The Burning Bridges of Ubuntu 346
jammag writes "According to this article, 'Whether Ubuntu is declining is still debatable. However, in the last couple of months, one thing is clear: internally and externally, its commercial arm Canonical appears to be throwing the idea of community overboard as though it was ballast in a balloon about to crash.' The author points out instances of community discontent and apparent ham-handedness on Mark Shuttleworth's part. Yet isn't this just routine kvetching in the open source community?"
So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Interesting)
It's back to Debian?
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Interesting)
No we should all go to Linux Mint which will then make a minty fresh Debian version of what Ubuntu Desktop should have been by now,
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Funny)
Will then? You're late to the party. [linuxmint.com]
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Mint have an independent millionaire sugar daddy supporting it?
Although I'm not sure if that's a pro or a con right now. ;)
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
What is happening is flavour of the moment in the Linux world is 'Android' and because of that Ubuntu is in the shadows. Rather than fight Android, Ubuntu should embrace Android with an effective USB or wireless remote to enable data input, configuration and synchronisation of Android phones on a full sized desktop screen. Right now the better Ubuntu desktop/notebook plays with Android the more popular it will become, it has a real chance to gain a big chunk of market share by creating a desktop that links well with an Android smartphones and effectively extends it features onto more workable screen real estate.
Re:Yes, and (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that's his main target. Shuttleworth is one of the few people (Newell may be another) willing to make fundamental changes to gnu/linux desktop computer to bring it to masses as opposed to just opinionated geekdom. This non-traditional desktop experience is bound to annoy traditional gnu/linux power users who feel their vision is being ignored. What they fail to see is that their vision is not attractive enough for average people.
I for one welcome canonical's changes. For me, the more they deviate from 'traditional gnu/linux desktop', the better. I want to see how far they can push it and how many fresh ideas they can bring. KDE desktop has looked pretty much the same for the last 10 years. Gnome is getting uglier and less useful with each new version (but I do like that they're starting anew). Windows 8's interface, despite its questionable usability, is fresh and people who have used it for more than 10 minutes in a shop, like it.
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I know LMDE is there and have used it before but they can still make it what Ubuntu Desktop should have been.
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Note - there are issues with LMDE. The main one is that the update cycle is infrequent, as in the last "update pack" became available nine months after the previous one. Between update packs there are no security updates. This is what will drive me away from LMDE in the end. I b
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No we should all go to Linux Mint which will then make a minty fresh Debian version of what Ubuntu Desktop should have been by now,
Of course, as long as Mint uses Ubuntu to cover most of its development infrastructure, if Ubuntu goes, there is no Mint. Just saying.
Mulefeathers! (Score:3)
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Funny)
(As someone who's been on Debian for well over a decade, all I can say is "humbug!" to the lot of them, what with their fancy schmancy integrated desktop environments and wibbly-wobbly-window transitions, and crap like that.)
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Interesting)
It's the obvious "backward" step (and I don't mean that in a negative way, retreating from the dark alleyways [Mark Shuttleworth] has led [Ubuntu] down is a good thing), but most of the people I know who actually liked [Ubuntu] have moved sideways to Mint.
Mod Parent Up.
When I first found Ubuntu, I was evangelizing it like crazy to friends and family.
There it was, the first Linux that I could recommend to one of those "I don't want to understand it, I just want it to work" Windows XP users.
Sometimes people didn't want to abandon their famliar Windows XP environment.
Others were happy that their computer was now pratically immune to malware.
I continued this up until Ubuntu released Unity as the default desktop.
My mother clicked the button to do a distribution upgrade (I always instructed her to install the updates ASAP), and she called to say "everything changed around on me".
From that point, I decided that Ubuntu had finally jumped the shark [wikipedia.org].
Now that my mom couldn't use it, I could no longer recommend it to anyone.
I evacuated her data to an external drive, reinstalled the previous Ubuntu, restored her data, and instructed her not to install any updates.
I had her continue this holding pattern until I discovered Linux Mint [linuxmint.com] on DistroWatch [distrowatch.com]. It was at the top of the page hit ranking, so I gave it a try.
Here it was again! The new Linux that I could recommend to the "I don't want to understand it, I just want it to work" Windows XP users.
Even better, since Microsoft totally rearranged everything in Vista / Win 7, nobody was afraid to lose their environment.
In fact, they loved the fact that Linux Mint was close to the Windows XP they loved and far from the unfamiliar Vista / Win 7.
That "don't want to change my computer" has only grown with the release of Windows 8.
Nobody that I know wants to use Windows 8, and everybody to whom I show Mint desperately wants to keep it.
Now Linux Mint is on my mother's computer, my brother's computer, my best friend's computer, my best friend's boyfriend's computer, my girlfriend's laptop, my girlfriend's daughter's laptop, my work laptop, and my home laptop.
I'm not sure who else all those people may have sold on Linux Mint, but they love to show it off (especially my girlfriend, to her friends at college).
I'm sure my story is not unique. Parent is right.
Those of us who liked the old Ubuntu have moved to Mint.
And we've taken our friends and family with us.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
I continued this up until Ubuntu released Unity as the default desktop.
I think this is the main point.
No, contrary to OP, this is not "just the usual Open Source kvetching." Successful Open Source operations listen to their users. Now it's going its own way even further with Mir.
Users were happy with Gnome (or KDE). They did not want Unity, and said so.
By now Ubuntu is too proprietary to be considered "open" anymore. It's not just a Linux distro, but rather it has become its own operating system. That is somewhat contrary to the spirit of Linux. What's next? Its own (proprietary, incompatible) versions of the command-line tools?
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
Users were happy with GNOME 2.x - they hated 3.x. Ubuntu tried to do something about it, which the users didn't like either.
Personally, I feel like you've captured the spirit of current Linux development. Don't like something? Developers don't care. You don't have a choice. Systemd, GRUB2, GNOME3, Wayland, KMS - doesn't matter, you're getting it whether you want it or not. And the old versions (or previous products) are left to die (until projects like MATE and Trinity form later on, if you're lucky).
FWIW, I still can't configure GRUB 2 easily. And KMS broke Linux on several laptops that I was still using. Linux does not run well on old hardware, and really doesn't run well anymore (period).
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:4, Informative)
(cough)slackware(cough)
cheers,
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I feel like you've captured the spirit of current Linux development. Don't like something? Developers don't care. You don't have a choice.
Wrong. Developers DO care. Just not all the developers. When Gnome3 came about, it was pretty obvious that the Gnome developers didn't care about the users who complained about this new direction. However, a bunch of other developers DID care, and those developers created MATE and Cinnamon.
As for GRUB2 and KMS, you're one of a tiny number of people complaining about such things; everyone else seems to do just fine with them.
Wayland is a pretty important and necesary item too; X is obsolete and doesn't work well for modern hardware. And unlike the others, you can't even use Wayland, since no one's made a distro with it yet; it's still under development, and unlike some other projects in the past, the Wayland developers seem to be concerned with making sure it's actually ready for prime-time use before releasing it as such. Don't complain about it until it's actually out there, and not just under development.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:4, Informative)
There was a time when the majority of slashdot readers WOULD know how to get an in-development project like wayland up and running on their boxes, regardless of distro..
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I don't think the number of slashdot readers who know how to do that have decreased. What I think HAS decreased, is the number of slashdot readers who actually care enough to do it.
You get to a point where, even as a born and bred high-level techie, you just want shit to work because you have more important things to do. I am one of those people. That's why I switched to Mac. All the power of linux, but also with support for commercial apps, it works exactly as I expect it to, and I don't worry about so
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:4, Informative)
X is mature. That's not the same thing, young grasshopper
As for modern hardware? It works just fine as long as it has supported drivers, and Wayland & co have exactly the same prerequisite.
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No X was mature 10 years ago.
Like a cheese it has gone from a delicious mature flavour to a mouldy mess with which you don't know what to do. Yes you could cut the edges off, modify it a bit and maybe make it work. If you cook it it's probably safe to eat too, but the hacks are nasty and you should just go and buy some new cheese.
When your screen saver defeats the lock screen due to a fundamental architecture flaw, when 99% of the features aren't used in favour of straight out bitmap rendering, and when the
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, just try using it. It's slow as shit, because X does a terrible job with bitmapped graphics. X was designed to be network-transparent by moving all the drawing primitives to the X server, so the only information going over the wire would be drawing commands, rather than bitmapped graphics. I guess that worked well enough in the days of butt-ugly CDE and Motif, but those days are long past, and now everyone uses Qt and gtk+, which don't use those drawing primitives at all, and instead everything uses bitmapped graphics. X has no compression, so moving bitmapped graphics over the wire is very slow. For comparison, try running a remote desktop session between two Windows machines, or even between a Windows machine and a Linux machine with "rdesktop"; it's much, much faster.
Wayland will be dumping the obsolete drawing primitive stuff and moving to RDP for network transparency, last I read. So maybe we Linux users will finally get network transparency as good as Windows users have had available for over a decade!!! But for some stupid reason, a lot of curmudgeons would rather we stick with 30-year-old technology that doesn't work half as well as what Microsoft has been using for ages and wasn't designed for modern use cases.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:4, Informative)
From what I've heard from the X developers themselves is thta the code base is doing a lot of things it wasn't designed for and is in need for some major refactoring and rethinking, to the point where it makes sense to just start over with something completely new.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
As for GRUB2 and KMS, you're one of a tiny number of people complaining about such things; everyone else seems to do just fine with them.
Grub2 is nice and beautiful when it works. Which it does, most of the time. But when it breaks or you want to do something non standard, it requires a much much higher level of expertise than GRUB did. GRUB was edit a text file. GRUB2 is secret hidden handshake which seems to be illegal to write documentation for.
This kind of thing is becoming standard practice in modern software, unfortunately. Firefox used to export bookmarks in an HTML file, which even the most casual nerd could edit (maybe I only want part of it, or I want to add to it... whatever). Then it became a JSON file or something, which I guess makes it easier for developers to write tools for?
We keep getting software that makes life easier for the developers and harder for the end user. This is only a good thing if you are trying to get rid of end users.
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Wayland - the guys who built X? No, they are the guys that maintain X.org. I doubt any had any part of actually constructing X11, X10, or any other version all those years ago. The problem is it stayed at X11, and was slowly modified over time. With that said, there is nothing wrong with X11. They just want to have a project that they can say they did.
KMS - It's a pain in the rear. I don't want to have my text console default to whatever resolution that my monitor might be. And I wish I could still u
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Funny)
[...] my girlfriend's laptop, my girlfriend's daughter's laptop, [...]
I'm not sure who else all those people may have sold on Linux Mint, but they love to show it off (especially my girlfriend, to her friends at college).
I'm sure my story is not unique.
Unique? Maybe not, but again not that usual on /. You see, not many of us have girlfriends... at college... with daughters...
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I didn't say impossible, I said not common on /.
Look... it's still possible his girlfriend be a teacher at that college - technically not quite a girl anymore, but hey, are we (/.-ers) supposed to be living in the basement of our mother's home, even many of us are well over 40?
I gnashed my teeth over Unity for a long time (Score:3)
Then I realized the only part about the UI that bothered me was Dash. Adding classicmenu fixed that.
Between Dash being a mess and its online integration, these two things account for the lions' share of dissatisfaction with Ubuntu's direction, IMO. The rest of the changes they're making remind me of the good parts of OS X and I welcome the effort Canonical is putting into them.
OTOH my limited time with Mint places it little better in terms of smooth operation than Fedora or Debian. I do NOT like my screen c
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um.. windows has always been a malware gangbang.. Think about it, if you patch on tuesday, and there's more patches to be had next tuesday, were you ever truly secure up to that point? No. If you assume you're compromised or compromisable from the beginning, it doesn't really matter whether ms issues patches for it or not because your operating procedures will reflect this reality and minimize the risk. Does that risk go up a little as time goes by with no new updates? Maybe.. but it's unlikely you'll run
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Tried it.
"error loading firmwares" - - - having to go back and locate 1, 2, 3, (how many more) proprietary firmwares made installation a bit more painful than I had patience for. (after dealing with Legacy/UEFI boot issues).
Also: latest Debian kernel seems pretty old compared to what ships in the latest ubuntu release.
But I really feel the community drop-off in ubuntu, compared to a couple of years ago. And that's pretty important. They're going the way of Red Hat.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:4, Insightful)
But I really feel the community drop-off in ubuntu, compared to a couple of years ago. And that's pretty important. They're going the way of Red Hat.
I'm betting Canonical wish they were going the way of Red Hat, with a billion plus of revenue.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:4, Informative)
RHEL doesn't have GNOME 3 yet...
It boils down to Red Hat is the name business knows. And relies on for support. The Fedora Project, aside from being a testing ground for RHEL, is very involved in upstream development, as is Red Hat in general. Thus giving RH/FC a solid standing with a lot of people.
Plus, Red Hat offers more products then just Linux for workstations and servers.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing servers. The huge majority of Linux servers are Red Hat, because that's what the server software vendors support, and you don't run something that's not officially supported. As an additional bonus, IT departments running Red Hat on their servers will pay Red Hat for official support, so Red Hat's actually making money on all this. Almost nobody, of course, runs Ubuntu servers.
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if latest kernel is so important, Debian experimental repository has them or just follow instructions to compile from source from the big yellow "latest stable" button from kernel.org
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I don't see why not. It's what I did, and I'm quite happy with it! :)
Granted, it wasn't until the release of wheezy that Debian suited my needs. A lot of multimedia packages were only available via a third party repository, the distribution packaged versions of the official NVidia drivers were way too old to support my card, and earlier versions wouldn't boot properly on my UEFI/Secure-Boot based machine. That and to be quite frank, the desktop environments and packages in general were just too damn old. :)
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It's back to Debian?
Yep, and MATE (gnome2), or XFCE, GNOME3, etc. I don't even have a reason to go with an Ubuntu based distro like Mint.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
It's always been Debian for me. I'm grateful for momentum that Ubuntu created, especially in things like wifi drivers, but I've always stuck with Debian (for home, that is).
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Is there really that much difference between:
sudo apt-get install foo
and
sudo yum install foo
That said, there is a yum replacement in the works called "dnf"
From the man page:
DNF is an experimental replacement for Yum, a package manager for RPM
Linux distributions. It aims to maintain CLI compatibility with Yum
while improving on speed and defining strict API and plugin interface.
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Or, for Mageia:
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Funny)
Or for Slackware
cd sweetapp
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-awesome --compile-flags="YEAAAHHH" ... ... ../
./configure --prefix=/usr/local ... .. .. ../sweetapp ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-awesome --compile-flags="YEAAAHHH" ... .. .. .. ... /
.
Error can't find blah, version 2.x
cd
wget http://blah.someplace.com/source/blah.2.3.4.tgz [someplace.com]
tar xzvf blah.2.3.4.tgz
cd blah.2.3.4-2013-10-02-0030
make
.
.
sudo make install
cd
make clean
make
sudo make install
sweetapp
ld_config: Can't link library xoo.o, terminating
.
.
.
sudo rm -rf
Much easiser ;)
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure in the trivial cases it's the same.
It's the nontrivial cases that get you. Where you have to learn how to hammer the package manager into doing what you want. Once you have learnt that for one system it's painful to re-learn it for another.
Last time I used fedora (which admittedly was several releases ago) dependency changes in updates lead to me accidently removing gdm. I installed it again but afterwards it refused to start for no obvious reason. Did I do something wrong? was there a fault in the packages? I don't know but either way it seriously put me off fedora.
Canonical Needs to Make Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Canonical Needs to Make Money (Score:4, Insightful)
Ubuntu seems to be trying to lock users in with many of its recent changes, but has just succeeded in pushing users away.
Re:Canonical Needs to Make Money (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I feel so locked in, what with my choices of Ubuntu, or Ubuntu Gnome, or Kubuntu, or Lubuntu, or Xubuntu, or any of the many derivatives of Ubuntu that's out there. And it's all just an "sudo apt-get install" away from appearing on my machine. It's smothering, I tell you!
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If you're going to have to switch to an Ubuntu sub-distro in order to get the configuration you want, why not just go the whole hog and switch to a non-Ubuntu distro?
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I never said I wanted to move away from Ubuntu, but if I did it's very easy to switch. No distros I've used in the previous five years have even come close to the polish that Ubuntu provides. The stability of a Debian distro coupled with the desire to release a free operating system that could rival the ease of use and polish of a system from Apple is what drew me to Ubuntu in the first place. Hits and misses have occurred within the project, but there's nothing out there I've seen that convinces me to swit
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That much has become clear for quite a while now. What's also become clear is they don't know how to do it, what direction they're in and they're unusual recent behaviour is just a bunch of initial death throes.
Sorry, I thought you meant they didn't know how to throw their users overboard properly. You know, the way Apple and Microsoft do, with almost every unnecessary software (and hardware) update.
bad @ biz (Score:2)
right
my question: Has any Linux distro ever been clear that they *do* know how to Make Money?
I think Ubuntu and Canonical could *certainly* have made a profit, but that's my opinion. I think **I** could make them profitable if they were my companies...maybe something similar to a Mozilla model w/ my own twist of course ;)
what I'm asking is about the general consensus...is there a way that is common knowledge that these companies like cannonical ignore
Re:bad @ biz (Score:5, Interesting)
what's an example of a profitable linux distro company?
Red Hat are profitable, aren't they?
Canonical could have built a 'just works' Linux distro that people would have paid for, but they felt the need to go all Jobs on their users' asses instead. So most moved to Mint. Guess they'll have to move to the Debian version of Mint when Ubuntu goes away.
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Red Hat is the Microsoft of the Linux world. When they eventually own (own as acting as gatekeepers to core projects) the whole stack, there won't be any room for startups like Canonical to come in an offer alternative technologies. Pretty soon Debian will die because it will become redundant since they'll just be packaging the same stuff from Fedora. They can barely keep up with the patching necessary in order to support systemd and Gnome while giving their users a choice of different technologies to use i
Re:bad @ biz (Score:5, Funny)
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What exactly is this Mozilla model that works so well? Besides charity from Google I mean. I wonder if Google keeps Firefox alive just to avoid antitrust issues with Chrome.
Re:bad @ biz (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not charity, it's a perfectly reasonable business arrangement. Firefox still has a good 30% or so of all web users. _All web users_. That's a massive number of people. Being Firefox's default search engine is worth a significant amount of money to Google, and Google pays a significant amount of money for it. If Google didn't, I'm sure Yahoo or Microsoft would.
w/ my twist (Score:3)
Mozilla may depend on google.com alot for contributions but that doesn't mean it is not a success or sustainable company.
Most startups (including my favorite imgur.com) generate alot of revenue from small contributions from donors.
I'm not saying I'd use the donor model for Cannonical/Ubuntu
I'd probably have the 'Ubuntu Foundation' and use it to release a free OS *and* do things like the Electronic Frontier Foundation only targeted mostly on OS issues. Rootkits for example. We'd lobby for net neutrality and
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I think the best way would have been to ask for money ... before pissing their most likely contributors off with their Amazon search stunt. They really don't seem to get it. A large percentage of Linux users appreciate privacy ... they send search results to Amazon. A large percentage of Linux users appreciate options ... they switch to Unity and take the Apple attitude of "we know what's best for you".
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the big deal?
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Slow news day, and a quota of Linux stories that was unfulfilled for today, to they duped last week's "bashBuntu", since it worked pretty well.
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You could even say the "forked" last weeks bashBuntu post
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I think the big deal that we never want to admit is that the success of a project usually isn't from the community. We like to think we're the critical component when in reality most of the important work is being done by the benevolent overlord.
Sure we could fork Android for instance... but it wouldn't advance very quickly and it would be garbage compared to the Google helmed branch.
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I'd love it if they took Linux further, unfortunately, in trying to accelerate their financial success, they're damaging Ubuntu's longer term viability. Has MArk been hanging around with too many corporate CEOs?
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The fork is available already. I prefer Mint with KDE. Usable and pleasant to work with. I haven't touched the Ubuntu proper from the day they pushed Unity and I tried it. Since then they carefully coded additional privacy-destroying functions, and of course I am not interested.
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"will fork"??.... it already has. And while i'm sure it's been done numerous times, one of the most popular is Linux Mint. It a much more streamlined OS and I think they're really growing to a point where they're leaving the shadows of their initial Ubuntu roots.
Yet isn't this just routine kvetching? (Score:2, Insightful)
kvetching
There you go. Dismiss it. Let us know how that goes for you.
Shame really. Upstart is nice. I've landed on systemd systems because of Shuttleworth, however.
Good will is more important than your vision, Mark. You're killing your own, platform. And I can't figure out why. You're years past your own deadline for profitability, yet here you are, beating this horse to death while people evacuate. WTF??
I switched to CentOS and never looked back (Score:5, Informative)
The stability of CentOS is great. I don't get all the fancy features but I don't want those anyway as they just get in the way. At work when we need something supported we just use RedHat and pay for the support. Moving development between CentOS and RedHat is totally transparent to me.
Re:I switched to CentOS and never looked back (Score:5, Informative)
Oracle "Unbreakable" Linux, on the other hand, was broken by one of their updates within 3 months of me installing it. Fedora wouldn't run what I needed. Ubuntu messed me up with a system update, so I'm back on Debian myself.
I'd rather run slightly older stable software than the latest bleeding edge and losing my system.
Re:CentOS == win 7 of linux (Score:2)
Older, more mature, and runs everything guaranteed.
Kind of like XP is too some of the die hards who refuse to upgrade. I started to like Windows 7 again after Gnome 3/Unity and realized it really is not a bad OS anymore.
I also fell in love with CentOS again too and run it on a VM with FreeBSD if I want some hacking with things like smtp trace and ipf for my virtual networks.
RPM is not bad folks! Many of us in the 1990s had nightmares trying to get gnome 1 working with 1 million plus RPMs and therefore refus
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The stability of CentOS is great. I don't get all the fancy features but I don't want those anyway as they just get in the way. At work when we need something supported we just use RedHat and pay for the support. Moving development between CentOS and RedHat is totally transparent to me.
I manage a network of over 100 servers mixed CentOS and Debian. They all do the same thing, all configured pretty much the same. Lots of times I want to set them up to do something new and most of the time, for the Debian ones theres a package for that. For the CentOS ones I have to fuck about so much either hunting down 3rd party repositories or building from source. The CentOS ones have to use about 8 3rd party repositories. This is just for 'normal' stuff like smokeping or OCS.
Ie: Debian/Ubuntu 'apt-get
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C'mon RedHat/CentOS recommends you don't do an in-place upgrade.
Uh, what? I've been doing in-place upgrades on my CentOS machine since 2008.
Sure, you can't do major version upgrades in place, but minor version upgrades are painless. Ubuntu tries to allow you to do major upgrades in place, but after a year or two you have to reinstall to clear out the crud.
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Meanwhile, I've been running the same Gentoo install for ~9 years now (having migrated through 5 different machines). Rolling upgrades are awesome.
(It would be >10 years, but I did have to reinstall early on to migrate from x86 to x86-64).
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And I've been running rolling Fedora dev versions for three years, and before that I ran Mandriva Cooker for years. Any geek _can_ keep any given distro rolling on their personal desktop, it's not that difficult to do. Making an OS that you sell to real people for extremely large amounts of money to do mission critical work on across thousands of machines robust enough that you can recommend in-place upgrades for major releases is an _extremely_ different kettle of fish.
We don't _recommend_ upgrades between
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Ubuntu tries to allow you to do major upgrades in place, but after a year or two you have to reinstall to clear out the crud.
Say what? Unless something has really changed between Debian and Ubuntu there really shouldn't be much crud being built i`since it provides a remove feature for obsolete dependencies. I have been running Debian for over a decade and I only reinstall for server replacement or corrupted drives.
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C'mon RedHat/CentOS recommends you don't do an in-place upgrade.
Uh, what? I've been doing in-place upgrades on my CentOS machine since 2008.
Sure, you can't do major version upgrades in place, but minor version upgrades are painless. Ubuntu tries to allow you to do major upgrades in place, but after a year or two you have to reinstall to clear out the crud.
Whereas with Debian in place major upgrades are almost always a piece of cake. The only time they aren't is when someone has fucked up the package management system.
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What's evil about RedHat?
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Yeah so evil.
So evil for a company to provide jobs, QA, have someone answer calls, assist corporate users, and do things like the above where volunteers can not.
There is a reason people use CentOS and Redhat. They work and are guaranteed to work where I would be fired if something went down. Redhat works with OEMs and hardware makers and creates a stable environment to test and optimize so my server I buy will work guaranteed. Sorry but the college frat boys working on this junior level class making a GNU d
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C'mon RedHat/CentOS recommends you don't do an in-place upgrade.
What? I've done at least 4 in place Fedora Upgrades.
How come nobody talks about SUSE anymore? (Score:2)
Did Novell buy it and fuck it up? Or...?
Re:How come nobody talks about SUSE anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
The latest version opensuse actually is the best linux I have ever run, and that counts for a lot having run every major distribution since when the kernel was in the .9x timefame. That also includes all the recent versions of Ubuntu/mint/etc. It falls closer to the "it just works" mantra than any previous version (of course a few things still have hickups).
No one talks about Suse because we are off talking about more exciting things. That is the problem with having a stable sensible distribution that actually works.... Its doesn't have the latest $sexy to ignite peoples fires, or the latest $sucky to piss everyone off.
Personally, I suspect a fair number of people drop suse when they thought KDE jumped the shark a few years back. Now that it turns out its Gnome that jumped the shark no one remembers the one remaining major KDE based distribution.
Finally, there is SLES which is all the goodness of opensuse combined with long term vendor support as good as what is provided by redhat.
Re: (Score:3)
No, nobody talks about SUSE because it is it got bought by Novell [wikipedia.org] who then did a deal with the devil (Microsoft) on patents. Which was the kiss of death to us back when we were looking to trade-up from Gentoo to something more stable.
The o
Re: (Score:2)
From a desktop perspective they lost my interest when they moved to systemd.
Why? From a "desktop user" perspective it doesn't make a difference. You can even use the old "service" commands if you want.
Not every company can act like Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
Cannonical is another failing company with Steve Jobs/Apple's attitude of "We will tell you what you like, and will like it." Everything from putting the window close button on the left hand side of the panel, to Unity, enabled by default Amazon search lens, and now Mir have been completely unilateral moves with no input from the community whether that decision meets the users wants or needs.
Re:Not every company can act like Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Cannonical is another failing company with Steve Jobs/Apple's attitude of "We will tell you what you like, and will like it."
The attitude can be highly effective ---- but there is one minor important detail: You have to actually be right, for things to work out.
If your UI turns out to be a turd, then you will go down.
Seeking innovation is a high-reward, high-risk thing.
Re: (Score:3)
"Hey guys! We're thinking of moving the menubar to the top status bar, and making that unremovable. We'll have to move the close buttons though, vote on this strawpol.me and let us know what you think of the new changes
The problem with that; is you (1) will get a lot of opinions --- most of them opposed to any change, because humans are naturally resistant to change: especially user-interface redesigns, when users are accustomed through habit to a certain UI appearance.
People are resistant to innov
Unpopular decisions (Score:5, Interesting)
Lets be honest this is more about Mir and Unity(and maybe Amazon integration for a few of us), being promoted over *Alternatives* and both have been discussed on and off topic to death. Whatever you personally think of these choices, users currently have a choice of Desktop(and I am still not going to choose Unity), and Mir is still a twinkle Shuttleworth's eye. I am personally using the very polished Xubuntu(promoted by the Cinnamon split from Gmone), which smooths over the clash between GTK2/3, and other than a stupid oversight with the volume indicator. Has been the best desktop I have ever used...and yes I do miss a few Gnome features, but it has its own to love, and I am in love with Gmusicbrowser.
The bottom line it is still is the no brainer Linux install...unless you are wedded to (the still wonderful) Cinnamon (personally I am keeping my eye on Cut http://cut.debian.net/ [debian.net] ), I wish Canonical all the luck with their phone, If they can wed themselves to decent Chinese manufacturer that can produce low cost phones. It may be my next phone.
I've started giving up on it (Score:2)
Debatable decline? (Score:2, Interesting)
The idea that Ubuntu is in decline, at least from the point of view of number of users, is not debatable, it is false. Ubuntu's numbers are up and steadily climbing. They may or may not be ignoring the community (I would argue they aren't given all of the community initiatives and offerings from Canonical of late) but whatever the Ubuntu team is doing is working for them. Their installation numbers are up.
Re: (Score:3)
do you have sources for that assertion? Googling "ubuntu in decline" pulls up a number of interesting recent articles that claim the opposite from polls, distrowatch, etc.
Elementary OS (Score:5, Interesting)
I hadn't heard about Elementary OS until this Wired write up [wired.com] yesterday. Out of curiosity, I tried it out in VirtualBox just to have a look at it. And yup, it's pretty, and simple, and it's not Unity. I considering giving it a try for real on my workstation, but it kind of barfed on my nfs shared home directory, so I think I'll pass for now. That has been my most current pet peeve; distributions that do not respect the 'Unix Way' of doing things, like having a network mounted home directory, so all my files and preferences go with me to which ever machine I log into on the network. I had just wrestled with Shotwell refusing to import some photos in my nfs home, and since the article talked up EOS's tight integration with all things Yorba, the authors of Shotwell, I didn't really want to go down that road. I did try out Yorba's email client, and liked it enough to install it on my Ubuntu machine. And it seems to work just fine so far with my networked home.
Anyhow, if you want to see what Wired is calling the Apple of Linux OSes, take a gander at Elementary OS [elementaryos.org]. I can appreciate them striving for the 'Just Works' mantra, but it needs to 'Just Work' with the tried and true ways of doing things that Unix and friends have enjoyed for decades now.
And I'm not saying that it completely fails at an nfs mounted home directory, but it was competing with Ubuntu's settings (where that home directory mounts on my real machine) for simple things like the desktop wallpaper. I imagine it can be made to play nice, but I wasn't looking to spend time tweaking yet another distro to get things to work the way I want them to.
Re: (Score:2)
NFS is hardly tried and true. NFS always has had numerous issues where a mounted filesystem isn't quite like a local one (AFS is better for the 'unix way', as aside)
anyway, use Samba. it sucks less than NFS, and I speak as LONG time unix admin. I'm older than Unix.
The rise of anti-Linux .. (Score:2)
And straight from the mother ship
“I’m thinking of hitting the OEMs harder than in the past with anti-Linux they should do a delicate dance”, Joachim Kempin, Microsoft [theregister.co.uk]
People just forget the past... (Score:5, Insightful)
People just forget the past so quickly. Sure, we can argue simple things like if "upstart" is a good runlevel daemon and all that, but think about all the improvements Ubuntu has brought to the Linux world over time. The high quality of other distros these days is due to Ubuntu pushing the bar higher.
Hardware detection: Ubuntu made all your devices "just work" without manual module configuration and kernel recompilation. Unity: good-looking, well-specced desktop that anyone can use. The community and documentation are great. Media playback works easily, printing works great. Nice and clean system configuration file structure. Ubuntu Software Center introduces newbies to high-quality picks of open source software without having to do random poking in the repositories. Ubuntu was stable enough platform to provide the base for Steam. And remember how Ubuntu made enabling non-free drivers easy: you just have that little PCI card tray icon, and from the pop-up dialog you select your device. Ubuntu comes with LibreOffice preinstalled, rivaling the MS Office monopoly from the start.
I mean, are you sure you would want a Linux world without all these improvements?
Let's not forget all the little things that Ubuntu has improved -- the things which we take for granted today.
Re: (Score:2)
Somehow I got the feeling that the users like Mark/Canonicals decisions... otherwise they'd not be users, no?
To properly determine the answer to that you need to explore the limit of the function \lim_{users \to 0} \frac{likes}{users} :-)
Re:No it is not kvetching. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ubuntu took a perfectly good Debian and fucks it up.
Ubuntu took a perfectly good Ubuntu and fucked it up. Luckily, there are distros like Xubuntu - which take the good parts, and leave off the bad parts (aka Unity).
Re: (Score:3)
I've always been mysteriously partial to Kubuntu (mysterious as in, I can't really say why I keep installing it, other than I like KDE...)
Re: (Score:3)
Try Netrunner, it comes from the company that supports kubuntu, is based on kubuntu but is more polished and complete.
Thanks. I've been using Kubuntu for years and the whole family uses it now. I wonder if Ubuntu fades away what it will mean for Kubuntu...
Re:No it is not kvetching. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with your idea, but you got it a bit wrong: Xubuntu it still Ubuntu. I think many people hate Unity (I don't; I just treat it as an "early beta" of an idea that one day might work), but don't realize that things like Xubuntu and Kubuntu are very much still Ubuntu.
The desktop interface is a *very tiny* part of the OS, really. But it's the first thing most users see, and is crucial for PR.
I love Xubuntu. Hence, I also love Ubuntu (if not the Unity package) and the great work done by everyone involved.
Ubuntu should follow the openSUSE way: when you install it, it asks you which desktop you want. There's no realy need for separate distros, IMO.
Not a Linux User Then (Score:5, Informative)
The 'linux communities' have all devolved into petty little fiefdoms of some degree.
Except its a lie, As both a Gentoo and a Ubuntu user. I have enjoyed massive support both though chat and forums, and bug reports. In fact on a whole most OS communities are pretty helpful including those of Windows/Mac. People on the whole like to help.
Re: (Score:3)
not true, most issues and fixes are found in the entire Debian -> Ubuntu -> derived distro (e.g. Mint) space. Use Mint at home, we have Ubuntu and Debian servers at work.....no problem to find answers to anything that has come up thus far.
Trust a greedy(sic) businessman (Score:2)
intent only on making a fortune, says the greedy businessman as he tries to make his fortune.
Moral: Never place too much trust or respect in a CEO of a private company.
Except most here are pretty happy with Ubuntu wanting to make money. The (recent) direction Ubuntu is taken is a unified ecosystem across platforms, and some of us think that result is not pretty...but the stable;cutting edge; pretty desktop we loved. Personally I always thought they should have got their store and by extension games sorted before Humble/Bundle and Steam got themselves together, and their approach to Music has been uninspired.
Pursuit of Money should not only be considered healthy buy encour
Re: Manjaro rolling release (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you tried dealing with major transitions in a rolling release? e.g. sysvinit to systemd or upstart? Non-SELinux to SELinux? Rolling releases do not(or historically have failed) to manage this gracefully. Remember when Arch switched to systemd? Fun times....
I get it though; glad it's working for you. I love rolling releases as well [at home], and it beats the grind of a major version upgrade - hoping your /home plays nicely. It's also appropriate you mentioned "non-enterprise". You can imagine it's difficult for a software company to say "we will support product X on distribution Y for N years" when Y is changing with a rolling release cycle.