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Is Ubuntu a Serious Desktop Contender?
Exter-C asks: "2006 was the year that a large amount of people started to talk Ubuntu as a possible contender for the Enterprise Linux desktop. There are several key issues that have to be raised: Is Ubuntu/Canonical really capable of maintaining Dapper Drake (6.06 LTS) for 5 years? I know this is not a new question but the evidence after 6 months seems to be negative. A case in point is the 4-5+ day delay for critical updates to packages like Firefox. Given that such a large percentage of people use their desktop systems on the web critical, browser vulnerabilities seem to be one of the core pieces of a secure desktop environment (user stupidity excluded). Can Ubuntu/Canonical really compete with the likes of Red Hat, who had patches available (RHSA-2006:0758) the day that the updates came out?"
Just a note for your point 1)
You can fix needing to run your cd burner as sudo by either:
easy way: SUID root your CD burner software (major security risk though - atleast in unix terms, no worse than always loging in as admin under windows)
slightly harder but much more sensible way: add group rw permissions to the CD burner device and make sure your user is a member of that group (I'm actually a little surprised and disappointed that that is not the default on ubuntu...)
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1 has alread been answered
2 If you are talking about Visual Studios, ok, I understand that, but for the rest, Mono works quite nicely.
3 I've had that experience too, but I think it's partially due to the generic compilation used. I have not had that issue in either FreeBSD or Gentoo, where I had the exact opposite experience, when handling multiple tasks, they are much more responsive than windows.
4 No argument there
5 very little argument there. With WINE you can get some nice options, and if you are willing to search long/hard enough, you can find nice OSS options for linux/BSD
As for the video, again I'd blame Ubuntu, it is one of the slowest distros I've used.
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Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
The thing is, you shouldn't have to do this. CD burning should work and work easily, especially for a desktop solution that's trying to be an easy desktop alternate to WinXP. The original poster did nothing but common desktop tasks that I would expect most people to do on a regular basis with XP. CD burning on OSes should be trivial at this point.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I know you are trolling but one of your was interesting to me:
... ...
3) I hate to say it, but virtual desktops and fluxbox leave my desktop a lot less cluttered and much easier to work with than windows does out of the box, and my computer is under load from its graphics a lot less often
I use XFCE for my XUBUNTu desktop but I have not found a way to "tile windows" and "cascade windows" or anything equivalent, I found the ION window manager which pretty much an overkill solution for what I want to do (just automatically tile more than one file browser and terminal window...).
4)Things like configuring wireless interfaces were endlessly confusing. Theres about 4 different places to enter a wireless key - but only one of them accepts my home key, as the rest claim it is too long! With linux I just typed it in and it worked.
Can you name the FOUR places where you had to enter your wep key? you just need to run the network wizzard and it is done, in contrast with Linux where, well, it depends the distribution you are using the program you will have to use but only *if* your wireless network card is supported (my notebook network card just keeps turning on and off but does not works... oh and I have the "supported drivers" and the firmware... go figure).
he final thing which did it was when I wanted to play a video - WMP has gone through many funcitonality decrements over the years, and when I finally switched to mplayer it coped a lot better with partially missing files, keyboard shortcuts and general niceness than the MS equivilant.
hmmmm... I use VLC in Linux to play movies etc, I had to install it (as the applications that come with Xubuntu are terrible to watch video, and ubuntu and on any other distro you MUST download all the "restricted", "no open source" "devil" "god forbid them" whatever codecs). Oh! and the installation was a time consuming... even to make it play the same types of video I *used* to play with the same program on WINDOWS. So yeah, nice troll there.
1) I got sick to death of having to install different programs to burn CDs correctly, with the drag and drop interface terribly annoying and confusing.
Why? just intall Nero the NERO Burning ROM CD that came with your CD-RW (or DVD) recorder. If you bought your computer chances are they are already installed. if you pirated windows just pirate it from the same site. Not that I did not need to install a program to burn in Xubuntu... oh! and it was a PAIN in the ass to burn with more than the lousy 8.3 format and more than 7 nested directories... I had finally to sucumb and download KDE's K3B program which I dont like because each time I have to start it it takes ages while it loads all the KDE crap (talk about memory hog) like kdesyscoca and whatever else.
2) A lot of software I like as a programming hobbiest is not easily available with a simple command like apt-get install
Name 1 (ONE) programming language or software that you can run on Linux that can NOT be run on Windows XP.
hello?
Thank you.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Right click iso image, asks for cd to be put in drive, then click write, it burns, no password required. Put a blank cd in click "Make data CD" button opens a file window, can drag files into window, then click write to disc, writes files to disc, again no password needed. Not sure why you are getting that problem.
You've got to be kidding me!
First, Ubuntu has not required root to burn since Breezy Badger. The "back to XP for my childish trailers guy" was lying on this one or doesn't know what he installed.
Second, I find it funny when people complain about Linux usability. Have you ever tried to burn a CD out of the box on Winblows? Oh wait... you need to spend $90 on Nero??? Even then, it takes 100MB of RAM and 2 hours to actually _find_ the "burn" option. For all the people that complain about options in KDE, there are about 20 times as many in Nero.
Winblows won't be desktop ready until I can right-click on an ISO and burn WITHOUT extra software!
How a "registry" can be more or less cryptical than a bunch of ini files?
.Net: "50727 REG_SZ 50727-50727", cryptic keys such as: "{874aa5f2-3745-9e23-8a39-8972bcb1455e}" - care to tell me what that means??? Unless you have the source to the application and know where these things are used in that source or VERY extensive documentation, you are screwed.
Simply because most programmers (such as Microsoft programmers) use ENUM values in it, so you end up with entries such as "Policy DWORD 3", this gem from
Contrast that with damn near any native Unix app (such as Apache) where all the configuration files are in a human readable form where you can easily cut and paste examples from the internet, easily copy to another machine, manage it from any text editor, etc. (I'm not saying that the apache config file is the best format, but it does work.) Instead of having to hand-compute bitmasks, you use words.
While you CAN use regedt32 (regedit) to partially "manage" settings, the majority of the contents are useless as the registry is first and foremost designed to ONLY be managed via the various applications via the API it and Not by humans.
The registry is a double-edged sword. It can be an efficient way for applications to save and restore state / settings, but at the expense of making it Very difficult to manage outside of the application.
Many Unix applications are beginning to use XML files to replace the old way. I'm on the fence about that, but still prefer it over the Windows Registry.
2) A lot of software I like as a programming hobbiest is not easily available with a simple command like apt-get install ...
It's not about whether or not you can get them, it's how easy it is. After having used linux for a few years now, finding software in windows is becoming one of my biggest gripes. When I do a reinstall, I need to hunt down every little utility I want, whereas on linux I just hit the package manager and say I want foo, bar, and baz. A similar package manager for windows would be absurdly useful, but inconvenient to do at this stage.
Name 1 (ONE) programming language or software that you can run on Linux that can NOT be run on Windows XP.