This is around the time I first installed Ubuntu. I had previously tried several other distros (Libranet, Mandrake, PlanetCCRMA, Agnula, Fedora, …) and all of them made me want to gouge out my own eyes with a plastic spoon.

Then I saw Ubuntu on a friend’s computer and she wasn’t having any…

I think it’s worth not losing sight of the people who don’t have a positive experience with Ubuntu or any other community-based projects. I tend to run into occasional problems (mainly due to my choice of hardware) but I have the experience, knowledge, time and will to fix them; it can take hours to get a trivial problem fixed (or non-trivial, such as X.org failing to start) and the common user we’re supposed to be targeting will get so frustrated by this that it’s not worth their time dumping the default OS (Windows) for the sake of a bit of extra freedom. They can put up with malware and bluescreens for the sake of the fact that It Just Works (if only to a certain extent).

At first glance, I thought I-Hate-Ubuntu would be a blog filled with specific anti-Ubuntu hate, but as the opening post explains, it’s just a real-world example of what happens when humans try to interact with insentient machines. If nothing else we should use this as a basis to correct the mistakes that leave out the people for whom Linux doesn’t Just Work.