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Bruce Perens on UserLinux and Ubuntu
SDenmark writes "Ever wondered what happened to UserLinux, and how it's faring now that Ubuntu has stolen the spotlight? Linux Format has an interview with Bruce Perens, founder of UserLinux, the Open Source Initiative and Linux Standard Base. Perens discusses the impact of Ubuntu, how industry bodies are helping open source and why figureheads are important for the Free Software community."
Figureheads are useles unless they're glamorous. I can see it now - (Pick your favorite Hollywood Floozie) dressed in a business suit touting the wonders of (favorite flavor Linux). Marketing speaks to mouth-breathers.
Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't UserLinux just sarge (when it was testing) pinning some sid packages? I honestly don't remember it being anything terribly more substantial than that along with some convenient metapackages like graphical-desktop-environment and enterprise-server.
When Perens announced at the Desktop Linux conference in MA a few years ago, it sounded like a pretty half-baked idea.
Interestingly enough, its listed under Inactive or Discontinued distributions on Wikipedia.
That's because it has been inactive for a very long time. In the article, Bruce says that he will try to get back to it.
I was on the UserLinux since the beginning and it's absolutely true. Please mod this as "informative", not "funny" !
... a paperplane ! woohoo !
In fact, the mailing list was more grumbling about the logo and the name than anything else. The only constructive work was done by an Italian guy who did the paperplane logo because he tought it was a good idea (and it was right).
Then, for the next two months, everyone was discussing the color of the plane, if it must point to left or right.
After 6 months of effort, we had
Ploum.net.
Every single one of them LOVE Ubuntu and will not switch back to windows. Why? installing new software is brain dead easy... Far easier than windows and MAC os has ever been, plus they all do not care about running brand name apps but simply something that works.
It sounds like your family and friends really don't need that much in the way of software. There are a lot of people that can basically live in a browser. That's fine, but once you need to step out that repository universe, installing software becomes much more difficult than on windows or mac.
I never quite understood why something like autopackage wasn't adopted as a universal package format and native package systems could be retrofitted to play nicely with it.
For example, a developer could just package up his code in an autopackage and it would just work with all the major distros. The native package system could go out and find all the dependencies and install them seamlessly. Of course there could be library versioning problems with that scenario, but who knows.
I actually consider Linux (or something like Ubuntu) to be a better fit for newbs than windows. I'll still use windows on my desktop though because I can basically get a full Unix environmnet, plus a whole lot more with windows. I tend to run colinux or an xserver to the machine in the basement.
ALWAYS use Synaptic, its loads stabler than Adept (and its interface is more traditional and not so 'search filter' lamed). Also don't use 'Kubuntu' iso installs, install Ubuntu then apt-get the kubuntu-desktop package.
Coincidentally, if you are doing development from within linux, you should use a distro you are comfortable with and actually know how its configured. Did you spend any time on ubuntuforums.org or (especially) on the irc channel asking for help? I've never come across a more nub friendly free support experience.
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