“I like Ubuntu. With each incarnation I’m seeing improvements and betterments that make the OS better, more robust, more user friendly and more fully-featured. In fact, Ubuntu 8.04 is the first Linux distro that I’ve come across that I would consider loading onto my notebook to replace Windows. Throughout my testing Ubuntu 8.04 beta has been reliable and performed flawlessly. Bottom line, Hardy Heron is, for me at least, the best Linux distro ever,” writes Adrian Kingsley-Hughes.
First Look at Ubuntu 8.04 ‘Hardy Heron’ Beta
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Isn’t every release supposed to be the best release ever? I kinda thought that was the point of development?
Although it’s good someone thinks they can replace windows a 6 month update isn’t going to change the world.
Taking Adrian Kingsley-Hughes’ advice about matters of Linux is only marginally better than taking Steve Ballmer’s advice. Neither one knows much about it, really, and both have some interesting biases — but Ballmer is just slightly more likely to lie outright.
Kingsley-Hughes’ articles about Linux, by the way, appear in his “Hardware 2.0” weblog at ZDNet. Think about that for a moment. He’s supposed to be the hardware guy. When you want information or advice about Linux, get it from a guy who’s expected to know something about operating systems rather than someone who’s supposed to know which graphics adapter works best with World of Warcraft.
You’re completely missing the point. Here is a guy who’s a windows hardware expert, and he has a history of windows bias. Despite that, he’s saying positive things about Linux. Not just positive things, but things like
“In fact, Ubuntu 8.04 is the first Linux distro that I’ve come across that I would consider loading onto my notebook to replace Windows. Throughout my testing Ubuntu 8.04 beta has been reliable and performed flawlessly.”
When a windows guy who isn’t an OS or Linux nerd says something like that then it’s pretty significant. Far more so than it if it was said by someone who’s been running Linux since 1995.
Edited 2008-03-24 10:37 UTC
“Despite that, he’s saying positive things about Linux.”
He’s saying blindingly ignorant positive things about Linux, though. Even when he reverses his position on something about which he’s been wrong in the past, he still manages to be wrong in the manner he says it.
Anything in particular you’re thinking about? I read the article and on the whole it seemed quite reasonable. Nothing too wrong or ignorant about it.
Not once did he mention sed or grep, neither did he compile a custom kernel. Thus, he must not be knowledgeable.
Don’t be an ass.
He seems to think Nautilus is new.
He refers to default applications that have been replaced as though these are improvements — but doesn’t even refer to any substantive improvements in most cases.
He’s talking about how Ubuntu is the only distro worth using to replace MS Windows, and as proof lists a bunch of software that could run on any distro and some changes that are common to all distributions (like a kernel upgrade).
Hell, my favorite Linux distribution isn’t even my favorite OS — and I still find his ignorant assumption that Ubuntu is the be-all and end-all of Linux-based OSes beyond absurd.
No he seems to think Ubuntu 8.04 comes with a new version of Nautilus, which is correct.
So it’s not a very in depth review. That’s not the same thing as being blindingly ignorant. If the new apps are better than the apps they’re replacing then surly that would be an improvement.
No he’s talking about Ubuntu in an Ubuntu review, how very very strange. This isn’t supposed to be a complete roundup of all available distros. He also didn’t say that Ubuntu is the only distro worth using to replace Windows. He said Ubuntu is the first distro he tried that he would consider replacing windows with. Notice the huge difference between the two?
He talked briefly about the new Ubuntu in a brief review of the new Ubuntu. How totally ignorant of the fool.
He says “One of the most significant changes is the new Nautilus file manager”. That reads to me like he’s saying Nautilus is new. I can see how maybe he just meant it was the new version — but I suspect that someone who doesn’t know much about what’s going on in the Linux world would interpret it differently.
Why isn’t it an in-depth review? Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have anything to offer. He isn’t saying anything! Not anything useful, anyway. He basically just clicked on a few icons and wrote down the names of the programs, from what I can see. Anyone who actually knew anything about it, writing this review, would say something worthwhile.
It’s like someone giving a review of the 2008 Honda Accord and saying “It comes in a nice color of blue, has four wheels with tires on them, and has an automatic transmission.” Well, no shit, Sherlock. Now tell us something about acceleration, handling, roominess, trunk space, gas mileage, the feel of the upholstery, dashboard and instrument panel ergonomics, crash test ratings, and other things that we can’t determine for ourselves just by looking at a photograph.
I guess you must not have read the part where he said “Ubuntu 8.04 is the first Linux distro that I’ve come across that I would consider loading onto my notebook to replace Windows,” and the part where he said that it is “the best Linux distro ever.”
I talked briefly about what’s in the screenshots and release notes offered by the Ubuntu people themselves, basically — and threw in some comments that imply all other Linux distributions are worse, and only now has he found an OS that (based on the release notes and screenshots) he would ever use for longer than the thirty seconds it takes to say “This isn’t Windows, it sucks.”
You can make snide comments suggesting I’m wrong to take him to task for talking about Ubuntu in an Ubuntu review all you like, but ignoring the fact it’s a mostly useless, uninformative review doesn’t change the fact it’s a mostly useless, uninformative review.
It’s a beta. You basically never to an in-depth review of a beta product, it would be a waste of time to do so. You wait with that until the final product is released and then to the in-depth review.
Good guess. Probably not the real reason.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes never does in-depth reviews of Linux systems.
There’s just no pleasing some people.
I’m actually pretty easily pleased, in general. It’s a little more difficult to actually impress me, though.
. . . and to please me there has to be a net positive value.
Pretty much any 3d graphics card since 2000 will work with world of warcraft. You should have said crysis. lol
Edited 2008-03-24 19:14 UTC
So does this mean only professional musicians can review music, only directors can review movies and only programmers can review applications?
What it means is that you should take an orchestra director’s gushing about how fast a Ford Escort goes with a grain of salt.
Yes, it is.
There are, of course, exceptions … Vista compared with XP is a perfect example of regression in a later version.
Supposed to yes, but it is far from always true. Anybody who’s been around software long enough can come up with plenty of examples of where the latest version (and especially and Beta of the latest version) was inferior to the previous version.
Also note he said best Linux distro ever, not best Ubuntu release ever. There’s a difference.
No, but it might just change his world. The features and polish added to 8.04 might very well be just the things needed to push him to take the plunge.
Except for the windows installer stuff, most of the things mentioned in the article is about Gnome 2.22,
and will in time most likely show up in most other Linux/FreeBSD or even Solaris distros as well.
In other words even the worst distros out there will be at least this good. Combine this with efforts like freeIPA project and we will have a very nice highly managable and secure Linux desktop that have the potential to attract business as well as home users.
Desktop Linux certainly have come a long way.
The people, who describe month by month 1000 best tips to make Windows 1000% faster and XP looks like Vista 23 illumination edition?
Maybe they have figured out how to make Ubuntu look like Vista?
Ubuntu is there as a Desktop experience, it is not at all lagging behind Vista except for the advanced text features: voice recognition, TTS and handwriting support, and that arguably isn’t used by many people. Even IMEs and the Clipboard are somewhat usable, as long as you don’t use QT apps. I even like the default theme.
The problem with Ubuntu is everything else. GNOME is slooooow(More so in Ubuntu, maybe they should work on getting those nice GUIs working on Xubuntu?), it kills apps randomly from time to time(since Gutsy), and hibernation is still not working in many(most) computers. And given the boot times of Linux I think the latter is as close to a deal-breaker as you can get.
Have refinement and big changes dont always do the job, it’s smaller nicer things that get people moving over.
Ubuntu it’s just refining itself bit by bit and these make alot of difference on each release. Just take OS X Leopard, nothing huge but the refinements make a huge difference of Tiger and I think thats what makes a OS just better and much more enjoyable to use.
For a lot of people, Ubuntu is now the default Linux distribution to advise to others, to install just to get it done quickly, etc. This momentum might be what it takes to have people equate Ubuntu with Linux as Hoover with vacuum cleaners (or Luxaflex with window blinds, if you’re in Europe
).
Does that suck for the other distros? Technologically, no, that’s why open source licensing works so well. But you don’t want to code/maintain/develop for a distro that only a handful of people use.
Any thoughts about that here? Is Ubuntu slowly but steadily eating away others’ desktop mind/market share? Or are all main distros growing?
Since/if Ubuntu is such a great, flawless system, why is anyone still using anything else? Isn’t it better to unite under one Ubuntu flag? All our bug reporting efforts will then be concentrated on one distro; etc. And the new user’s complaints, ‘why are there so many distributions’ will disappear too.
Then again.. maybe PC-BSD will come and kill Linux altogether. :p
Disclaimer: non-Ubuntu user.
Does that suck for the other distros? Technologically, no, that’s why open source licensing works so well. But you don’t want to code/maintain/develop for a distro that only a handful of people use.
Unless you are creating software that is only meant to work on a particular distro then the software will work just fine on all of them without making any changes whatsoever.
Any thoughts about that here? Is Ubuntu slowly but steadily eating away others’ desktop mind/market share? Or are all main distros growing?
At the moment it does seem most people do equate Linux with Ubuntu. Most reviews too where they f.ex. compare Linux vs Windows they choose Ubuntu. It is somewhat unfortunate cos now a lot of other good distros won’t get to shine in the spotlight at all :/
Since/if Ubuntu is such a great, flawless system, why is anyone still using anything else? Isn’t it better to unite under one Ubuntu flag? All our bug reporting efforts will then be concentrated on one distro; etc. And the new user’s complaints, ‘why are there so many distributions’ will disappear too.
I personally will never start using Ubuntu. I have never liked it. Every time I have tried it I have found one or another big issue which required quite some work to get it working..It’s like it’s patched boat which does look OK outside (I don’t say “good” just because the theme is so horrible) but the bottom is leaking. Though, this is just my opinion and my experiences with it.
“Every time I have tried it I have found one or another big issue which required quite some work to get it working..”
Such as?
“Every time I have tried it I have found one or another big issue which required quite some work to get it working..”
Such as?
I don’t remember all anymore, sorry, I just haven’t bothered to memorize them all. But I remember the last time I tried Ubuntu 7.10: no matter what I did it always failed to initialize my USB keyboard even though the mouse worked! Thus I couldn’t even install it, even less try to fix it.. The strange thing is though that 7.04 did get the keyboard working just fine. Anyway, because I couldn’t make 7.10 work I just opted to install Gentoo (that’s what I am most familiar with)
To whomever who is modding my posts down: please, tell me why? I am not bashing Ubuntu, I just answered the guy’s question :O Modding me down just because I do have issues with Ubuntu isn’t going to make those issues disappear.
I’m not the OP, but after using Ubuntu as my main OS for about 5 releases I’m done with it. There’s a lot to like about Ubuntu, I think they’ve done a huge amount for general usability in Linux, especially for end users, but their quality control is just not good enough.
There are major regressions in every release (just check the message boards after a release for the slew of “my xyz device doesn’t work any more!”, and my personal experience, using Ubuntu on a desktop, laptop, my girlfriend’s computer and a home server, is that out of about 14 upgrades I’ve done of Ubuntu, probably about 5 of them have upgraded cleanly without dying in the middle of the process for one reason or another. I hasten to add I’m not someone who uses Automatix, or lots of third party debs, I stick to the main repos wherever I can.
I really think that Ubuntu is too focussed on its release schedule and is too willing to ship with what I personally consider major bugs.
Anyway as I say, apart from the quality control I think Ubuntu is great and I wish them luck, but I’m off to mamma Debian.
I haven’t specifically answered your question, and I haven’t reported many bugs recently, but here’s a list of bugs I’ve either reported or subscribed, or those bugs that my reports were found to be duplicates of.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/~slight-/?field.searchtext=&orderby=-impo…
Debian does handle upgrades better than anything else, but beware if you stray any farther than that from Ubuntu… The RPM based distros are quite horrific for upgrades! And don’t even get me started on source-based ones.
I used RedHat and then Fedora for a few years before moving to Ubuntu and I wouldn’t say they were any worse for upgrades to be honest. Yum is slow but apart from that I think they’re pretty much of a muchness. Personally I prefer apt to yum, but I know people who have very valid dislike of debs due to the fact they can only hold a unified patch rather than a separate patch for each item being patched in the upstream source.
I would say on individual packages, RPM has its advantages; I just meant on full-on distribution upgrades, I’ve never seen anyone do it as well as Debian.
I’ve been saying this for a long while – Linux needs to have a stable API that is not always changing. It needs one package management system. It needs to stop the plethora of application clones that all aim to do the same thing, and merge applications into one ‘killer breed of application’. It needs to standardise on one desktop. Choice is great, but it’s a double edged sword, and this choice is something that really does turn a lot of people off on using Linux from my experience.
Concentrating on one application/desktop environment etc will allow more developers to work on the project, decreasing bug fix times, increasing implementation of new feature times etc.
Sadly, trying to explain this to Lunix Loversâ„¢ is almost like Tom Cruise giving up Scientology to become an Atheist.
When this starts happening, you’ll find proprietary 3rd party software vendors will start porting to Linux more frequently, Linux drivers will become more frequent and so forth. Oh, and if the Linux kernel development team actually stop sucking up to the big corporations, and actually start developing the kernel to favour desktop users…
See, Microsoft has a code base for servers, and one for Desktops. Linux has one codebase, and whilst it simplifies development to some degree, it allows favouritism for one group over the other (usually the group with the biggest money), which skewers development.
BSD has it sort of right, although the licence is crud imho.
Dave
I’ve been saying this for a long while – Linux needs to have a stable API that is not always changing.
What are you referring to? The kernel or some user-land library?
It needs one package management system.
Why? What’s wrong with having several ones? Home-users don’t care, system-admins neither.
It needs to stop the plethora of application clones that all aim to do the same thing, and merge applications into one ‘killer breed of application’.
That would just hinder development, not boost it. First of all, a whole lot of apps which seem somewhat similar do things different way, allowing them features their alternatives don’t have. Secondly, if there was only one single app for f.ex. media playing..what would you do if that app didn’t have the feature you need?
It needs to standardise on one desktop.
It has. GNOME and KDE are the standard DEs on any home-user oriented distro. Power-users on the other hand are just often delighted to experiment with alternatives.
Well, I’ll happily use my Microsoft Windows operating system cos it works, and works well and does what I need it to, and merrily watch as Linux becomes well, less adopted than ever.
More people are now switching from Windows to OS X than Windows to Linux, and if the Linux community doesn’t want to get its head out of the sand, it’ll just end up being a geeks o/s. You can mock me now, but history will show me as being right in ten or 20 years.
Linux has already missed the boat – the fact that people are happy to pay $$$ to Apple for a hardware and o/s change, than try a freebie Linux download says it all.
It’s amazing at how many idiots are out there that call a post flamebait, or a person a troll just because they think outside of the box, rather than think like a lemming like the rest of the community.
But hey, it’s your loss (i.e. the Linux community), not mine. I gave up on Linux a while ago for the very reasons that I’ve pointed out in my earlier post.
Dave
PS Linux is even losing out in the server stakes, with more and more enterprises switching from UNIX to Windows Server 2003, or even from Linux back to Server 2003 (or from earlier versions of Windows server to Server 2003). We also see IIs making large inroads into the web server market now. I know all of your Lunix Luddites will say Microsoft is fudging the stats etc, and with attitudes like that, the Linux o/s is sure to go downhill.
Well, I’ll happily use my Linux operating system cos it works, and works well and does what I need it to, and merrily watch as Windows becomes well, less adopted than ever.
More people are now switching from Windows to OS X than Windows to Linux, and if the Linux community doesn’t want to get its head out of the sand, it’ll just end up being a geeks o/s. You can mock me now, but history will show me as being right in ten or 20 years.
I don’t actually care if Linux was just a geek OS. It works, it works good, it’s good-looking, and it does what _I_ want, not what some company wants. So, so what if Windows users don’t flock to Linux? Doesn’t bother me.
Linux has already missed the boat – the fact that people are happy to pay $$$ to Apple for a hardware and o/s change, than try a freebie Linux download says it all.
Newsflash: people have been buying Apple hardware and software since the foundation of Apple. They’d be bankcrupt if that wasn’t true!
Besides, that’s like comparing apples and oranges here: if someone wants a new computer, does she download a Linux livecd or buy a new computer?
Nah, next time try to troll atleast with some arguments, okay?
Newsflash:
Microsoft used to have 99% of the desktop market, and Apple the other 1%. Linux came along, Windows lost a few percent, Linux and Apple both gained, but Linux more so. Those days are long gone now, with more and more people switching to Macs. You know how many people I’ve seen using Linux in my role as IT support (speaking to many thousands and thousands of people over the past 6 years alone) – I can count them on 2 hands. Seriously. How many people using Apple Macs? Hundreds. And that number is just growing and growing from what I see.
Do you really think the corporations will pay the Linux kernel developers money to develop a kernel with a tiny server market percentage, or a tiny desktop percentage? A tip for you – corporations are in it to make money. As soon as Linux stops making them money, they’ll drop it like a hot potato. Most of the current crop of Linux kernel and application developers are in it for the money, not for the ideals of the FSF – witness the Linux kernel anti GPL v3 brigade. Once the money is no longer coming in, I think you’ll find more and more of them will spend less and less time developing for “free”.
Personally, I’d love to see Linux win against Macs and Windows – it’s a better operating system in many, many ways. However, it’s faults, if left untreated, will result in a stagnation of users. Of course, Linux can be guaranteed some users, those that are too tight to pay for their operating system (i.e. software pirates), who’ll migrate to Linux not because of software ideals, not because they think it’s better, but because it’s free as in beer. As time moves forward, this type of crowd will not step up and fight against software patents, or the abuse of free software. Let’s look at the Novell vs Microsoft patent agreement – how many developers actually left Novell because they disagree with this stance? One. The rest don’t care – Linus himself has not even worried about it. It’s an abuse of the GPL, and everyone knows it, but few want to take the step and migrate to GPL v3, which will cut out these loopholes. Why? Because big business pays money, that’s why. When money becomes more important than sticking to the ideals of Free Software, one has to question the morality of the developers, and who they are in bed with. Personally, I have an intense dislike of Linus Torvalds these days, I don’t trust him, his motives and so on.
Anyways, there’s no use preaching to the blind, deaf and dumb and mute, for they just won’t see or listen.
Dave
Most of the current crop of Linux kernel and application developers are in it for the money, not for the ideals of the FSF – witness the Linux kernel anti GPL v3 brigade
They are in it for the money? :O Geesh, that’s quite an insult towards all of us developers, including me! Linus didn’t start coding Linux kernel hoping to earn money with it in the future, nor did he start coding it because of the ideals of the FSF. Nor did the devs who joined him do that in the hopes of money. People program stuff FOR FUN, or they want to do something useful for others. Heck, I program just because of those two reasons, I have never even hoped to get money for programming nor have I ever believed in FSF ideals.
Let’s look at the Novell vs Microsoft patent agreement – how many developers actually left Novell because they disagree with this stance? One.
Maybe not everyone cares about GPL or FSF that much? And perhaps they like to actually earn some money to live with and pay bills with?
However, it’s faults, if left untreated, will result in a stagnation of users. Of course, Linux can be guaranteed some users, those that are too tight to pay for their operating system (i.e. software pirates), who’ll migrate to Linux not because of software ideals, not because they think it’s better, but because it’s free as in beer.
That’s quite an insult, almost like calling any Linux user a software pirate. And pray be tell what are those “faults” that you are referring to? I just got the impression that you are trying to preach for GPL3 here and that anyone disagreeing with you is wrong.
And this is why I really wish the FSF had made the GPL v3 licence in such a way that all FSF based software automatically becomes GPL v3 and that it cannot be used with GPL v2 software unless it migrates to GPL v3. That way, much of the software in a Linux distribution, which is built by FSF developers would be useless, and those that are freeloading on the FSF, but do not believe in its goals can go and develop their own versions (in a clean room environment please).
The FSF is why you mongrels have free software in the first place, and why open source took off. Ungrateful bastards.
Dave
And this is why I really wish the FSF had made the GPL v3 licence in such a way that all FSF based software automatically becomes GPL v3 and that it cannot be used with GPL v2 software unless it migrates to GPL v3.
*Poof* That’s the sound of freedom for developers to choose the license under which they distribute their software. *POOF* And that’s the sound of quite a few developers refusing to develop for Linux and/or the FSF fascists and moving to other platforms. Good work.
The FSF is why you mongrels have free software in the first place, and why open source took off. Ungrateful bastards.
Bah. Free software has existed in dozens of forms throughout the age of computing. FSF didn’t just suddenly change that.
I smile at the irony. Your viewpoint represents the very thing that the FSF opposes. Arbitrary control of software by an entity versus the user. I’m hardly an FSF partisan myself, but your post shows you really don’t *truly* understand what the FSF stands for.
Yes, and Apple is the only reason we have GUIs, so we should all be grateful to them, as well.
*sigh* If you’re arguing about open source “taking off” in the sense of reaching some sort of populist acceptability, I would argue that linux is the reason it took off, because linux broke the barrier between geeky OSS-philosophy and pragmatic commercial acceptance. But that’s my personal opinion.
You could then you could argue that linux needs GNU. Then we could get into an argument about how GNU was never able to develop their own kernel so GNU really relies on linux for relevancy. Then we could drag the argument all the way back to the birth of the ENIAC and the fact that punch cards and toggle switches are the reason we have pocket-sized PDAs today.
But what’s the point?
Liar! Xerox is the reason why we have GUI today!
…
Wait, what’s that wooshing sound?
–bornagainpenguin
Dave, April 1st is still 6 days away.
Hey, just like Linus. Well, maybe he’s not in it for the money but he don’t care much about the FSF and its ideals.
Windows server 2003 Reliability Average downtime in a year 9 hours
Linux Server (RedHat,Other) ZERO
Which is more reliable?
Interesting you say you think the BSD license is crude, I don’t see what people have against it. Which line(s) do you disagree with?
I actually strongly reject the GPL license because it seems to legally try to force you into socialism and the required redistribution of wealth, and version 3 of GPL seems to step it up a notch into socialist fascism.
At least the BSD license gives full respect for individuality and does not make the software community central above individual freedoms. Even proprietary licenses at face value I don’t have objections with. And I am only talking about the license, nothing about the business practices.
merge all applications for a killer breed, but split off the kernel for convenience/ personal preferences?
this sounds like a standard flamebait rant.
Except of course won’t play out like that. If, for example, the KDE project was magically shut down, do you really think all (or even most) current KDE developers would become GNOME developers? The thing is when people are working for free (and often even if you’re paying them) they’ll only work on things they think are fun. All KDE and GNOME developers have looked at both projects and picked the one they think looked fun to work on. If that choice is removed they’re just as likely to find something else entirely to do with their spare time.
That’s the essentially unchangeable nature of open source. It’s very easy to find plenty of developers willing to work for free, but basically impossible to guide them to work on what a central authority considers important.
I think you’ll find that most people have no problem understanding your argument, they just realize it is at best highly impractical and at worst incorrect. And insulting people is hardly helping.
And at the end of the day if everybody thought like you, Linux wouldn’t even exist.
Isn’t it better to unite under one Ubuntu flag? All our bug reporting efforts will then be concentrated on one distro; etc.
Ubuntu’s handling of bug reports is bad enough as it is with the users it already has. They basically ignore most bugs unless it happens to be high profile or interesting to them. I am a user of Ubuntu, by the way.
UBUNTU error reports.
On my tri-boot system (3 hard disks), UBUNTU would not dual boot with XP on disk1. (Dual core Intel). But two other distros did ok.
What you have to realize is that Linux is very much like the car industry was in the 1940’s. Then every car owner carried a toolkit in the trunk. Every car owner changed his own sparkplugs, batteries, etc.
Ubuntu is only one of many fine distros. On my system, my two defaults are Fedora 8 and PCLINUXOS. Both work fine, and I use each of them on alternate days.
It sure sucks for other vacuum cleaners…
I would hope that this never happens. A little competition among distributions is a good driving force for improvement. The problem with bug reporting is better solved by making common rules, i.e. standars for how software should interact in Linux.
First of all Canonical is very good at marketing, and Ubuntu isn’t always as good as they make it sound. (E.g. compare Ubuntu 7.10 with OpenSuse 10.3, and you get that Wow feeling, that Microsoft thought they had reserved for Vista).
What’s the best desktop distro varies over time, somtimes it will be Ubuntu, sometimes it will be OpenSuse or even something from Red Hat.
Having different distros, makes it less likely for a good idea to get killed for some organizational internal reason in one company.
Just to be replaced with complaints why doesn’t it do what I need. The good thing about open source is that you can twist it to fit your needs.
The problem with many distros doesn’t exist as I see it, there are just a few that really counts, unless you have some kind of special interest that needs to be addressed. The ones I’m thinking of is of course distributed by Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical.
The reason for being the ones that counts have very little to do with their technical merits, and more to with their ability to do business, how well they can convicne their customers that they can provide viable support and actually be there for them if something goes wrong in a long time to come.
This should be a hint that Ubuntu is not such a great, flawless system, but instead you seem to conclude that people use other distros because they don’t know any better. I have tried Ubuntu several times, and I still prefer PCLinuxOS, especially for beginners. Linux Mint, an Ubuntu derivative, is also better than Ubuntu in my experience (of course, other people’s experience may be the opposite).
Anyway what I like most is the fact that GNU/Linux is free software, so whoever wants to create a new distro, package manager or desktop environment can do it. That’s not going away, get over it. When a project is clearly better than the rest, developers flock to it because they like it, not because someone convinced them that having too much choice is bad.
On concentrating efforts… you have to factor in the law of diminishing returns. Too many developers in the same project are no use if the project is not modular enough. When there’s just one big project, developers lack the perspective and friendly competition that many small independent projects with similar goals can provide.
Several little projects, being compatible with each other through open standards wherever it makes sense, and facilitating migration where being compatible doesn’t make sense (like in radically new, experimental systems) seems a better and more realistic antidote for fragmentation than de-facto standardization around the biggest player.
Ok they brag about SELinux, GFS, most likely the clustering, been there done that in Fedora and RHEL5.1 Enterprise….
I am NOT trying to start a flame war, however the Ubuntu guys seem to think the world revolves around them. These technologies have already been implemented in Fedora way before they had it on the ‘Ubuntu’ radar.
Plus, the fact Red Hat/SuSE is the Linux distro for the Enterprise Data-Center and the desktop.
If someone wants to try a Linux distro the Fedora model in my opinion seems to be more logical and the way the file system is laid out.
Who’s bragging? This article wasn’t written by Canonical. It seems that some Linux users read every article about Ubuntu and then moan that someone’s written an article about Ubuntu.
Honestly, people spend all this time advocating Linux, and then when someone writes in the mainstream computing press of their positive experiences with Linux and advocates switching from Windows, what happens? You complain that one distro is getting all the limelight. Cheer up.
The article specifically talks about Gnome features, and that’s good publicity for Fedora and all Gnome-based distros. There are reasons why Ubuntu is more popular than Fedora, and Red Hat have been addressing things like codec support, boot times and package management. There’s no reason why Ubuntu should continue as number one forever, so just accept the good publicity for what it is.
Edited 2008-03-24 12:50 UTC
I have a little game I play. Just something for my own amusement. I have a list, here, of the OSNews users whom I know are going to show up in this thread and do just that. I note the time that the story was posted, and then the elapsed time until the user shows up to post his anti-Ubuntu rant, and plot that on an OO.o chart. They rarely disappoint, tend to be getting faster on the draw, and I begin to worry about them when they don’t show up on time.
Edited 2008-03-24 13:38 UTC
I REALLY want to see this chart! Mind emailing it to me?
You should get out more.
Ok they brag about SELinux, GFS, most likely the clustering, been there done that in Fedora and RHEL5.1 Enterprise….
Been there, done that in Gentoo since ages. So? Do you see me complaining Fedora is way behind? Do you see me complaining when some other distro gets new features? Nuh-uh, I am just glad if distros get better, no matter which distro it is.
I am NOT trying to start a flame war, however the Ubuntu guys seem to think the world revolves around them. These technologies have already been implemented in Fedora way before they had it on the ‘Ubuntu’ radar.
So, if some distro has a feature that Fedora doesn’t then does that mean Fedora is “way behind”? Or will you take a defensive stance and claim that that feature is unneeded anyway? No, it is you here who seem to think the world revolves around Fedora. Just because someone writes about Ubuntu it doesn’t mean that all Ubuntu users believe Ubuntu is the center of the galaxy -.-
Plus, the fact Red Hat/SuSE is the Linux distro for the Enterprise Data-Center and the desktop.
Give some arguments instead of just trying to state your opinion as a fact.
If someone wants to try a Linux distro the Fedora model in my opinion seems to be more logical and the way the file system is laid out.
How the file system is laid out?? O_o Wtf? What’s the difference between Ubuntu’s file system layout and Fedora’s?
Fedora is targeting a completely different market then Ubuntu at this point in time and those features are not overly important to the home desktop user.
Besides that fact I would argue that Ubuntu is the way to go for a home user based on the fact it is the most commonly used and the easiest to get help with.
Go, beta test stuff that’s not ready for mainstream use for Red Hat if that’s your thing. It’s not in Ubuntu for a reason. I’m thinking Ubuntu includes those things too fast actually – PulseAudio is nowhere near usable in Fedora 8 or Ubuntu 8.04 beta.
Ah.. The usual “Fedora had feature X before ubuntu”-post.
If any ubuntu story didn’t get a post like that, it just wouldn’t be osnews.
First off, I actually prefer Fedora to Ubuntu. I find it to be much more polished. However, you don’t see me slandering Ubuntu with these whiny posts. Just enjoy your Fedora in peace and let the Ubuntu users enjoy their Ubuntu in peace.
Indeed. They are really quite different distros. And they excel in different areas, with different kinds of users. For example, if you are a less savvy user who wants to do “normal” things like watch movies that aren’t in Ogg Theora format, Ubuntu will make sure you know that the codecs are not Free and might be patent encumbered. But it will give you a choice, and if you decide you want to watch the movie anyway, it will help you find the right codecs to make your own machine do what you want it to do. Fedora, currently, will direct you to the price list for pay for codecs, but will refuse to even take you to the web site where you can buy them. As of Fedora 9, if I understand correctly, it will just tell you that you don’t need to be watching that, anyway, without showing you the pricelist. For many users, that’s Ubuntu:1 Fedora:0.
On the other hand, for an administrator responsible for many desktops, and for the users of those desktops, too, Fedora really shines. Which is not to say that is the only place it shines.
I do not hesitate to recommend Ubuntu to new users who are going to be administering their own machines. But I would not consider anything but Fedora or CentOS for desktops I administer.
Fedora, CentOS, and Ubuntu are pretty much the only distros I need. But I do need all three.
On a slightly different note, I have noticed more anti-Ubuntu sentiment coming from fans of other distros than I have “anti” sentiments from Ubuntu fans regarding other distros. I guess we sometimes forget that a rising tide lifts all boats.
The beta seemed ok i suppose, didn’t detect my screen resolution and won’t let me change the refresh rate down to 60 like i have in windows, ubuntu wants to have it at 70 which bloody hurts my eyes. Also won’t pickup my sound now, how annoying!
holy fsck. 70hz hurts your eyes and 60hz doesn’t? wow… My eyes start hurting at anything under 85hz. heh, 60hz drives me insane.
I am using ubunto 7.04. Everything works great
When I tried to install 7.10 it trashed my system. But even with the live CD my internet all of a sudden my internet wouldn’t work.
I tried suggestions from those I found and none of them worked.
I tried a number of distributions and all of a sudden none of them would recognize my internet connection (with is cable by the way). Previous versions of these distros did.
The only recent distribution that I tried that I could get to work with the internet was Puppy Linux.
I am a little technical but not overly so. I don’t know how something goes from working perfectly to not working in a later version. If it worked before it should work afterwards. And I don’t want to spend hours (anymore) trying to figure out how to get my computer to work with basic functionality.
I downloaded the beta and It didn’t even make it past the boot scripts.
I don’t know. My experience with Linux is steadily going downhill.
I may yet give up on Linux altogether.
I had the same problem. I wonder how many people gave up and went back to Windows or MacOSX because of that bug. I surely did for a time until I solved it.
You must add the noapic flag to your grub. You can do it before the setup starts, at least in Debian and Ubuntu, that will add the flag to your partition afterwards. I wonder why that piece of crap is included by default.
With each release Ubuntu becomes more buggy, unpredictable and slower. And why Windows XP on the same machine still boots almost twice as fast as Ubuntu does – despite claims that each release boot faster and faster (“upstart” and so on) ? Like the child in the famous fairytale I feel obligation to say “But he has nothing on!” – and why I should say otherwise ?
I love the fact that Linux Distributions are still compared to Microsofts premium OS…XP.
I’m actually intrigued enough to have a look at I’ll try and get something in conversations later this week, but I am really busy till week end, and the machine that has these is occupied by my partner.
Quick references if anyone wants to beat me to the punch.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/excerpt/winxphacks_chap1/
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=674386
I suspect there is little in it, and in reality compared to the Irritating Black screen that Vista presents you with for forever is unimportant.
I’m also slightly interested in Ubuntu comment not picking up correct screen resolutions. This used to be a regular complaint in regards the intel onboard graphics, which I thought was long since gone. Although nothing is particularly rosy in regards the latest intel drivers which even though the git shortlog seems to post page-after-page of fixes seem if anything worse.
I would agree that Ubuntu is not polished but compared to something like Vista that is not ready. What is clear is that every 6 months it has the opportunity to be more polished, and can avoid regressions like that of Vista. What is a shame is when a wireless card that works using the command line and linux does not work within the Gnome interface. Wireless has come along in leaps and bounds and the beta prior to this did not cement the two half’s of the equation.
It is still the issue. I tried to install that beta (using wubi) as it was released, and it failed to correctly detect native screen resolution of my almost five years old LCD monitor (Philips 150B)
I agree. Ubuntu is dog slow for me. I run Gentoo most of the time and it’s snappy. I don’t think it’s the self-compiling that does it, it’s probably something else. But whatever that is, it needs to be fixed. Everything in Ubuntu is slow: the interface, the boot time, the package manager, starting programs, stopping programs (hah!), the list goes on. And I don’t know why it needs to be that way.
We must live in different countries because my emperor is nothing like yours. And from where I’m standing your emperor look like he’s the one with no clothes on.
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p…
I just got 5 questions.
1: have they fixed so that ubuntu doesent start FIFTY console-kit-daemon’s in the background like 7.10?
2: have they stopped totally insanely starting a webserver on a weird port serving a dir that doesent exist? (like 7.10)
3: have they fixed their insane runlevel manager so that when one wants to switch login manager, it instantly stops the one one uses
4: have they fixed so that not only must one change login manager in runlevel, but also modify a crappy file saying the path to the allowed login manager?
5: have they fixed their apache packages so they dont f–k up horribly?
As happy as I am for the article writer, I can’t help but wonder how much of his enthusiasm for Ubuntu’s latest is directly in proportion to his disappointment in Vista?
I am constantly getting impressed looks when people see me using Compiz and its effects on my old Dell Inspiron 5100. The same laptop that would crawl under Vista (I used one of the betas to find this out.) leaps and zooms with Ubuntu 7.10 Oh don’t get me wrong I had to resolve some issues here and there at first, but feature for feature Ubuntu just seems to out-perform the latest Windows no matter what I throw at it.
And I’m talking about a P4 with only 512 of RAM here, doing cartwheels around machines with 2gigs of RAM!
–bornagainpenguin
And I’m talking about a P4 with only 512 of RAM here, doing cartwheels around machines with 2gigs of RAM!
I have a similar laptop here, only 1.4ghz P4 processor and a really slow GeForce 4 Go 420 with 32mb RAM.. Yet, Compiz-fusion and all the cool effects work just fine on this setup and feels pretty snappy indeed. The thing I have noticed is that any web site with flash animations is slow, but they are just as slow without Compiz on.
I did have an issue I had to fix, but the bug lies in the binary nvidia drivers, it happens on any distro. But aside from that I didn’t have to tweak or fix anything to get a fully working setup up and running
Though, it’s not Ubuntu. I am using Mandriva Powerpack. This far a good and solid distro, but I will absolutely not recommend it to beginners. Not newbie friendly.
Why not? How is Mandriva less user friendly than Ubuntu? In fact, Mandriva was the pioneer of the user friendly linux desktop. Yes there were some missteps along the way but things are real good nowadays.
In fact, it would nice to see a comparison of Mandriva too.
Why not? How is Mandriva less user friendly than Ubuntu? In fact, Mandriva was the pioneer of the user friendly linux desktop. Yes there were some missteps along the way but things are real good nowadays.
In fact, it would nice to see a comparison of Mandriva too.
Mandriva just requires a little bit more pre-experience than Ubuntu. Like when I installed Mandriva on this laptop I found out it doesn’t have any repositories enabled by default so it couldn’t install new apps nor could it even check for updates unless I added the repos there. That’s not very beginner-friendly, they won’t even know what a repository is. Oh, and there’s things like this doesn’t automatically install needed codecs for media files and so on.. Though, that is apparently going to be fixed in Mandriva 2008.1 Spring
I also didn’t really like the default settings, like f.ex. there’s something like 4 different video players installed and they are all used to play different files.. And I also hit a bug during the installation where there was this “Welcome” screen, but it was in italian :O Clicking on back button reset it to english but then the buttons were in german. I did ask about it in IRC and someone there said it is a common bug.
Well the name for one…. How the heck can anyone take a distro whose name sounds like a gay male dancer seriously is beyond me….
At least with Ubuntu I can always explain it’s the African word that means…
Errr…sadly I don’t remember it that way. Really, as far as I was concerned Mandrake, Lycoris, and Connectiva all had issues that made me unable to make any serious use out of them. Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t most of their user friendliness from using colorful and nicely tarted up themes more oe less? Whenever you wanted to get anything changed in the actual system itself you always had to use distro specific tools which never quite seemed to integrate well with the rest os the system…
Sounds good to me. Let’s see first thing they need to do is install Gnome…
–bornagainpenguin
Well the name for one…. How the heck can anyone take a distro whose name sounds like a gay male dancer seriously is beyond me….
Hmm…Maybe it’s just you who’s thinking of such gay male dancers? Atleast I didn’t come to think of anything even remotely like that :O
Sounds good to me. Let’s see first thing they need to do is install Gnome…
I am using GNOME on both my desktop and laptop under Mandriva. Works just fine and peachy
The only thing I really have to complain about is that the default installation didn’t include Eye of gnome or Gthumb..I always set up Gthumb to import photos from digital camera, and Eog is just such a good no-fuss image viewer. So anyways, what was it again about installing/using Gnome under Mandriva? ^^
Nah, not really…it was a common joke back in the day when they first announced the name change after coming out of their buy up spree. Personally I’d have probably gone with either of the names of the two companies Mandrake bought out…Lycoris sounds like candy and Connectiva has a vaguely networked sound to it. Mandriva? Let’s say it slowly, shall we? Man-driv-ah! Ahh…I’ll pass thank you!
Hmmm so they have GNOME support also? Out of the box? How integrated is it? I see you mentioned its missing a few apps… Sorry to sound so ignorant but last I checked Mandriva had GNOME support the way Red Hat has KDE support…
–bornagainpenguin
EDIT– clarified a point
Edited 2008-03-28 13:55 UTC
Let’s say it slowly, shall we? Man-driv-ah! Ahh…I’ll pass thank you!
I just think that sounds pretty homophobic..But well, that’s off-topic.
Hmmm so they have GNOME support also? Out of the box? How integrated is it? I see you mentioned its missing a few apps… Sorry to sound so ignorant but last I checked Mandriva had GNOME support the way Red Hat has KDE support…
Yeah, GNOME does work just fine and dandy out of the box. I atleast haven’t had any issues with it. I just dislike some default application settings, like as I said, Eog isn’t installed by default. They have installed F-Spot instead. The reason why I dislike it is just that since F-Spot is a Mono app it takes a while longer to load it up than Eog, and even a few seconds makes a difference when you are just going to check some pictures you have lying around. Eog is just better for that.
About the integration.. Well, I don’t really have anything else to compare to than my previous Gentoo installation. I haven’t used any binary distros in years, you see. So, all I have to say is that atleast it works just fine.
This is sort of off-topic since we are talking about Mandriva in Ubuntu post..But I like Mandriva quite a bit better than Ubuntu. Mandriva has been rock-solid this far, you don’t have to do anything special to install nvidia drivers cos they are installed by default and so forth. And the upcoming Mandriva 2008.1 Spring will ship with Codeine (or whatever it was?) which will install audio/video codecs when needed.
Yeah it is, unless you look at it from a marketing perspective. I can get away with installing Ubuntu and explaining how its an African word that means “humanity towards others” with Mandriva I got nothing.
I might give it a shot for my own use though if this next version of Ubuntu burns me as badly as the current one has…
–bornagainpenguin
I’ve been using hardy for a few months now. It has gotten increasingly better. That said, you have to wonder about how much he actually reviewed.
If you take the time to mention something, at least take the time to give it a twirl.
Vinagre VNC client – How on Earth do you not rail against this application? A VNC client without the ability to send ctrl-alt-del or other special key combinations.
I’m sorry, this is not a personal bug or a minor flaw. It’s not some hardware incompatibility that you can blame on proprietary drivers…
It would be like having a first look at a word processor and realizing it doesn’t let you change the font. Somethings you gotta pick up and realize that right now…as things stand this was a poor choice given other potential VNC clients (tightvnc…).
Edited 2008-03-24 18:18 UTC
Not a bad release, but again with the puke orange. I cringe every time I look at it. Didn’t they say they were planning on changing that at one point as the default theme? (Yes, I am aware it can be changed after install, please don’t bother posting replies telling me that.) First impressions are everything, so should the default theme really be so horrendously grotesque? Is it a form of torture they are trying out on the public?
Edited 2008-03-24 19:12 UTC
I tried the alpha because I wanted to see what KDE4 was all about. I wanted to scratch my eyes out within minutes. Too much glitz…too much like Windows. I will get the beta and turn off some of the candy. I tried in the alpha but it locked up (hey is was alpha).
My first attempt to flee the Windows prison was right around when Red Hat 6.0 was released. I was getting the shaft from a Windows Tech, he was charging me outrageous fees to help maintain my Windows system. He preyed on my lack of knowledge of windows as most people will do to make easy money. I needed an alternative and a friend suggested the Red Hat 6.0. O.S. The price was right up my alley…free.
I tried and failed so much I almost had a breakdown. I kept at it though, the partitioning was a nightmare and keeping the system/s running efficiently was impossible at my experience level (lower than a noob). Not to mention adding or removing additional packages or software using .tar. But the thought of going back to windows forced me to keep trying Linux.
I kept at it, year after year plugging away finding flaws and incompatibility issues difficult to over come eventually leading me back to the windows O.S. I would over time try every mainstream distro out there. I ruined machines, crashed hard drives, trashed whole computers in a fit of rage. But always there was a new Distro a new version that would peak my interest and I would slick a drive and give the new distro a go. If it installed graphically and worked fresh out of the box with all my PCI cards I used it. I supported it, I donated money.
I can tell you now with confidence that with Ubuntu and the flavors of Ubuntu I will never return to Windows. There is no valid reason for using a Windows O.S. now. The closest I will ever get to using a non-Linux based system is a Macintosh. I run Ubuntu and Ubuntu based Distros on all my laptops and desktops. I also use it at work. As a matter of fact if I have a problem that I cannot work-around I back up my data and reformat the drive and just re install the O.S. After I configure everything I’m good. It takes more time to make a pot of coffee than to rebuild a system.
Linux is very fluid and that’s what I love about it. It’s learning and getting better. I see no end in sight for Linux.
Like many others here, I have been on that same road. It has been SO long, and full of many twists and turns. I can’t even count the number of distros I have installed, including all of the BSD’s. The only difference I might add to your story is the ALL of the major distros are moving rapidly towards that point of usability and stability, not just Ubuntu. Mandriva, Suse, Fedora are all very solid distros now. The BSDs grow ever more stable – and PC-BSD is just a beautiful thing to see.
BTW, I had another milestone on my journey away from Windows dependence – I FINALLY got Half-life working under Wine. The secret was to change video cards. I had been using an ATI X1300, 256MB PCI-x. Half-life would always crash after a few seconds no matter what I did (Feisty/Gutsy). All I did was change to an Nvidia 8600 256MB PCI-x. Works beautifully!
So now I have one less reason to boot into my Vista Business partition. For my .NET development, I can just use Parallels. I haven’t been able to make the Mono jump yet, but who knows.
I think the snowball is starting to make its way down the hill…
[EDIT: fixed accidental slight to the BSDs]
Edited 2008-03-24 20:54 UTC
PC-BSD is in fact a beautiful system in operation.
I do however have a few faults with it.
Ports cannot find most applications, and pkg_add fails miserably too.
I cannot get Limewire to connect through the firewall…
Flash not supported past version 7 unless I run Firefox-Wine.
Grrrr it is frustrating, because otherwise PC-BSD would have replaced Ubuntu on this system.
I thought PC-BSD ports used the standard FreeBSD ports, and thus all of FreeBSD ports is available. I’m not sure what you mean by “ports cannot find most applications”.
I thought it used the standard ports too, until I tried to download such things as avidemux, mencoder, w32codecs.
None of them were found under ports or cvsup
I realize Evolution is a Novell issue now – but will we see this release of Ubuntu having an Evolution where popup reminders work in the calendar? My boss loves Ubuntu and doesn’t know better (or care) to differentiate Ubuntu from Evolution…and this was the one issue that kept us from adopting it for 300+ employees here at our corporate HQ (my boss is the CIO).
Get your boss to try Google Calendar.
I have been using Evolution, and it’s great — except when it crashes, which is somewhat frequently.
But… I just began using the new & improved version of Google Calendar ( http://calendar.google.com ) and I love it.
The main reasons are:
1. It works great for collaboration — you and your assistant, you and your boss, a group of 64 people, a church group, an Ubuntu Users group, whatever! You can have multiple calendars and see them — or any number of them — displayed at the same time.
2. It works great on iPhone. The iPhone browser combined with Google Calendar’s mobile Calendar view (which is all automatic, by the way) is excellent. I can consult my calendar from my phone any time any where — even if my assistant just changed my appointments around two seconds ago!
3. It make synch’ing your data obsolete. Because it is web-based, it is always synch’ed. No need to worry. It’s always there.
4. SMS event reminders are great. It also does pop-ups, and even email reminders — any amount of minutes or days in advance. Any combination of about 6 reminders per event. Slick! If it’s important, I get an email 1 week in advance, an SMS 2 hours in advance and 30 minutes in advance, and a pop-up 30 minutes in advance. You set these things.
5. It’s integrated into Gmail too. Ever email has an option, “Create Event”, which allows you to make an email into an appointment/event on your calendar — or on someone else’s calendar (which you have rights to) — or to a group’s calendar (which you have rights to). Cool! Also, all of your contacts are seemlessly integrated from Gmail into your Calendar, so that when you add/invite people to an event, their names pop-up from your Gmail addressbook.
Now, I am toying with using Gmail Contacts as my primary address book — for all the same reasons. I want to make synch’ing my addressbook obsolete. I want access to it everywhere.
You know, if we weren’t already entrenched in Exchange he would probably do just that – he likes GMail but it would be long-to-never before we migrated everyone onto a GMail-based solution.
Because hosting your company secrets with a 3rd party is always an awesome idea. Especially with a 3rd party that takes no responsibility for what happens to your stuff and offer no guarantees.
I have a Kubuntu box at work and a Gentoo box with KDE at home; when I run the Acid2 test:
http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html
in my Kubuntu box using Konqueror, shows a non-Acid2 compliant browser, and running the same test in my Gentoo box [same KDE and Konqueror version], the test passes successfully. I am not able to test this in another environments, but in my case, that is what it is.
Where am I going to?
People like the eye-candy, and Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse and a lot of distros try a lot to give us the “best user experience” on Linux, but, in several cases, they break the “Linux experience” in a very bad way (another example: I do not like the superpowerful user on Ubuntu and the way they surpass all the groups concept).
It may be the best Linux distribution ever… it will however still damage your drives…
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695/
My 4 month old 2.5″ Samsung drive has (before I now manually turned that thing off) a load unload count of almost 200,000… with an estimated point of failure somewhere after 600,000. In other words, unless I had discovered this I would face a possible drive failure in less than a year… YAY!
Amazing this bug has not been dealt with yet.
I do however believe this is a Linux / kernel problem and not Ubuntus fault – the kernel simply keeps the default settings from the drive manufacturer, which are way too extreme. They might work well if you have your computer turned on for a few hours a day, then the lifetime of the drive will be 5 years+. If you have your computer turned on 24/7… then you’re shit out of luck unless you MANUALLY change this.
I do however believe this is a Linux / kernel problem and not Ubuntus fault – the kernel simply keeps the default settings from the drive manufacturer, which are way too extreme.
The problem is the default values of the hard drive manufacturers, mostly. It affects all OSes and Linux distros unless they change the default power management values of the drive. Some OSes do change the defaults, some don’t. I noticed on my system that the default pm setting on the drive way too extreme so I’m going to add an init script to set it to safer values.
Ubuntu isn’t apparently going to change the default values supplied by the drive.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DanielHahler/Bug59695
I don’t know about other distros.
So it’s actually a manufacturer problem then.
Yes and no. Manufacturers should take into consideration that people do run these 2.5″ drives 24/7 and change their power saving settings to something more sane.
However, since its kinda late to change the firmware on most harddrives (I’m not even sure you can do that for most drives, I think Hitachi had a tool, but that’s about the only one I can recall) this problem should then be solved in software.
Ubuntu has failed to do this for quite a long period of time, meanwhile laptop drives are failing left and right (or will be… soon heh).
I am just happy I noticed this before it killed any of my drives and I am also happy I have the knowhow how to fix a thing like this.
I am however NOT happy about the fact that people that are less knowledgeable about these things will find this out when their drives die.