Let's be honest: if it takes more than 3 hours to install an OS, a general consumer is going to give up. I almost did after 17 hours of attempting to put Ubuntu 14.04 onto my school desktop. The first 3 were my fault for not verifying the hash of the ISO I downloaded to ensure I got a perfect image. Admittedly, I got the OS installed, but everything was broken. It erased the windows 7 installation and went on fine, but everything from the get go was wrong once I got in. So, I tried again when I downloaded 14.04.1, this time verifying the hash. All was good. It's now been 4 hours.

As I begin the installation process, I hit wall after wall trying to install. I erased all the old partitions and went to booting from the disk to try Ubuntu. I formatted my drives to ext4, but the corrupt bootloader from the old install still remained in my hard drive cache (nasty piece of work to unseat that thing) and so I couldn't install back over that. I unraided my drives, erased them all, tried everything I could. by hour 10 I was switching back to Windows 7 because I had work that needed to be done.

The next session I immediately re-raided my drives, booted from the Ubuntu disk (shockingly slow given I have the fastest CD/DVD/Blu-Ray reader on the market), and formatted the array for ext4. Now I went to install. It couldn't install the bootloader to SDA, or the primary mount point, the only volume on the system. I tried using the smart partitioner Ubuntu suggests, and while it installed all of Linux, the GRand Unified Bootloader couldn't be installed. For 2 hours I tried various things before resorting to heavy research on the ubuntu community forums. Of course this happens to be one thing they broke between Ubuntu 12 and 14: RAID 0 support. If you want your distro on a RAID 0 machine, you have to jump through a number of hoops to get it. You must install on an empty drive, back up the entire system image, erase and dump the caches of your RAID drives, format for EXT4, and import the whole image and pray the striping doesn't mess up the bootloader. Guess what? If you have 3 or more drives in RAID 0 (300GB velociraptors), it can't possibly succeed. Hour 14: I'm livid, but I'm still willing to try it out. I give up on my raid drives and install to a single drive on its own. I format the other two to FAT32 and put them in RAID 0 to hold my programs and applications (this is much easier to arrange).

Somewhere in the first few attempts I realized my wifi wasn't working. It turns out that's something on my school's end not fully supporting Linux over WiFi, but a fellow enthusiast helped me solve the problem. He runs Arch Linux.

Hour 15: installing all the updates that aren't included on the distro...typical, thank god for fast college internet. Also, drivers, drivers, drivers... SHEESH! 15.5: Getting my programmer's software. Emacs, G++, and Clang all install just fine. Standard C/C++ programs compile fine, but OpenCL libraries weren't included. Sigh...I had to hunt down the proper namings for the Nvidia and Intel OpenCL libraries (I knew I had an Intel chip with an iGPU, but I'd forgotten it was a 2600k which doesn't support OpenCL (wasted time, boo...)). The Nvidia drivers were also temperamental while installing.

Hour 16.5: Installing Intel's Parallel Studio and Compiler Collection, setting up environment variables for use. Intel could improve a couple things honestly given the man pages are sparse and the documentation is buried in an install directory you can't reach unless you know the secrets buried in youtube videos instead of the online install guide Intel provides.

Hour 17: Java language, runtime, and compiler... Holy freaking Hell! All the libraries have very similar names, and they all had conflicts with each other. ARGH! 17:45: Okay, everything's installed. Everything compiles and runs under all environments as desired. Except, all my code files and executables are the same shade of green in the command line. I looked up the existing guide to change file type display colors in the command line. It figures Ubuntu 14.04 has broken this too. All the guides working for 12.04 do not work for 14.04 despite the fact all environmental variables are the same. It's just something broken the user can barely change. You can't add some file types to the LS_COLORS variable, or, if you can, I and a slew of people having the same issue are just lost and the community isn't being helpful.

Canonical, if it weren't for the fact the Intel compiler set doesn't work properly in Mint, I'd be leaving you for the next 5 years. This is about the perfect storm hitting trying to push me away from your platform, and the Ubuntu derivatives which don't have your embedded spyware are no better after trying them too. You bastards are damn lucky.

If anyone can recommend another distro that has the same standard commands but doesn't have the functional bullshit I've run into involving a lack of RAID install support, and can run Parallel Studio XE 15, please, please tell me. If you want to try Linux and you aren't a programmer, try Mint. It's a great Windows Look-Alike and has tons of helpful tools. It just can't be my Linux driver.

This has been a nightmare of a first experience with Linux, and I know some of it was my fault, but Canonical needs to get its crap in order. Also, I refuse to use 14.10 out of the sheer principle no OS should have the name or branding of a pink unicorn.

This blog is my least professional and I really don't care. The rage needed to come out, and people should be aware of the problems with this distro.