Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Wed 8th Jul 2009 18:34 UTC, submitted by rlem6983
Google's recent move of revealing the Chrome OS to a suspecting public has put a great many people on alert. Some say it's a major privacy issue, some say Google oughtn't to become more and more monopolistic, while others think that the wide array of popular Linux distributions shouldn't become even more fragmented than it already is. "Google's decision to create its own Linux distribution and splinter the Linux community decisively once again can only be seen as foolhardy and self-obsessive.
Instead of treading its own path, Google should have sought to leverage the stellar work already carried out by Mark Shuttleworth and his band of merry coders and tied its horse to the Ubuntu cart."
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RE[8]: No thanks Ubuntu.
by sbergman27 on Fri 10th Jul 2009 00:41
in reply to "RE[7]: No thanks Ubuntu."
Member since:2005-07-24
Ok, what is specific to Ubuntu that makes it a great Netbook OS?
For someone who claims not to care, you are certainly inclined to write paragraph after paragraph, post after post in disparagement.
OK. Attitude toward users.
Codeina. One of those (in)famous Fedora projects. What happened with it? Ubuntu provided it to users. When the user desired to play video or audio that required a codec which was not intalled, Ubuntu would offer to look for a codec. If it turned out that the required codec was possibly patent encumbered, it would inform the user of that fact, explain a little about what the implications were, and trust the user to make their decision as to whether to install it. (OK? Cancel?)
Meanwhile, the Fedora devs decided that Codeina was immoral and pulled it from Fedora. Thus the hapless user would end up in Fedora's forums looking for help playing a video, where they were more or less equally likely to be ignored, abused, or helped. (Enduring the tender mercies of the Fedora Forums crowd is not something I like to think of my friends having to face.)
Of course, as Ubuntu's popularity took off, the Fedora devs were forced to either start paying attention to the needs of real users (as opposed to their ivory tower, idealized view of users) and restore Codeina to their distro or... get left behind even further with regards to popularity.
So that's just one example of how Ubuntu does a good job walking the line between what users want and need, and providing users with the information they need to see how their decisions might affect the computing world around them.
I actually came from the Red Hat and Fedora camps. (Well, AT&T Unix '386 and AT&T Unix for 3B2, and Xenix, originally, back in the mists of time. But my Linux life began in the Red Hat camp back in '96.) But I have found the advantages of Ubuntu, both professionally as an admin, and on my own personal desktop, to be so compelling as to convince me to migrate (mostly) over into this "Debian World" over the last few years, even though I've never really liked Debian itself.
As you have pointed out, RHEL and CentOS can sometimes have some nice features for enterprise deployment. (Kickstart is really nice. Ubuntu supports it. But I'm not sure how well as I've not had occasion to use it.) But when it comes to user interaction, Ubuntu just beats anything in the RH camps hands down. Last I looked, netbooks were not enterprise servers.
Edited 2009-07-10 00:46 UTC
Member since:
2005-08-07
Ok, what is specific to Ubuntu that makes it a great Netbook OS? I've already informed you that very little of what goes into Ubuntu is specific to Ubuntu, so why can't Google take those same parts and take their superior development team and create a better product?
I think it would be almost trivial for anyone to create a better system than Ubuntu currently has, simply because there are already many examples. Couple that with Googles superior enterprise muscle, and I could foresee marked improvements done in a proper way, rather than just bandaged up...
Ubuntu relies on companies like Red Hat and Novell to further their software stack since they don't contribute anything meaningful to it. Those two companies are worth combined around 20x less than Google. I think it doesn't take rocket science to figure out that even for the most die hard Linux fan, having Google contributing much more due to depending on Linux code more than ever will benefit everyone.
Lets not get into the development model too much though, I'll just say that having 100% of the market as a userbase will be quite a draw for developers. Every system currently has internet or intranet access, and that is exactly the medium ChromeOS will be leveraging! Last I checked, 100% market share is greater than 90% so I believe eventually everyone will just write apps based on web standards, porting native code just isn't cost effective, especially when there needn't be any performance hits from doing things in the cloud. Google has many technologies to ensure that performance is not effected already, and I foresee many more examples over time!