Shuttleworth Calls Ubuntu Performance Art, Calls Out Critics 231
darthcamaro writes "Mark Shuttleworth has taken a lot of heat for Ubuntu's decision to use Unity, to move away from Wayland and about its stance on the community distros like Kubuntu. In a new interview Shuttleworth shoots back claiming no matter what he does people will always find fault due to...'competitive pressures.'"
Re:He has a point, no? (Score:5, Informative)
There's a reason for this: in the Windows world, change is mostly for the worse.
There's a reason for this: in the Windows world, change is mostly for the worse.
Lets see. I remember Windows from v1 all the way through to XP.
2 was better than 1. It had overlapping windows!
3 was better than 2. Icons and early networking.
95 was a huge step forward from 3. e.g. People didn't close down Windows to run their legacy DOS apps anymore. They ran them within DOS boxes.
98 was a better 95. It fixed the rough edges.
ME was apparently a step back. I didn't try it. I took a sidestep to 2000.
Windows XP was a big step forward in reliability, merging consumer UI with NT kernel.
I can't speak for versions after XP, as I went to OSX at that stage. But I've covered most of Windows history there, and you're wrong with that statement.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Microsoft or Windows, that's why I moved to OSX. I had grown to have complete contempt for Windows by the end. But it's wrong to say that Windows changed for the worse with most versions. It did generally improve.
Mint on sub GB RAM hardware (Score:4, Informative)
Can't get Mint installed on sub GB RAM hardware, resource waste is my biggest beef with Unity and Mint doesn't solve it (and it seems only the installer is the bottleneck).
That's odd, considering I'm replying on my 2004-vintage HP Compaq Presario X1000 Pentium M 1.7MHz laptop with 768M RAM, running Mint.
Mint XFCE works just dandy on low-resource early 2000s hardware. I had it happily running on a revitalized homebuilt-in-1999 tower whose last upgrade was in 2002 to a Pentium III 850MHz (from original Pentium II 350), with all of 448MB RAM. Used that one as my primary computer for months at my old place before moving out, nuking the drive, reinstalling it, and leaving it out by the condo dumpster with a note with the password.
On this laptop, I can happily run Firefox and Thunderbird together, while running a VNC client into my other machine, and supporting a VNC server to go the other way, and manage to use LibreOffice or the GIMP at the same time. It streams videos fine, runs jEdit fine for a decent universal code editor. Runs Chrome OK, but just like on Windows, modern Firefox is lower-memory than Chrome once a few tabs and extensions are loaded, so Chrome is non-optimal on this, and was non-optimal on the tower. But Chrome is non-optimal on my wife's Windows 7 netbook with a dual-core N570 Atom and 1GB RAM too. This 768MB laptop even runs IBM Lotus Symphony decently, which I happen to prefer over its LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org relatives due to its tabbed interface and preference panels, especially when doing creative writing or articles where I have lots of research and notes open. (Yes, ducking tomatoes for using non-free-as-in-beer variants, but IBM did give the whole thing to Apache, so now it is.)
If you're trying to use Mint Mate, or Mint Cinnamon, or Mint KDE editions on a sub-GB machine, just don't. You'll be lucky to be able to install, or even boot the Live DVD with those, and if you do, a lot of the window chrome either won't paint, or will paint while you go out to get lunch. But Mint XFCE edition works like a charm. The previous low-resource official versions of Mint that had LXDE also were great on this hardware. I am staying on the Mint 13 Maya Long-Term-Support version, but prior to that I was using Mint 12 Lisa LXDE Edition which was slightly faster. You can always install LXDE but I haven't really seen the need. I think if I still had that tower, which was even lower resource, I might have gone back to LXDE, but I did use the heck out of it with XFCE.
I have to get around to switching the netbook to Mint LXDE one of these days. Everything that my wife and I use is available for Linux. We do switch off using that or the new better laptop (Windows 8 with Start8 login-to-desktop) depending on any given day's respective workload and deadlines. If I upgrade the netbook to Mint, maybe I can get the fast laptop back!