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I think often because people just say KDE as if it provides the answer. Better to say https://kubuntu.org/. I personally go with Kubuntu, although I do swap around with Gnome and have both accessible with just a configuration change at bootup.

So the answer is not so much go with KBE as go with Kubuntu. One leads to more questions and the other leads to a direct simple answer, even if you already use https://www.ubuntu.com/ or http://edubuntu.org/ or https://lubuntu.net/. After all those links it would be mean not to put in https://www.canonical.com/.

Linux == choice ;).

It's also very rare.

You sound like a sysadmin who doesn't pay very much attention. I'm running the 16.04 LTS release of Ubuntu. I installed it last year with kernel version 4.4.0-7.22 (Ubuntu numbering), actually a 4.4.2 mainline kernel. Since April last year there have been 51 kernel security updates each requiring a reboot to apply to my Linux machine which means that on average my Ubuntu server gets rebooted twice as often as my Windows machine for the purposes of applying an update.

Speaking of, I just logged into SSH to double check this before posting. Guess what greeted me:

Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-93-generic x86_64)

  * Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/
  * Management: https://landscape.canonical.co...
  * Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage

0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

*** System restart required ***
No mail.

I'm going to eat some humble pie and admit that my server with an up-time of 41 days is now 4 kernel updates behind because I haven't rebooted in a while. Hopefully no security updates.

" I would have expected something big, like say Ubuntu, to take it, polish it, and start offering it out of the box, fully supported. "

You will come a little closer to sounding like someone with a clue if you star saying that Canonical might start offering it, since the company that packages Ubuntu isn't called Ubuntu anymore than the company that creates the worlds most popular digital petri dishes is called Windows.

I thought Ubuntu *did* ship with that support since it's a South African distro, not US-based (and that this was one reason why people liked it--it came with everything out-of-the-box).

Canonical is UK based, http://www.canonical.com/about

Correct. I'm no fan of Canonical when they try to impose their will (Unity of course being the biggest example), but for fuck's sake people this is making a big deal out of literally nothing.

Quoting directly from the Canonical Intellectual Property Rights Policy (emphasis mine):

Any redistribution of modified versions of Ubuntu must be approved, certified or provided by Canonical if you are going to associate it with the Trademarks. Otherwise you must remove and replace the Trademarks and will need to recompile the source code to create your own binaries. This does not affect your rights under any open source licence applicable to any of the components of Ubuntu.

Just like Mozilla, just like Red Hat, and just like many other major open source projects Ubuntu uses trademarks to protect their brand. Don't use their brand and you're just forking an open source project as normal. See also Iceweasel, CentOS, etc.

Bazaar. It's a VCS that Canonical developed. Why Switch to Bazaar?

IMO, the only things that Bazaar has up on Git these days is released, official support for Windows and thus better GUIs all around for all platforms. Git is still technically a pre-release for Windows. Bazaar is also purportedly better for binary files than Git, and allows downloads from any point in the history (instead of Git requiring that you download the whole repository history).

Bazaar. It's a VCS that Canonical developed. Why Switch to Bazaar?

IMO, the only things that Bazaar has up on Git these days is released, official support for Windows and thus better GUIs all around for all platforms. Git is still technically a pre-release for Windows. Bazaar is also purportedly better for binary files than Git, and allows downloads from any point in the history (instead of Git requiring that you download the whole repository history).

Sure, it will come in a box, as did the previous stable version.

Ubuntu is doing more than anyone to bring Linux to the desktop

If you expect documentation, and probably support too, then you will find a commercial package (eg Landscape) will fit your needs better than the free equivalents.

That's not to say the commercial equivalent is better in any way, or necessarily does more, or has better features.. just that they are the ones to go with if you need that level of support.

Or you could just hire someone to provide you with that support internally, the fat sysadmin that was mentioned :)

> They cant pick and choose.

In fact they MUST pick and choose. To avoid losing their mark, they need to be proactive about instances that could be considered infringement.
They can allow certain users and decline others. What they can't do, under the law, is ignore potential infringement - they are supposed to either allow it or object to it.
One way they do that is through the published policy, which grants people the right to use their trademark in specific ways:

http://www.canonical.com/intellectual-property-policy

One thing their policy explicitly grants permission for is:

        You can use the Trademarks in discussion, commentary, criticism or parody, provided that you do not imply endorsement by Canonical.

It seems to me this use was already authorized under that published statement of permission.

So now Ubuntu's lawyers don't read their own legal policy http://www.canonical.com/intellectual-property-policy . I looked into it when I wrote a blog post about Canonical going bankrupt eventually.
Note:
"You can use the Trademarks in discussion, commentary, criticism or parody, provided that you do not imply endorsement by Canonical."

So not only is it fair use it also is ok under their own intellectual trademark policy.. Talk about one hand not knowing what the other is doing.

they've basically decided to ignore whatever the rest of the community is doing and implement their own (buggy) stuff which is "better". Canonical's stuff makes GNOME3 look usable. That takes some doing.

They can do what they want to do, this is not communist community where people work together "or else". I'm sure you have an infinite amount of seemingly ingenious ways of how to spend someone else's money, but you don't get to do that.

Sure, you can use it as a desktop, you just need to buy a dock that you carry around, or a dock for every desk you usually use.

Or maybe you can settle for an MHL-cable, which is what it'll actually use. The "docks" you see are simply necessary replacements since they use a Nexus 4 as a testi-bed for the software.

Sure, you can use it as a phone, you just need a bluetooth headset that you have to keep charged when you're using it as a desktop. Sure, it's dual-boot, it just means that you can't phone or use the desktop when you switch modes.

OMG a phone that requires input in order to record! First of all, you don't know. It might as well use the onboard mic, even when docked; and if not, then it's no different than any other dockable phone.

Sure it can do all of the above, but you have no battery life.

You don't know. How much Silicon anode battery tech have you tested to actually know how much power it will have?

People who need to navigate and use their phone a lot tend to have TWO devices: a GPS or built-in satnav an a phone. Convergence is a great idea, but you're going to pay a lot in battery life for all those features.

GPSes don't tend to run on battery, they're hooked up to a USB or similar cable, the phone can very well accomplish the same thing.

The copyright clause in all Canonical software...

Is not a copyright clause if you'd actually care to read it: http://www.canonical.com/contributors

Mir

...is their own damn business. How would you like to have hedged your company and personal fortune on Wayland pre-Mir? You wouldn't. Again, there you go pissing away other people's money on what you think is right. Just because Canonical does open source doesn't mean you get spouse-access to their paypal-account.

forking GNOME into Unity

Dude, seriously, it's old, let it go.

doublespeak pouring out of the community spokesdrones have been in stark contrast to the early days of Debian, Slackware and open culture

Ah yes, back when getting sound out of the speakers was a noteworthy accomplishment and glxgears could be used as an analog second-timer if you opened the correct amount of windows...

I believe Ubuntu has single-handedly done more to bring down the quality of Linux on the desktop than any other distro.I believe the reason Ubuntu is so successful is because of marketing. NOT because of technical quality. This is why I believe that the human race is getting stupider every year. Ah well.

Before Ubuntu every Linux-distro was either serversoftware or Stallmanic neckbeard-distros used by the class' smelly kid. Unfortunately Ubuntu changed that, so the smelly kids were left with no haven; aimlessly these kids drifted around; no longer fed with cheetos by their friends for fixing their pc's they became skinny and pennyless. In their desperation they drifted towards OSX because it smelled like UNIX and the olden days, and now these people are known as "Hipsters".

I've been using bazaar and it's everything subversion is, but better. It's had true renames since I've been using it and it really knows how to merge branches properly (which were the big big problems I've had with subversion).

It's worked out well so far

I beg to differ, check this out!

I call your yang with my yin:
Most in the Linux community offer the recipe and the candy. Shuttleworth is only offering the candy and can't make a profit. RHEL and Suse manage to profit while offering both, hence the anti-Canonical sentiment.
Judging by Canonical's CLA could Mark have something in common with the Chinese?
And spare me the sainthood anointment, that was just over the top.

From the actual licence:

2.3 Outbound License
Based on the grant of rights in Sections 2.1 and 2.2, if We
include Your Contribution in a Material, We may license the
Contribution under any license, including copyleft,
permissive, commercial, or proprietary licenses. As a
condition on the exercise of this right, We agree to also
license the Contribution under the terms of the license or
licenses which We are using for the Material on the
Submission Date.

(Empasis mine)

Name one of those four that would do so using Ubuntu. IBM and HP both have their own solutions, and Dell is a RHEL reseller. That leaves you AT&T... would you like to call them or should I?

Name one? How about all four:

HP
IBM
Dell
AT&T (although AT&T don't mention it themselves, but their cloud does run on Ubuntu: "Ubuntu and OpenStack are also powering clouds at the likes of HP, AT&T, Rackspace and Dell.")

London, 15th February 2013:

Images and open source code for the Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu will be published on Thursday 21st February, supporting the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones.

Canonical press release

Funny how this comes from a community that complains about walled gardens and vendor lock-in.

Take a look at these screen shots of the Ubuntu Software Center. Looks a lot like the Windows Store, doesn't it?

Heck, most of the apps featured here are available for the Windows platform.

It is necessary to explain the Ubuntu isn't targeting the geek who compiles from source or is willing to navigate the depths and complexities of app-get?

Mind you, I was not a happy camper when installing the simplest of Internet radio apps and the Chromium browser Software Center did not install the essential (and different !) dependencies required to play audio.

... assuming Microsoft 'approves' it. Buying into a locked ecosystem is a mistake. It's rewarding a company for taking the ownership of your hardware away.

The hardware doesn't belong to the third-party developer --- the hardware belongs to the user. Users who often have an entirely different set of values and expectations than the geek.

The Ubuntu Store has the look and feel of the Windows Store. Not at all, surprisingly, since it is targeting the same market. Most of the apps prominently on display on these sample pages are available for both platforms.

How much of his hardware does the geek really "own?"

If the geek were honest with himself he would admit that his distribution's Linux repository is selective --- not every free or commercial Linux program makes the cut.

The mass market Linux app store will always be even more selective in its offerings.

The shopper there will have no interest in navigating the depths and complexities of app-get and he will not be compiling-from-source programs that have not been packaged and tested for his use.

Remember "Canonical, the sponsor of the Ubuntu project, today announces that Ubuntu is now available pre-loaded on the new ASUS Eee PC series". Never shipped.

"Canonical and Dell have teamed up to offer an extensive range of Dell desktop and notebook configurations, certified and suitable for home use, business use or software development." No mention of such products on Dell's site. Do they just make this stuff up?

From the Canonical Blog Post on the new feature:

Privacy is extremely important to Canonical. The data we collect is not user-identifiable (we automatically anonymize user logs and that information is never available to the teams delivering services to end users), we make users aware of what data will be collected and which third party services will be queried through a notice right in the Dash, and we only collect data that allows us to deliver a great search experience to Ubuntu users. We also recognize that there is always a minority of users who prefer complete data protection, often choosing to avoid services like Google, Facebook or Twitter for those reasons – and for those users, we have made it dead easy to switch the online search tools off with a simple toggle in settings.

So while I think the privacy concerns with sending data to Canonical when you'e doing searches is significant, so long as the user is aware and has the option, more power to them. I don't think I want to integrate my desktop and network search, but I certainly see a mass market that may want this. Depending upon how easy it is to create and configure these "scopes" to plug into this system it might be a great way to build customized searching without the need for Google to know everything about me.

I think people are too reactionary when it comes to both privacy and commercialism. From the previous posts you'd think this was a mandatory feature and Canonical was selling user data or something. They seem to be responsible players here creating cool tech that some of us may not want. I see nothing for me to get upset about.

Ubuntu has been selling support for years, and it's cheaper than Red Hat:
http://www.canonical.com/enterprise-services/ubuntu-advantage/overview

To be honest I'd take a ancient DOS 4.0 System written in QBasic over Google Docs any time.

First of all: Moving to Google Drive for critical docs is a stupid idea. We (me and my freelancer crew) have team stuff on Google Docs, but those are for the very most part non-critical things. The rest are docs in Git Versioning with a central virtual server to push and pull. If Google Docs shuts us down, we won't miss a step. And if our vhost ISP folds, it takes me (or anybody else on the core team) to completely set up a new one and clone to that in less than an hour. That's how it should be.

I suggest you talk to Bob about doing a redo of the system *together*, preferably on x86 Linux, some kind of distriubted versioning (Bazaar has an x-plattform idiot-safe GUI as part of the core project) and maybe with a web-frontend. There are tons of easy setup/maintain FOSS systems that offer solutions for stuff like this. Help him sort the docs and show him some neat new stuff in the FOSS world and see to it that you *both* decide which system to slowly migrate to.

Coming on board as a kid and pissing into the captains soup is a bad idea, even if you know for sure that you know much better soup. Make it clear to Bob that you are here to help, and I'm sure he'll gladly listen to your suggestions, once you've delivered on your promises.

As far as I can tell, apart from the Adobe version of the small 'i' looking less attractive and their comma being more vertical, they are identical.

The ubuntu font was introduced last year.

I prefer bzr, coming from SVN. It actually intrinsically supports various workflow models, including a very SVN-like central model.

When our corporate dev team of ~20 tried git it was an unmitigated disaster. Since we also moved to a "branch per feature" model simultaneously, this only exacerbated the problems.

May you never experience the "joys" of your devs hoarding commits locally because the DVCS allows this, thus reducing collaboration.

Or having the complex/confusing git push system cause a dev to rewrite history on the central git server and effectively "lose" another devs' previous commits by unhooking those from the branch history. (Why is the ability to rewrite commit history & orphan commits in branches on the central server considered a feature in git? God only knows...)

Or have your devs spend more time with git's two phase commit crap and so forth when all they wanted was to mimic the effects of a simple "svn commit" operation (hahaha, silly devs, committing should be *complicated*!), leaving them uncertain whether their crap is actually committed, committed locally, or actually pushed to the central server.

BTW, hope you think monotonically increasing revision numbers for commits in SVN are worthless, because git has no way to do anything like that. BZR has an approximation of revision numbers, on a per branch basis, though. Also, hope you have no use for having an empty directory checked into your repo, because git doesn't support that either. Naturally, you probably have no use for having renames be a supported operation in your VCS, because git doesn't do that either (it uses heuristics instead, though bzr *does* support true file rename capability/tracking).

Of course, the list goes on and on. Eventually, the team decided to go back to using SVN. Unfortunately, while there is a SVN-to-git importer, there's no way back. We decided it was better to write off years worth of commit history to get back to a useful VCS, so we merged all our git branches, stomped them flat, exported, and committed a rev 0 into a brand new SVN repo.

Thus ended that debacle.

Now, my view is extremely unpopular around the internet. Git zealots abound who are loathe to acknowledge any other VCS could be superior to git in any way, under any circumstance. They just don't seem to understand that not every project is the Linux kernel, which requires coordinating thousands of devs around the world in a distributed fashion.

That said, branching & file renaming blows in SVN. BZR does all those things very well, and "bzr commit" actually works like a SVN user would expect, etc, etc. I suggest you give it a try.

Please, if you're going to troll try a little harder next time.

Please, if you're going to troll try a little harder next time.

Canonical should recommend by default that you buy CD's from them

They provide that as an option on the Ubuntu Desktop landing page.

since they can't know that you have a CD burner in your computer.

If a novice is trying to decide whether to download or buy, it's easy to tell whether or not the optical drive can burn CDs by looking for the CD-RW, DVD-RW, or DVD+RW logo on the disc tray. And even if not, a CD image can be turned into a bootable USB image; at least one of my machines got Ubuntu through UNetbootin. How can a novice easily determine whether a PC has a 64-bit CPU without opening the case?

Or just recommend that they'll sell you a whole new computer

They provide that as an option, though it's slightly harder to find than buying CDs.

They'll say Landscape. http://www.canonical.com/enterprise-services/ubuntu-advantage/landscape

$105/year Desktop
$320/year Server

For 'bulk' (more than 5) contact them for "special" pricing.

I wish they didn't do this, I'd love to try it and use it myself, locally hosted.

But I'm NOT paying them for the feature.

They proclaim the wonders of Open Source and Ubuntu - then go and drop in closed-source crap that there is no replacement for. Hack something yourself, or pay them stupid amounts of money to use what came preinstalled.

Canonical announced an EEEpc with Linux, and that never happened.

It launched in several GEOs, and there have already been launches with Ubuntu on carrier-branded netbooks as well.

http://www.monclick.it/catalogo/search/ricerca.asp?testo=ubuntu&x=0&y=0

Canonical announced an EEEpc with Linux, and that never happened. I'm wary of Canonical claims that they're "partnering" with somebody, when the other "partner" doesn't announce the deal too. Where's the announcement from Google?

For Canonical (primary sponsor of Ubuntu) : http://www.canonical.com/about-canonical/careers
For Red Hat : http://www.redhat.com/about/work/

( as said elsehwere, I am working for Red Hat, and I can say that's a great place to work, and we are hiring a lot for cloud related stuff, or to fill position of people who have decided to be moved internally to cloud related thing , see the url ).

I would also take a look at the various others companies listed around Openstack, etc, as I know several of them are hiring ( like Puppetlabs, Opscode, etc )

But now we see the strategy of Canonical and why the (at the time) weird decisions were being made

Um duh, it was made for Instant-On web devices, it just so happens that tablets fall into that category nicely.

But let's look at each point individually because not everything you stated relates to Canonical's desire to go to Tablet's, it's more along the lines of, "it just happens to also help them out towards tablets."

1) The nasty split, isn't any more nasty than other things in the Linux world. Canonical wants Canonical stuff in Canonical's distro. GNOME 3 is still used in Unity, but just differently. It's hard for me to explain because I suck at summing things up, but trust me, Unity is GNOME 3 at the core and Unity runs more with how people predicted GNOME3 to be used more as a platform and less like a standard desktop. The main facet is that it removes a lot of upstream push from the GNOME community. Canonical wants their desktop to look the way they want it to look, not what GNOME developers want it to look like. You'll see this type of mentality in a lot of Ubuntu. Also, let's face it GNOME developers are difficult to work with at best. It's very easy to paint the main developers as being the pearly towers (metaphor for someone who dictates how things should happen, but have little to zero real-world experience to back up exactly why that's right.)

2) The choice to use Wayland over X boils down to the same debate that was had on xgl versus aiglx. Mark thinks running direct to the video card is a better method than the way X provides. This has been a common thing that comes up ooo, I'd say every five to six years. Someone comes up with a better way to run direct to the card and someone jumps on the band wagon. Usually there is just too much inertia to make the jump from X to the something else happen and we all go back to using X happily. There's a lot of misconception that Xorg (specifically) and X11 (in general) are bloated, slow, won't run well on older machines. X11 is a pretty hefty "standard," but not everything in it is in every implementation. There are multiple of X11 implementations (I'm given too, Google can help you see more) that target embedded systems that run quite well. Xorg implements a lot of stuff to keep backwards compatibility with older machines. Wayland doesn't. However, don't confuse that because just because it is implemented does not mean that it gets loaded if it is not needed. You aren't going to be using XRender when your video card offers the ability to use OpenGL pixmap to texture. The biggest problem with X is drivers (and that shouldn't surprise anyone) and the low quality those drivers exist in. That problem will not go away with Wayland. The idea is, and to me it's a bad bet, if we make the model more simple (remember the X11 "spec" is a pretty big tome) then vendors will be more incline to write better drivers since the model for those drivers is more simplistic. However, as bets go, that's immaterial to why Canonical wants to go Wayland. It really boils down to the fact that they want to do Window Decorations the way they want to do Window Decora

More info at Canocial blog and Ubuntu website (including a video).

Yesterday I have to install sun-jdk on ubuntu worked without problems - sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner" sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk and I run update manager right after that - and jdk is still here and no, openjdk is not an option. at least until Google updates Android build scripts (it's even worse on Mac OS X - Android is basically unbuildable on Lion)

From the previous Slashdot article about this debacle (the one where Shuttlesworth says "power users" are all wankers for not loving the Unity) one is directed to https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/882274/comments/36 and then http://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-unity/ which states that the usability of Unity was tested on 15 people, where "Of the 15 participants recruited, 13 were Windows users, 1 was a Mac user, and 1 used both Windows and Mac. None of the participants was familiar with Ubuntu."

This is jumping the shark with *lasers*

Tested, you say? Read this and weep: http://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-unity/

It states that the usability of Unity was tested on 15 people, where "Of the 15 participants recruited, 13 were Windows users, 1 was a Mac user, and 1 used both Windows and Mac. None of the participants was familiar with Ubuntu."

It's about far more than making things look pretty (and actual software developers are NOT the experts in that field, either, by the way). It's about studying how to make things usable. I am not an HCI expert, but I work with one, and I know that when she starts a project she sits down with users, interviews them, spends time observing how they work, until she understands the processes they go through better than anyone. Then she works with the developers to implement something that's usable, that makes sense, based on scientific research principles about how people work.

You hit the nail on the head. And you also demonstrated *why* the UIs for things like Unity sucked.

They did some of that for the Unity UI.

.

.

After they wrote it.

And then, when the results came back indicating serious flaws, they shipped it anyways. (Study is here if you're curious.)

And now, one year later, lo and behold, people are bitching about the same things. But yeah, Shuttleworth, I'm sure it's just that we're stick-in-the-mud "power users", right?

The entire Unity fiasco reeks of a group of self-proclaimed usability experts (who do none of what you described) mocking up something, building it, and then declaring "it's easier to use... and if you don't think so you just are stuck in your ways and hate change." It's change for the sake of change, pushed out a group of people who wished they could make the leap from designing pretty UIs in Photoshop to actually designing software that meets peoples needs. Only it seems their leap left them quite a bit short of the other side of the cliff.

Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) and RedHat, as well as a Kernel developper, have published a white-paper regarding the subject. It can be found here http://blog.canonical.com/2011/10/28/white-paper-secure-boot-impact-on-linux/ What they suggest is to let the user manage the keys necessary to allow a secure boot process on any operating system they choose.

Then why is the HP Public Cloud built on Ubuntu Linux?? http://blog.canonical.com/2011/10/06/ubuntu-powers-hp-public-cloud/

All of the above worked out of the box on my Thinkpad T520 with Ubuntu 10.04, 11.04, and 11.10. (depending on how you define "long battery life" -- my battery lasts about 20% longer with Win7 than on Ubuntu.)

I don't know what all "Applecare" gives you, but you can buy a Desktop support contract from Canonical for around $100/year:

http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?currency=USD&products_id=667

You can do UbuntuOne cloud based backups (depending on how much data you want to back up), or something like Dejadup or Flyback for local backups.

"There's really no support for RMS or the FSF being good at running large projects"

The problem is simply because in the society and age we live people still have to work (make money) for a living. So large projects become unfeasible unless you are already rich (see: canonical).

http://www.canonical.com/

That and the tools for modifying software and making it still by and large are arcane and not complex enough to offload more everyday design tasks to automation so that users can design their own software. We do not yet have sophisticated enough tools where end users can actually modify their software easily without having to be programmers. One day we will get there but it's decades and even possibly a century away.

First part: No, no and no.... How exactly could I have known? My main experience with Debian is on servers and usually I have everything I need in the stable branch for that.

On Ubuntu (LTS 10.04, my work machine):

user@hostname:~$ aptitude search adobereader
p adobereader-deu - Adobe Reader
v adobereader-enu -

This comes out of " deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner". You might say "that's not a repository". I say, for an end-user it's as good as it gets. You can enable it with a simple program, which is the indeed the "Software Center". Installing it manually from Adobe, introduces the "do I get updates?" problem. While not as good as the mainline repositories, you have at least a chance that Canonical and their partners will give new releases with security fixes. If I simply install and forget, that will not happen, ever. Subjecting my users to greater danger.

Compiz: I hope you realize that I don't actually care about compiz and neither do my users. The rest was about polish and (surprise) you agree with me on that. Debian Squeeze Gnome2 default theme feels Win2000 like. You might not agree, but it's how I feel. Shiki really is fine though.

Languages: Did you ever try to setup a desktop that is English for the Interface, has a Luxembourgish lcoale, supports German, French, Dutch and English spell-checking/thesaurus for all installed applications (where possible of course)? No? Well, that is my environment, because I live in Luxembourg, I prefer my GUI in English but need the correct locale and I want writing aids for all languages I speak, read and write. Outside of mono-lingual cultures such a setup is not uncommon at all. The sheer number of packages you need to know to install on Debian is really impressive. Ubuntu solves all this with a simple interface except for the locale, but I found a pretty easy workaround for that. It works under Ubuntu and Debian and makes no problems whatsoever. Do note that this problem exists pretty much on all operating systems. It's also solvable on Windows, but the approach for doing so is totally orthogonal to the Linux solution.

I actually run Debian Squeeze on LXDE on my Asus EEE PC 701 4G and I'm very happy with it. Could I give that to my mother in law or my own mom. No way in hell. The slashdot journals I linked to were Squeeze too (and I even tried testing and sid, which broke way too much). The goal is "fire-and-forget", "usable for non-tech" and "polished". Ubuntu gave me that (note the past tense, I have no confidence they'll fix their issue), but to get Debian at that level you need a lot of work with the uncertainties introduced by having no updates for software like Adobe Flash/Reader.

Performance and ideological issues aside, one problem with Bazaar is marketing and support.

I've never heard of Bazaar before, and just now from this thread I finally realized what those bzr checkouts were for. I just never associated the two together.

Git is used for the Linux kernel, and heavily pushed by Linus. He wrote the damn thing, and he's the primary market spokesperson. When he talks about needing to merge 8600 commits, people pay attention to what SCM he's using even if he's not explicitly pushing it.

I had to Google for "Who Uses Bazaar?". While I recognize a lot of those projects, this is the first time I hear Bazaar mentioned.

Git has gotten popular enough that Google Code decided to add Git support despite already supporting Mercurial, which brings me to another point.

GitHub is the Facebook of online source control hosts. They have neat tools and a great social system built in.

I looked up source control hosts for Bazaar. There's Launchpad (no surprise there) and Sourceforge. I must have missed the memo, because I thought Sourceforge only supported Subversion. It feels like Bazaar has no marketing whatsoever (to be fair Sourceforge also supports Git).

That is why all performance items being equal, I don't see Bazaar overcoming Git anytime soon. Let me know when they get some publicity like Linus' Git presentation at Google Tech Talk.

Actually: http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/HistoryOfBazaar Bazaar pretty much evolved from GNU Arch, though it is of course a very different beast now and there is AFAIK no shared code - but the developers migrated there from a GNU Arch branch and they took some ideas with them, so it still can be seen as a spiritual successor. :-)

Actually Gnome 3 didn't survive a 30 minutes test with me, however I've a AWN user and didn't think of using it on Gnome 3. I've heard that Gnome 3+ AWN is very usable which I believe since it's just awn with an annoying bar on the top.

Seriously what with that top panel? Were they trying to implement apples top menubar and gave up mid way? Gnome 3 doesn't even work with gnome-global-menu from what I've gathered. If Gnome wanted to rip off Mac (no shame in copying what works) they should have focused in supporting that.

The truth is that Gnome 3, like Unity are optimized for tables, actually scratch that, they are optimized for iPads! that's been the only thing in the head Ubuntu's people for a while.

In fact I doubt Mark and his team of Cupertino rejects *ehem* I mean the Canonical Design team have been using anything other than iPads for a while now.

Canonical already does usability testing and according to Shuttleworth they have the most usability/design testing of any free software project.

Check http://design.canonical.com/category/usability/ for details.

I'm not sure who decided that we needed Cell Phone UI's on our desktops, but I'd like to slap the person(s).

I believe the recipient of your slappage would be Christian Giordano:

http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/introducing-overlay-scrollbars-in-unity/

At least, this quote would seem to be culprit:

"Other platforms optimized for touch input like Android and iOS are already using a light-weight solution visible only while dragging the content."

So that's your question answered I think.