Please Note: My personal journal is now fully independent of my main personal Web site, but I am still working on some things such as my new page designs and many improvements to PageDrive, my software that runs my journal site. If you encounter any technical problems, please either just try again a while later or let me know.
I don't know why I do this to myself. I keep wanting to love GNU/Linux, so I keep trying new releases. The latest is the new Ubuntu 8.10 release candidate, to which I upgraded from within a working installation of Ubuntu 8.04 only to be greeted by a display mode that my connected display does not actually support. I switched to a console and checked /etc/X11/xorg.conf, which looks so barren that I wonder if Ubuntu is using some other method of specifying display modes now.
I am not particularly interested in spending any more of my time than I already have searching for a solution to something as basic as getting a computer operating system to display more than stretched, blurry text on a display with a very common native display mode. It doesn't matter what functionality or aesthetics an operating system offers or what social ideals it represents if just getting the thing to a state of basic functionality remains so tedious and elusive.
If Microsoft wants to improve the image of Windows Vista, they should probably resist any further inclinations to participate in rebuttal advertising against Apple and focus their attention on GNU/Linux in general and even Ubuntu in particular. They could even try a new slogan like "Sure you can't use that expensive printer with your new computer, but hey, at least you can see our windowing system" or "Windows: It actually shows you windows".
Ubuntu is annoying.
