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Ubuntu Operating Systems

Results of the Ubuntu Desktop Applications Survey (dustinkirkland.com) 93

Posted by msmash from the what-we-said dept.
Ubuntu Product and Strategy head at Canonical, dustinkirkland writes: A few months ago, Slashdot readers were asked for feedback on the Ubuntu Desktop default applications. This blog post, by the author of that post (hi, it's me again), provides the aggregated and processed results of that survey.
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Results of the Ubuntu Desktop Applications Survey More

Results of the Ubuntu Desktop Applications Survey

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  • There's no report to read here (Score:5, Insightful)

    by goose-incarnated ( 1145029 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @10:09AM (#55225275) Journal

    I'm getting the impression that knowing how to read automatically removes the user from consideration in the Ubuntu (and Gnome as well) worlds.

    The message you send by making video-only text-based content is :"If you can read you're way too smart to be the target of this content. This content is for people too stupid to read, so go away!"

  • IDE (Score:3)

    by Merk42 ( 1906718 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @10:12AM (#55225287)
    Winner:
    Visual Studio

    Clearly no one from Slashdot voted for that as it's made by Microsoft.

    • Browser: Firefox, Chromium, Chrome.

      Seriously?

      Firefox 4,500; Chrome-ish 3,000 total.

      • What self-respecting *Nix user uses Chromium based anything? Thats for the unwashed Windows masses.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          What self-respecting *Nix user uses Chromium based anything?

          The official client for Skype uses Electron, which is Chrome hardcoded to visit one website. So does the official client for Discord.

          "Then just use the web-based client in Firefox instead."
          Web-based clients either are missing features or make them Chrome-only. Skype for Web running in Firefox for Linux is missing voice and video chat; the Call button is grayed out. Discord for Web running in Firefox doesn't allow uploading emoji images to your own server or to other servers where your account has the permis

          • What self-respecting *Nix user uses Chromium based anything?

            The official client for Skype uses Electron, which is Chrome hardcoded to visit one website. So does the official client for Discord.

            "Then just use the web-based client in Firefox instead."
            Web-based clients either are missing features or make them Chrome-only. Skype for Web running in Firefox for Linux is missing voice and video chat; the Call button is grayed out. Discord for Web running in Firefox doesn't allow uploading emoji images to your own server or to other servers where your account has the permission. Firefox users can rename or delete emojis; they just can't upload new ones. Firefox users can upload attachments, but not emojis. Uploading emojis to Discord in Firefox worked until May 23, 2017, when the server settings user interface was redesigned.

            Shit what self respecting geek who codes still uses VIm or Emacs when Chromium based Electron editors exist like ATOM.IO, Microsoft Code, Adobe Brackets, and a few others.

      • I might have voted for Edge if it were cross platform. :-) C'mon, MS, get your act together!

    • Dude, IDE sucks. Even SATA is dying. Everyone is moving to M.2 if they can.

      • No, everyone is moving to nvme. m.2 sucks, too. It's no faster than SATA and SATA is the bottleneck, now.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Vairon ( 17314 )

          The M.2 specification allows for PCIe 3.0 (4 lanes), USB 3.0 or SATA 3.0 to be exposed. Most NVMe cards such as the Samsung 860 Pro use a M.2 interface. See http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/consumer/ssd960.html [samsung.com]

          It's up to the host device (motherboard) maker and storage device maker to decide which bus to allow through the M.2 interface.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Vairon ( 17314 )

            Correction. Revision 1.1 of the M.2 specification allows USB 3.1 gen1 instead of USB 3.0 I stated earlier.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rklrkl ( 554527 )

          It's SATA 3 that sucks *really* hard now - so much so that if anyone reviews a SATA 3 SSD nowadays, they're mostly wasting their time (hint: SATA 3 was saturated by SSDs about 6 years ago). m.2 in its PCIe form is the current choice for those who want speed - my SM961 does over 3,000 Mbytes/sec read for instance.

      • Everyone's a comedian,...
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        How can Visual Studio be the best IDE for Ubuntu if both it and its defining .NET Framework can only be natively installed on Windows?!

        Presumably because they can be non-natively installed into a licensed copy of Windows running in a virtual machine on Ubuntu, and Merk42 believes that the advantages of Visual Studio outweigh the Windows license price and the VM overhead.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Visual Studio would be running on Windowsand only the corresponding virtual machine on Ubuntu.

            I guess that rules out anything written in Java, C#, or Python, as all three languages run on virtual machines. Eclipse would be running on IcedTea, MonoDevelop would be running on Mono, and even Update Manager would be running on CPython.

            And even if you're willing to explain the key difference between JVM, CLR, or a Python interpreter on the one hand and VirtualBox on the other hand, let me rephrase my interpretation of Merk42's comment in light of your rule that applications in virtual machines don't coun

            • Comment removed based on user account deletion

              • In fact, these situations are identical to running Visual Studio on a virtual machine! Any application written in Java is actually being run on its virtual machine rather than on Ubuntu, why should that situation be any different?

                The most relevant differences are that these virtual machines are (a) free software and (b) included with your Ubuntu installation. Windows is neither. One might also point out that the JVM or other language-specific virtual machine is much "thinner", and better integrated with the host operating system, than the full PC hardware emulation that you need to run Windows as a guest operating system.

      • https://www.microsoft.com/net/... [microsoft.com]

        Microsoft raised the white flag and surrendered to Linux a year or two ago.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • I just read a long analysis by someone who seems to be quite knowledgeable about both, and they updated it over time as .Net Core improved and the focus of the Mono ecosystem has changed.

            The bottom line:
            For server and cli / console applications, you're probably better off with . Net Core. Microsoft is heavily invested in making that work well. They want .Net used on Linux servers, since everyone is using Linux servers.
            For GUI applications, Mono is a better bet. Microsoft isn't big on supporting the Linux g

            • Comment removed based on user account deletion

              • > On the other hand, you are not saying anything about compatibility issues (perhaps there is a theoretically perfect backwards compatibility with old .NET versions, but what about applications developed before the relatively-new .NET Core was even created?)

                While it's supposed to be backward compatible, .Net Core is designed so you can embed the (small) copy of whichever version you want right into your application, so you can have multiple versions on the same machine.

                Because it's small, it doesn't incl

      • Winner:
        Visual Studio

        How can Visual Studio be the best IDE for Ubuntu if both it and its defining .NET Framework can only be natively installed on Windows?! I guess that this refers to Visual Studio Code, an enhanced code editor which has little to do with Visual Studio. Apparently, the best Linux alternative for Visual Studio is MonoDevelop [monodevelop.com].

        Electron based editors are all the rage now and can do alot of MonoDevelop and more. Atom.io, Microsoft Visual Studio Code (ironically), and I think Brackets as well. True the real Visual Studio has tools for groupware and advanced testing but Atom.IO has A TON of add-ons that do so so much. Web developers will not touch something like VS 2017 or Monodevelop after using one of the 3 above or Sublime.

    • I use Visual Studio Code on a daily basis. It's the best IDE on Linux by a huge margin. It's much, much, much more efficient to use than Atom, vim or Emacs are, and I say this as somebody who has used vim for many years and is quite proficient with it. It's nowhere near as slow and bloated as Eclipse and NetBeans are. Visual Studio Code provides a great foundation, and there are a lot of great plugins that make it even better.

      Face it, the Microsoft of 2017 is not the Microsoft of 2007, and it's not the Micr

    • Visual Studio, the IDE whose C++ compiler secretly injected spyware into binaries [slashdot.org]?

    • Winner:
      Visual Studio

      Clearly no one from Slashdot voted for that as it's made by Microsoft.

      Well there is Visual Studio Code for Linux. I just installed it on Ubuntu and Fedora VM's right before I went onto slashdot. :-)

      What I would like to see for me to use Linux again as my host OS is to get rid of Gnome, SystemD, and work on Mate (very outdated now) and redo it. Even Microsoft realized no one wanted a cell phone on their desktop and came out with Windows 10. Maybe a gnome 4 with an gnome 2.6 like UI but more modern and flat looking with a taskbar like some of add-ons and a Windows 10/Launcher (

  • They aren't locked away in the video, are they? Is there any chance they could be made available in a reasonable format?

  • I prefer Totemto VLC, except when I run across videos that Totem has trouble with. Totem has a nicer UI, and works most of the time, so VLC is a backup. Same as it is on Windows. I just don't want it to be the default.

    Gnome-Terminal is nice, and so is gedit, but I'm more a fan of KDE. Konsole, Kate, and no Gnome registry. Dolphin or Konqueror for a file manager. Suprised they scored so low. I guess KDE users got tired of getting dumped on by Canonical, and switched to other distributions. Or maybe they ar

  • coming from the Ubuntu camp, why am I not surprised?

    • Not entirely unintelligible. Largely uninteresting. Pretty much everything is Gnome, except where they are longstanding clear leaders, like Firefox or VLC, or some OpenOffice variant. Visual Studio as the IDE is the only real standout.
  • Have they solved their endless power management problems, where Ubuntu gets less battery life than Windows, even if you install any proprietary drivers on Ubuntu manually? No? Then I don't care what applications it runs as default, Ubuntu is still useless for most people (and so are all Desktop Linux distros). It's a mobile world out there.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zekica ( 1953180 )
      My Latitude E5470 (i5-6300u) uses 4.5W while idle at 50% brightness and achieves 12 hours and 20 minutes while idling. In windows 10, it uses 4.2W and achieves 13 hours in the same conditions. My Latitude E5450 (i5-5300u) uses 5.2W while idle at 50% and achieves 10 hours. In windows, it uses 5.0W and achieves 10 hours 10 minutes. My Vostro 5470 (i3-4010u) uses 4.5W while idle - 11 hours 30 minutes. In windows it uses 4.3W - 12 hours. That's not a significant difference (5-7%), I can use the PCs for 7-8 hou

  • Linus is the future and it always will be. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This crowded unaccountable garbage is exactly why Linux (including Ubuntu) is still by-programmers, for-programmers... all about the coders.
    No normal human being would want to sift through that cr4p, and if they did, there's no "there" there. I thought maybe things had changed. Maybe linux as a desktop OS was finally ready for users who were not coders. I took the chance of switching from windows to using ubuntu (instead of Mac), and no It looks like a total dead end.

    • Don't judge all of Linux by Ubuntu. Personally, I think Ubuntu is not a good distro at all.

      • What do you use in preference and why?

        I tend to default to Ubuntu, though with FVWM and my own config.

        The main "problem" is that LTS gets rather stale, though that's kinda the point. You can always install a different distro, e.g. newer Ubuntu in a chroot if you want newer programs.

        • My main problem with Ubuntu is that I find it very difficult to make it work properly on several of my machines. I also dislike Ubuntu's choices for settings and default apps, so I end up having to spend a lot of time rejigging Ubuntu installs to make them usable for me, and even then I tend to have stability issues.

          I generally use vanilla Debian, since that nearly always works acceptably "out of the box".

  • Hi, I am fully illiterate and can't read or write. Could someone please make a video to summarize the results of this survey?
  • I feel it should be noted that they separated Thunderbird and Lightning into two separate entries in the survey. For those unaware, the calendar plugin for Thunderbird is Lightning. Therefore, they should be counted as one. Doing so would make them the winner hands down. Unfortunately, since the separated them, Gnome-Calendar was the winner.
    • Perhaps most Ubuntu users have an Android phone, and Google email, and so the Google-Calendar syncs better than Lightning in Thunderbird?

    • Ubuntu is Gnome territory, so I would fully expect to see a lot of Gnome-love in the results.

      • Ubuntu is Gnome territory, so I would fully expect to see a lot of Gnome-love in the results.

        But there isn't. Most people are using Thunderbird. However, the people that ran the survey screwed up the results.

  • That's my review of this shit.
  • We just helped some motherfucker write his keynote? Wait, not me. I smelled a rat and stayed away from the initial story.
  • Melinda Gates is a cunt.

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