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Ubuntu: Desktop Linux's Success Story
Johhny writes "What is it about Ubuntu that has enabled it to grow so much? This distribution has clearly built on Debian's success but it has more than a few other things going for it. Ubuntu has become one of the most popular versions of desktop Linux despite its many differences from some of the other popular versions out there, including its scheduled releases and its counterpart, Kubuntu. The article takes a look at this distribution and tries to find out how Ubuntu defied the odds. This article generated a really informative comments page at OSnews."
... two hunters meet to discuss their predicament:
Ubuntu: Did you hear that? They took my name and made a Linux distro out of it! It's time to sue!
Jumanji: Hell yeah! That's what I've been saying all along!
The major barriers affecting linux adoption on the desktop is hardware compatibility. Ubuntu is constantly pushing these barriers. Consider the example of wireless cards - often a problem are for linux. For both of these cards (DWL-G650 PCMCIA and DL-520 PCI) (both Atheros chipsets) were automatically detected in installation. And to configure them, it was a simple application (network-admin). While there are still areas for improvement (WPA with wpa_supplicant) Ubuntu is still a great desktop OS.
And this is all without mentioning apt-get, the Ubuntu package tool. While using windows I constantly wish for the ease of use of apt-get. A simple apt-get update && apt-get upgrade is enough to update. I wish I could say the same for XP.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
I think the real success story here is the presence of an informative comments page at OSnews
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
One of the things that i think might have been a key to Ubuntu's success is the very fact that they didn't ship with the various multimedia libraries necessary. Yes it's all true that it installs easily on almost any hardware, and yes the chocolate coloured theme is quite pleasant. But i think there was a real magic trick to leaving out mp3's and avi's.
let me put it this way: you get a fresh clean install and there's nothing at all to configure or fuss with. seems great but you can't play mp3's. hunh? it's a small thing, you can figure it out. so you go and do a little search at Ubuntu and they explain that it's not free. you're a newbie to linux and you don't understand how it's different here than on your windows box. so you drift over to GNU and do a little reading. maybe you learn about free-as-in-beer vs free-as-in-speech.
then you go back to the friendly forums and find a nice step by step on how to add in extra repositories. wow, all this stuff is free, and hey look how much there is in the Universe, and then in the Multiverse. yoiks! this linux thing is amazing. and it's not so tough.
and i think that might be the whole point. someone waltzing into a full distro with everything in the world (even a program that will time how long your tea steeps) is a lot more intimidating than most of us really think. and of course the exact same goes for a distro that you're compiling from scratch. if there is any single thing i think Ubuntu has going for it, it is that it gives you everything a complete OS really needs to have (office, web, photos) but somehow sneaks in just a small lesson here and there about what the linux world is really about. if your parents can read a help menu (and the Breezy Badger help is one of the best i've ever read) they can figure out those little things that will eventually convert them to being true penguin lovers for life
Debian scores higher then I expected and since debian is hardly cutting edge it must be because its package system is considered so good. I can only think that this is also the reason that gentoo actually is visible despite the fact that it is a beast (I use it myself so I know what I am talking about).
It seems that the choice of software is less important. ubuntu is gnome by default (as far as I know) if you want kde it is called kubuntu and since in general KDE seems to be more popular (/me runs from an angry mob of Gnome fans + assorted fans from the gazzilion other desktops out there) it is odd to see a gnome distro score so high.
Oh well good luck to them but lets not be too optimistic about this shall we? The survey was after all only asking wich linux distro people had installed with no option for NONE. Ubuntu having x more installs then suse means very little when you realize both are fighting over the table scraps left by MS.
Although, IF the PS3 + HD addon does indeed have the capacity to run user choosen linux apps (IBM's own site reports that they ported it succesfully and it can run most PPC (mac) linux apps without modification) then we might see a huge potential market for linux being opened up. MS will probably not allow windows to run on the PS3 (although a sony spokesman did suggest that the cell should be able to run any OS) so that leaves the field right open (Apple has already declined to use the cell in its new computers) for linux.
Can you imagine millions of living room desktop machines? Supercomputer linux. Droool. Oh and no driver problems since you will know EXACTLY what hardware is inside a PS3. The biggest handicap of linux (no drivers for every piece of crap hardware outthere) solved in a flash.
Worth considering I think for any distro that wants to be handed a few million virgin computers with NO ms inside and a hardware maker that would love to shaft MS like it has never been shafted before.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It seems that the choice of software is less important. ubuntu is gnome by default (as far as I know) if you want kde it is called kubuntu and since in general KDE seems to be more popular (/me runs from an angry mob of Gnome fans + assorted fans from the gazzilion other desktops out there) it is odd to see a gnome distro score so high.
... People are all focused on making a nice system for you no matter what you happen to prefer. It's the idea that things should work well together, be cooperating, not competing.
Well, usually both Ubuntu and Redhat are very high on any use list; on distrowatch, Gnome-based distros have frequently been at the top. The vocal people - the ones that are very visible and audible - are a fairly small group, and not representative for the large group of users. You have to be both passionate and fairly knowledgeable to bother to vote or fill in survey results about such arcane things as the choice of desktop. Most people just don't care that strongly either way.
And I think that is exactly what Ubuntu is getting right. Yes, apt is nice, the distro has a lot of spit and polish applied, and it has a wide and current selection of packages to choose from. But most important, Ubuntu is inclusive. People on the mailing lists and forums really _don't_care_ if you're running Gnome or KDE; or if you prefer Vi or EMACs, or
Since that attitude is fairly pervasive on everything from mailing lists to Wiki docs, people feel welcome, they feel appreciated. It's easy to get help because it's easy to _ask_ for help; you can feel nobody is going to call you an idiot for asking a dumb question. I think that is really what sets it apart and what makes it so popular.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
hmmm ... :p
not to be a complete troll but most applications that have security exploits exposed are also used in other distros
and ubuntu is the only one brave enough who gives out warnings and security updates at the same time to keep you safe. other distros just leave you in darkness or provide you with packages that are safe, but sadly older than my grandma. if you compare the number of codelines in package sources to the number of ubuntu/debian developers/packagers, you will find out that there developers and packagers are always and forever hopelessly outnumbered. it's impossible for them to create distro from opensource packages which is 100% secure, but unlike redhat and it's colleagues, debian/ubuntu people have the guts to tell you that "hey, there's a bug or a security flaw here".
if one company in redmond doesn't have the staff to check it's 100 applications for flaws, how do you suppose a bunch of opensource workers or a few hundred redhat people can pull the security checks off for thousands of applications ? it's pretty clear that they just can't. you are no safer with any other linux distro.
i use ubuntu on my laptop because i'm a fan of debian, but a raw debian on a laptop is hardly as nice as ubuntu. so this is the "gui version" of debian for me. i know how to keep it safe and i know how to keep it clean. most commercial distro users have no idea about any of this on their machines. and this successfully nullifies their idea to go on linux for better security. ignorance may be bliss, but it won't protect your files.
nothing can protect the computer from the ignorance and stupidity of the end user, not even the "supermegabest distro".
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
I agree, and I think this is important and is often overlooked. Ubuntu people I've chatted with on IRC are among the most friendly and helpful people I've experienced online or off. This really matters, and it matters at least as much as, (and to a newbie, especially, quite a bit more than,) the technical merits behind differences between distros or desktops. I've always respected Debian, but I can't say I'll be going back to their IRC channels.
I've only been using linux for about two years and I recently switched over to Ubuntu (I used Fedora and Suse previously). At first the warm tones of the human theme and the gnome desktop threw me off, but now I quite like them, and even if I hadn't it's not hard to get around them. There are two reasons I prefer ubuntu:
1.It is well thought out. Not only did I find ubuntu easy to setup the way I wanted it, but it had a lot of nice added touches like sound effects. The ubuntu website makes it pretty easy to get any information you need.
2. What really appealed to me about linux in the first place was the idea of people freely helping and empowering one another, without being reliant, or not as directly reliant on corporate interests. Ubuntu seems to capture that spirit very nicely. I like the idea of a distro striving to be equally accessible to people of different regions and with differing physical abilities.
That said, if they shot the three happy hugging people in the togetherness logos I wouldn't get upset.
Is it successful because of the number of downloads or ordered CDs? We all know that is not a very reliable measure of success. The number of searches on Google? The number of positive articles submitted on the web? Doesn't say anything about actual usage, as we all know.
For most companies support is important. You can't afford to have a desktop no one can fix if something goes wrong. Which is why Xandros could be attractive to companies, or maybe Fedora/Red Hat/SuSE. Ubunto might be solid as a rock and work out-of-the-box, but I doubt companies would use it unless you have people that can support in in-house, or from a company (that you've actually heard of before). Which is basically why people use Windows. It "works" and you can easily get support if something goes wrong. And you've got Office. (Again something most people think is exclusive to Windows).
As for users .. For most users "Linux" is just like "Windows", just more isoteric (read: difficult) .. but free. (Free is not always a good thing, remember that. Free means crappy and unsupported to some.)
The distro names have no meaning to them, just like the difference between "Windows XP" and "Windows 2000" might be lost to them (except that they might know XP is newer than 2000, and newer means better .. right?). What is important to most is that they can read their mail, surf the web, write documents and play an occational game (raise your hand if you've heard of someone that don't like Linux because "games don't work").
What it all boils down to is .. this "success story" seem an awful lot like preaching to the already converted. It's "successful" to a limited community. Just like Gentoo was "successful" a while back (and still is, except that no one's talking about it anymore). Next year something else will be "successful". And people will still use Windows .. :\
(K)Ubunto is a nice distro. No need to hype it.
/* Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana */
Well, I second to everything for that matter. Ubuntu doesn't try to be too lean, or too optimized. (I've done LFS, btw.) Doesn't try to put every single app in the galaxy into 3-4 DVDs. It's just right, and it just works. I don't mean to be a flamebait (and I'd suppose this has been hovering at the backs of the minds of more than just a couple or people) but I guess it has captured that "Windows formula" and then some.
Make everything fit on a CD, plus the essential stuff that'll run your PC. Plus don't give out too archaic, or too dumbed-down error messages.Make adding and removing programs a snap.
I just love the Synaptic Package Manager. To Windows users, its like Critical updates on steroids. Like I said, everything just works, and everything's, convenient. That's the word I was looking for.
It's sad to see an opinion piece based on a news story about a survey that doesn't really tell you anything concrete about what the opinion piece claims to be about. If you look at the survey, you see that only 50 percent of the respondents claim they have already deployed Linux on the desktop. The question about distros asks which distro they're considering or currently running. So there's a good chance half the people are doing rectal extrapolations based on what they've been mulling over after reading something somewhere in the mainstream media about easy-to-use versions of desktop Linux.
And the survey choices can be questioned. They list quite a few distros, but don't have three -- Mepis, Slackware and Damn Small -- that have been in the Distrowatch top 10 for a while now.
Worse, the guy who wrote the opinion piece goes out of his way to lump Kubuntu in with Ubuntu (which seems fair, given the Kubuntu respondents would probably pick Ubuntu), but doesn't lump the two versions of Suse and Red Hat together. Maybe he was put off by the fact Suse would have ended up with 60 percent of some imaginary number (seeing as respondents could apparently choose as many distros as they wanted) and beat out Ubuntu. I can see why they would want paid-versus-free information on the survey, but if you're doing an opinion piece strictly about popularity, I think you should lump them together.
But popularity is the point. And the little note about the survey getting more attention in some communities than others is, I think, the telling point. I use Slackware and Ubuntu, and as somebody who lurks in both communities, my take is that Slackers are busy keeping to themselves, solving their own problems and doing stuff, while those Ubuntu guys set aside some time in their days for evangelism. They're everywhere, and they're apparently writing and voting all the while. Reminds me of when I was a Mac user and certain sites would link to online surveys to make sure the Mac platform wasn't left out. You could watch the numbers change as the word spread in the Mac community, skewing the results.
So the article is air, and not even hot air at that. That said, I use Ubuntu on my laptop after getting several distros (Gentoo, Slackware, FreeBSD...) almost there (damn suspend and CPU frequency scaling). I popped in Ubuntu and everything worked out of the box. It's not my main machine, so it's the path of least resistance. And we all know how appealing that is to most people.
Not that any other distro does either, but it's something the average user would miss, and it makes a heap of difference to media performance...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Here's a topical answer for you: One of the major factors in Ubuntu's technical success has been the no-questions-asked, "Just Works" philosophy it shares with GNOME, and the application of that philosophy to the entire operating system stack. If you needed any proof that real users are begging for simplicity in their digital life, look no further than the spectacular rise of Ubuntu and the even more spectacular rise of Google.
By the time the bloom has worn off of Breezy, Dapper will be in open beta. You'll see lots of articles about it. Then it will be released and you'll see more articles about it.
And so on.
It's the 6 month cycle that feeds the journalists' need for new material.