On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 9:19 AM, pirast <email address hidden> wrote:
> Hi Ma, thanks for your commitment :)
> The Dell support does not have a clue, and on the Ubuntu-side I only have the option to rely on community based support.

That's probably the case for many Linux OEM systems.
I once bought a desktop computer with Linspire pre-intsalled.
I cannot find a way to start X so I gave up soon and installed Ubuntu 10.04.
One guy asked a question about SUSE Enterprise Linux on his laptop the
other day in local LUG mailing list, no one has a clue since no one
used that distribution before.

Ubuntu is a little better since there is a community.

> Personally, it really saddens me because I've been a free software advocate and have been using Ubuntu since 4.10.
> Now I think that some things are going into the wrong direction :
> - Amazon integrated into search

I hope you can discuss this issue somewhere else.

> - bad hardware support for "certified" systems, while manpower goes into supporting Google Nexus  (!! what for if even normal laptops are not supported well)

That annoys me also.
We are using, contributing, advocating Linux distributions but we have
no clue what kinds of laptop is fully supported, even those with
Ubuntu brand.
I'm not aware of a well maintained hardware knowledge base for Linux or Ubuntu.
There is no graphical hardware listing still, newbies still need to
understand what is terminal and what is lspci/lsusb/...
I tried to help solving a bug of hardware issue but I didn't get very
active response.

> - manpower used to develop multiple desktop environments (GNOME 3, Unity, none of it being perfect), while I know much more severe desktop bugs that might be worth looking into

This problem somehow belongs to Red Hat I believe.
They develop GNOME Shell that make many people unhappy.
I don't think Ubuntu's decision to shipping a different DE is a problem.
The problem is that Unity seems quite buggy.
I use and contribute MATE, a GNOME 2 fork, now.

> - little given back to upstream (i.e. for GTK, there is one person full-time working on it, and hes not employed by Canonical)

That guy probably works for Red Hat?
I'm not a fan of GTK3.
http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/
For upstream contribution, I don't think Canonical actually developed
that many things different from upstream of GTK.
Are you a fan of Overlay scrolling? I'm not.

> - still (since 2006) no results in making third party software easier to install and manage on all products of the Linux platform (see https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/en/Packaging)

Use Ubuntu Software Center if a third-party developer focus on Ubuntu.
For distribution agnostic packaging, there is an interesting research work:
http://www.pgbovine.net/cde.html

> I'm not really requesting any help, because for sure there is a way to somehow compile a newer mouse driver supporting my alps touchpad, to take a newer kernel improving fan control and run it with tweaked power options (I guess I'd somehow figure it out).
> But after installing Windows and having it almost running perfectly after 30 minutes (while I miss apt/yum package management), I have given up. Maybe I will have a look at Ubuntu/Linux in 1 year again, and I would be really happy if those things would be fixed, but I'm not that positive about it to be honest.

I do dual-boot on my MacBook now.
You may consider this option too.