Occasionally I have recommended Ubuntu to people because I had been under the mistaken impression that great strides had been made in terms of usability for the Windows crowd. I am probably responsible for much of this misunderstanding because I still cannot fathom that anyone with half a clue would use GNOME, even though there is evidence to the contrary.

Whatever the reason, I have lost some credibility, because neither Ubuntu 4.10 (warty) nor 5.04 (hoary) are as usable for some people as Windows XP.

In one case, a poor computer was unable to get onto the network (its only NIC is an Atheros 802.11g card). On the plus side, the non-free madwifi driver was installed without issue. However, this did little good because of Ubuntu bug #6882 which causes the WEP key entered in the happy little GUI to be written to /etc/network/interfaces in the wrong format. Consequently, the computer is unable to associate with the access point unless the admin happens to prepend « s: » in the WEP field in the GUI, edit /etc/network/interfaces directly, or set the key with iwconfig.

When the admin has no idea what « s: » means; or that /etc/network/interfaces exists, or what it does; or what iwconfig does; then this problem is impossible to diagnose, much less to work around.

While I was able to point out that this was a known issue, and to provide a workaround, I was unable to explain why this was not treated as release-critical, why it had not been fixed, or why the file browser was unable to mount a vfat-formatted floppy.

So now I have nothing to recommend to those for whom Debian is too difficult.