of the population wouldn’t stand a chance of completing, I’m not going to bother. I’m simply going to save myself the bother in future by never using ATI again.

I fixed my problem by following a complex guide on the Ubuntu website, purging all traces of Nvidia drivers and reapplying the “radeon” driver. I then went to an unrelated website about advanced configuation of “xorg.conf” and guessed a number of settings to type in. Fairly certain my edits would simply cause the system to crash, I crossed my fingers, restarted and… It worked! It actually worked. I got my 1600×1200 back. I lost all 3D support, but at least I don’t have to bother keeping Wine installed anymore…

What’s my point?

I really want to recommend Ubuntu to friends and family, like most of the Linux fan base would. Frankly though, that’s years away from happening. There are so many fairly fundamental usability issues in Gnome and KDE that mean installing it for my parents would result in many hours per week in technical support to them.

Something as simple as adding items to the “quick launch” or “start menu” equivalents is a sweat inducing trial of endurance for anything but the most technical person. Running scripts on startup that require elevated privileges is something that’s eluded me so far, and I open a terminal to “sudo” run them manually every time I start the PC.

Ubuntu is a great operating system though. Having a LAMP server setup on my desktop PC in a few lines of text makes me very happy. The range of 1-click install software on hand is wonderful. I just wish some of the fairly basic features you expect to find (like intelligent driver selection…) were worked on a little more.