Nevertheless, it is not perfect and here are some of my pet peeves (most of them admittedly minor or at best medium-level) which stop me from giving Ubuntu a 10/10 rating. Some of these are Ubuntu issues, some GNOME and some just have to do with particular Linux apps.
- Does not recognize wide-screen monitors
My brand new 19" widescreen Acer just doesn't get recognized properly, in particular it's 1440x900 resolution. I had to manually edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to give me that option, but I still have not been able to force it to use 75Hz refresh rate, Ubuntu shows me only 50Hz, 60Hz and 61Hz in my options.
Responsibility: Ubuntu. Needs to improve hardware detection
UPDATE: According to one of the comments, this is an issue with the Acer 1916W monitor which (supposedly?) does not report its resolution correctly. Although that explains things a lot, it's still an issue since on XP I was able to set up the correct resolution without issues (once I got the NVidia driver installed it showed me 1440x900 as an option), while Ubuntu did not...hence the manual hacking of xorg.conf. It would be nice if the Screen Resolution screen showed all available resolutions, just like its Windows counterpart. - Has problem dealing with multiple sound cards
On my system I have 3 sound cards: the default one on my motherboard (never used), an old Soundblaster Live (used only for its MIDI input port, but not for audio) and my main one, a high-end professional M-Audio M66 (24-bit, 96KHz). Even after setting the proper soundcard in the GNOME option panel, some programs (in particular games) still did not use my M-Audio card.
In the end I had to drop down to command line to properly set the default card in ALSA after looking at this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=499520
Responsibility: Ubuntu. Improve handling of multiple sound cards. - Does not allow to change default music player
Rhythmbox is fine, but it's a poor cousin of Amarok (for KDE). I would like to change it to use Exaile, which is more in line with Amarok's features. Although you can change the default application for MP3 files to be Exaile, GNOME does not allow you to change the default media player to be something different than Rhythmbox.
Responsibility: GNOME. Add more flexible configurations. - Global keyboard shortcuts are inflexible
I wanted to assign some global keyboard shortcuts to Exaile's functions (e.g. play/pause, volume up/down, next/previous track, etc.). Unfortunately, GNOME's options only allow to do it for the default player (i.e. Rhythmbox, see point above) so I was not able to assign global shortcuts to Exaile.
Responsibility: GNOME. Once again: ADD MORE FLEXIBLE CONFIGURATIONS
P.S. Btw, the volume up/down shortcut did not work, even with Rhythmbox. Looks like a bug. - SoundJuicer has no control over CD ripping quality
Most proper CD rippers give you some level of control as to whether they are using cdparanoia to properly rip CDs, even scratched ones. SoundJuicer has no configuration whatsoever and rips them without doing any serious error checking (which is why it is so fast compared to other CD rippers). As a result, a lightly scratched CD I had was ripped with audible cracks/pops, while using other rippers (like KDE's default KAudio CD Creator) took longer, but gave me a clean, good sounding rip.
Responsibility: GNOME. ADD MORE FLEXIBLE CONFIGURATIONS!!! - SoundJuicer has wrong MP3 options configured
Selecting "CD Quality (MP3)" in SoundJuicer will create MP3s with 128kbps bitrate. This is NOT CD quality, not even close. If you want to use CD quality, you need to use the "-- preset standard" option of the LAME encoder, which means creating a new GStreamer pipeline with the following value:
"audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc preset=1001 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux"
BTW, creating a new GStreamer pipeline is a major pain. If not for the fact that this preset was in the Ubuntu Wiki, I would not have been able to figure it out on my own. Give me command line options any day.
Responsibility: Ubuntu. Create a proper CD quality MP3 setting for SoundJuicer. - Gimp UI is so 1994
Really, Gimp is such a great tool. But can someone finally update it's UI to stop looking like the Visual Basic 3 IDE with its dozen of floating windows? Whatever the Gimp team is doing, they should drop it and focus on rewriting the UI. It makes my Windows friends laugh every time they see it and is the butt of endless Linux jokes. And they are right. Linux's best graphics app should look better than that.
Responsibility: Gimp. Rewrite the UI. - Digital Audio Production on Linux is a Joke with a capital "J"
As an amateur musician, I am used to the power, ease of use and flexibility of such Windows tools as Cakewalk Sonar, Native Instruments Guitar Rig, VST/DXi plugins and virtual instruments, etc.
First of all, Linux doesn't come even close to the same depth and quality of audio production software.
Second, the whole concept of the JACK server (wiring separate apps together) is complete idiocy. It is too complex and offers not much extra in flexibility compared to what VST can do on Windows. Not to mention that if I really created a full song using let's say in Ardour (multi track recorder, which BTW looks horrible on Ubuntu), Hydrogen (drum machine), Freebirth (synth) in order to load that song again, I would need to load each app separately, remember which preset I had loaded into each for that particular song (e.g. Hydrogen drum patch) and then wire it all again with JACK. Are you guys for real?
I won't even mention the fact that getting Hydrogen to play properly took me a week (didn't show any errors, just wouldn't play, turned out to be some hidden option in JACK once again, related once again to multiple soundcards) and as soon as I added a slightly heavier plugin to it (I think it was parametric EQ) it started dropping out and couldn't play. Pretty sad.
Contrast that to my Windows XP, where I start up Sonar, it loads all my plugins with their own presets automatically for every song and I am up and running in 20 seconds, trouble free.
Right now digital audio production on Linux is not simply behind Windows, it is basically in the Stone Age and no one seems to be doing anything about it. That's why unfortunately I still have a Windows XP partition on my PC and dual boot into it.
Responsibility: No idea. No one seems to be really thinking seriously about this space on Linux.
With that in mind, I will repeat that Ubuntu is great, it is my primary OS and I enjoy it a lot for all the wonderful things it provides. I hope the points above will help make it even better one day.
13 comments:
i can't really comment on some of the things you don't like as i find editing xorg.conf pretty easy (i have dual widescreen LCD's and it took me less than 5 minutes to get them both working at native resolution and to get dual-monitor working)...i only have 1 soundcard (sound on the mobo disabled in the bios)...As for Gnome not being very customizable...yes, it is...that's the BIGGEST reason people use KDE...if you want your DE to be insanely customizable, go to KDE and stop whining. Gnome was meant to be simple.
Really, changing a default app or keyboard bindings is not insane customizations...I would say it's actually very basic customizations.
And if GNOME is supposed to be simple, than its default should be correct (e.g. SoundJuicer's cd ripping or MP3 quality settings), instead of being wrong or misleading.
allow me to revise what i was saying: Gnome is meant to be for people who just want stuff to work (people who check their email, write a document, etc)...Most people, if they want to rip a CD, they want to open a ripping app, put the cd in and click start (go, run, do it, whatever) without going through and selecting their fileformats and bitrates first. On linux, there are many alternatives for everything, if you don't like the idiot-proof-ness of SoundJuicer, use something else. And for the record, 128kbps MP3 has been known as "near CD-Quality" for as long as i can remember. Also, it's quite easy to change a default app or keybindings...AT LEAST it's easier in Gnome than it is in Windows to do those things. I don't see why you're having a hard time with it...
128kbps is NOT cd quality, any CBR-based MP3 cannot do that, especially for music with wide dynamic range (e.g. classical). Please go to Hydrogenaudio.org and educate yourself on MP3 audio quality. Saying 128kbps is audio quality is like saying Vista can play HD-DVD when it reality it purposely degrades the qualiyy/
For the keyboard bindings, they can only be changed for the DEFAULT media app. And I am not allowed to change the DEFAULT media app.
Hence, I am not allowed to remap global shortcuts to my preferred MP3 player. I can do it on Windows with minimal fuss using Foobar2000 (the best Windows MP3 player), so why am I not allowed to do it on Linux?
Just to follow up, KDE ships with "--preset standard" as the default MP3 encoding option. They have it right.
OK, I agree that the default xorg.conf generated by Ubuntu sort of sucks. Reasonably speaking, you should just delete any settings under the monitor session and let Xorg figure your monitor settings out by asking the monitor itself. And for the record, LCDs generally have the default refresh of 60Hz and you should not change it. It doesn't result in flicker like it does on CRTs.
Handling dual sound cards has ben my personal peeve with Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular. It is relatively easy to configure on command line (something in the config of ALSA modules, don't recall at the moment), but you should be able to do this in GUI.
I don't understand your complaint about the "default" music player. What do you mean by default? The application to open particular sound file format can be configured using file manager (I wish GNOME made a central application for configuring MIME type handlers) and application that starts on inserting a CD can be configured in preferences in removable media.
No offence but your last point seems to be a bit over the top. You can't really expect free applications written by people in their spare time to compete in quality or functionality with commercial apps. I understand your frustration, since I am forced to keep my Windows partition just because of a couple of specialized apps that have no real equivalent in Linux, but until commercial software companies start making Linux versions of their apps we're stuck.
That monitor issue you had is actually a problem with the monitor. Acer AL1916W, right? I have the same one. It doesn't properly report it's native resolution, so you have to explicitly tell X what it is (1440x900).
bad wombat:
The "default" music player issue: basically I wanted to assign global shortcuts to Exaile. However, unlike in Windows or KDE where you define them within each specific app, GNOME has a central Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts panel. In there however I cannot assign the standard shortcut for let's say Sound/Play or Pause to any app, but only to whatever default app is defined in GNOME.
And since GNOME does not allow me to change the default app that is defined as the music player (i.e. Rhythmbox I presume), I cannot accomplish my task of assigning global shortcuts for MP3 playback to Exaile, which seems like a very basic requirement.
Hence, I think you see how the issue of default MP3 player and global shortcuts (and GNOME's lack of flexibility in both) is tied together.
Voislaw:
Well, it's not only that the current apps are way behind their Windows equivalents. It's also that the direction they went to (i.e. wiring apps together via JACK, which I agree is very flexible, but way too complex for the average musician Joe who needs to get a DAW, drum machine, synth plugins working togeher) is just plain wrong in terms of design and the wrong basic approach to the issue.
On Windows they have VST or DXi:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Studio_Technology
and it's a much simpler (from a user's point of view) approach, as long as the host application supports VST.
Not to mention that the sound doesn't drop out randonly, like on my box with nothing but the Hydrogen drum machine running.
Quite right! Take it back to the store and demand your money back. Speak to the store manager if you have to. The points you make are very valid and if I spent my money on something like this, I'd want my money back too.
* rolling my eyes over *
If the argument "it's free, so don't complain about it" is supposed to be valid, then Linux will never have a chance as a desktop OS. It's supposed to be "free and better", as that is the only way it can eat into Windows's market share.
Hey, I was just looking into the same thing (keyboard shortcuts). I came across this thread on ubuntuforums:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=350974
It works for launching exaile, but I still can't get the play/pause to have any affect.
Be sure you're using Exaile's global hotkey plugin (seen here). Global hotkeys work just fine for Exaile on this end (I'm using the latest svn, however).
As for a decent CD ripper... perhaps EAC?
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