“Unless you have been living in a cave somewhere in Redmond you would no doubt have heard of Ubuntu and its many derivatives, touted as ‘Linux for human beings’. Ubuntu has become the darling of the Linux media and has stolen the limelight from other prominent distributions such as the stalwart Red Hat and, the now Novell owned, SuSE. The question is why?” More here.
Why Ubuntu Got It All Wrong
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Flooded? Anyway, I am dying to know why someone things Ubuntu got it wrong… followed tomorrow or later today with a refutation article.
After reading this article I wonder if the author is living in a cave somewhere.
This is nothing more then a personal rant and a bad one at that, not worth reading.
People shouldn’t write about topics they can’t comprehand.
I have a lot of respect for you Eugenia, but this one is an absolute miss.
Edited 2006-09-02 18:45
I have a lot of respect for you Eugenia, but this one is an absolute miss.
Ever heard the saying, “Don’t shoot the messenger”?
OSNews staff are just the messengers, they didn’t write the fetid tripe posted there.
Ever heard the saying, “Don’t shoot the messenger”?
OSNews staff are just the messengers, they didn’t write the fetid tripe posted there.
Uhm, I’m pretty sure the editors can decide for themselves what they want to post.
So critisizing their choices is a valid complaint, especially about this troll of an article.
“A tested and bug fixed version of Debian unstable with a pretty installer, a splash screen and the Gnome desktop is hardly the ‘revolution’ which it is purported to be”
I’m no fan of Ubuntu, but if thats what they are doing, whats wrong with that? Do you have to reinvent the wheel to be classified – revolutionary ? To think of it, a gem is just a piece of rock; cut and polished.
I fully agree.
While I’m far from being a Ubuntu fan (I rather use Fedora and/or Slackware… Debian if I must), this article is nothing more then a series of rants against world + dog.
Move along people, nothing to see here.
– Gilboa
Ubuntu’s hardly the only distro to “get it all wrong,” by this article’s standards. It seems like the writer just singled it out for its (in his opinion unwarranted) popularity.
hell, i even think windows failed his “standards”
I can’t read the page. Firefox shows me a white page. Dont know why?! Maybe just because i use archlinux
me too, i also get a white page. maybe it’s because i use gentoo linux
No, you just need the re-emerge firefox with -no_white_pages
No, you just need the re-emerge firefox with -no_white_pages
LOL Monday morning it should be up and running
“No, you just need the re-emerge firefox with -no_white_pages
”
Oh, how I love slashdot style jokes
No, no, you got it all wrong. It’s USE=”-white_pages” emerge firefox.
“No, no, you got it all wrong. It’s USE=”-white_pages” emerge firefox.”
Haha! Brilliant. As a Gentoo user I can take a joke and critisism. Unfortunately Ubuntu users cannot.
I must say the title of the article is to blame. The content is interesting and is a good read. I use nothing but Linux and I still agree it sux in many ways. It is like many of the political parties nowdays. One just sux less than the other. Linux sux less than MacOS and Windoes luckily.
Me too, I get a white page. Maybe it’s because I use Firefox and GNU/Linux
Same here. Probably cuz I’m using Ubuntu, stupid me. Gotta switch to a better OS like …
Same here. Probably cuz I’m using Ubuntu, stupid me. Gotta switch to a better OS like …
Ubuntu – yes I am using Firefox on Ubuntu Breezy and it’s fine – but hen maybe its because I’m using Mozilla distributed the binary not the default install I’ll check it out – baksun
Yeah – works with the 1.5.0.5 dapper firefox too.
“Same here. Probably cuz I’m using Ubuntu, stupid me. Gotta switch to a better OS like …”
Well that is exactly the point he is trying to make isn’t it? There isn’t really one and that is the problem.
it shows up here on arch linux .. but I didn’t read it anyway
>Unless you have been living in a cave somewhere in Redmond you would no doubt have heard of Ubuntu
The world will turn without it too, especially the world of unices.
It’s like a bad advert nowadays, you see it again and again and at some point you zap away. It’s easy try it. It’s maybe a nice distro, but it’s a distro with many hype and whether pro or contra, people get sick of it hearing this all day long.
I agree. There’s hardly a day when someone doesn’t praise ubuntu. Mostly those oppinions repeat the same arguments over and over again. I love ubuntu but I have enough of these “articles”.
On the other hand writing dumb anti ubuntu rants isn’t the right answer. In the end they simply add to the noise.
With no current satisfactory solutions available Ubuntu should have either created their own Desktop Environment or, better still, invested some of its millions of development dollars into one of the projects such as Enlightenment, Mezzo or the Sun sponsored Project Looking Glass.
So this person believes they could sit a secretary down in front of Enlightenment or Mezzo and get them to be productive?! KDE and Gnome are now very mature DEs with so much to offer in terms of consistency, great applications and well thought out technical architecture. The author needs to spend time reviewing all the usability testing conducted by Novell; watch the videos and see just how joe public reacts to a linux DE.
KDE and Gnome have come a long way in the past 12 months, with both projects developing at a fast rate and in some places evolving beyond what their closed source counterparts offer.
Equally ridiculous is telling someone who spent four years at University obtaining a degree using Photoshop to ‘switch’ to The Gimp which is ‘similar’. Someone needs to raise the bar and sink some cash in to Wine so that MS Office (All versions) and Photoshop (All versions) will run on Linux as if they were native Linux apps.
I am shocked by this whole post; this paragraph summarises how limited the author’s knowledge is. The author needs to spend some more time investigating what OSS is all about, how it all works, and generally why that statement is so ridiculous. If you want closed source apps on Linux, you approach the vendor. Until those are ported and supported by the vendor themselves, the OSS alternatives will remain the focus of all the development and, where available, monetary support.
Edit – page mirrored here – http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=881D219C…
Edited 2006-09-02 18:52
So this person believes they could sit a secretary down in front of Enlightenment or Mezzo and get them to be productive?! KDE and Gnome are now very mature DEs with so much to offer in terms of consistency, great applications and well thought out technical architecture. The author needs to spend time reviewing all the usability testing conducted by Novell; watch the videos and see just how joe public reacts to a linux DE.
Usability testing is useless on its own. Among other things, it’s almost impossible to test anything other than initial easy of use, which is basically useless unless you expect your users to only use it once. Usability testing also can’t make up for a lack of options tested–sure, x may be better than y, but who cares if they’re both terrible? For example, you could compare Windows XP (or Vista) to OS X and come out with the conclusion that one is easier to use than the other, but that doesn’t matter in the slightest because neither is particularly well designed.
No Satisfactory solutions? If they think its so terrible they should try writting a DE and see how satisfactory “their” solution is. In other news OsNews sees a spike in trollish news to drum up hits.
So this person believes they could sit a secretary down in front of Enlightenment or Mezzo and get them to be productive?! KDE and Gnome are now very mature DEs with so much to offer in terms of consistency, great applications and well thought out technical architecture. The author needs to spend time reviewing all the usability testing conducted by Novell; watch the videos and see just how joe public reacts to a linux DE.
I fail to see the problem with Enlightenment (I do not know Mezzo). It is a window manager, not the whole system, so if the programs are there, what difference does it make? It has a taskbar, a clock, workplace switcher, etc. I don’t remember anything that I saw on my default Dapper desktop that I couldn’t find in E, aside from the icons of mounted devices. (Of course, I am talking about E17 here.) Only looking 200% better and being 200% faster (may be an understatement).
Now it even has the Ubuntu (FDO) menu. Ok, it was added
just recently, but we are talking about ‘what if’-s here…
Office, Explorer, Photoshop, all run fine for me under Wine, FWIW.
The newest versions of photoshop or office don’t run fine. And not all parts of Office work either.
so ubuntu is all wrong… sure, ubuntu is maybe not the best solution, a lot of things may (and should) be changed… but I don’t understand why the author has to attack it like this. Don’t like the fact that it’s succesful?
I mean if he’s got some ideas on how to improve it why not write them in the ubuntu forums?
anyway… the article seems to say: “human beings are stupid, hence we need an OS that is stupid”
and of course esthetics are always very subjective… but enlightenment is definetely not looking better than gnome… just because it’s got some effects… gnome is IMHO one of the most usable and consistend desktops, even better than mac os, for some things.
It’s a great base to work on, and in fact I think that is what people are doing, reinventing gnome, getting one step further, but that is not going to happen over night…
I’ve tried several distros, I’ve tried the big ones like Suse, Freespire, Fedora, I’ve tried Vector, DSL and Knoppix… ans some I probably forgot… ubuntu is the only one that stayed on my laptop for 2 years, the only one that really worked… and it worked out of the box for me.
I don’t think that it is just hype… ubuntu has something that feels right. it feels different from other distros… and that’s, IMHO the one thing that makes it so popular.
I pretty much stopped reading after the second or third “What users really want blah, blah, blah!” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, please for the love of all things holy shut the hell up about what “Joe User” wants and let “Joe User” speak for himself.
I believe from spending some time on the Ubuntu forums and seeing literally thousands of regular non-technical people jumping ship to Ubuntu, a large portion of “Joe Users” has already spoken for themselves.
EDIT:Can’t spell
Edited 2006-09-02 19:19
please for the love of all things holy shut the hell up about what “Joe User” wants and let “Joe User” speak for himself.
Thank you. At last some one gives me the opportunity to express myself in a world of geeks.
>> I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, please for the love of all things holy shut the hell up about what “Joe User” wants and let “Joe User” speak for himself.
That’s right. You know what? I’ve never ever met the guy. Joe I mean. But even if I had: Joe is supposed to pay taxes, he’s supposed to get himself an insurance, he’s supposed to send his kids to school, he’s even got the right to vote, and on top of all that he’s supposed to make arrangements for his retirement.
But for some reason, to some people, Joe is NOT supposed to pick his own operating system and get acquainted with it, and get to like it even if it’s a little different. He’s not supposed to visit a friendly online forum once in a while to be helped to get something running. And he’s certainly not supposed to be more able to assimilate something new, than certain people in California want him to.
I sure hope Joe won’t listen to ’em.
*Read “Joanna” and “she” wherever you like.
“I pretty much stopped reading after the second or third “What users really want blah, blah, blah!” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, please for the love of all things holy shut the hell up about what “Joe User” wants and let “Joe User” speak for himself.”
Look as a noob here I know I’m even more in for a flame here but I thought I should probably just point out that “Joe” is already making his choice. Whether “we” the geeks like it or not, “Joe” is choosing Windows.
Not just because it is the OS that is pushed on them but also because as much as “we” all like to complain about blue screens and registry bloating, these things are not really issues to “Joe User”.
Why would “Joe User” care about anything other than being able to put a document together and email it to his 10 friends, knowing that 9 of them can read it without a problem, and the 10th, who is his geeky nephew who is always trying to get him into this alternative Linux thing, will work it out on his own anyway.
I work with Unices every day, I am running an ALMOST Windows-free environment at home and there is no way on earth that I would push any Linux distribution on my In-laws who are currently fighting the good fight trying to understand OSX and WinXP. I have gone as far as setting them up with OOo, firefox and thunderbird. They are happy to try it all but none of those apps are without problems for them. Not just the ordinary things that they would probably get in the MS equivalents as well. Such as program crashes and odd behaviour. But also the discomfort of being moved way beyond their comfort zone just by finding menus in different places and struggling to identify the functions that they are after.
I don’t claim to understand “Joe User” anymore than most other geeks, but I do try to understand the friends and family who struggle with computers everyday. These people feel discomfort when the menus in Word have been changed, how are they going to feel about everything changing? For all these hopes and dreams of what Linux should/could be I think “we” the geeks have a hard time accepting that “our” goals and the goals of “Joe User” are quite different. I believe that “Joe” just wants to come to work, have his computer look and work the same as it did yesterday, without having to understand why. And when he goes home he turns it off and forgets about it again until next day.
This does not mean that “Joe User” is simple, it just means that “Joe User” is more interested in playing footie, having a bqq and spending time with friends and family. Than he is in playing with his computer… It is after all just a tool, not a hobby.
-Ras
It’s funny that you say that. I can make the same argument in reverse. My Linux box has not changed in the past year and a half, but I bet if you load up Windows and spend a few days surfing the net plenty of stuff will get changed without your consent. I’m not saying that Linux is for everyone. There is a place for Windows and it’s users, but I’m sick and tired of people using the “Joe User” argument to tell us all what everyone needs and wants. All i want is for people to start speaking for themselves and stop assuming that their view is the same as the rest of the world.
EDIT: I’m givin ya a +1 for a well thought out comment. I may not agree with it, but there is no need for flames this time.
Edited 2006-09-04 01:46
I do see your point. From my point of view though, if I am right and “Joe User” really couldn’t care less what OS he/she is running as long as it familiar and works. Then we will never ever hear from him what he/she is after, simply because there is no reason for him to get involved in the debate.
Effectively I think it goes back to what I stated before, “Joe Users” is making their opinion known every day when they buy the PC with Windows installed and potentially spends the extra money on the Office Pack.
I don’t know what the solution to this whole thing is but I’m slowly learning what the rest of the community already knows. Linux’ biggest problem is that it’s users rather want to argue over the merits of vi over pico than embrace the freedom of choice that is created and accept that there are people choosing both.
Thank you for the score ;O)
It is easier to tell my friends install Firefox, it has tabs anyway, Service Pack 2 etc. then trying to switch them to linux.
And after doing this, Windows is secure enough for them.
“So this person believes they could sit a secretary down in front of Enlightenment or Mezzo and get them to be productive?!”
Well, if you sit an `enlightened` person down in front of a Linux distro and I am sure they won’t make a `mezzo` of it.
How do you define productivity. IT shops must always clean up the `mezzo` `enlightened` and `productive` Windump users make.
I guess I’m not meant to read “why ubuntu got it all wrong”article. I tried reading it with firefox and opera browsers on freebsd,gentoo,openbsd, all i kept getting was a dull blank white page.
guess I’m not meant to read “why ubuntu got it all wrong”article. I tried reading it with firefox and opera browsers on freebsd,gentoo,openbsd, all i kept getting was a dull blank white page.
nervermind i guess i was meant to read the article after all, but for some reason had to wait in the end of the line to be given a chance. even though i’m a diehard gentoo user. i’ll give ubuntu a spin to see what this ubuntu hype i’ve been hearing is about.
Edited 2006-09-02 20:58
I’ve personaly ran every distro from PCLinuxOS, to paid Mandrake. Even tried Sun Java. Kubuntu seems to fit me perfect though.
Your milage may vary.
p.s. No other distro runs Doom3, or my MAME games faster, and straight out of the ‘box’. I donated.
Judging from the article, I’m pretty sure that the author has never actually used Ubuntu and has just gone under the assumption that Ubuntu is “a tested and bug fixed version of Debian unstable” (in the author’s own words) and written an article based on that assumption. It also contains several rants that have very little do do with reality.
Let’s look at a few examples:
> The gui front-ends for apt however leave a lot to be
> desired…query such as ‘Internet’…and are
> presented with hundreds of options for everything
> from the Bind DNS server to the more obscure
> libiiimcf2 package which according to its description
> is an “Internet/Intranet Input Method Framework Library”.
No you’re not. Not if you use “Add/Remove Applications” instead of the more techie friendly Synaptic (which is less visible in the configuration section). What you get is 41 applications, most of which have GUIs and all have Human readable names (none of this libiiimcf2 business) and a brief description. If you click on a single entry, you’ll get a more indepth description of what the package contains.
> Freespires CNR software warehouse is simply
> brilliant. Copy it and don’t feel bad about it.
Personally except for user ratings and screenshots, this functionality is provided by “Add/Remove Applications”. Compare for yourself:
http://www.linspire.com/lindows_products_categories.php?category=1&…
http://people.ubuntu.com/~mvo/gnome-app-install/new-look/gai–new-l…
> It’s great that an application crash doesn’t freeze
> your entire system in Linux but that doesn’t mean
> application crashes are acceptable on a regular basis.
I’ve yet to run an app (other than Mono apps) that has done that, even in the case of Mono apps, it’s only the app that crashes, not the system. Ditto for system freezes. I think he’s taking the “frozen Debian *unstable*” a little too literally.
> A control panel which contains everything (!!) needed
> to administer the system via simple gui-based
> utilities with a consistent look and feel.
The System->Preference and System->Administration menus seem pretty complete to me. What’s missing besides utilities to help with server management (i.e. not the domain of the Desktop)?
The article also make ridiculous statements such as:
> Equally ridiculous is telling someone who spent four
> years at University obtaining a degree using
> Photoshop to ‘switch’ to The Gimp
You don’t spend 4 years to learn Photoshop. You spend 4 years learning graphics concepts with the aid of Photoshop. If all you learned was how to use version X of Photoshop, god help you when you get out in the working world and discover that your company uses version Y. There are plenty of things to critisize in Gimp, this isn’t one of them.
Similarly:
> tell them to change their spreadsheet software from
> Excel to Open Office would be deemed ridiculous.
Considering that OpenOffice’s interface is a lot closer to Office 2003 than the yet to be released MS Office (which is a dramatic GUI change), it seems that he’s contradicting himself.
Similarly:
> Someone needs to raise the bar and sink some cash in
> to Wine so that MS Office (All versions) and
> Photoshop (All versions) will run on Linux
It’s being done by Codeweavers (with a reasonably good response), but it’s not an easy task and it’ll always be playing catchup because Windows is a moving target. It’ll also never integrate properly with Linux and very liable to legal attacks (e.g. you may only run Office on MS Windows) and technical attacks (e.g. you may only use Window Update to get the next version of Office) from Microsoft so it’s ultimately a losing strategy. Anyone who thinks this is a good strategy shouldn’t be looking at Linux. They should be looking at ReactOS.
Ultimately, Linux needs to depend on making the best of the breed so people *want* to switch. And people do switch when there’s sufficient motivation. It happened with Windows 95 from Windows 3.1 and DOS. It happened with MS Office (from Word Perfect Office). It happened with IE (from Netscape) and is also happening with Firefox (from IE) as well as OpenOffice (from MS Office) at a slower rate.
I consider myself a FreeBSD user, and I collaborate fixing some ports, but in the Linux world, Ubuntu is the best distribution I’ve used.
Sure, it’s not polished in many areas, but it’s working at least 95% out of the box. Other distros give the impression that you get Kernel + a lot of mess. Ubuntu is very well rounded.
For a Linux distribution I definitely choose Ubuntu (not Kubuntu — KDE it’s too bloated for my taste).
FreeBSD for a more traditional UNIX way of doing things.
Ive been trying to figure out why there is this backlash against Ubuntu for some time now. As for the points that this article talks about, I agree with MechR that “gets it all wrong” by this articles standards, however, I would expand that to ALL OS’s get it wrong by this articles standards and by the articles own standards most everything should confuse the newbie.
consistent look and feel: The latest releases of Linux by various vendors have the most consistent look and feel of most OS’s out there. Is Windows or MacOS very consistent? NO! Also, people seem to do just fine, so I have to assume that this is either not that big of a deal or everyone “gets it wrong”
Speed: Im not sure how this could confuse Joe User, however, this myth should be done away with now. Yes, Linux will run on older hardware(and usually quite gracefully) However, the assumption that you should be able to install Linux on some boat anchor and have it run as fast as Windows or MacOS on a Core Duo is just crazy. In my experiences on the same hardware, Ubuntu feels faster than on WIndows or MacOS, however, the expectation that it should eliminate the upgrade cycle is just crazy.
Aesthetics: This one is really a red herring. Aesthetics means different things to different people. Yes, ALOT of people love Aqua, however, I know people who can’t stand it. You will never please everyone, however, at least with Ubuntu its possible to change the theming – without any hacks or paying someone for some “tool” which does the hack for you.
Stability: First a quote from the article
“It’s great that an application crash doesn’t freeze your entire system in Linux but that doesn’t mean application crashes are acceptable on a regular basis. Unfortunately this appears to be the case even with many of the major distributions currently.”
This would be a reasonable assessment, however, it applies to most OS’s out there. Windows crashes quite often. Now, I realize that alot of times other 3rd party drivers or 3rd party applications are to blame, however, you really can’t compare the two on those merits because they are two different models. Show me a Windows system that has comparable software as a Ubuntu install and I guarantee it will crash as much. Note: Ive not had any crashes in Dapper since I installed it 2 months ago.
Package management: I feel this could use some work. I like the easyUbuntu Model. Maybe make an app that only has the applications and a Simple interface. However, the situation is far worse in other operating systems. You have to look on the internet or in a store for the app you want. There isn’t a central repo.
Software support: A valid point, however, this has nothing to do with Linux or Ubuntu. Its the vendor’s problem. If I wanted a Linux only app running on Windows do i call Microsoft or even blame them for not having it? Of course not, you contact the maker of the app and ask(or pay) them to port it, or port it yourself.
These points I have above I think covers the main points of the article pretty well. I feel the problems aren’t with Ubuntu so much as they are with all Operating Systems.
The Problem I see with this and other articles about what is wrong with Linux/(distro of choice) is that they make comparisons with Windows where no comparison applies. The author mentions that the CNR warehouse is one way that Linspire is copying Windows(he doesn’t say it directly, but I felt it was heavily implied) when Windows has no such feature. Also, app quality is not Ubuntu’s problem. If the Gimp doesn’t stack up to Photoshop – tough. One if Free(in all regards) and the other costs several hundred dollars and is closed source.
Im not saying that the Linux software stack is worse than Window’s stack – and im not saying its better(though I personally feel for most things it is) however, they are DIFFERENT. If you want to compare fairly, don’t pick an industry standard(and expensive) app and a free app and compare them. Pick apps that are in the same class. Or pick common uses. The Gimp or openoffice may not have all the features, however, for most users they have all the features they need, and really, thats the point when it comes to Joe User.
-Mike
> Package management: I feel this could use some work. I
> like the easyUbuntu Model.
Easy Ubuntu is pretty good, but it really does reimplement most of the functionality of Add/Remove programs. What would be great, however, is if “Add/Remove Programs” provided a “playlist” functionality, which would appear in the sidebar as just another predefined search.
The “playlist” would contain only three things 1) a set of repositories, 2) a set of packages plus optional descriptions, 3) text description for the playlist. That would make Easy Ubuntu’s job a piece of cake. Instead of maintaining an application, all they’d have to do is to put a playlist on their website which you can import into “Add/Remove Programs”. “Add/Remove Programs” would ask you if you wanted to add the given repositories into your sources.list and provide an appropriate warning if it’s an unrecognized repository. You’d then be able to add any or all the packages in the playlist. You could even make your own playlists (e.g. take a playlist snapshot of your own system) and load it into another machine.
Edited 2006-09-02 20:44
Your right. I just looked at Add/Remove Programs(ive always used aptitude, ive never used it before) and its a great interface.
The whole point about “Add/Remove Programs” is to make life easy for novice users. They would be easily confused by the concept of repository.
I think the app installation and upgrade part of Ubuntu is fine as it is.
The average user does not talk about desktop systems this way. This guy is an idiot.
Anyway, the argument should be:
you are so concerned with the ‘problems’ of WINE?
So why don’t you contribute to the project? You don’t anything about GCC? Well, contribute reporting problems or coredumps… No? Well.. Documentation?
You don’t want to contribute and expect ALL software working 100% the way you want?
Shutup.. It’s about collaboration , stupid.
I love Enlightenment, but to say that an average user switching to Linux would find it preferable to KDE or Gnome? Puh-leez & give me a f***ing break.
A few of his complaints, in a strange way, have a very small kernel of truth in them. Of course the average Windows user will be confused when they type in something like ‘picture’ into the apt front-end and maybe end up with ‘libtiff’ as an option. Not that I know, having never used Ubuntu.
And if the user already has a copy of MS Office that they own outright, why not make it easy to run it on their Linux box? BTW, MS Office works ‘out of the box’ on the latest WINE release, at least on my Gentoo box.
And to say that potential Linux converts want innovation? NO WAY. They want Windows for free. They want what they already know. They want Gnome; they want KDE. As as far as an easy way to install software goes, maybe he’s right that Ubuntu isn’t right for everyone. But has he tried Suse? The Yast software manager is great.
A control panel? Okay, fine. KDE. Let me say it again. KDE. Or for that matter, even the earliest versions of Mandrake/Mandriva had a control center where you could control every aspect of the system, including software.
Application crashes on a regular basis? What is he using? Get a new computer, get some more memory, get *something*. This is not my Linux experience AT ALL. Yeah, I know, we all use Linux so we don’t have to upgrade our hardware, but that was back when computers were damn expensive. Has he priced a new computer lately? They’re f***ing cheap, as in $300.
I’m open to criticisms of Desktop Linux, because there are things worth criticizing, and software installation has always been a sticking point in nearly every Linux distro; proprietary codecs are another one. But the argument needs to be well thought out, and I don’t know that this one qualifies.
I’m glad OSNews editors linked to this article, so no criticisms there. It’s as much their job to foster discussion and to show opposing points of view as it to preach to the choir.
Edited 2006-09-02 20:56
This is a pretty crap article, not least because the writer doesn’t understand that Ubuntu is aimed at users all over the world where in many places high-powered desktop PCs, broadband and all the trimmings are still luxuries or don’t exist at all. Ubuntu is not just about eyecandy for Joe Sixpack’s secretary, FFS.
That said, the writer’s betisses shouldn’t blind us to some important points that apply to any distro, such as polish, polish, polish for your intended audience, keep things as simple as possible and provide back-up for your users in terms of good support, documentation, etc. Ironically, considering the writer’s criticisms, Ubuntu does this as well as if not better than any other distro.
I guess Ubuntu increasingly attracts flack because it has become so well known, not because the flack-spreaders necessarily know anything about it. Ubuntu is just the first name that comes to mind when they feel the urge to scratch that crazy itch.
When the guy starts talking about project looking glass, and that it just needs a bit of a tickle up, and bang it in – problems solved, I’m thinking … this guy has no clue.
The article is full of second hand, generalised, FUD cliches.
The only specifics he gives to support his arguments are problems that are already solved by Codeweavers. The rest is just over generalised drivel.
Mod Story Author: Troll
White page with Fedora Core 5.91 and Firefox. Maybe it’s because I’ve also got Dapper and Edgy on this PC
I too were getting white pages at first. i thought it was because i was running gentoo.freebsd,openbsd, but i was wrong all you have to do is insist. click on the hyperlink until the article appear
Edited 2006-09-02 22:05
It looks like that the writer had a bad day, got his car stolen, his girl left him, he came back home and his favorite distro just crashed when he wrote a good-bye letter before suicide.
Okay, this is a very, very frustrating read I had, I’d just like to notify the editors here that this is not the kind of material that interests me in reading.
This is:
– a flamebait
– a rant
– an attempt to just bash on Ubuntu’s name
– certainly not what I would refer to as a quality article, or an article at all.
I mean even the title is “Why Ubuntu Got It All Wrong”. Okay now tell me exactly what the h… in the article represents what ubuntu has done wrong? I thought so.
You can copy the article, paste it in your favorite text editor (because, as a Joe User, you CAN chooser your favorite text editor, right?), do a search-and-replace for the word “ubuntu” and replace it with any of the following, more or less: gentoo, debian, SuSE, NLD, Fedora, Slackware, Linux From Scratch, or, heck, even windows or mac OS
If you, Sam Banks, feel that you can direct the whole FOSS community, then why don’t you just hire a whole team of code mercenaries to realize what you think is the best for Joe User? Those GNOME and KDE guys are certainly wrong, they are wasting their time, screw them!
Please. Please. No more articles like these. They made me scream out loud in my room.
stopped reading in one of the first paragraphs, where he is talking about the “old and no longer up to scratch” Gnome and “resource-hungry” KDE.
Glad I didn’t waste any more time reading that
Remember in English class when the guy behind you tried to repeat some comment that he’d read online at Sparknotes last night about ‘Hamlet’ in order to get his five points for the day and you just wanted to turn around and yell ‘Did you even read the book, man?!’?
This author didn’t read the book.
Why does everyone keep on bashing synaptic and adept while the default application installer is add/remove programs (either gnome-app-install or adept_installer), they do both what he want them to do.
Next thing all DE are trash and outdated to him, well writing a new DE from scratch would be the worst thing to do, it killed netscape for example (they rewrote netscape at the moment IE came along, so instead of fixing the old one they decided to write longer and longer and more and more, so eventually they had a buggy browser that lost all it’s market share). Scratch means bugs, bugs that were already fixed, so starting from scratch everytime you get a new idea won’t improve the results. It’s better to do like KDE does now with the 4.0 release: new framework, cleaning the code every 2 or 3 years for a major release. GNOME needs to work on that too. Glucose and AIGLX and hopefully once XeGL will provide the necesary power to use flashy stuff on low specs hardware.
It sounds like one of those people that cannot stand that ubuntu is popular yet his favorite (likely commercial) distro isn’t and has become pointless due to ubuntu being so goood…. C’mon! Isn’t that what it sounds like?
The article only shows another example of the old ‘linux is not ready for the desktop’ and in this sad sample, the boy complains about the control panel, just click in system and you will find everything you need, if don’t add to this menu, is *that* hard? and the worse part ‘two substandar DE’…
Use it, if you don’t like it, involve in the project or just go away, but please STFU
“STFU” has to the be most cogent, rational, well thought-through positive argument when countering any critique of Linux.
I guess I’ll be modded down again, but I would say that “Linux Foreign Policy” itself has somewhat radicalised this generally OS agnostic user (W2K, OSX, PCBSD and currently Kubuntu and Yoper) into someone who is more and more sceptical of the vociferous wing of the Linux “community”.
The article has generated debate, but what a poor debate it is.
Nothing much. I use Ubuntu very successfully as a server OS, and it provides a slightly more focused set up than most distributions which is what I wanted.
However, as a desktop it just isn’t as spectacular as people claim. In a desktop environment people need to be able to manage everything through a graphical interface? Can you do that? No. Support for wireless and WPA is a case in point. The article gets this right:
A control panel which contains everything (!!) needed to administer the system via simple gui-based utilities with a consistent look and feel.
I would argue that if Linux, or Ubuntu, wants to be a success even on the server, this is required. The problems is that Gnome in particular is just not complete enough, nor does it have the graphical development tools to produce these utilities.
Oh, and despite projects like Autopackage and even the LSB trying hard to get a way for people to install widely software in a straightforward way, how many distributions are helping them? None, that’s how many. I can understand it coming from Red Hat or Suse, because they use their own repositories and packages as a lock in tactic, but Ubuntu? They’re the ones who should be moving this forwards. A package manager should only be used to manage the core system when needed. The comments about the Freespire CNR service are spot on. It’s aimed for ‘human beings’.
As it is, Ubuntu isn’t any more special than any of the other distributions. It’s just flavour as the month, as Suse Linux and Fedora once were.
The article then descends into a bit of a farce by claiming that Ubuntu should be looking at Looking Glass or Enlightenment. The problem is they aren’t as mature, well tested or as complete as Gnome or KDE.
“Support for wireless and WPA is a case in point”
apt-get install wpa-supplicant
then edit the config file.
Not so difficult, but there is no GUI for it unless they have changed that in Edgy.
wpa-supplicant is supported by NetworkManager, which pops up a dialog asking for either the WPA key, or the passphrase used to generate it.
NetworkManager is AwesomeWare (think I’ll TM that word!!) and will hopefully be shipped by more distros ASAP.
apt-get install wpa-supplicant
then edit the config file.
You’re missing the point. If this isn’t in a GUI then it’s useless.
“If this isn’t in a GUI then it’s useless.”
LOL
Whatever.
LOL
Whatever.
ROTFL.
You’re commenting on an article about what’s wrong with Ubuntu – a desktop distribution that’s supposed to be for human beings?
I think you’ve just adequately demonstrated why the person writing the article is largely right and why the many hoards of people, like yourself, who claim that desktop Linux is ready for the world are talking out of your proverbial rears.
Tell you what, find where in my comments in this article that I’ve claimed Linux is ready for the desktop and you may regain an ounce of credibility.
Thanks.
My comment of “LOL Whatever” was my take on the preposterous notion that * Linux distribution is useless because it doesn’t have a GUI for WPA (which actually it does).
Again, I say
LOL
Whatever.
Edited 2006-09-03 12:37
Tell you what, find where in my comments in this article that I’ve claimed Linux is ready for the desktop and you may regain an ounce of credibility.
You can gauge it from looking at that one comment. Again, you’re commenting under an article that is talking about what is wrong with Ubuntu – a desktop distribution for human beings. You’re implying that a GUI for setting just about everything up isn’t required in a desktop distribution like Ubuntu. Hate to burst your bubble, but it is.
…was my take on the preposterous notion that * Linux distribution is useless because it doesn’t have a GUI for WPA
And again, you’re calling the notion that a desktop distribution for human beings is useless unless it has adequate GUIs for configuring things preposterous. Ergo, you think it isn’t necessary. I’m afraid it is.
If it hasn’t got a GUI for confguring it in a desktop OS then you might as well not bother putting anything in. That’s the bridge that many geeks have to cross. ‘Oh, you can just type this in…’ doesn’t cut it.
(which actually it does).
Which it doesn’t, actually (you have to install a new network manager yourself now), and is still not yet picked up in the installer and configured. WPA isn’t exactly bleeding edge technology, and it’s only very recently that you didn’t have to jump through a great many hoops instead of just a few (which is still too many).
There’s still no coherent adequate GUI tools for managing hardware either, many network settings (hello, 21st century calling), still no way of sanely getting a piece of software made available to a user and installing or uninstalling it, or a multitude of other things a desktop user would want to see.
Again, I say
LOL
Whatever.
You can laugh until steam comes out of your ears, but I’m afraid everyone who is being told that they should try out a Linux distribution is laughing at you.
“You can gauge it from looking at that one comment.”
No, you can’t.
“Ergo, you think it isn’t necessary. I’m afraid it is.”
Your opinion, millions disagree.
Thanks.
“still no way of sanely getting a piece of software made available to a user”
Yet another loss in credibility. Ubuntu features “Add Remove” try it sometime.
So you have to edit config files, LINUX IS NOT WINDOWS.
Thanks.
“is laughing at you”
That’s why my previous comment was rated +5 right?
The only one laughing is the guy with zero credibility.
Boy my feelings are hurt. /sarcasm
Thanks.
No, you can’t.
Yes you can – and it was explained. Then again, you deliberately skipped over that didn’t you ;-)? :
“Again, you’re commenting under an article that is talking about what is wrong with Ubuntu – a desktop distribution for human beings. You’re implying that a GUI for setting just about everything up isn’t required in a desktop distribution like Ubuntu. Hate to burst your bubble, but it is.”
Your first comment ever tells everyone you hold that opinion that as well. Mind you, you’ve probably forgotten it by now ;-).
Your opinion, millions disagree.
Millions? ROTFL. You keep thinking that. Any evidence for those millions of users, apart from the fact that Gnome say they’ve got millions of users? 😉
I would say that the opinion of hundreds of millions of people using Windows and Mac OS, using the functionality in those two systems that is severely lacking in any Linux distribution, would count for more.
Yet another loss in credibility. Ubuntu features “Add Remove” try it sometime.
Wow, So I can go to a local computer store and install a game, or download a proper installation package off a web site and install it in an easy and straightforward way? You mean, I can actually get the latest version of Bacula from their web site without having to wait for that slow and silly repository system (that all distributions use, which duplicates effort and wastes manpower) to update it?
Not.
You might want to try that some time.
And spare me the ‘repositories are it’ rubbish. Repositories duplicate packaging manpower and effort, can never have the most up to date software and simply do not scale in the wider world for the multitude of software people would want to install.
So you have to edit config files, LINUX IS NOT WINDOWS.
So it isn’t good enough to be a desktop OS then? Thanks for the confirmation. That’s all you had to say, and it would have saved you the effort of writing that rather non-sensical comment before that got modded to +5 by all the other Ubuntu worshippers.
That’s why my previous comment was rated +5 right?
You must have signed up for an account just to comment on this article :-). Number of comments 6?
As sad as this may seem, it was almost certainly modded up by fellow delusional weenies who think Ubuntu is the salt of the Earth and don’t know what’s required in a desktop OS. Try looking at a world away from OSNews ;-).
The only one laughing is the guy with zero credibility.
*Gets back on chair from laughing* That would be you then.
Boy my feelings are hurt. /sarcasm
Where’s your opening sarcasm tag? 🙂 Don’t worry, I’m sure your feelings aren’t hurt. He who believes himself implicitly lives in his own world and feels nothing.
I notice that you didn’t mention the WPA thing anymore since you had your ass handed to you, nor did you comment on the lack of graphical hardware configuration tools, adequate network configuration and management (configuring DHCP as well as getting things like WINS and print servers from DHCP without a lot of huffing) and a multitude of other things people just can’t be bothered to spend time on to get working.
*sarcasm* Thank you */sarcasm*
Edited 2006-09-03 14:58
“Then again, you deliberately skipped over that didn’t you ;-)? :”
Because it was as worthless as the rest of your commentary, yes.
“Millions? ROTFL.”
Do you honestly believe that millions don’t use it?
I have a bridge to sell you.
Cheap.
“So I can go to a local computer store and install a game,”
Here comes the spin.
“So it isn’t good enough to be a desktop OS then?”
Nope, I said that you have to edit config files. That doesn’t discount it’s capability on the desktop. Perhaps to you, but that’s just another worthless opinion.
Thanks.
“You must have signed up for an account just to comment on this article :-)”
I’ve been here for over 5 years, Eugenia can vouch. I took a bit of a hiatus for the last few months / year but that’s not relevant to the topic of conversation.
Thanks.
“That would be you then. ”
“Where’s your opening sarcasm tag?”
Oh, you aren’t smart enough to figure it out? Sorry about that.
I haven’t had anything handed to me thanks. You believe whatever you want, it’s your basement.
Thanks.
Again, more opinion. Discredited opinion none the less.
Oh, and despite projects like Autopackage and even the LSB trying hard to get a way for people to install widely software in a straightforward way, how many distributions are helping them? None, that’s how many.
That’s not entirely true. Distributions aren’t just not helping them, they’re actually resisting them. For example, “attempts at getting relaytool or dlopen support for gtkspell into Gaim” were rejected by Debian.
It’s not enough that a lot of linux zealots say FUD about Microsoft and they lie just about any issue and downplay any problems with linux.
They are actually fighting and putting FUD out against themselves with different distros.
This is just more proof that they are just wasting time and huge amounts of efforts. They are just fighting over stupid stuff that does not matter.
Again, I am not trying to troll here, just telling it like it really is. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out by now.
“The only real problem with Ubuntu is Ubuntu itself. A tested and bug fixed version of Debian unstable with a pretty installer, a splash screen and the Gnome desktop is hardly the ‘revolution’ which it is purported to be.”
It was a *FORK*, it’s not debian unstable and hasn’t been since hoary hedgehog.
” For Ubuntu to upset major players in the desktop arena such as Microsoft and Apple they need to start behaving like a professional company and provide for the needs of their customers as opposed to what the company thinks they need.”
Thanks for the opinion.
“Let’s begin with Gnome. If Gnome was going to be a Desktop that would create massive changes in the IT world it would have done so by now.”
That’s why Sun, and so many other companies are depending on it, because it’s creating massive changes in the IT world.
Thanks.
“is there really any need for another bloated, windows-like version of Linux? I believe the simple answer is, No.”
Ubuntu Dapper boots into about 128MB of memory footprint. That’s without subtracting cached memory. How is this bloated? Also note that Dapper server can be tweaked to run in about 14MB of memory space, again how is this bloated?
Right, it’s not. Thanks.
“I could go on for hours about my personal dislikes for this particular flavour of Linux but as it is relatively indistinguishable from so many others this would be pointless.”
Read: I could cry and whine even more than I am now, but this is plenty of whine.
“Instead I will outline exactly what I believe the open source community needs to develop in an operating system which will interest the rest of the world enough to ditch what they know and try something new.”
Thanks for the opinions.
“Unfortunately in recent years it has proved wholly unimaginative and under-developed within Ubuntu releases.”
Oh? You mean the whole new icon set etc aren’t well developed for dapper? How about “Human” it’s not the greatest theme, but look at the Windows themes out there. I’d say that Human is absolutely as clever as XP’s default GUI was.
“however like any piece of old software architecture they have outlived there usefulness and their popularity is due to the lack of a comparable alternative.”
How about something to back up these empty statements. You should at least provide a single example where either desktop has outlived it’s usefulness.
“For Linux to retain its reputation as the fast, stable, secure and freely available operating system it needs to continue to live up to all these qualities. Gnome and KDE as the current default desktop environment means sacrificing at least one of these qualities. Sadly this is making Linux a less attractive solution which is bad for the community.”
Which one do they sacrifice? Please provide some examples of Gnome or KDE not being fast, stable, secure, or freely available.
Thanks.
“All that would be required would be to get the code for one of these amazing projects, add some polish, remove some options and make sure it has the following elements designed to help, not confuse the intrepid newbie”
They did this with GNOME, what’s the issue?
Right again, there isn’t one.
“A control panel which contains everything (!!) needed to administer the system via simple gui-based utilities with a consistent look and feel.”
I thought you DIDN’T want it to be like Windows.
“A consistent look and feel across all applications available via the package manager. If it doesn’t look right either change it or don’t include it.”
How about grabbing an app’s source, and starting to work on that.
Thanks.
“Speed.”
Huh?
We use Linux because we don’t want to be forced in to constant hardware upgrades by OS manufacturers that have strategic partnerships with hardware vendors or, in the case of Macintosh, are the hardware vendor.”
How do hardware upgrades have to do with speed?
“Aesthetics. If you want to beat Mac and even Windows it had better look better than Gnome.”
Lets have an example of where you think Gnome is lacking.
Thanks.
“It’s great that an application crash doesn’t freeze your entire system in Linux but that doesn’t mean application crashes are acceptable on a regular basis. Unfortunately this appears to be the case even with many of the major distributions currently.”
Examples please, I’ve been using Ubuntu for a few years now along with RedHat SUSE Caldera Debian Gentoo * distro. I have only seen a few small issues, none worth mentioning. Linux desktops have been stable for years, though I would be very interested in hearing re-creatable examples of issues you are having.
“Secondly and possibly just as important is the package manager.”
What’s wrong with Synaptic or “Add Remove” in Dapper today? Have you actually spent more than 24 hours with Ubuntu because it sure doesn’t sound like it.
“The gui front-ends for apt however leave a lot to be desired, a ‘human being’ using the Ubuntu package manager would likely find it less than useful when they type in a query such as ‘Internet’ in the search box and are presented with hundreds of options for everything from the Bind DNS server to the more obscure libiiimcf2 package which according to its description is an “Internet/Intranet Input Method Framework Library”.”
Hmm maybe you should search for umm maybe something a little more what’s the word? Right, precise. Maybe you should use a more precise search. Something like “Web Browser” or “mail client”.
Thanks.
“Software support. Human beings don’t like change and cannot be expected to change every piece of software they use all at once. Therefore an operating system for human beings wouldn’t require them to do so, unfortunately it does. It’s true that there is an abundance of excellent software for Linux that makes it possible to achieve almost anything within the realms of the imagination. The problem is that people are familiar with their tools and understandably don’t want to change those tools. It might be feasible to convince someone to change their email client from Outlook to Evolution and their browser from IE to Firefox but to tell them to change their spreadsheet software from Excel to Open Office would be deemed ridiculous. Excel (in their opinion) displays all their current company spreadsheets with VB macros and tables correctly and a change to Open Office will more than likely garble any non-standard spreadsheets including those which will continue to be sent to them by friends family and colleagues. Equally ridiculous is telling someone who spent four years at University obtaining a degree using Photoshop to ‘switch’ to The Gimp which is ‘similar’. Someone needs to raise the bar and sink some cash in to Wine so that MS Office (All versions) and Photoshop (All versions) will run on Linux as if they were native Linux apps. Until these issues are addressed no distribution of Linux will ever threaten the big boys in the Desktop arena.”
Boy, can anyone even read this? Who the he** edited this before publishing?!
How much have you donated to wine? I’ve purchased every major release of crossover. Have you?
“This may seem like a pretty damning outlook on the state of Ubuntu”
No, it seems like a pretty damning outlook on the state of your credibility. You haven’t provided a single example proving any of your opinions. Further, you’ve spend most of your article ranting about Linux distributions in general and little time on Ubuntu.
Thanks.
Users want a pretty, easy to use environment with consistent menus and one administrative ‘control panel’ type utility. This should provide a simple solution for all administrative tasks such as adding and removing programs, hardware and networks.
Uh, sorry… but this is linux. If you want windows (or mac for that matter) then quit bitching about Linux and go get yourself a windows/mac box.
I use Gentoo, but when my aunt and unkle wanted to try a linux box I dumped ubuntu on it because it’s quick to install and easy to set up for them. The last thing it needs is a place where they can go screwing up the hardware, software or networking. That’s what got them into trouble with windows in the first place. With ubuntu I can set it up, lock it down, and not have to worry about haveing to go back two days later to fix something.
Oh, and the last thing I want to experience on Linux is that “Wizard Hell” I go through every time I want to set something up on windows machines.
I’m curious…did your aunt and uncle stay with Linux?
I’m curious…did your aunt and uncle stay with Linux?
Yes. They occasionally call me with questions, but over all they seem to be much happier with Linux than Windows, even though they don’t really quite understand the difference. (My uncle doesn’t understand how I can install drivers without using the CD that comes with the hardware.)
That’s cool!
Is it just me or does this guy seem to be a bit full of himself? There is only one place in this article where he states that this is what he thinks is needed and that is buried deeply within the article and would be very easy to miss. It looks much more like a “This is what I want” article rather than a true attempt to evaluate Linux needs to succeed. He does make some valid points, but the article would have been much better if he had stated up front that this is entirely his opinion on the state of things. Anyway, just my 2 bits worth.
Saying that Ubuntu has failed because Photoshop doesn’t run on it is like saying Windows XP failed because it doesn’t run OSX’s GarageBand. If proprietary software makers decide to support Linux, great. Don’t blame Ubuntu because they’re not Adobe.
Saying the package manager is difficult I found to be utterly ridiculous. The guy certainly mentioned Synaptic package manager, but when just looking for a simple application to install he could’ve just used “Add/Remove Software”, but that could potentially nullify his point. I’ve been tinkering with linux since redhat 6, and considered it more potentially as a desktop around Fedora Core 2. From my experience, Ubuntu’s debian based package management system is the easiest package management system I have ever used. After using Ubuntu, I wondered why I hadn’t tried Debian prior.
Also the author failed to provide any specifics as to why the windows interface was superior to Gnome’s or KDE’s. I personally love Gnome’s two bar system, because I can make use of widgets, and unlike windows, I don’t have an incredibly cramped taskbar. I would easily consider KDE’s control panel to be superior to Windows XP’s. I’ve always believed(at least since Fedora) that the linux desktop has massively more usability than that of Windows XP. It’s blindly easy to see. Here’s a challenge: compare any windows start menu, to any linux “applications menu” and tell me which is more thought out.
When I read this article, this guy decided to single out Ubuntu(even though his arguments easily apply to almost any distro), and in the process forgot that Linux is not Windows.
I love to watch these MicroDump vs. Linux articles. I work with Oracle and know for a fact that Dell uses over 20,000 Linux servers worldwide.
It’s not a matter of if Linux over MicroDull … just when.
Just another looser pro-microslappy article.
The author wanted to make a more general point, but got bogged down on a bunch of superfluous details.
He handwaves about Gnome not being up to snuff and KDE being a resource hog, but fails to explain his reasoning.
But the fact remains that in reality Ubuntu is just another debian-based distro that has some resource backing, but not nearly enough to take it over the top to break into the mainstream.
I’m still waiting for someone to do something truly different that will really differentiate itself from distro-flavor-of-the-month, because I’d like to see Microsoft face some competition, but what we have now isn’t it. I started programming Linux professionaly about 9 years ago and always thought by now that we would have some unique operating systems built on top of Linux, but that never happened. Gnome/KDE and Suse, RedHat, Ubuntu, whatever will never be real competition for Microsoft. It’ll take something different than the distros we have now, and it’s not good enough to just be good enough. It seems that the days of innovation are long gone for Linux. There’s just nobody that has the resources, creativity, and guts to buck the establishment and do something that can take some kind of free unix desktop over the top. There’s just been too much time wasted trying to copy Microsoft and being conservative. Linux is great for our business needs and it’s great for my programming workstation needs, but I’ve given up any hope for the current crop of “distros” to ever put a dent in Microsoft’s monopoly.
Linux is great for our business needs and it’s great for my programming workstation needs, but I’ve given up any hope for the current crop of “distros” to ever put a dent in Microsoft’s monopoly.
Why does anybody believe that behemoth Microsoft will suddenly and rapidly collapse in the mythical “Year of the Linux desktop”?
MS has built their empire over more than 25 years and they have become a very wealthy company. It will take decades to starve them to death, if that even is possible let alone desirable.
MS can buy their marketshare. Every desktop PC is fitted with a preloaded Windows. People are not asked what they want, they are told they can shuffle a bit with the hardware and Windows is included, take it or leave it. It has made people think that this anti-competitive situation is normal.
Throwing a mythical “new, innovative GNU/Linux” in the ring won’t solve this. Nobody wants it, that is why distros like Symphony OS are not making big strides at all. They are innovative, they are not stock GNU/linux nor are they Windows clones, yet they are niche projects.
The biggest enemy to newcomers is the familiarity with the old devil you know. That is why new OSes are niche things and incumbent OSes hard to beat. MS has had 20 years to make Windows familiar. GNU/Linux only has had ten years as a desktop OS. It will take time to chip away at MS’ dominance.
MS will not vanish “poof” into thin air overnight. MS will die the death of a thousand cuts, till it becomes one of the players and not the sole player.
One other thing that people fail to grasp is that the current situation is unnatural. If MS ever loses its stranglehold, there will not be another ueber-monopoly taking its place. We will return to a competitive market with multiple players. GNU/Linux will never be that one single entity of Microsoft-esque proportions.
nothing more to say 😉
It’s not enough that a lot of linux zealots say FUD about Microsoft and they lie just about any issue and downplay any problems with linux.
They are actually fighting and putting FUD out against themselves with different distros.
This is just more proof that they are just wasting time and huge amounts of efforts. They are just fighting over stupid stuff that does not matter.
Just exactly like the KDE vs. Gnome nonsense in the linux community. It is sad, it really is.
Again, I am not trying to troll here, just telling it like it really is. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out by now.
“Equally ridiculous is telling someone who spent four years at University obtaining a degree using Photoshop to ‘switch’ to The Gimp which is ‘similar’. Someone needs to raise the bar and sink some cash in to Wine so that MS Office (All versions) and Photoshop (All versions) will run on Linux as if they were native Linux apps. Until these issues are addressed no distribution of Linux will ever threaten the big boys in the Desktop arena.”
They need to be native linux apps. Hell, Gimp can not even handle jpeg’s properly. Either way this is a software vendor issue, not a Linux issue. I like Kubuntu myself, as it seems to handle more then any of the other distros do. Another item that was missed was the ability for ‘Joe User’, who needs to use his webcam over yahoo to chat with family and friends without telling friends and family ‘I can’t do that..please download another program’.
What do you mean GIMP can’t handle jpg properly, please provide some specifics.
“What do you mean GIMP can’t handle jpg properly, please provide some specifics.”
Anytime you try to print a jpeg to a printer for a photo, GIMP craps out when the format is jpeg. I can reproduce this on Fedora, and Suse by opening The GIMP, then a .jpg file, then attempting to print it. The GIMP will hang and have to be shut down through a virtual console. I will try it with newer versions of these however, as I stopped trying this about 1 year ago due to the above. I ended up using other programs as work arounds for printing photos.
Oh, I can’t comment on that since I don’t print from GIMP. It’s entirely possible that you are on the money with your comment.
“Users want a pretty, easy to use environment”
…
“The current desktop environments namely Gnome and KDE have done great things to bring usability and eye candy to Linux on the desktop.”
Yet somehow they’re still completely “substandard” and should be replaced? When he thinks they’re doing great things in the exact areas he identified as vital? Er, okay.
I think picking on Ubuntu was just a way of getting attention – it’s obvious what he was saying about Ubuntu could have applied in parts to any distro, even SUSE which seems to be going more in the direction he wants.
So has he got any good points? I don’t know, it seems to me what he wants is someone to take Linux and reinvent it – make it into something like OSX out of it. Could Gnome or KDE be better, well I quite like the Gnome in Ubuntu but it could be better even if it is quite fun with compiz added.
I must admit to being quite interested in the Blue eyed OS project in the past – however, Ubuntu is here and Blue eyed OS is not and the author is possibly right why not use the Linux kernel to build something truly modern and different.
PS As some who has to use MS Access at work, I have to say it would be nice if it ran on Ubuntu.
I must admit to being quite interested in the Blue eyed OS project in the past – however, Ubuntu is here and Blue eyed OS is not
I was interested in it too. The Blue Eyed OS developer actually had an XWindow article here years ago. He seemed to have a firm grasp on optimizing the hell out of it.
and the author is possibly right why not use the Linux kernel to build something truly modern and different.
I don’t know why it’s not done, and why everybody is so consumed with copying windows. I imagine something like squeak http://squeak.org, but with a beautiful, hardware-accelerated interface, where every part of the desktop is completely extendible. Or maybe something built on top of Lisp, with a easy to use DSL for scripting the entire environment, where it would be easy to basically build any kind of desktop that you want, with little COM-like objects for putting together apps.
Thi guy has got it all wrong. I can tell you that even as I don’t use Ubuntu because I’m a Gentoo user. Next time he should think twice before writing an article related to Linux.
I don’t believe any of the things the author suggested are actually _that_ serious as problems preventing many people from using Ubuntu.
Sure, we all know the GIMP doesn’t replace Photoshop if you’d spent years at uni getting a degree in Photoshop (assuming anyone actually does that?). But those are a vanishingly small proportion of users – there are, what, 800 million Windows users out there or something? Of whom you’d be lucky for 1% to own Photoshop, let alone have a clue how to use all the features that aren’t in the GIMP.
He suggests that aesthetics, stability and speed are all problems; I say they’re not, because Windows is worse on all three. Of course this is fairly subjective, but then nobody knows whether Ubuntu’s better or not until they’ve tried it, and people aren’t trying it en masse.
I suspect that Linux (likely Ubuntu, but could be some other distro) won’t become popular until it gains a measure of popular mindshare. I know a bunch of people at uni who are all fairly technologically able, and most of them think Linux is just some weird command line thing. I’m not sure what the answer to this is – possibly an aggressive advertising campaign *might* do it, but it’d have to be done well.
“It’s not enough that a lot of linux zealots say FUD about Microsoft”
well… it’s not like Ms has done a lot to prevent it… I mean from the software quality point of view.
I can’t understand all this people defending Windows, saying that it’s great and that everything works fine… just because the webcam works out of the box…
Have you ever been thinking about the fact that most things we use on a computer are just things we use because we can, and not because we need them?
It’s like mobile phones… 90%of the features on any modern mobile phone are just plain useless stuff.
So maybe Windows offers a lot of features, all the nice high-tec hardware runs somehow and you get all the pretty software and the shiny games and stuff… but that helps them only to cover a faulty base… to hide the fact that the OS is a bunch of badly design pieces put together somehow…
Ubuntu may provide just the more basic features (although there are some fields where it’s already pretty advanced) not every hardware piece out there may work out of the box, but you get an os that has several advantages in under and above the hood. at least that’s my experience… and beleive me I’m neither a developer nor a very experienced user… just somebody who’s fed up with windows… not just because I have to reformat my harddrive every 6 months, not because I have to defragment the HD every month, not because I often loose files to viruses, not because Mr.Gates is spying on mny private business, because every time I reinstall windows I have to bloody activate, because every app I install clutteres my start menu… baut mainly because I think Windows is a badly designed interface, that hurts the eye and makes it diffcult to find things and perform taks.
using ubuntu was a relieve.
if that’s the way ubuntu got it all wrong, then I’m proud to be wrong too.
The author’s main obsession, imho, is that he wants a GUI that is perfect to him personally, fast, 3D, goodlooking, and… new.
For some reason, some non-developer people talking about software, tend to forget all about its enormous complexity. They don’t mind demanding that projects they don’t like for reasons of bloat (or, they might have picked up somewhere that “the code isn’t clean” or “it’s full of ugly hacks”) should be “rewritten from scratch”. You say what ?
“Gnome, KDE? It’s old, Canonical! Get yourself another DE! Or develop it yourself, invest a couple millions, do it in a few months so I won’t have to wait too long, and make it perfect.”
(??)
People that do write code know that rewriting something from scratch, or say throwing out Gnome for a totally different GUI, is quite often the single worst thing to do for an OS. An OSS *n*x desktop environment is something that grows organically, it has its own character, and it takes time and dedication to make it look and feel great.
Even the Mac GUI has never had revolutionary conceptual changes in the way it looks and feels. And at Apple they are reported to have a feeling for GUI.
Maybe software nitwits (like myself) should refrain from launching their revolutionary GUI/DE project dreams on the web, prior to actually contributing a few lines of code themselves.
As much as I dislike Ubuntu I have to admit that this acticle full of hot air. Why should Ubuntu or anyone else reinvent the wheel? The point of OSS is that you get to contribute and in doing so create a better software that one man/team ever could. While Gnome and KDE are old projects there have been a substantial number of changes in both projects and they have evolved over time. Also the author apparently knows nothing about KDE and KDE4 if he claims that KDE is resourse hungry and that there is no way that it could provide the “needed” flashy looks that users desire. I am not really sure that the majority of users want flashy looks and as far as KDE4 goes, the community has finally gotten to their sences and are doing a lot of progress.
Also Ubuntu didn’t really steal any users away from Red Hat or Suse. Only before RH used to be the leader in user % and now Ubuntu is.
To be fair the writer got one thing straight. Ubuntu is suffering from lack of ideas. While the first couple of releases contained a fair number of improvements, the latest release seem identical to the one before it ( almost ). Considering that things are very far from perfect in Ubuntu and the Linux scene in general, this release seems like a total waste of time. But a great deal of this feeling is due to the fact that Gnome also seems to have gotten stuck with their creativity.
Anyway, I appreciate the effort to point out that Ubuntu is really no cure at all but when you are going to write an article you need solid and concrete facts.
I’d have to say you hit the problem right on. Ubuntu is great, almost perfect for a Free Software project, but “perfect” isn’t good enough. Ubuntu is lacking a “killer app” something to Wow users (other than being 100% free). I’ve had Ubuntu installed on this machine since pre-hoary and it’s gotten better each time. Like you said though, there’s not a lot of new features that WOW users in each new upgrade. Sure there is new stuff like XGL & Compiz but it’s not default and takes too much work for “normal people”.
That said for Ubuntu’s purpose I find the Gnome layout cleaner and smarter than the KDE one. The Gnome layout is clearer with less options to confuse… of course the KDE layout is more “mainstream” with all the extra bells and whistles you’d always wished for in Windows or Mac. And there’s the problem, we’ve come full circle, if Ubuntu makes the main desktop TOO far out there, as much as they should do it, nobody will come to the party because it’s not “what we’re used to”.
No distro right now can make enough people happy.. that’s the real problem with OSS. It’s not “just like” another commercial program, and it’s not “revolutionary” enough to get people to change how they work… and as a side note, it’s not controlled by one company with massive marketing power to tell people they “will like” it because of clever commercials, and magazines, and books, and web press.. not to mention locked in OEM contracts to sell it “their way” wether you want it or not!
Without reading all the “my ass is bigger than yours” responses here, I’m just going to say that after just reading the 1st too paragraphs I knew what it was about.
It’s a personal rant. Nothing more nothing less. For example the “one control panel” stuff? That’s BS. I’ve got atleast 3 friends who moved to ubuntu from windows or KDE based distroes who SWEAR by the way how configuration is handled in GNOME.
So PLEASE, if you EVER EVER again want to get attention by making big shitty titles like this, PLEASE just don’t put your personal crap in it ok? I’m going to go there one more time to see who this author is so I know what NOT to read without reading it..
SHEESH
P.S: I don’t give a damn what you use, or the guy who posted the thing above me, or my neighbor… or ANYONE, so leave your “my ass is bigger than yours” replies at home, thanks.
“A control panel which contains everything (!!) needed to administer the system via simple gui-based utilities with a consistent look and feel. ”
Hmmm… seems to me that there is a control panel with all of the usual suspects present, as well as guified admin tools. However AFAIC a system that would be actively administered a GUI is not necessary, nor even really wanted, especially if it a server.
“A consistent look and feel across all applications available via the package manager. If it doesn’t look right either change it or don’t include it. ”
Windows is a poor choice wrt to consistency here, yet macs are a good example. Mac zealots will raise a hairy fit if even a free app deviates more than slightly from the standard menu/window system. I agree that this isn’t all bad as the default setup of key shortcuts for my favorite OSX newsread, MT Newswatcher now conflict OSX’s defaults, however in this case I’ve been using MT Newswatcher for over 10y now(and so know the key shortcuts), also it does have an option to change the shortcuts such that it doesn’t override the system defaults. As to linux, yeah, it’s a mess, but what do you expect when GNOME/KDE never really bothered to push development guidelines too heavily, and on top of this many of the best apps are just using Qt or GTK and not necessarily targetting either of those DEs…
“Speed. We use Linux because we don’t want to be forced in to constant hardware upgrades by OS manufacturers that have strategic partnerships with hardware vendors or, in the case of Macintosh, are the hardware vendor. ”
Haven’t really noticed a “speed” problem as GNOME/KDE still run adequately on 500+ MHz machines. Anything slower than that is pretty damned old, or some sort of embeded platform. Even OSX & Windows manage to run adequately on similar hardware. If we start talking about games, then, yeah, you need more horsepower, but that really doesn’t enter into this editorial.
“Aesthetics. If you want to beat Mac and even Windows it had better look better than Gnome. I can draw a parallel with cars; no matter how much innovation is achieved in an automobile design; no one wants to be seen dead driving a Fiat Multipla. To the pragmatist aesthetics and speed may seem mutually exclusive but you only need to try Enlightenment to know this isn’t the case. ”
Aesthetics: Hmmm… OSX is ok, Windows is FUGLY, GNOME and KDE seem to be just about as good as OSX to me, especially if you use a nice theme. Ubuntu & Kubuntu both use nice themes IMO, along with the rest of the base Ubuntu desktop looks just about as good. On top of this, serious/corp users don’t care about this, and as a matter of fact there was just another aricle linked to on OS news touching on this… Make up your mind which target audience that your article is addressing please.
“Stability. Naturally this is a very important consideration but oddly enough seems to be getting less and less attention these days. It’s great that an application crash doesn’t freeze your entire system in Linux but that doesn’t mean application crashes are acceptable on a regular basis. Unfortunately this appears to be the case even with many of the major distributions currently. ”
Windows: still pretty unstable compared to any unix or unix like system, but much better with 2k & XP.
OSX: Had 1 kernel panic with 10.0 beta.
Linux: have had 1 kernel panic, several years ago.
Both kernel panics were related to USB devices…
“Secondly and possibly just as important is the package manager. One of the major advantages of using Linux is the availability of high quality free software. The advantage this provides for distributions such as Ubuntu (who use Debian as their parent OS) is that they already have a brilliant command line package management system available in the form of apt-get or aptitude. The gui front-ends for apt however leave a lot to be desired,”
Default Ubuntu package manager setup is pretty limited, especially if you’re directly comparing it with OSX’s system/base sw update. They are in fact equivalent showing approximately the same amount of information and options. Windows update is pretty crappy web based thingy, and has the uber dumbified express button or auto updates, both of which Ubuntu and OSX can be configured to do as well.
Now, if you’re talking running synaptic or any of the other GUI package managers to add new software: these simply don’t really exist for either windows OR OSX. In both you have to find the app, download, then run the installer or uncompress the package. If we add the darwin ports collection or fink, then the GUI installers are in an even worse than state than synaptic and friends…
It would appear to me that there is no clear cut winner here, but I will add that Ubuntu’s best contribution has been to make the desktop environment look MUCH less like a random collection of pieces, and more of one of a whole itnegrated design than any other distro has done to date out of YDL, RH, SuSE, Slackware, Corel Linux, Mandrake, Debian, SLS, etc.
As for severs: my linux/*BSD based servers NEVER get X11 installed, so all the distros are about equal here.
Windows, Solaris, OSX, etc. don’t really give you an option to skip the GUI with their installations, and skipping the GUI in older Windows servers would render them mainly useless as there was extremely limited CLI control facilities available. OSX & Solaris really don;t need their GUIs if you understand how their configurations systems work as each provide complete CLI tools for configuration and control.
Side note: I actually found this article to really sound like whinging about why Canonical is not giving away money to what appear to be the author’s little pet projects…
…as well as guified admin tools.
Wow, As well as things like a GUI to view and manage your hardware?
However AFAIC a system that would be actively administered a GUI is not necessary, nor even really wanted, especially if it a server.
Sigh. You keep thinking that. I tend to find that people make comments like that because they’re in denial over the fact that no Linux system has adequate GUI tools.
Sigh…….
If you don’t agree with something, and you can see elements of truth in it but don’t know how to respond – mod it down.
I’d heard stories and seen evidence that many Linux, and Ubuntu fans in particular, sincerely believe that their distribution is the height of user friendliness, even when faced with the sorry, sorry truth.
I want to see a desktop Linux distribution go out into the world and succeed as much as the next person, but I think we all just have to start accepting that there are areas where it falls well, well short. Unless people start accepting this, forget it.
Sigh all you want to. It’s getting quite irritating at this point though. I am the one who modded you down. Not because I’m a fanboy and I’m trying to hide some great truth, but because I’m absolutely tired of Windows trolls. Just because YOU don’t know how to use a system beyond clicking a gui, doesn’t mean there aren’t users out there that can make use of, and in a lot of cases prefer, a command line interface. Don’t like Linux? Stick with Windows or Mac and do us all a favor and shut the hell up.
It’s getting quite irritating at this point though.
People claiming things that aren’t true certainly is irritating.
Just because YOU don’t know how to use a system beyond clicking a gui, doesn’t mean there aren’t users out there that can make use of, and in a lot of cases prefer, a command line interface.
No, I’m afraid you don’t understand and it’s fairly embarrassing that you don’t. It has nothing to do with me – and I know how to use a CLI ;-). Unless a Linux system, server and desktop, has a graphical configuration system to go head-to-head with Windows in the business IT world you can quite simply forget it. It’s that simple. That’s not me talking, that’s the rest of the world.
Don’t like Linux? Stick with Windows or Mac and do us all a favor and shut the hell up.
Want to tell us all that Linux in whatever form is ready for the desktop and that departments out there using Windows Server and businesses using Windows SBS pretty happily should switch to Linux? Do them all a favour and keep your trap shut about a world you’ve clearly never been in and know nothing about.
Sorry, not everyone needs a GUI to be functionally capable with their desktops / laptops / whatever systems.
Then again, most people using Linux desktops are technically capable and could care less about GUIs for most things.
Absolutely doesn’t discredit Linux on the desktops, it means we just have to educate ourselves and not be mental midgets.
Not a Linux problem honestly (or any other OS for that matter).
“Want to tell us all that Linux in whatever form is ready for the desktop and that departments out there using Windows Server and businesses using Windows SBS pretty happily should switch to Linux? Do them all a favour and keep your trap shut about a world you’ve clearly never been in and know nothing about.”
You really should not make asumptions about people you don’t know. I have 14+ years experience in IT and currently work for the largest managed hosting provider in the country. I’m well aware of what is being used where, and why.
Sigh. You keep thinking that. I tend to find that people make comments like that because they’re in denial over the fact that no Linux system has adequate GUI tools.
Actually, although it’s not perfect, Yast is probably the single best comprehensive management tool for distros. Novell GPL’d it a while ago, I can’t believe that none of the mainstream distros have made a serious crack at porting it.
Hardware settings (including integrated support for ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant), printer management, support of system configuration files, the ability to manage common *nix services like Samba, NFS, WINS, dhcp, apache etc., common tweaks like managing dma settings etc., even the ability to power tweak things that average users would never touch. It’s as if the developers added a new module or functionality to yast every time they came across a common config function that required CLI.
And for an interface it runs under Qt, Gtk or even ncurses for some pretty sophisticated config capability without X running.
I can’t speak to Gnome, but on a standard KDE Suse installation, between the control panel and Yast, a user never need touch a CLI for day-to-day useage and management unless they choose to.
I’m not a dev, but it seems to me that since much of the heavy lifting is done, all that would really be required is translating between Suse’s non-standard config/file layout and the local distro’s. As I said, I know it’s not perfect, but it works and it works better than anything else right now. Certainly the user interface could use a little modernizing and streamlining, for instance. But I hope it’s not NIH that keeps devs from looking at it instead of re-inventing the wheel or ignoring the need altogether.
I know there was an effort to port it to Deb, and they got as far as the interfaces and engine, but none of the modules have been tackled.
http://yast4debian.alioth.debian.org/
If *buntu is looking to make a mark on the useability front, why not take a look at it? If they could port it, not only would it benefit *buntu but could roll back and benefit Deb users as well, though I suspect many of them would be loathe to admit to using GUI tools…
There are some people working on it for ubuntu (not official ones, but there is an active forum thread about it), the only problem is, everybody who has heard about yast and complains about it compares it to aptitude and apt-get (wich are command line program installers btw), first Yast is graphical, and second that the yast program installer is such a PIA has more to do with rpm’s than with yast. The yast projects get a lot of negative attention just because of one flaw that was not yast’s fault. I’m hoping for inclusion in kubuntu and ubuntu and xubuntu once, because well: it’s one setup tool, for all gui’s (just another frontend), so it’s easier to setup your desktop/server because the tool is actually the same in all desktops.
Actually, although it’s not perfect, Yast is probably the single best comprehensive management tool for distros.
I’ve used it – extensively. The fact that it’s the best there is in the Linux world is a major problem.
Hardware settings (including integrated support for ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant), printer management, support of system configuration files, the ability to manage common *nix services like Samba, NFS, WINS, dhcp, apache etc.
It’s functionality is severely lacking in setting up DNS, Samba and alike. It doesn’t configure Bind properly to the extent where you need to additionally install Webmin, and setting up a Samba server is severely limiting. There’s nothing for configuring an LDAP server, nothing for configuring software like Subversion or groupware.
I’m not a dev, but it seems to me that since much of the heavy lifting is done…
There’s an awful lot more heavy lifting to do.
“It’s functionality is severely lacking in setting up DNS, Samba and alike. It doesn’t configure Bind properly to the extent where you need to additionally install Webmin, and setting up a Samba server is severely limiting. There’s nothing for configuring an LDAP server, nothing for configuring software like Subversion or groupware.”
F-ing cry for us.
Who cares that you have to open network manager and change your network settings or vi smb.conf to tweak your samba settings. Use swat if it’s that much of a problem or go back to f-ing windows where you belong.
If you want GUIs use an OS that provides them and quit crying.
Linux isn’t *YOUR* OS.
Thanks.
F-ing cry for us.
Nobody’s crying but you, or some of the die-hard Ubuntu or other supporters, when this stuff is pointed out.
Who cares that you have to open network manager and change your network settings or vi smb.conf to tweak your samba settings. Use swat if it’s that much of a problem…
Nevertheless, it’s true about YaST. Nobody wants use use half a dozen, pretty incomplete, admin tools just to get things working properly.
People who currently use Windows Servers in departmental settings, and in large companies, where there is not a snowball in hell’s chance of people spending entire afternoons or whole days configuring (needlessly) some of the stuff that needs to be done are not going to be terribly impressed. They’re not going to go deep into learning the format of various config files either, because what a surprise, they’re all different. No money will be spent, Linux systems will never have a chance of getting into those places, Microsoft will continue to improve their server systems and will ‘eventually’ create a command line system which will mean that another criticism of Windows can be chalked off.
What then? Many people, like Red Hat and other companies and people, seem to be under this delusion that what Linux and open source systems have are safe and it’s only a matter of time before Windows is conquered. Sorry, but it can all be peeled back in no time.
Mr. Samba, John Terpstra, himself has already talked at length about this – sensible guy that he is.
…or go back to f-ing windows where you belong.
You have a slight comprehension problem. I have no problem with Linux, or a CLI, but I’m afraid taking that attitude to a small business using SBS or a large company with departmental Windows Servers will put you so many steps back you won’t be able to count them.
Additionally, such comments are what people who’ve taken the trouble to try a Linux system (like Ubuntu), and have been told ‘it is ready’, get every day. It isn’t going to help the situation.
If you want GUIs use an OS that provides them and quit crying.
People already are – they’re called Mac and Windows. It’s no skin off their nose. If people like you, or others such as those promoting Ubuntu as ‘ready’, want that situation to change then you’ve got a fair way to go. Part of that journey is accepting what’s wrong rather than covering your ears and telling people to politely F off back to Windows.
Linux isn’t *YOUR* OS.
Again, you have comprehension problems. Linux is my OS actually, and I use it successfully, but I have enough foresight to accept that it simply isn’t as ‘ready’ as many silly people are claiming.
Telling people that they’re idiots when they raise these issues and that they should open a terminal, hand edit some conf files a F off back to Windows isn’t going to help.
Edited 2006-09-04 13:29
“Nobody’s crying but you”
Then why do you keep demanding that things be done to change Linux? Sounds like a whole lot of waah to me.
“some of the stuff that needs to be done are not going to be terribly impressed.”
So, when I use regedit to lock a windows server down before deploying it into a DMZ I should conclude that Windows is not ready for the desktop because there’s no easy way to do it from a GUI.
“I have no problem with Linux”
Then shut up about it already.
Thanks.
“If people like you, or others such as those promoting Ubuntu as ‘ready'”
Again with this. Where the he** have I said Ubuntu was ready in this topic? I haven’t, right.
“Linux is my OS actually, and I use it successfully”
Then shut up, grab some code and fix your problems.
Thanks!
My take: If you are a software engineer and want to live a better life and provide your family necessary comforts (as all other engineers, lawyers, doctors) do, please stay away from GPL. Stallman is such an A’Hole man. Wish he was never born.
Stallman’s take on proprietary software: That’s unethical, they shouldn’t be making any money. I hope to see all proprietary software wiped out. That’s what I aim for. That would be a World in which our freedom is respected. A proprietary program is a program that is not free. That is to say, a program which does respect the user’s essential rights. That’s evil. A proprietary program is part of a predatory scheme where people who don’t value their freedom are drawn into giving it up in order to gain some kind of practical convenience. And then once they’re there, it’s harder and harder to get out. Our goal is to rescue people from this.
You proved yourself retarded the first time you posted that, we did not need a second opinion.
I have a difficult time with the messy home directory in Mepis. You have to allow the files to be un-hidden to go into folders that are lowercase to grab things like screenshots etc. Plus there are a tun of files that get thrown in there too. There needs to be better instalation or file tracking method to clean this up.
Maybe make all the hidden folders go into a Programs folder and make them uppercase too. Also the programs themselves should allow you to change the location of these files as well.
Exactly what does upper/lowercase have to do with anything? A hidden directory is marked as hidden because it starts with a . (period) not because it’s upper or lowercase.
OK, I was talking about what I get with Mepis. The hidden config folders that are created with new programs in the home directory are lower case. The hidden folders might be fine but all the extra files that are dropped into the home directory don’t look great. This is with Mepis so I’m not sure how other distrobutions are.
Ubuntu and many other distros certainly got it wrong, I discovered this weekend that my new Core duo 2 I built won’t accept Linux, freezes on startup, apparently it is a known bug with IDE CDROMS. Tried Windows, worked first time.
Did someone say that Linux was ready for the desktop?
hmmm my core duo 2 setup installed ubuntu fine, although I was using a IDE DVD drive not a CDROM
but linux has been ready for my desktop 3 years ago, I will not corrupt my system with anything else.
Well,
I tried to install Windows XP Vanilla (Sorry lad, that’s the version I got – I know it’s old) on my S-ATA disc. It didn’t work right out of the box. I had to load some drivers during the installation. That was kind of difficult, don’t you think? 😉
Did someone say that Windows was ready for the desktop?
[/irony]
>hmmm my core duo 2 setup installed ubuntu fine, although >I was using a IDE DVD drive not a CDROM
Apparently the problem is specifc to a few motherboards and I happenned to have one of them (GA-965P-DS3), it could be a Intel 965 chip set problem. There are some long threads on the matter. This was going to be my leap to Linux but I was quite disappointed that I could get it to run. Instead I loaded up windows and that’s where I am again for a few years I guess.
The author adresses the problem of ubuntu with a motto/product problem. Ubuntu is not friendly enough for everyone, it’s not an increible experience. If ubuntu where great like some people says it would be everywhere!!, it’s not, and it s not going to be!!.
It has bad multimedia support/apps, bad gaming, not support for the best comercial software. It;s useless for someone looking for a home/work os.