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2.-FIX YOUR DAMNED DRIVER MODEL! It is 2011 and the constant driver borkage is getting old, okay? It is bad when a long term Linux user tells me "Well Linux just does that, what you need to do is" and then here comes the terminal bullshit. I don't care if you do it with an ABI, or offer Linus to Cthulu, but the reason NO shop will touch your OS is in no small part to the 6 month driver borkage!

While I agree with the sentiment in general, it's not necessarily a reason to not use Linux in the home user/SMB user market. There's a simple solution for these people: Use a long-term Linux distribution such as Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS).

Link: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

Let's face it: Most home users/SMB users don't change their hardware very often, so once a computer is set up, it is essentially a static configuration, save for the occasional memory or hard drive upgrade, upgrades to monitors or replacing keyboards and mice. This being the case, an LTS version of Linux is ideal, I would think?

Finally, I fondly remember OS/2 - I ran it at home from Warp v2 to Warp v4, and it was a great OS! I ran it dual-boot during that time (OS/2 and DOS/Windows 3.x and DESQView, later DESQView/386 and QEMM-386), buying hardware based on OS/2 driver support. When Window 95 was released I saw the writing on the wall, but continued to dual-boot. I finally gave up on it completely a few months after Windows 98SE was released: OS/2's hardware support was lagging ever-farther behind, and when Creative Labs stopped releasing OS/2 drivers I'd pretty much had enough. I bought a copy of Scitech Display Doctor for OS/2, and that helped somewhat, but my next computer had no OS/2 partitions. I still have my last copy of OS/2 Warp v4, and occasionally look at it on my shelf and think "I should try get it running under VirtualBox"...

Regards,

dj

::facepalm::

::facepalm::

Have you considered this?

Go and try to donate a Linux-only PC to some place and see what they say.

I was looking for the licensing terms for verbatim redistribution of Ubuntu as a whole, but I couldn't immediately find anything on the Ubuntu web site about licensing of the "compilation copyright", or the copyright in the selection and arrangement of materials. If I could find them, I'd recommend printing them up and bringing them in as the "license papers" for a PC with GNU/Linux installed.

The PS3's controller works then fine in Linux, using BT, like a regular controller work.

Does it? As mine doesn't. The two ways to make it work after the sync seems to be patching hidd or killing hidd/bluetoothd and using QTSixa, at least judging from what I have found so far on the Web and most of it seems rather outdated. There also seem to be issues with the controller not using authentification that one thus might need to disable in the bluetooth config.

Long story short: If somebody has an up to date HowTo on how to make the controller just work over Bluetooth without additional hackery in Linux, I'd like to know. As so far I didn't had any luck.

Ubuntu users have been seeing it for years

I'll give you a counter proposal: Ubuntu minimal. If you hit f4 and choose command line, you'll get a base install, afterwards you can simply apt-get install xfce4 or whatever.

Whats the point? PPAs, The single thing Debian is sorely missing. PPAs in a Debian distro are like addons in a Mozilla browser, simply addicting.

The minimal installer is just 22MiB, and will save you from downloading a large ISO and then updates, so you can do more in less time.

The idea of a sudoer instead of root + user is an (expert) option of the Debian Installer, say no when it asks you if you want a root account. You might hate it, but others find it useful.

There are no "Ubuntu's wizards", It is called Network Manager and can be installed in Debian as well, or uninstalled/ignored in Ubuntu. Network Manager will not manage any device you define in /etc/network/interfaces by default, so you can go back to ifup/ifdown or direct ifconfig. Network Manager is very good with 3g modems so i don't agree with you in getting rid of it. Some people prefer wicd for wifi, its an option as well.

Like Linus, I also switched to XFCE. Sure it needs more polishing, but the more of us using it will make sure this happens. XFCE is actually better than gnome in some aspects: Window buttons to the right or left? You choose it with a drag and drop gui, not a cryptic gconf thing. How could gnome miss simple things like that?

it should be possible to port it.

It's always possible to port a free application that runs on a free operating system to a different platform: just run the free operating system in a virtual machine. But porting it to run within another operating environment requires porting all its dependencies. For one thing, it depends on gconf2, Perl, Python, D-Bus, Expat (via D-Bus), ncurses (via psmisc and D-Bus), SELinux (via D-Bus), init scripting (via D-Bus), APT (via python-apport), and many more. (Is there a way to show a package's entire dependency tree on one page?)

So neither the article or the summary actually link to the main product at hand. Convenient.

Here: https://one.ubuntu.com/

Multiarch is not gonna let you run ARM binaries on an Intel chip or anything like that

Are you sure?

Both http://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/TheCaseForMultiarch and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec appears to disagree with you.

This is in Natty. See Here

have you tried syncing with something that's not 5 years old?

Under Linux, no - has support been broken in the newer products?

There seem to be guides available, but I have not tried them.

I've never been able to get any PC with an ATI card to hibernate correctly in linux, and I've found very little help on the topic. The best document I've found about the suspend process is here, and it is specific only to Ubuntu:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnderstandingSuspend

Suspend works on my laptop, but it will overheat when I place it in my bag. I really would like to get hibernate to work.

How long does Apple continue supporting OS releases? (I have heard it's shorter than MS, but I'm actually pretty ignorant...)

Longer than the average Linux distro (which in most cases is a couple of months if that).

Ubuntu releases are supported for 18 months. Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) releases are supported for 3 years on the desktop, and 5 years on the server.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Dunno about the Air, but I've tried Ubuntu on a Macbook Pro (generation 5-5) and while things mostly worked, it was a hassle to make everything work and work seamlessly. Lots of little things, like keyboard backlighting, 24" Cinema Display (took months before a developmental version of NVidia drivers became available), I had sound problems (had to manually compile ALSA), suspend/hibernate was never completely reliable and battery life was never as good as the MacOSX (screen not dimable and temp sensors not working). According to the wiki page below, lots of those problems have subsequently been solved, but it was a pain. That said, problems differ between different versions of Ubuntu and different Macbook variants.

This is a pretty good reference https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook

http://releases.ubuntu.com/11.04/ubuntu-11.04-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/torrents/Fedora-15-x86_64-Live-KDE.torrent ... I could go on...

PulseAudio is not about fixing ALSA, it's about fixing the parts the distros/people think are missing in the Linux audio stack.
Please try these:
http://ossguy.com/?p=347
And from the previous article: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/CleanupAudioJumble#Use%20cases
http://www.cio.com.au/article/320807/open_source_identity_pulseaudio_creator_lennart_poettering

Ubuntu appears to have a policy regarding support. The longest they'll support something is an LTS Server release, at 5 years. At least according to their Wiki:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

That said, I think that support should be based upon the last time that a product was sold/distributed/promoted by the company. When it was first sold is completely irrelevant. It's been 3 years for XP. It's harder to compare to an open source OS.

I wrote a JavaScript bookmarklet that displays days till the XP EOL.

(Just so I could say things like: "Rob, we need approval for those upgrade licenses; we only have 1001.02432 days left")

You either buy Redhat, or go with Debian, Gentoo, or Ubuntu (which I have on mac ibook https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCDownloads )

Or forget Linux and go with OpenBSD, FreeBSD, or NetBSD

absolutely. I also agree with the commenter below, get rid of empathy and go back to pidgin, and then we'll be a step closer to ubuntu not being crap.

It might well happen.I think the main driver was the integration with Gnome and Ubuntu deferred to the Gnome guys. With Ubuntu moving away from Gnome lately we could see a reverse.

Trouble is, neither Pidgin nor Empathy have progressed very much since Ubuntu put together this comparison:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EmpathyVsPidginUsability

This is the perfect time for Wubi: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/windows-installer

It's an Ubuntu installer (I believe there is an option to pick Xubuntu or Kubuntu during the install) that runs from inside of Windows. It automatically sets up dual boot without touching the partition table; it creates a disk image on your Windows partition and takes over the bootloader. If you choose to boot into Ubuntu, it mounts the Windows partition and then the disk image from there. It also puts Ubuntu in the Windows Add/Remove control panel, so Ubuntu can be uninstalled like any other Windows program.

Yes, there's a performance penalty for disk performance, but it's a great way for a Windows user to get their toe in the water with minimal risk and effort, and there is a tool that can convert a Wubi install to a proper multi-partition multi-boot setup later if you decide you want to take the next step.

Puh, CD's are soo previous decade ... get yourself a 2Gb USB stick or something and boot from that.

In fact, http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download explains quite well how to get the OS running from an USB stick. In my experience this is quite a bit faster but also allows for some actual storage (see "persistence"), double-win ! =)

As opposed to a LiveCD I would recommend installing it on a flash drive instead. The flash drive can be written to, so it can behave more like a real OS (allow you to persist files and settings after a reboot) and its just quicker than CD/DVD.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick

Yup. And this should do the trick: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ runs on windows and Mac.

If you want to recommend a non-current version of Ubuntu, at least do it right -- it would be the latest LTS release (10.04). Not that there is a good reason to run it on a personal desktop, as 11.04 is fine as it is, except for the choice of default desktop environment.

As opposed to a LiveCD I would recommend installing it on a flash drive instead. The flash drive can be written to, so it can behave more like a real OS (allow you to persist files and settings after a reboot) and its just quicker than CD/DVD.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick

Whatever distribution you choose, start with a LiveCD and boot from that. You won't have to make any changes to the computer at all. If you can install to a USB pendrive, it will be reasonably quick, too.

If the computer is reasonably hefty, with a modern processor and at least 1 GB of memory, I'd try Kubuntu 10.10 because I think the KDE desktop looks more like what someone used to Windows would expect. Otherwise, try Ubuntu 10.04LTS for the GNOME experience and avoid Ubuntu 11.04. It has an entirely different desktop environment (Unity) and is probably too buggy for someone whose never touched Linux before.

I haven't used Fedora in quite a while so I'm not competent to discuss its current incarnations. I've never taken to OpenSuSE, but I'm sure others here will tell you why to use that. Mandriva is likely to get some endorsements as well.

Personally, I've found Ubuntu very useful in situations where I couldn't do any dedicated partioning for linux and only a bootable version would do. They're not the first or the only distro to offer a bootable linux kernel, but they typically provide a nice desktop interface and fair driver support. There's also an incredibly active community, with forums, where news posts are usually not even required (your question has been asked and answered countless times over, accessible via search).

http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://www.kubuntu.org/
http://www.xubuntu.org/

In the event she's looking to do some more serious introspection on linux, I would suggest Arch Linux. CLI from the start, and certainly not for the weak of heart. I started with Arch Linux years ago, because I like a challenge, and it definitely paid off in the long run.

http://www.archlinux.org/

I mistook the article title as being about the Unity 3D game development tool, which unfortunately doesn't support Linux yet. Unity is a desktop system for Ubuntu which apparently happens to have 3D effects.

It'd be nice if you clarified product names when writing headlines.

Here's some help: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne

I have the D150 and everything works

Free offer of recovery CDs for Windows users: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

So they get to choose between a system that is unusable from malware or a system that is unusable because it won't run their Windows applications?

Free offer of recovery CDs for Windows users: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

It can grow if it needs to.

"Needs to" according to whose estimation? Some people think they need it to grow for various reasons; others behind capping ISPs need it not to grow.

We could use rewriteable media.

You already can; it's called a USB flash drive or SD card. See Installation/FromUSBStick.

And YOU insist on not listening. I'll spell it out in little words, okay? Unless I sit these boxes aside and patiently wait for the next LTS I already have LESS THAN 2 YEARS before these machines shit themselves and die. And this of course doesn't take into account the true insanity of software tying itself to the kernel, so if you have kernel 2.6.x and the software wants 3.x.x you are fucked. What is so damned hard to understand about that?

And yes they DO intentionally break sir! If I design a car, to use the world famous /. car analogy, that can ONLY have its oil changed while going 70MPH+ down the road while you balance on the hood then IT IS MY FAULT if you injure yourself changing the oil because my design is bad and it is THAT, that right there, that is the heart of the matter! You have an entire OS ecosystem held hostage by ONE man, that man is Linus Torvalds. Linus said in 1993 he'd never allow a hardware ABI, here it is 2011 and he STILL refuses to change his mind, thanks to a combination of ego and religious dogma, neither of which should be anyway shape or form the basis of OS design!

Now EVERYONE and I DO mean everyone, OSX, BSD, Solaris, OS/2, Windows, they ALL have an ABI and you know what? Their drivers do NOT break! To take Windows for an example the Win2K/XP driver model lasted for over a decade and will continue to be supported until 2014. That is 14 YEARS of drivers that work! The WinVista/7 driver model will most likely get the same or longer, that is another DECADE PLUS of drivers working!

But as long as Linus insists on treating the kernel as his own personal play toy, as long as I said there is NO decent way to upgrade the thing without Linux shitting itself, I just looked up the numbers and guess what? Ubuntu LTS that is currently out dies hard in just a year and a half so again, your answer is...what? Death March or...death march? Because 10.04 LTS as you can see here has less than a year and a half on the desktop. Do you expect me to put these boxes in a closet for a year?

I'm sorry but your driver model is shit sir, and the sooner the community accepts this and has a royal raging shitfit at Torvalds and demands better the sooner Linux will be able to "just look for the penguin on the box" and can be all over retail shelves like Windows is now.

You show me ONE, just one mind you, one single distro where I can get a GUARANTEED 6 years worth of security updates WITHOUT the upgrade death march and I'll be happy to install it this very moment. But you can't, you know why? Because the entire community is based around the new hotness and since upgrades are "free" (except they are only free if your time is worthless) nobody cares about longer than 3 years worth of support, and most don't even care about that. But I have customers to support, and they ain't gonna take CS classes to learn the fucked up Linux broken driver dance.

Fix this problem, and you'll see Linux machines right next to the Windows ones in every B&M across the country. Isn't that what the community wants? The year of the Linux desktop? Well only you can make it happen, and that is by having a royal shitfit and demanding better than the shit sandwich that is the current driver model.

I agree: JavaScript is the fastest way to get into coding today. It's an Interpretor that every one can use with no setup -- like BASIC on my trusty Osborne One, except with JS you just open a browser.
[Hint the URL bar is a console... think BASIC's > prompt. Try entering: javascript:alert(document.cookie); ]

Using only the address bar I created a simple JS evaluator. that beginners can use immediately at the click of a link...

Here is a Tetris clone I created using the address bar (which prompted the creation of the aforementioned JS evaluator).
Here is a SHA1 Password Hasher bookmarklet created using the evaluator (use one master password to generate a new password for each website you visit).

Note: I only tested these in Firefox. IE has too short of a URL limit to be useful without pulling in code from a server.

IMHO, all web browsers should come with a nice JS console feature; It's really inexcusable not to...

I agree: JavaScript is the fastest way to get into coding today. It's an Interpretor that every one can use with no setup -- like BASIC on my trusty Osborne One, except with JS you just open a browser.
[Hint the URL bar is a console... think BASIC's > prompt. Try entering: javascript:alert(document.cookie); ]

Using only the address bar I created a simple JS evaluator. that beginners can use immediately at the click of a link...

Here is a Tetris clone I created using the address bar (which prompted the creation of the aforementioned JS evaluator).
Here is a SHA1 Password Hasher bookmarklet created using the evaluator (use one master password to generate a new password for each website you visit).

Note: I only tested these in Firefox. IE has too short of a URL limit to be useful without pulling in code from a server.

IMHO, all web browsers should come with a nice JS console feature; It's really inexcusable not to...

I agree: JavaScript is the fastest way to get into coding today. It's an Interpretor that every one can use with no setup -- like BASIC on my trusty Osborne One, except with JS you just open a browser.
[Hint the URL bar is a console... think BASIC's > prompt. Try entering: javascript:alert(document.cookie); ]

Using only the address bar I created a simple JS evaluator. that beginners can use immediately at the click of a link...

Here is a Tetris clone I created using the address bar (which prompted the creation of the aforementioned JS evaluator).
Here is a SHA1 Password Hasher bookmarklet created using the evaluator (use one master password to generate a new password for each website you visit).

Note: I only tested these in Firefox. IE has too short of a URL limit to be useful without pulling in code from a server.

IMHO, all web browsers should come with a nice JS console feature; It's really inexcusable not to...

Two things that you don't seem to realize:
1) Development on Synaptic seems to have stopped already, or at least slowed way down. http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/ gives the last update as January 2009. However, I believe Debian has adopted it and maintains it. It hasn't changed enough to make a difference in that timeframe outside of bugfixes, at least that I can see.

2) USC has been the *default* package manager since 10.04, though Synaptic still shipped. (see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoftwareCenterFAQ)

It really isn't that much of a hardship to drop Synaptic from the default install, as useful as it may be. The people that want it know where to get it, myself included.

Also, since realtime conversations take place in the client it can be good to follow them up in the same medium rather than send an email

Offline instant messages aren't the same medium as regular instant messages because they're stored and forwarded. They're just e-mail with a different proprietary protocol. If a single client supported both e-mail and IM, there wouldn't be any user-visible difference between following up via offline IM and following up via e-mail, at least any more than a user-visible difference between following up via MSN and following up via ICQ in a multi-network IM client such as Epiphany or Pidgin. Perhaps the "messaging menu" under Ubuntu comes from a realization of this. As I see it, the root of the problem is that AOL long ago made a decision to offer AIM service at no charge but charge per month for e-mail. Otherwise, AIM would have integrated AOL e-mail.

I don't think they have plans for dropping Gnome altogether just yet, if you check on the roadmap for Oneiric Ocelot, you'll see that they have Gnome 3 in the current alpha: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/TechnicalOverview/Alpha1
Now, I'm not saying that won't change, but I do think that the current plan is to keep it available.

Don't forget gutsy

10.04 is the right version 10.10 has shutdown issues with eeepc I have a 1015pem ans the sound system prevents shutdowns. see here I did not have this issue with 10.04 I was hoping that 11.04 would fix it.

In other words, spend a lot more time making it usable??

Huh? Not any more work than you would go through downloading the regular Ubuntu CD and installing it. Or you can just search for it in the Ubuntu Software Center and install Lubuntu Desktop (LXDE), Xubuntu Desktop (XFCE), Kubuntu Desktop (KDE) or if you're a power user, like the guy I was replying to, you can install any of the window managers, log out and log back in for your shiny new desktop. If this is hard then iTunes is hard. It works the same way.

There's no problem at all, unless of course someone would go ahead and make this the default setting for the most popular and visible Linux distribution for non-techies out there today. But why would someone put together a hack like this and release before it's stable.

::Sigh:: Well, perhaps its due to the fact that this "unstable" hack is not a long term support release. If any other OS Vendor released every 6 months you may find the same situation for the newest releases -- Even with infrequent OS releases what's the saying? "Wait till service pack 1 before you upgrade."

There are no doubt "non-techies" that accidentally installed an operating system that was not as stable as they would like.

For this I can make no excuse. If only it were noted somewhere prominently on the download page: "...long-term support (LTS) releases are supported for three years on the desktop. Perfect for organizations that need more stability..." -- Perhaps it would be best to place such text right next to the download options, near the giant "Start Download" button.

If only there were several ways to try out the operating system before installing it, as well as step by step instructions on how to do so; Perhaps these should go on the download page as well?

Alas, What fools they are! If only they were even more user friendly! Or -- Perhaps they've made it too easy to upgrade. MS wouldn't think of having a single button + admin password upgrade feature... I bet they don't have this problem on Windows.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-19/

That cartoon is funny because it assumes that the Cloud would actually be using encryption.

Silly Dilbert!

(yes I know Ubuntu aren't the only fuzzy cloudy people on the planet, but their 'encryption is hard dur we don't need it' stance makes me hit my head against hard things).

You should at least try using a search engine before making a remark like that:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Linuxvirus [ubuntu.com]

Funny story: I have actually come across a Linux ELF virus in the wild. It was so ancient and badly-written that it caused most of the programs it infected to crash, which kinda blew its cover. Pretty much all of the Linux viruses out there are ancient, proofs-of-concept or both - several of them you even have to compile from source yourself!

(Interestingly, that page's description of the BadBunny virus seems to be a bit off... it's actually a cross-platform OpenOffice macro virus what runs on Windows, OS X and Linux.)

To this date there have not been any viruses (i.e. self propagating code that infects machines without user intervention) for Mac OS X and I'm pretty sure Linux as well.

You should at least try using a search engine before making a remark like that:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Linuxvirus

I say this as someone who has used nothing except GNU/Linux for many years now: there are viruses out there that will infect a vulnerable GNU/Linux system. Do not be fooled, these things are out there. As an exercise, you can try to write a very basic virus that targets the vi text editor and inserts itself into any C program a user creates (if you want bonus points, have the virus remove itself from the program whenever the user opens it with vi). This is not a hard thing to do if you are a halfway decent programmer.

But if you have a literate UNIX user, then tricking them is usually harder

I can say the same about Windows users. Literate Windows users generally avoid malware: they know what not to do with their computers. What is your point? That uninformed/easy to manipulate users will be the targets of malware infections?

Hmm... just tried the download page seems to work fine for me if for some wierd reason it isn't working for you try the torrent

Except that that is wrong. A little distribution called Ubuntu 11.04 uses 2.6.38 which is affected. But no one uses Ubuntu, right? https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NattyNarwhal/ReleaseNotes