Ubuntu. Really for Human Beings?

I've never been much of a fan of Ubuntu, my several encounters with it's various incarnations have shown it to be inconsistant, unweildy and much over hyped. It seems to be lacking the most basic of tools for easy graphical configuration and administration of a Linux box. Tools that I've come to expect, having used Mandriva (formally known as Mandrake) for many years. Even Suse with it's Yast monstrosity still manages to provide a decent graphical system administration tool.

Recently I realised that my understanding of Ubuntu barely scratched the surface of what really using it will be like on a day to day basis. So I decided to commit a partition to it on me lappy & actually try using it for daily activities. It's been about a week now, here are some of my findings:
- It 's quite alien to me. Its inerds work completely differently from the typical Redhat based systems that I'm used to.
- Synaptics is shitloads faster than urpmi. (At least 30% faster)
- Boot speed is just a tad slower than Mandriva.
- GNOME has got a stupidly huge RAM footprint compared to KDE.
- I had to visit the Ubuntu Help wiki ALOT. The documentation is very nice, acurate & accessible.
- I had to visit the Ubuntu Help wiki ALOT MORE. For things I can easily do with a few clicks in Mandriva & Suse.
- Laptop power management support was poor. Suspend & Hibernate will lockup on resume. (both Mandriva & Suse could at least hibernate & resume properly)

Once up & running, thing are peachy for a while. But after a week & after installing > 30 apps (My usual suspects) from Synaptics, things don't look so pretty anymore. The menus are overcrowded and excessively long. Reminds me of the Windows Start Menu. (Takes a bloody long time for the menu icons to load up too)

The repositories are not as comprehensive as I was led to believe. After turning on all the repos, (including the commercial & 3rd-party ones) I still couldn't find some key pieces of software. (Freevo my prefered media center was nowhere to be found)

& finally GNOME.. Oh GNOME GNOME, what can I say about it.. well.. I still don't like it. GNOME is like soup from the soup nazi. It's good really, but can you deal with not having any real say in what u get with the soup? I can't, so I guess it's no soup for me & I recommend 'No soup for You!!' too. Viva la KDE!!