WTF, Ubuntu

Um, seriously WTF, Ubuntu? I must be getting old and intolerant, or
something. Ubuntu (and the current crop of Linux distros) all seem
to be trying to out-Windoze one another. The bloat and propensity to
hide everything from supposedly clueless users has gotten really
irritating.

I recently had to setup a desktop for my family, so I resurrected an
old PC and set about installing the latest (9.04) Ubuntu [0] on
it. Because it's an older model with only 512 megs of RAM, and seems
to be running a bit slow after the install, I figure I'll take a
look at what's running and trim it a bit (that's a sad statement in
itself). I go to System->Preferences->Startup Applications and see a
frighteningly Windoze-like display of unknown daemons. WTF is the
'AT SPI Registry Wrapper'? Seriously, why do I need a bluetooth
daemon on a desktop PC? So I disable a bunch of shit - with no
indication whatsoever that something happened. At least with Windoze
you get some text to the effect of 'Stopping Service', and whether
or not it succeeded. Then I do an update (using aptitude, I can't
stand the GUI thing that does this, I turn that off, too), which
wants to upgrade 'bluez', presumably related to that bluetooth
daemon I disabled. At the end of the update, it restarts the
bluetooth daemon. Sigh. Not that I knew if it was even ever
stopped. So I jump to a console, and sure enough, 'bluetooth' is
enabled in all the usual runlevels that matter, and is running. So
now I'm wondering, does the Gnome desktop/startup applications thing
even look at system startup settings? Or does it just do it's own
thing? What a frakking mess.

My solution was to 'aptitude install lxde' [1] and say goodbye to
Gnome/Ubuntu, which presumably I'm too stupid to use. Also 'aptitude
install sysv-rc-conf' gives me a nice curses-based display of all
the crap that really gets started on my system, and allows me to
de-activate it (and when is any mainstream Linux distro going to
ditch that awful mess that is System-V and switch to a single
BSD-like startup file? At least Slackware [2] has it right). I
discovered some sort of daemon just for generating 'crash reports',
as well as 'saned', the scanner daemon, and 'seahorse', the most
irritating thing ever since it feels the need to popup a dialog to
ask you for your passphrase when using commandline SSH.

I am much more productive using simple console-based apps than I am
when using GUI-based apps - so I'm probably unusual, even among the
geek crowd (not here at SDF, of course). But how do the unwashed
masses cope with this nonsense? Apart from the whole virus-
experience, there really is no difference between using Windoze and
Linux at this point, at least if you follow the crowd. You get a
slow, uncomfortable user experience that truly impedes useful work.

[0] http://ubuntu.com
[1] http://www.lxde.org
[2] http://slackware.com

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