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Also, much of the community effort seems to be in wasted providing workarounds, and writing long bash scripts to address gaps in functionality. I bet much more effort is spent on writing those forum replies and scripts rather than what would be involved in actually fixing the issue or functionality gap.

Linux forums are FULL of posts like this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11926504
http://kyleabaker.com/2010/07/11/how-to-fix-your-ubuntu-boot-screen/

And then we have people pointing out the issues with the scripts and trying to fix them. So in the end you have very poorly discoverable forum posts with workarounds that may or may not work for your configuration.

I guess this is because projects do not welcome contributors, and actively drive them away even if they want to contribute("Works for me!".

I believe he splits the prize with the other winner, so he only gets 600k. Nevertheless, he actually does have a pretty solid income anyways.

http://www.technologyacademy.fi/blog/2012/06/13/press-release/
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=953999
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#Later_years

And I think that some of them don't even read the question which leads to a lot of frustration.... We both have our anecdotes, but that doesn't prove either of us right :)

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1966609

Many suggestions on which mirror to pick, but not a single solution to the actual question - choosing the fastest mirror from the command line without needing to install the GUI.

He is probably talking about rendering of the cursor. If the GPU supports it then the cursor's position is controlled by two GPU registers & it is the last item to be overlayed on top of the frame buffer. When you move the cursor the framebuffer does not need to be rendered again.

It was not seen on any hardware that anyone sane would use for running games, for years. However it IS mentioned on http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1051483 , what confirms my suspicion that most "complaints" here are posted by Microsoft marketing people googling Ubuntu forums for plausible descriptions of bugs and problems.

I'm glad I don't have to manage as much HyperV stuff as you do. I've had more weird or stupid problems with HyperV ( stuff like: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1494797 ) than with stuff like VMware (I haven't used ESX) or even VirtualBox (that said soon after oracle acquired Sun, I actually had to rollback to an older "out of date" version of VirtualBox to get some stability).

Too often Microsoft product logs (HyperV, Exchange, IIS, .Net, etc) are like a someone calling up the doctor to say "Doc, it hurts", but the caller doesn't say what the patient was trying to do, which part hurts, and what sort of hurt. Sometimes you're not even sure if the caller is the actual patient!

For some reason I find this happens a lot less with the "UNIX/Linux/OSS" stuff. Maybe the logging code for the OSS stuff are done by people who actually use the stuff. Whereas the logging code for Microsoft's stuff is done by outsourced workers as part of some project requirement. e.g. "must log the error? OK, done.".

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

"DRM is the reason Netflix isn't available on Linux."

I hate DRM, but when Netflix tells you that's why Netflix isn't available on Linux, they are lying.

HBOGo - Available on Linux
Amazon Prime - Available on Linux
Hulu Plus - Available on Linux

On the plus side, Netflix's lies further tarnish the reputation of DRM, which is agreeable to me.

Origin of discussion:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?&t=1890619

@querent:

"First, I want to use TOR to download .pdf files"

First, how have you setup Tor? (it's not TOR btw, it's Tor)

Have you installed the Tor Browser Bundle? (TBB) It contains a (limited) preconfigured Tor environment (you need to reconfigure the included Noscript properly as by default it is set to allow everything, which is bad) and includes Vidalia, a Tor GUI front-end. If you have, you can right click on most .PDF file download links and select your local destination for the PDF to download to and it runs through Tor without leaping outside of the Tor client. Some PDF file downloads are caught by Tor button for unknown reasons, it thinks you're trying to load it directly and not download it when you're trying to download it. This may be a bug which appears at random. TBB's preconfigued Tor environment does not modify files like wgetrc (more on this later) or other application's files outside of the applications it provides.

My preferred method of handing PDF files when using Tor is to load them remotely via this free web service:
http://view.samurajdata.se/

I don't see that website as having any ads, but I block ads anyway, nor are there any posts begging for money, nor do they push an application to download in order to view the PDFs. It's the most simplistic layout I've seen for loading PDFs remotely and safely so they don't touch your system (your web cache should be disabled and is disabled if you use TBB, your swap and home partitions, if not your whole system should be encrypted). But does the admin track PDFs and IPs? Simple, always use Tor with that site with nothing personal.

It should be noted the moment you begin using your real name and playing about on Facebook with your friends or acquaintances via Tor, you've lost the plot. Do not mingle your personal Internet use with your Tor Internet use. Do not use Tor while at the same time accessing your personal e-mail outside of Tor (you shouldn't load it inside Tor, for that matter, either). Don't boast through Tor to one of your chums that you're using Tor.

The PDF files (at view.samurajdata.se) are transformed into single paged graphics which you may navigate through easily. 99% of the time it works, some PDFs it chooses not to load and spits out an error. It doesn't
require Flash and works without cookies or javascript enabled. I don't know who runs the site or their privacy and data retention habits, but I recommend it above all other sites offering to convert PDFs on-line. I have not tested uploading local PDF files to that service so I cannot suggest others do so, I don't know whether or not there would be any privacy leaks in doing so, so just copy/paste urls into that service.

In using that free PDF converter website, I can preview the document to determine beforehand whether it is worth the time, space, and effort in manually downloading the PDF and storing it for future access. Should you access PDF files on your system, I would recommend burning them to a CD or DVD, a read only medium, and accessing them from a non-networked environment such as a Linux LiveCD with the network cable unplugged, using an open source PDF reader, never use the proprietary PDF reader from Adobe, unless you're reading off-line from read only media, in addition to pulling the network cable prior to booting from a fresh and verified LiveCD and pulling the cable and power plugs from any hard drives (before you turn your system ON), to eliminate any possible contamination. Remember, you're downloading PDF files through Tor, and unless you verify each file through checksum verification (like MD5 or GPG) there's a chance they could've been trojaned by a rogue exit node, or contain phoning home instructions or any other type of malicious "feature". No amount of open or closed source virus/tro

Funnily enough, System76 states that Ubuntu isn't even ready for a tablet.

Q: Any possibility of a System76 tablet?
Sys76: Despite all of the progress towards being a viable option for tablets, Ubuntu currently isn't ready for the primetime as a tablet OS. It has a lot of the fundamentals, but it's missing out on a few key points, like the lack of a software keyboard. There are solutions for software keyboards that do exist, but they are mostly designed for accessibility, rather than touchscreens.

ubuntuforums

did you even google your question? http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ubuntu+lockdown maybe this will help you http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=456549 http://users.telenet.be/mydotcom/howto/linuxkiosk/ubuntu01.htm http://library.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/stable/menustructure-13.html.en

I'm dumbfounded that people get to ask such simple questions of /. readers. A simple Google search would have turned up many Debian-based solutions, forget about all the *nix ones out there. I used to think this kind of thing was lazy to ask at Ubuntu forums, but it's way worse here. I am seriously thinking about taking this site out of my rss feeds because I keep getting fooled by this crap. If anything, this is just more filler on a slow day for Ubuntu stories...a very cheap maneuver.

If I start an X server on display :1 it runs along the :0 instance. No need to do anything to the OS. And if that X server has ctrl-alt-F disabled, well then that's quite well locked up.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=776098
combined with
startx -config your-kiosk-xorg.conf -- :1

yeah, I didn't test it, don't want to lock up my office PC :-)

did you even google your question?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ubuntu+lockdown

maybe this will help you
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=456549
http://users.telenet.be/mydotcom/howto/linuxkiosk/ubuntu01.htm
http://library.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/stable/menustructure-13.html.en

Actually, I filed a bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/834037 (and another directly with the Linux kernel devs) and started an ubuntuforums thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1822629 . I did as much as I was able to with my skill set to gather information about the bug, and it looks like MANY others are experiencing the same problem. I would guess that you are also experiencing it, but just have not noticed (do an experiment and find out, and please report back on the bug). Thanks for the comment though -_-

I got bitten by another bug:
The first one is this (The OSX^h^h^h Unity bar does not recognize that an application is already running).

I can't find the bug report now but I remember I saw it was set to "low priority". It is funny that a bug that is so blatantly showing to the user is considered low priority.

Oh! and my laptop's touchpad does not work (what is this, 1991?)

May eventually happen, but It's going to be a bit...

Stats from from a real world web site over the last 30 days...

Which website? What does it host? Who's your target audience?

I'm sure your numbers will differ from www.slashdot.org which will differ from www.theponyclub.com which will differ from www.microsoft.com.

I'm sure that if you polled the webserver at http://ubuntuforums.org/ you'll find that 90% of the world runs Linux, what a shock!

Ubuntu has the largest mindshare, and the most nubie friendly support http://ubuntuforums.org/ as well as paid support if you get in over your head. You can install the "Server" version, and with "sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop" you would have the full GUI. You you can run a server on the desktop version, but with that many users, you will want a server kernel.

The two-graphics-card scheme you're talking about was developed by nVidia; it is called "Optimus."

There is an open source project to get this stuff to work with Linux/X11, called bumblebee. See here:

https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee/

If you want a more specific guide for using bumblebee with your specific laptop/distro combination, you may be able to find one if you look around. For example:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1763742

I can't vouche for bumblebee; I've never actually tried it myself. However, it seems to be exactly what you're looking for. Let's hope it's a solid project, as Optimus is becoming more and more popular and nVidia doesn't seem to have any plans to support it on Linux, with a open source driver or otherwise.

No. When Wubi breaks, it breaks hard. This is a bad option. These days, repartitioning is point-and-click off a live CD; there's no good reason for Wubi other than laziness, which is still a bad reason because in this case, said laziness may very well come back to bite you on the ass later.

I guess I could excuse dropping Synaptic if it weren't part of a disturbing trend.

The point is: defaults matter.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/defaults.html

This was supposed to be the entire point of Ubuntu in the first place. If your preferred configuration is just a setting away, then why not just run Debian and make the 10 or 20 adjustments you need?

Ubuntu forums discussion on defaults

Too late. It's this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1589130

None of it is necessary, of course, unless the user did "experimenting" on his own.

This problem has been solved long ago: get a color calibrator and generate profiles for each of you printer + ink set + paper combination. Then you'll get reliable prints. Now let's get onto the real problem: why did my printer stop working with Ubuntu 11.04 ?

I've gotten a lot of the older Westwood games (original Command and Conquer and Red Alert, Renegade, etc) to run perfectly under Wine

You don't need Wine, they work in DoxBox too. I even wrote a nifty script to do everything for you.

From what I can tell from the documentation, Westwood originally ported most of their games to the Windows environment using DosBox. To get them to run on more modern versions of Windows, you simply need a more modern version of DoxBox. By running these games in Wine, you are really just running the game in DosBox in Wine. Why not cut out the middleman?

You can install the snap functionality on non unity linux using the following tutorial I wrote and some fellow readers helped to improve on the ubuntu forums. Link: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1294661

aint gonna be drinking that koolaid.

gonna look for an alternative.

Kubuntu 11 is fine. Out of 4 computers I only have 2 problems: one laptop with wifi problems it didn't have before and FF4 behaving strangely on another one. Never go with the mainstream.

aint gonna be drinking that koolaid.

gonna look for an alternative.

Kubuntu 11 is fine. Out of 4 computers I only have 2 problems: one laptop with wifi problems it didn't have before and FF4 behaving strangely on another one. Never go with the mainstream.

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-208449.html

#!/bin/bash
# This script creates a random password using sha1sum

echo "Enter the master password"
read -s MASTPASS

echo "Enter the reason"
read -s REASON

echo "Enter desired number of characters"
read -s DESNUM

echo
echo "Your random password is:"
echo $MASTPASS $REASON | sha1sum | cut -c1-$DESNUM
echo

Not massively secure, but obscure enough that it's not low hanging fruit and very simple.

Does you Thinkpad have a GPT or a MBR partition table?

For correcting a GPT problem I believe "gdisk" is the best tool for the job.

You could find out by booting the install disc and selecting "Try Ubuntu" instead of "Install Ubuntu"
Once at the desktop, Start software Center, choose "Software sources" from the "Edit" menu, tick the Universe repo and click the "Close" button.
You should then "sudo apt-get install gdisk" from a terminal and launch "gdisk" once installed.

You could have a look at GPT_Issues for some guidance if you're interested.

I started a negative thread, complaining about Unity, and it was quickly closed.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10737811#post10737811

I tried to slashdot it, but with a generally slashdot never posts my stories.

This appears to work.

Or if you want to get really fancy, DD-WRT lets you control the LEDs on your router. It probably wouldn't be that hard to create a script that flashes your bandwidth usage in Morse code at a predefined interval.

While the OS itself might not change, usually app versions get frozen to a particular level per release and only get updated in the repositories (aside from security and major bugfixes) on the change of the OS version.

Mod up, pls. It's amazing how many Ubuntu users don't understand this.

Here's a slower explanation: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10037618#post10037618

LTS is really not about Stable as in Crashes Less, it's about Stable as in Long Term Support of the repository. People who missed the bad old days of Dependency Hell upgrades don't quite grok what the repository system is doing for them.

... included support for hardware decoding in Flash 10.2.

For the record, Netflix uses Silverlight, not flash. :)

Unfortunately, it also uses DRM so Moonlight is a bust. Sadface.

Apparently you can: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-28733.html

Citation needed? It's obviously a subjective opinion and one that I base on seeing how many times package management systems have left users with broken software. Go visit Ubuntu forums for some good examples.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1486437

Well, I do have mod points, but I preferred to post in this thread.

As usual, many ./'ers are taking the legalistic approach of noting that Mark Shuttleworth can switch the commission system in Banshee. But that kind of comment is hardly useful. Of course, he can switch the commission system.

The more interesting question is: ought he?

Consider: You take a piece of code, given freely, with only the compensation being to give a commission to a separate open source project (GNOME), and you switch it to give the money to yourself. Real classy.

As far as the cries of, "It's not just a music player, it's a whole distro that Ubuntu is putting out": There's no way Ubuntu would have been able to release distros without the Ubuntu community.

Continue to piss them off, and they'll leave for some other pasture.

Oh, and, if, legally, Mark $huttleworth can switch the money mechanism in Banshee, then the community can also, legally, criticize him for it.

Finally, is there something that all the paid Ubuntu staff are doing other than coming up with lame purple-wallpaper imitations of Mac? It would have been totally fine for Ubuntu to create (even contribute to) an innovative media player, and take the funding for itself.

HP2663 colour inkjet, to the left of my laptop, great quality, speed and economy under Windows (pity about the 150MB+ Windows driver package), but under Linux the job goes off to the printer and never emerges; and

Congratulations, you have found an old, and likely invalid, Ubuntu bug report and misspelled the name of printer in it:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/hplip/+bug/599956

Epson CX4300 3-in-1, to the right of my laptop.

Another success for googling:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1659498

You don't even have those printers. You just google for "ubuntu printer problem".

I wrote an article about this in 2005. Basically, the MS hegemony meant people learned where to click things, rather than what they do and the concepts behind them.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=47652

In the 80s you didn't need to be a geek to use a computer, but at the same time you learned basic ideas that would let you feel at home on any system or OS. Now people just think, "Go to the start menu. No start menu? What the fuck what do I do???"

People with half a brain should be using Linux instead?

There's a distro for that.

http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://ubuntuforums.org/

That inconsistency is part of the trouble with the awesome bar. I don't go to Accuweather too often, but I've been there in the last couple of weeks. If I type in 'ac' or 'www.ac', my options are, in order:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=662909&page=2
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=userinfo&user=
http://www.neatorama.com/2010/10/07/new-software-adjusts-actors-body-shapes-automatically/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Neatorama+(Neatorama)
https://chaseonline.chase.com/MyAccounts.aspx
http://www.accuweather.com/
http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/#ss

I find this asinine, but some people like it. That's fine. Give me the option to have something sane and consistent. As someone else mentioned elsewhere, if they would just put the items with exact matches at the beginning of the domain first on the list (or give the option for it), it would help a lot. Then they'd just have to work on how slow it is.

I mentioned "every now and then" - so not talking about the bugs, or specifically this particular alpha release. I'm talking about the direction/design/"dream". They keep moving widgets around for not good enough reasons.

And some time ago, when I looked at 9.10 apparently there was no built-in GUI unified sound mixer: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/10964/how-to-fix-sound-issues-in-ubuntu-9.10/

That's very far from "Steve Jobs insanely great" right? In fact that situation is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE for a desktop OS. How many years of Ubuntu till 9.10 came out?

Yes the CLI alsamixer is bundled by default in the desktop 9.10 distro, but we're talking _desktop_ OS right? So you can end up with a situation where the mixer is somehow set to zero, you try the default sound volume control via the GUI and it doesn't help - the volume levels are way too low. Turns out you need to run alsamixer and push up the main mixer volume etc. IIRC 10.04 wasn't that great with sound either. Anyone have good news to report for 10.10? Sound "finally works"?

Fact is, stuff like "sound working" should be pretty basic for a "Desktop OS". I don't even recall people having the degree of stupid problems with sound on the Amiga or classic Mac or IIGS or ST. And XP certainly works better than Ubuntu in this area.

Then there's the clipboard: http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1571237

When you copy stuff to a clipboard, it should not vanish just because the original does. Otherwise it is NOT a clipboard. If the current batch of Desktop Linux designers do not think a working clipboard is a core feature for a Desktop GUI then they're sabotaging Desktop Linux as I said.

Lastly, how many of you use their GUIs to run a browser, and "screen" for window management for other stuff. How good really is your GUI if it can't do much better than screen in task management of many tasks? How old is screen.

I do use Ubuntu Linux, but as CLI machines/servers. Works well for that.

But anyone impressed by Ubuntu as a "Desktop Linux", has pretty low standards.

Are you kidding? Just do a little reading - Pulseaudio has been an epic disaster for Linux. I myself have had so many problems with it that I try to purge it from my systems now.

http://blog.neogeny.org/2010/04/07/pulseaudio-sucks/
http://guide.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1546926
http://amplicate.com/hate/pulseaudio

That's three - I can give you THOUSANDS. Forums with hundreds of people posting about Pulseaudio problems and asking how to remove it.

Pretending Pulse is OK is sticking your head so far in the sand that you probably can't get it back out again.

This was fixed in 2004, with Ubuntu's Code of Conduct. Telling people RTFM is forbidden, either you help or shut up. People sometimes wonder whats the big deal with Ubuntu, and I'm positive this is one of the main reasons. You can check the forum http://ubuntuforums.org/ or hop to Freenode's #ubuntu channel to see this policy in action. No matter how repeated or simple a question is, it is allowed and if you reply, it is to help, even if thats pointing someone to a well written help page (like the many at help.ubuntu.com).

That policy is written in detail here: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/conduct

Link please.

I think you're full of it, and are just trying to perpetuate some old myth about socially incompetent *nix-users.

You'll always be able to find rude people on the internet, but Linux related forums is in my experience some of most polite and helpful corners of the internet. Like people willing to spend hours helping you track down some obscure bug or misconfiguration.

Random recent example: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-851901-highlight-.html
And: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=872137

There are already touchscreen netbooks, so some people have already been working to get Ubuntu working on them. I think they've tackled a lot of the driver problems, but I imagine that any new hardware like this is going to have its own set of driver issues to tackle (and no manufacturer support). As for Android in a virtual machine, I think you'd just have to run the Android emulator in Eclipse?

I assume with your comment 'Ethernet works fine' that you can browse the net with no problems. What does it say when you try to update?

As well, have you tried the Ubuntu Forums? They are simply awesome when trouble shooting.

I agree but thats one of the things I like about Gnome/Linux. If you dont like the way something looks there is probably a way to do it. If you want it to look like OSX or Vista http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=490398 you can do that too.
They're just trying different things to see what people like best.

Yes. Here there is another problem at play: cp reads in the whole (big) file and then writes it out. This brings the whole file into the Linux pagecache (file cache).

Since you seem to know what you're talking about, I'll post this here in the hope that you at least have a general idea of how to answer my question.
Does anyone know if this is related to the atrocious write performance on USBs? The performance seems to asymptote to 0 when copying files with either Nautilus or cp, regardless of filesystem. Using dd with a large (100M) blocksize seems to resolve it, so I'm thinking it has something to do with lots of small, frequent writes to the USB.

Once the norm for app installation is the App Store (and perhaps Apple starts putting up "helpful" warning dialogs about "untrusted software")

OS X already puts up a dialog the first time you run some software that you've downloaded from The Intertubes.

then, yes, for the typical Stat 101 or Stats for Poets student who's never installed any non-commercial software in her life it will be a somewhat mysterious step and 20% of the class will want me to hold their hand.

So the mere existence of an App Store will add 5 "It's Weird And Exotic" points to "click on this link and {do the drag, answer the questions}"?

If you don't believe me, just look at this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=107340 and imagine the Apple equivalent.

I rather suspect the Apple equivalent already exists, without the help of the App Store. (Those posts date back to 2005 - at least according to the Wikipedia page for the Ubuntu Software Center, the Software Center showed up in 2009 or 2010, well after Prudentissimus asked how to install a shell file.)

Once the norm for app installation is the App Store (and perhaps Apple starts putting up "helpful" warning dialogs about "untrusted software") then, yes, for the typical Stat 101 or Stats for Poets student who's never installed any non-commercial software in her life it will be a somewhat mysterious step and 20% of the class will want me to hold their hand.

If you don't believe me, just look at this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=107340 and imagine the Apple equivalent.

http://syncevolution.org/ Looks fairly promising using your current setup. A brief look give the assumption it's compatible with evolution, and will connect up to anything that talks syncml, and there's a syncml client for nearly any smartphone out there. And some dated info found at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=398113 gives info on someone setting up evolution to talk activesync, which would allow for windows-based phones to sync up...

I've installed it on my Acer Aspire One netbook and for the most part it has been good. The new Unity interface has some severe performance problems in my experience though. Also, Unity doesn't currently let you do much in the way of customising it via GUI tools. Adding a custom launcher, for example, is quite long winded.

I'm using the standard gnome interface on my netbook now. I think Unity's got potential to become something really quite good, but I don't think it's ready yet.