Why Ubuntu is a Terrible Distro

[Arameus]

Now, to be fair, I've only used a few distros: RHEL, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu. However I can assure you that by FAR Ubuntu was the absolute worst. Although I have heard many arguments, the most striking annoyance is the use of sudo and the lack of an actual root user. This is massively inconvenient, and it is the reason Ubuntu is almost completely unused in corporate offices and large servers (RHEL dominates this market). Bash scripting and administration of any kind becomes a massive hassle when you are constantly being informed that you have to have administrator privileges (ie you have to use fucking sudo) to do anything. It is only convenient if you are so fucking stupid that you try to do some dumb shit like delete /etc/passwd. In which case, simply dont login as root. Ubuntu sacrifices power for convenience, something for which it should not be forgiven.

[Goatboy]

Okay, I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that you haven't thought of this from any position other than your own.

Ubuntu is not terrible. It's not the best of the best, but it's not terrible. You need to consider what the goal of Ubuntu was. Read about the philosophy of Ubuntu and you'll understand. They didn't set out to make the greatest Linux distro they could. They set out to make one that would be available to people of all nations, all languages, all over the world. They didn't aim to be an enterprise solution. They aimed to get free software into the hands of those who wanted it. I'd say they did a damn good job of it.

I'll admit, it's not fun having to use sudo all the time. When I first installed Apache, I would always have to use sudo to edit any web page. That got to me. But that's not the point. Saying Ubuntu is terrible because it sacrifices power for convenience is like saying bikes are terrible because they sacrifice power for convenience. You just need to look at the goals from another angle.

[orwell84]

To paraphrase Goatboy, ubuntu isn't necessarily meant for corporate servers, etc--it's nicknamed "linux for human beings" for a reason, after all. It's meant to give an introduction to linux to people who have only used windows their entire lives (like me two years ago). For that purpose, it certainly does its job.
Secondly, to solve your problem of having to use "f**king sudo," try this command:

Code: Select all

sudo passwd root

That will make a root account by giving it a password. Or perhaps:

Code: Select all

sudo su

which will simply give you a root shell prompt.
Problem solved. Convenient, huh?

[Arameus]

NO. SUDO IS TERRIBLE AND YOU ARE ALL SUDO LOVING NIGGERS.

just kidding, although honestly I feel like sudo makes it less accessible. And yeah, I read about the sudo passwd trick and while that does essentially solve the problem, I just can't get over how much sudo annoys me on principle.

[orwell84]

Yeagh, safeguards are almost always an annoyance to more skilled users, but it does protect noobs from screwing things up too badly...

[tomgeorge88]

I agree with the the above views in fact. I've been using 5 various versions of Ubuntu and I should say they have done a rather good job of propagating the Free Software Movement than most distros which are too risky to be used by noobs who have no previous experience with Linux. In fact I would recommend it to anyone who is using Windows rather than fancy distros.

[d3v11]

Ubuntu disables the root account by default for security purposes. Ubuntu attracts a large amount of new Linux users, therefore to keep their box from getting hijacked they disable the root account. This is especially important if you have something like ssh listening on your ports. Having an active root account removes 1/2 the work for a hacker.

There are ways around this but many experienced users prefer to keep their root account disabled. Much like myself because I prefer the added security over convenience.

Code: Select all

sudo passwd root # will create a root password and enable your root account
sudo passwd -l root # locks the root account if you later want to disable it

sudo -i # this will run your terminal session as root


problem solved