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Looking Forward, Ubuntu Linux 6.06
SilentBob4 writes to tell us that Mad Penguin has an interesting look at the upcoming version of Ubuntu. From the article: "All in all, Ubuntu 6.06 is gearing up to be quite an impressive release. Granted, I saw some bugs during my stay on the distribution, but can I really complain? It's not a full release, so it deserves some breathing room. Considering some of the horribly authored software I've looked at over the years, I feel that Ubuntu in pre-release form is more stable than other distros when they reach final release status. It's not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora in that respect yet, but it's surely getting there in a hurry. As I said before, it smoked Fedora Core 5 performance-wise, so in that department it's solidly ahead."
digged and slashdotted on the same day.
Features
* Linux kernel 2.6.15-18 PREEMPT
* X.org 7.0
* gcc 4.0.3/glibc 2.3.6
* GNOME 2.13.94
* Firefox 1.5.0.1 web browser
* Evolution 2.5.92 email/groupware client
* OpenOffice 2.0.2 productivity suite
* Gaim 1.5.0 instant messenger
* Gimp 2.2.10 image editor
I haven't been keeping up with the 4.0 branch of GCC, but is 4.0.3 really stable enough for the average home user?
It's Dapper Drake. (translation: Good-looking male duck.)
"I feel that Ubuntu in pre-release form is more stable than other distros when they reach final release status. It's not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora in that respect yet, but it's surely getting there in a hurry."
Isn't FC intended as a test distro for new Red Hat stuff? I'm not a seasoned FC user but I've always thought FC releases were not first and foremost stable so much as innovative.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Agreed ... I tried first Fedora Core 5 and then Dapper Drake flight 6 on the same hardware not a week ago, and after 2 or 3 hours of Ubuntu gladly switched back to Fedora. There was no appreciable speed difference at all, and if anything the poorer driver auto-detection (rumours of it being better were why I tried it in the first place) and x86_64 package availability was enough to send me back to Fedora.
...
I guess for every "in the wild" example there's a counter-example
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
Thanks (u|k|x|edu)buntu devs.
I just can't be bothered.
I found this book helpful: Linux Desktop Pocket Guide
It covers Ubuntu, Fedora Core, Gentoo, SuSe, and Madriva. It should have enough information to get what you need done.
Have you tried searching the Ubuntu forums?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am a developer on the Linux platform and have been using linux since 1999. About a week ago, I was ready to install a linux distro since my old HD bit the dust (on my new custom-built Asus SLI AMD64 box). After hearing all the press about Ubuntu, I burned a copy and tried it. I found the install slightly painful.
/etc/hosts file to include my hostname. After doing this, gnome allowed me to configure my network. (Why can't the installer do this?)
Installation:
On my first install, I tried partitioning a 300 GB Fat32 partition at the end of the drive for sharing cross-OS stuff (mp3s, etc. I'd tried a windows Ext2 driver previously, but it eventually corrupted the partition and I lost all my recent mp3s) and 2 GB swap and the rest for the OS. Ubuntu absolutely failed to format the one partition Fat32, gave me an error and choked. OK. How tbout ext2? Well, that choked too. Not caring about that partition, I decided to just bypass the step manually and have it copy the OS. I can always format the partition manually. It choked setting up apt (for reasons I don't understand). I decided that, despite manually partitioning every linux distro I've ever used, I'd let ubuntu choose for me. This seemed to "work".
Configuration:
The first thing any computer user wants to do is get on the internet. I've got a static IP where I live so I decided to set up the networking. Unfortunately, without a working hostname, there's literally no way to do this. On bootup, gnome suggested I manually edit my
On the positive side all of my devices (audio/video) were configured correctly but on the downside, there doesn't seem to be any good way of upgrading packages (Firefox to 1.5 or my NVidia drivers) when the current version isn't in the repository (I'm probably missing something).
I'm hoping with the new release, Ubuntu can fix some of these usability issues while keeping their slick package management.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
1) No iTunes clone. amaroK - yeeeeech...
You can always apt-get banshee. Banshee allows you to manage your ipod, and the daapd plugin (which is also in the apt repositories) allows you access iTunes music shares, as well as share your own library with iTunes clients.
What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it's your mind. -Zappa
To turn it around, I noticed growing trend of smug and arrogant attitudes towards Ubuntu and its user base..or rather its *perceived* user base.
Get 6.06 here.
What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it's your mind. -Zappa
Ubuntu needs to stay the course with Gnome. Let the whiners whine. Ubuntu needs to stay focused onto what it is, a highly polished Gnome desktop distribution.
If everybody that whines gets the attention they want, Ubuntu will become as bloated as any other general purpose distro.
"1) Canonical sponsors many more gnome developers than KDE developers -- just look how many more gnome-related commits appear in the Dapper commit log."
Duh. Ubuntu is a distro built around Gnome.
"2) Edubuntu, whose education-specific programs come almost exclusively from the KDE Education Suite, runs on gnome instead of KDE. Canonical has never sponsored a KDE Education Suite developer, even though Edubuntu simply wouldn't exist without their work."
And the KDE Education Suite developer would still be doing what they were doing if there were no Ubuntu. Sounds like they are starting to get a bit eager for some of the pie, even though they volunteer to do what they do.
"3) Canonical does not financially support the team that creates Kubuntu-LiveCDs, so they have to pay all the expenses from their own pockets."
Did Canonical say they would finacially support the team creating the Kubuntu-Live cds? If not, hey, it's a vounteer operation just like most other distros. Suck it up. You chose the job.
"4) Kubuntu doesn't accept community contributions (ie. contributions by anyone beside Jonathan Riddell and Andreas Mueller). A lot of volunteers wanted to contribute, but they can't because they have no access."
Don't know anything about this situation, so I'll give it a big "So what? The people that run Kubuntu can do whatever they want to do. It's their baby.".
"5) The name of the version featuring gnome is called Ubuntu, while the version featuring KDE has a K added to the front. This makes it sound like gnome is the default, standard, and KDE is some sort of offshoot. It would be more equitable to name them Ubuntu-KDE and Ubuntu-GNOME, or Kubuntu and Gubuntu.
"
Oh boo-fucking-hoo. Cry me a river. Maybe because Gnome *IS* the default standard for Ubuntu, and KDE is an offshoot?
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
I've been using Ubuntu Dapper Drake (Ubuntu 6.06) Alpha 5 for about a month or so, and am very impressed with it. Of course, one can't expect the stability of a stabe release from an alpha, but ever since I installed it, I've been very surprised as to how stable it is for an alpha. This makes me look forward to the stable release even more -- if the alpha's like this... the stable release will be awesome! The best thing I like about Ubuntu (especially in Dapper) is its hardware support. I have hardware (such as a touchpad, etc.) that never worked correctly in other distros (it even had quirks in Windowze). Ubuntu had great drivers, but Dapper is awesome. Thanks, Ubuntu Devs!
Most people are working on things that benefit all of Ubuntu, not just one desktop. And since Ubuntu started specifically as a polished Gnome desktop - and since that was a major reson for the early enthusiasm - it is hardly strange that most employees and contributors are Gnome users and developers as well.
Same with the name - Gnome is the first and default desktop, with Kubuntu a later addition. And if there is any workers missing, it would be someone dedicated to polishing Edubuntu, not adding people to projects that alreade have staff working on it.
Further, it seems it's not actually the German Kubuntu people that are protesting, but some offshoot of the official group that (somewhat strangely) wants to both leave the commonality of Ubuntu behind and get paid for it by Canonical at the same time. They also seem to be asking for transfer of "officialdom" from that other KDE group. It looks more like some internal fight among the KDE people than anything else, with this offshoot angry that Gnome, not KDE, is the default desktop for Ubuntu.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I applaud them for this and this is soemthing that's been needed. Look I want to work on my program, my server, my web server or some other thing. I don't want to have to dick with things like getting the frickin hardware to work. Ubuntu has made great strides in this arena. Also, they are absolutley correct in saying the IRC help channel should be absolutely helpful. Telling someone to RTFM or to just google it isn't a solution.
Gorkman
TFA also mentioned that Ubuntu "beat the shit out of Fedora" in terms of the package management GUI. Unless the package manager in Ubuntu does some really cool things that Fedora's stock yum frontends can't do (install, remove, groups, dependencies...), how can it beat really beat the shit out of anything?
He also said Ubuntu looks very professional while the latest Fedora looks like a circus act. Come on, now. Based on screenshots, Ubuntu and Fedora look very similar. I don't see how either looks more or less professional than the other at all. Surprise, surprise! They both use recent versions of Gnome! The only major, obvious difference is that Ubuntu defaults to orange while Fedora defaults to blue. Big deal.
By the way, I admit that I use Fedora daily, so I might (cough) be a little biased.
I use Kubuntu but I'd like to offer the protesting 'developers' a nice big cup of SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Ubuntu is a GNOME based distro. Kubuntu is an offshoot KDE version.
Ubuntu with its default Gnome interface is polished and very 'usable'. My son learned to navigate it at 3 years old. KDE is no where near as simple to navigate, its a whored up MS Windows start menu + pretty OS X-ified effects. And I use KDE.
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Don't mod me down as flamebait right away.
Then don't go and Godwin yourself right off the bat by saying "the people on the freenode channels are complete nazis when it comes to "Politically correctness" and "being helpfull"."
The vast majority of Ubuntu people seem to really stick with that "Linux for Human Beings" thing they have plastered on their website. And good for them.
On a slightly different note: when did observing and calling someone out for rude or dumb behavior start getting derided for being bad?
Person A: "L0lz, I have this linux problem 'foo', where 'bar' doesn't work and that's teh ghey!"
Person B: "Hey, that calling that remark 'gay' wasn't necessary, and wasn't polite. Fix 'bar' by doing 'bleh', and 'foo' should work."
Person A:"OMG, STFU, political correctness!"
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
I'm eager to try out the new Ubuntu when it comes out. Will we be able to upgrade to 6, or will we need to do a complete reinstall? I used to have FC4 x86_64 on my system, and have since then put Ubuntu on it. I think I like Ubuntu more. I was dissapointed/annoyed that so much of the stuff built into FC were missing in Ubuntu, but I've pretty much added back everything I wanted (using synaptic, which is best package manager I've played with yet). The big thing I was missing was the stuff to compile stuff by hand, but it looks like after RTFA, that will be easy to fix (apt-get install build-essentials). I also wish the Ubuntu repository was a little more up to date, because I've had to install some stuff by hand. But the big pros have been the great package manager. Wine, Firefox, and whatnot work good in my chroot, better than I got them to work in FC4. X was leaking memory on my system in FC4, but with Ubuntu it doesn't. Overall, I liked both alot, but I think I like Ubuntu a little bit better.
I'm not a programmer. I don't develop software, and I don't really write code.
I _am_ a programmer. I _do_ develop software, and I write code all the time. And I love Ubuntu, for precisely the reason the OP seems to dislike it. If it's simple for the beginner, it mostly means it's simple for the experienced user as well.
I'm not interesting in using a desktop. My interest is in doing my job or pursuing my hobbies, and a desktop should just get out of the way and make it as easy and transparent as possible for me to do so. And of course, whenever I need a shell, it's still right there for me to use (and while I do use the shell a lot, it's still less than it used to be).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Why is speed of a distro even an issue?? Turn off the crap you don't want if you want to go faster. You aren't going to get significant speed gains by switching distros. If you don't want to lose feature set, the MOST you can expect to gain by switching distros while retaining your current feature set is maybe 5%.
Compile your kernel.. you will get a bigger speed gain here by filtering out what you don't need and it's a WHOLE lot easier than switching distros. If you REALLY want the last 5-10% then compile and strip EVERYTHING yourself custom for YOUR processor. No distro is going to do that for you because they need to remain generic so that they run on "x86" instead of "Dual Proc Pentium 3 Coppermines only". If you want to do that, then get Gentoo, which exactly why Gentoo exists. Switching from one generic binary distro to another is just changing a few details about how certain peices of the OS fit together and what is on or off by default and has nothing to do with speed.
I'm a *nix user (various flavours) for over 10 years now, and have been running Linux on the desktop both at home and in the office for the past two and a half years. I'm a professional *nix sysadmin, with experience ranging from embedded systems to supercomputers.
I don't feel like Ubuntu is dumbed down at all. I feel like it's easy to use, with sensible defaults. I love that it's a distro that works out of the box, and yet it still allows me all the power of a Debian box (without the politics and glacial pace of change).
Next time my Mum needs her WinXP box "fixed" again, I'll be using Ubuntu to fix it. And yet I'll still be using it myself - two unix users from about as far apart on the spectrum as you can get, with their needs both met by the same distro. I like that.
..and I'll form the head!!
I've noticed this "dumbening" (is that how you spell it?) as well. I've been on Ubuntu since 4.10 and little by little, I realised things were creeping into it that made it fluffier, softer, and weaker. Along these lines, though I realise it happened before Warty, what the hell was wrong with cd's and flash drives mounting in 'mnt'?!?! Doesn't that make sense? You mount things in mount! Perfectly logical to me. But nope, now they go to media.
But back to it. Today I was checking out the screenshots of dapper - trying to decide exactly what to put on my new box due friday - and noticed something horrifying; something so terrifying I stopped dead. Screenshot #6 is particularly ominous. I'm not sure what will be going on this new box of mine, but in light of recent evidence, I'd say that Dapper is not the forgone conclusion it once was.
The matter of the UI toolkit is partly a matter of taste. There are certainly areas where gtk+ and Qt are inferior to other implementations, but I don't think it's as drastic as you make out, nor do I think that cloning the Apple UI is the correct solution. I actually find getting around the Mac UI somewhat painful at times, and I think you'll find that a large part of the problem you're encountering stems from familiarity and taste (especially WRT appearance).
If there are specific instances where behaviour changes would improve usability, please submit suggestions to the gtk+ team and to TrollTech. Suggesting a wholesale "research and rip off" of the Mac OS X GUI is neither helpful, nor likely to ever happen.
If you're looking for an environment that behaves exactly like OSX....
Might I suggest...
OSX?
Seriously, if your measure of acceptability is "closer to Apple standard" and your problem with a desktop is that it doesn't behave identically to OSX, why are you thinking of switching to anything? OSX is obviously already perfect.
On the other hand, I'm personally never likely to use any environment that's much like OSX very often. Just not my cup of tea. A lot of us think that OSX isn't the holy grail of desktop computing. Sorry about that.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Here's the new link. :)
Would you mind writing a couple of sentances then? I've not noticed much difference :-/ Also some backing up of your statements generally would be a good idea -- a lot of moaning "it sucks!" with no specifics or suggestions make you look like just another troll
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
You may now proceed to mock my spelling and grammar in response. Nonetheless, I think that this article is a prime example of "juvenile journalism."
FC5 is very snappy indeed. It's the most responsive Gnome desktop I have used so far. Much better than Ubuntu 5.04. If the article is right, and the new Ubuntu really smokes FC5 with respect to speed, I will be impressed. This really looks good for Linux.
Usability is getting better and better for each new release of Gnome.
It is now at a state where it leaves Windows XP in the dust, and is seriously starting to get to the same levels of usability as MacOS-X.
Vista will need to be very good to beat this, or perhaps even more pollished Linux distros, using Gnome 2.16 that probably will be available by the time Vista hits the market.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
I installed the Dapper version of Kubuntu on my lappy yesterday. The install was quick and it automagically detected almost all my hardware. The only issue was with the wireless network. It would not work during the install, but it did detect my card and I was able to manually start the network after installation with a few commands. I still prefer KDE to Gnome, but I think I'll give Gnome another try once Dapper comes out. Like an idiot I failed to create a /home partition on my current install, so when Dapper is released, I'll just do a fresh install and try out Gnome.
I use Kubuntu as my every day desktop. Windows partition was deleted yesterday. :)
Smeghead every day of the week.
Hey, I was in the same boat for a while. I never had the solid block of time to learn all of Linux, so I weaned myself in rather successfully by doing the following:
1) start by using win32 versions of some popular OSS for your daily or occasional tasks. You probably already use Firefox, but OpenOffice and the GIMP are good ones to put on a windows machine. Perhaps the best lessons for me at this stage were installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP, but go with whatever you use.
2) use them. Go through an upgrade or reconfiguration, and use them for your day-to-day tasks. Linux becomes a really quick thing to pick up if you're already comfortable with all the apps you'll be using. Seriously, if you have experience with all your apps, then it's just a matter of getting stuff installed and set up, and you're at near 100% productivity instead of having to learn how to format paragraphs in your word processor.
3) make your first install on a computer other than your main computer. If absolutely necessary, dual-boot your main computer, but getting set up on a secondary computer is useful for two reasons-- if something's not working correctly or you're in the middle figuring something out, it doesn't stop your day-to-day computing. Also, while you're working on one, you can be browsing the web for guides and tips on the other.
4) don't try to install every package you might possibly need at once. start with a basic setup, then add and configure apps as you have a need for them. all the big distributions have strong app-adding capabilities, so don't worry about not being able to add X after you get the box up and running.
5) three tools you should make sure you have and get familiar with-- google, man, and a text editor.
hope this helps
My boss spent two months getting a set of robotics cameras to work with Mandrake 10, recompiling a bunch of custom kernels, getting various gurus in, working every day from january through march, just to get the camera data read properly by the libraries and the libraries working properly with the system.
We were talking about distros, and I mentioned that he might want to check out Ubuntu.
An hour or two later I get this incredibly emotional call from him. He had installed Ubuntu on the robot, one-click-built the camera packages, compiled the vision libraries, and it worked. 30 minutes of system install plus literally 10 minutes of compiling and he had just done what took him two months on another distro. He is still in shock over this.
That having been said, I'm running Dapper as of yesterday, and I had to do crazy tricks to get it to actually print to my standard, detected printer.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
I bought an emachine specifically for Ubuntu to play around with and get to know the OS. I couldn't get the Breezy 5.10 or the 6.X beta to recognize the onboard NIC, video or onboard audio. I want to get to know the OS. I don't want to have to know how to install or create a driver at this point. Maybe after I get my feet wet with the OS. I returned the emachine and put Ubuntu on the back burner. From what I was told, there just aren't any drivers written for alot of onboard components yet. =(
Adjusting the screen resolution is one problem I've consistently seen with Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
This review is too kind on the matter for the audience I talk to; suggesting that novices use "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" and answer questions about their hardware is not something I'd recommend to novices. While other parts of Ubuntu GNU/Linux shine for the novice, this is not one of them. Fedora Core GNU/Linux has always been better at letting me use the GNOME screen resolution adjuster (and setting the default to the highest screen resolution at the highest refresh rate so I don't often have to adjust the screen resolution at all) and getting the desired results.
I hope Ubuntu's chosen resolution picks the native resolution for LCD screens. I mostly work with users who have older computers and CRTs but are planning to switch to LCDs real soon now.
Digital Citizen
Has Linux *really* reached a point where stability is an issue, or is this a red herring misleading those that don't use it? If indeed it does have stability issues, how often does it crash? What are the chances of losing a filesystem?
You know, all this talk about Linux stability is really more related to the advancement of bloated desktop environments and poorly tested features and new versions.
Every distro is constantly rebuilding the latest KDE and GNOME with $NEW_FEATURE and sometimes it doesn't work well or isn't well tested.
I believe that you could disable X (or run twm) and run just about any Linux distro as a rock-solid server.
But... as time goes on, Linux users evolve (or should I say devolve?) and more people consider Linux-the-desktop-experience to be Linux. If you run a bleeding edge Linux distro and try Beagle, it might well crash. Does that make Linux unstable? Depends on your audience...
Well, I use both fedora and debian (but not yet Ubuntu) and I can say that while yum has made great strides since FC1 (when it was essentially unusable), debian kicks the shit out of fedora in this respect. Primarily this is the advantage of having what amounts to a HUGE core -- almost any free package I ever looked for was available from the standard debian repositories. Even counting extras fedora has a relatively small base of pakcages, and they have consistently abandonded older packages that some of us still use. Thus a fedora user must add a number of alternate repositories, which can frequently have package name conflicts with each other and from one release of core to the next.
Even within core+extras I have had to manually resolve conflicts with rpm when upgrading from one release to the next. It has been a long time since I have come up against an upgrade that couldn't be resolved by apt with no help, or at most using "dist-upgrade" instead of "upgrade".
Again, I haven't used Ubuntu, so I don't know how much of this applies to that comparison, but I would say it is definately possible to soundly beat fedora on package management.
Also, apt-get continues to be way faster and use way less memory. When I recently upgraded a system to FC5 and upgraded 100+ packages from extras the transaction check thrashed the machine to death (with 512 MB RAM) and still took over and hour after upgrading to 1 GB RAM (On a dual Athlon MP). apt-get has never done than even on much less powerful systems.
It's time to change that absolutely ghastly default colour scheme.
Otherwise Ubuntu is beautiful.
Your comment ommits the fact that some people don't want to invest allot of time to see performance benefits. Yes you can compile everything, but most people don't want to sit around for that. Don't get me wrong, I like gentoo as much as the next ricer, but I will admit the strengths of ubuntu/debian. And you as a gentoor (new word?) should appreciate not having to disable extra stuff, but rather enable the bloatware.
Has Linux *really* reached a point where stability is an issue, or is this a red herring misleading those that don't use it? If indeed it does have stability issues, how often does it crash? What are the chances of losing a filesystem?
Stability is only an issue at the desktop level (Gnome, KDE, OOffice, Firefox and so on), and xBSD are running the same stuff as Linux at that level, and they're overall equally crash-prone no matter what platform.
On the kernel level, I haven't seen a crash for years - and that was when I was fiddling with a device driver, making it my own fault. I know the closed-source Nvidia drivers can apparently take down a machine, but then again, you'd have the same situation on BSD if you have the drivers.
On the file system level, the standard file systems seem very, very stable. I have never heard of disk corruption that wasn't hardware related. The more experimental stuff, like ReiserFS, seem anecdotally less stable; but then, they aren't used by default either. As usual, if you want to live on the bleeding edge, expect to cut yourself from time to time.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
My advice?
Forget about getting a perfectly working desktop system, and just concentrate on learning Linux. Don't treat the project as a plug and play Windows or Mac replacement so much as a side project learning a new (and very different) system. Linux is a rewarding and fun system with the right expectations, and the willingness to take your time learning stuff.
If you are new to *nix altogether - I would even say forget about the GUI altogether and learn Linux from the ground up with the command line (on an old surplus PC) and maybe some stuff like Apache etc. IMO learning Linux is easier from the bottom up rather than the top down. Starting with a nearly fully configured desktop is just too much complexity to take in at first.
Installing non detected drivers requires a level of skill that is much higher than that needed to just use Linux. You will struggle if you decide to tackle that as your first lesson. Start with simpler goals and you will soon find that over time you can tackle trickier problems much easier as the info you find on the web starts making more and more sense.
Learn Linux because you want to learn Linux, not so you can just replace something else.
Ubuntu was a good choice - I'd recommend just forgetting about trying to get the sound working for now. If Ubuntu doesn't autodetect it, it will probably be a 'hard' problem for you at this stage. Just start learning and playing with the stuff that does work, and worry about the sound drivers much later on.
Let's clear up the misrepresentation.
n ounce/2005-December/000028.html
Breezy (5.10) uses hotplug and udev. This is the nice, comfortable way with which most people using Linux 2.6 are probably at least vaguely familiar. Dapper (6.06) has ditched hotplug and uses udev. Why? Linux 2.6.15 and udev perform everything that the older 2.6.12 kernel, udev, and hotplug performed. Read more here [0].
Next, Dapper currently has v1.1.1 of the ipw2200 driver, and it supports "wardriving" just fine.
[0] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-an
I've been a long time Linux user (Debian) and it still is my favourite OS on custom built PCs. But what still bugs me about it - especially after using OS X for almost two years now - is that you need to be a computer expert to get it running. I know you have to be the same when installing Windows from scratch, but I've stopped taking Windows as the bar like 6 years ago.
I recently did an update on my debian box and again the german keyboard is gone and I've got wrong (english) characters everywhere. There goes half and hour of research and fixing again. When I go about and reinstall it (or Ubuntu or something else) I better be fully aware of all my hardware and it's chipsets or else I will have serious trouble getting Linux to work. When you run Linux you usually know your HW inside out but it's been nearly 3 years ago since I last did some larger setup and config. I write my HW specs on small stickers that I put everywhere on my cards and MB but thats quite a prospect - opening your box so you can prep for a fresh Linux install that will take 20hrs.+ before everything is where it was before.
Obviously I'm getting old and gotta get real work done rather than fiddling with crummy x86 architectures, but admit it, I've got a point, no? Remember the C64? Unpack, plugin, works. That's how modern computers should work.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Mandriva may use KDE as a default but offers a well-polished and stable GNOME environment (and a bunch of other desktops) as well, just a few mouseclicks away. They employ developers that work on both "big" desktops, too.
Ubuntu needs to stay the course with Gnome. Let the whiners whine. Ubuntu needs to stay focused onto what it is, a highly polished Gnome desktop distribution.
I normally don't say things like this, but I think that Kubuntu should merge with Mepis. I've been using Mepis 3.4, and it's really a better Kubuntu than Kubuntu. Now that Mepis is changing to be based off Ubuntu, I'm not sure if there's a purpose left for Kubuntu. I agree with you that Ubuntu should stick to making a great Gnome distribution, but I think Ubuntu's KDE people would probably be better off making Mepis a great KDE distro.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Unless the package manager in Ubuntu does some really cool things that Fedora's stock yum frontends can't do (install, remove, groups, dependencies...), how can it beat really beat the shit out of anything?
Well, considering that Fedora's stock yum frontends can't do anything at this current time, that shouldn't be a problem.
Yum is an ongoing disaster. Inferior to apt in every single facet of its conception and design. It can't even do dist upgrades. It's also a huge resource hog. Up2date regularly hangs and crashes, so it would be easy for any apt frontend to surpass all this.
I've used Fedora since FC2 and I have to say that my biggest complaint throughout has been the woeful package management system. Quite frankly, just using plain rpms is often faster than trying to coax yum to work. If fact, the workaround for a lack of a dist-upgrade option is to use rpms.
Like a stubborn mule, Fedora won't let go of yum, lest they use apt and become "another debian os". Consequently, Fedora is a great distro, with a lousy package management system. It's a real achilles heel on an otherwise great workstation OS.
May the Maths Be with you!
You're missing the friggin' point.
Ubuntu *is* a Gnome distro.
This is a problem. Gnome is ugly in our eyes.
Your problem, not mine. If you don't want Gnome, don't use ubuntu. It's that simple.
because I as a user do not want it.
But there are plenty out there who do. Your personal opinion is not going to decide if Gnome is successful on the desktop or not.
And I cannot stand the Gnome imperialism.
And I cannot stand the KDE imperialism.
There are two types of people in the world: 1) those that can extrapolate from incomplete data.
You might want to look at this article about Espresso, the GUI installer that one runs from the Dapper Drake Ubuntu Live CD.
I'm curious to know your reasoning. No-one's talking about adding KDE packages to Ubuntu by default, so I'm afraid I can't understand why you think that developing KDE as an alternative to Gnome would add bloat to the distro.
Um.
It is developed as an alternative. It's called Kubuntu. I think you mentioned it earlier. You can even just apt-get install kubuntu-desktop.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
I'm sorry, but you're absolutely wrong in this respect. I have upgraded to the next distribution at last twice that I can recall, using Yum.
See HERE for the "secret recipe."
It was relatively painless.
As you can see from the site, it has been possible to upgrade distributions using Yum since FC1--so I'm not sure where you got your information.
I used to use APT with Fedora, until FC4 when Yum became facile enough to use on an ongoing basis. Since then, I've abandoned APT entirely. The fact that the Fedora project officially supports Yum, and that they have improved it dramatically over the past year, seals the deal for me.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.