Nobody’s reading this, but…

Yep, I am a throwback. No Facebook or Twitter for me. Add to that no skills as to promoting this blog in any way. That said, I’ll continue as follows. Natty (Ubuntu 11.04) is complete tripe, maybe useful on smartphones, but completely useless as a desktop OS. Mint 11 has corrected issues with my wireless (as has Ubuntu, and all variants, to be fair), yet openSUSE and the latest Fedora (gnome3) still remain laughable. The latest Slackware refuses to find my wireless usable, while PCLinuxOS (antiquated at best) and Mepis are good with it, yet lacking in ability to use any sort of compositing, regardless of which driver used (I have both nvidia and ati machines).
Only a year ago I had 30+ installed distros all working perfectly, with wireless and desktop effects fully usable. Right now? Only Mint really… And since Mint is grub2, it doesn’t see PCLinuxOS or any other older stuff.
My main gripes here are grub2 and regressions in ALL distros other than MInt regarding desktop effects and proprietary drivers. Sure, Natty will grab the drivers, but it will not boot (nor will Mint) any legacy grub OS. Zorin, Pinguy, etc just add further ketchup to this mess, with varying degrees of success and mostly failure.
Once again I must admit to booting W7 9 times out of ten. At least it doesn’t break after every round of updates, as has happened to me with almost every linux flavor for the past several months. What was once promised as “easier and more secure” is now just more secure. I defy anyone to “easily” get an nvidia card working with Fedora’s latest RC or even openSUSE’s stable release… let alone getting wireless to work (especially with openSUSE or Slackware).
It didn’t used to be like this. Perhaps Unity and Gnome3 need to be dropped completely in favor of much of what Mandriva/Mageia have done with KDE, with a commensurate kicking of grub2 to the proverbial curb, in lieu of a standout graphical app to seriously configure it reliably.
In summation, grub2 and ubuntu’s recent efforts to become the mac are darts to the heart of linux usability. Can it be fixed? Of course. Will it? Almost certainly not. Winner? Bill (holy crap am I lucky my opponents ain’t lactose-intolerant).
I dunno… call me a cynic…