Another Ubuntu release, another disappointment. I maintain, that in my personal experience, Ubuntu is the buggiest of the mainstream distros. This week I installed Ubuntu Server 15.10. I wanted to test out Juju and the MAAS software, and get a nicely automated Openstack Cloud operating in my lab using said software. Unfortunately, I ran into a couple of problems.
First, there was no option to install the GUI from the default install media. Second, my attempt to install desktop software using the limited guides published by Ubuntu proved problematic. There is no obvious way to get the Gnome Desktop environment running, nor the Unity desktop.
I’m no linux lightweight, but I expect basic services such as the GUI to work out of the box, especially if they are pushing the Juju and MAAS software which is GUI based.
I suspect that this release suffers from ‘permissions hell’. There is an effort to make the CLI behave more like the desktop, prompting for the admin’s password without having to run sudo. Perhaps this is a systemd thing?
I’ll revisit Ubuntu for it’s next LTS release, 16.04. For now, that install is getting wiped for Debian.