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New Ubuntu Foundation Announced
AccUser writes "Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Ltd, founders of the popular Ubuntu
Linux-based operating system, have today announced the creation of The
Ubuntu Foundation with an initial funding commitment of US$10m. From the article: 'The Ubuntu Foundation will employ core Ubuntu community members to ensure that Ubuntu will remain fully supported for an extended period of time, and continue to produce new releases of the distribution. As a first step, the Foundation announces that Ubuntu version 6.04, due for release in April 2006, will be supported for three years on the desktop and five years on the server.'"
I am very impressed by Ubuntu ease of use, and even more, by their commitment. When you have such an active community and big money behind such a project, it has a very good chance to succeed. It is amazing how much the folks at Ubuntu pay attention to minor usability issues.
If Linux ever becomes mainstream, it will be because of distributions like Ubuntu.
IMO Ubuntu is the distro most likely to break out into the main stream. I recently switched from Gentoo and can personally attest to the simplicity and ease of use of Ubuntu. The typical non-nerd doesn't want a command line; doesn't want to compile a custom kernel; doesn't know what "compiling" means. Ubuntu is perfect for the mainstream, and a guarantee that the project will continue is great news.
Long live Ubuntu! (And Kubuntu too)
I'm very happy that Ubuntu has come out of the gate, and done everything right. Since I've been using linux (1998) I've never seen any company so behind Linux as Cannonical have been, and I have a good feeling about this. Funny thing is, yesterday I just recieved my free Ubuntu cds; I 'ordered' 15 x86 versions, and 6 powerpc versions. I'm giving them to friends to try the 'live' option, and dropping them off at coffee cafe's, music stores and colleges. It's a good time to be using free software, and I think it can only HELP the world in coming together.
bad_outlook
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Is this vague enough for you?
Yes, if we could just get them all working together on some sort of United Linux, all of our problems would be solved...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
3 Years of desktop support and 5 years of server? The fact that Ubuntu is looking at long-term development for their OS instead of the usual 6-month fire-and-forget releases of many other Linux Distros subscribe to is an encouraging sign that Linux is coming of age.
Longer lifespans for Linux provides a level of security that will allow many users wary of switching over from Windows to start looking at a Linux distro as a serious replacement for their current OS. Just think: there IS an alternative to warning users that they have to buy a new OS for new features and security updates.
I'm only worried that theyll spend all $10m on pretzels and beer.
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Amadaeus
The last bastion of Mathie-ism
You forgot Fedora, which has a very large desktop share, and Slackware, which is still popular. And SuSe sees some popularity on servers. It's still pretty complicated. Not that this is nessessarily a bad thing, as others have said.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
I've been playing with Ubuntu lately, and I like it. There are some problems though:
Sound. I have to kill -9 the ESD process to get some applications to work. A lot of applications had to be tweaked individually after install.
Synaptic. Synaptic does its job, I can say that. But the user interface leaves a lot to be desired. I upgraded to Hoary yesterday. Why did that have to involve editing sources.list by hand?
Applications. Why the hell do newly installed applications need to be added to the menus manually? This is Ubuntu's biggest flaw. When you install a new program, you'd better know how to invoke it from the command line -- and good luck finding that out from Synaptic's description, which disappears after install anyway.
Firefox. Ubuntu's web browser of choice, Firefox, is unresponsive after opening new tabs. Firefox is much nicer in Windows. And IE for Windows is far more responsive than either.
Menus. I like the start menu organization. The "Places" menu is great. I was beginning to think that Linux was congenitally incapable of setting up the most important bit of UI on the system. The menu is even better in Hoary.
Folder Navigation. I don't like the fact that there is no back or up arrow when exploring file folders. This is massively stupid UI design.
All in all, it's a nice system. It's a million years behind Windows in usability; there is clunkiness present everywhere. But there are lots of free applications. As usual with Linux, it is so impossible to install or change anything without expert knowledge that you can safely recommend the system to your grandmother without the slightest fear that she will be able to mess anything up.
I was going to mod you up so we could see a healthy discussion on this topic, but I'll reply instead.
I have to respectfully disagree. I run Ubuntu on my laptop, and I have switched the
That's impossible simply because of the organization of Debian. It is not designed to be a supported commercial quality distro. Each maintainer has pure authority over their own packages.
Ubuntu strives to put together a cohesive distro without the infighting that happens so frequently. You must remember, time is money for these people. All the improvements on software that Ubuntu makes are available for Debian to pick up. Usually even submitted into Debian's bug system.