This one. As far as the detection goes, it isn't so much the kernel finding all the pieces of the pie (though I've never seen it better in any other distro.) it's that you can easily bake the pie from scratch with utter ease and throw anything in it without being told what to do.
The problem with Ubuntu is it's designed for the lowest common denominator. The problem with that is, it only works with the lowest common denominator. If you have some obscure piece of hardware or peripheral getting it to work right (and with some stability) can be a real buzz-kill.
One of my worst "hardware detection" nightmares happened last spring when someone fooled me into trying Hardy because it was "so much better then the last version." I was trying to install the drivers for my graphics card. It was an older Nvidia card, but old enough that the newest drivers work with it.
I first tried using the automated setup program Hardy came with that supposedly made installing the drivers simple. (I forget what the program is called.) The problem was, said program kept installing the legacy drivers which caused a whole world of problems errors, wrong refresh rates, etc.
So then I decided to just download them directly and install them. Well, first I figured I had to download and install the build-essentials package since it isn't installed by default. (And I think it should be.) I figured that's all I needed. So then I went ahead and rand the Nvidia setup program. Got an error saying it couldn't build the kernel. So I did some reading, and found a handful of more packages to download and install. So I went ahead and installed them and the setup ran fine and told it to auto configure xorg.conf.
I restarted X and all the fonts were really, really small. Unreadable even. So I figured I could just manually edit the monitor section of xorg.conf and it'd be fine. Sure enough everything seemed okay.
A few days later I got around to getting compiz up and running. Everything was haywire.
After double checking to make sure I'd set up xorg correctly I ran:
Got an error.
So I uninstalled the driver completely and tried it over again. To cut a long story short, if I left the fonts small, compiz worked fine. If I tried to fix them, it didn't. And after trying a dozen or so different things to get to work right, I just gave up.
With Slackware, I've never had this kind of problem. Over the years I've thrown everything (including the kitchen sink) at it and it's detected it fine and dead stable to boot.
If you dislike Ubuntu so much, maybe you should man up and use Debian like the rest of us.
I do. While 9 times out of 10 I prefer Slack, I do have them both on my laptop. If there is one complaint of Slackware I have is it doesn't come with GNOME. Yes, there's always building it from source and the third party builds, but I've never had much success with though. Not that it matters much though since I use Fluxbox 99% of the time.
In any case, I ask this very question of Ubuntu people all the time. At best, Ubuntu is a watered-down, overly flash version of Deb testing/non-stable. Yet, it comes pre-installed with most of the "problems" people have with Windows: poor security, instability, etc.
The ironic thing is, in a lot of ways I think Deb is easier to use, anyway. Plus, it's been my observation that Deb's repositories are more reliable.
You post here a lot for someone you completely hates Ubuntu and everything about it.
Well, it's my life's ambition to see to its utter eradication.
