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?"

Comments

Aren't they really

[joshetc]

Competing against Windows? I'd say a better idea would be to compare cost / exploits / patches to Windows on the enterprise desktop rather than Red Hat Linux...

These aren't the big issues at all

[MikeRT]

I gave Ubuntu 6 a shot as my exclusive desktop for about a month and a half, but switched back to Windows XP Home a day or two ago for a variety of reasons, all of them desktop related.

1) I got sick to death of having to run CD burning software with sudo.
2) A lot of software I as a .NET hobbyist like is simply not there.
3) I hate to say it, but Windows XP actually runs consistently faster under load on my laptop than Ubuntu. The GUI in particular is more responsive under load than GNOME or KDE.
4) Things like easily configuring wireless connections really do work out of the box better on Windows XP than they do in Linux.
5) Windows has far more good software options.

For me the final straw was when I tried playing the high def trailer of Halo 3 in VLC on Linux, and it sucked. Choppy as hell. MPlayer handled it better, but then it was using a minimal GUI and actual Windows codecs. VLC on Windows can handle that stuff with no problem on the same machine.

It's a light weight contender at this point. I would recommend it to geek and nerd friends who will understand its limitations, but not a normal user who uses their machine for anything other than things like office functions and web browsing.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[simm1701]

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...)

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[lavid]

My experience with Edgy (since late betas) and Feisty have been that it was not required to sudo to burn anything.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[jimstapleton]

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.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I love linux, your comments point to a more general problem. On no machine I've owned in the last 9 years that I've used linux has ANY linux distro supported ALL the hardware of the machine without some level (often minor but needing knowledge, like setting the burner device to RW as one other responder comments) to complete lack of support.

The closest I managed was an ancient Performa 6360 from 1997, and that's because it's about as basic as it gets. Technically it WAS completely supported, but not all features at the same time. By the time X supported accelerated graphics on its onboard ATI, kernel support for its ethernet controller had died years before and panicked the machine when used.

On the other hand, I can't remember a time WinXP or various incarnations of MacOS didn't support something on the machines I was running them on. Linux works well as my server, but I got too sick of fucking around with insane shit constantly to bother with it as a main desktop, and now I use a Macbook.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[Bastard of Subhumani]

.NET hobbyist. Can't comment as I don't really understand what you mean. What is a ".NET hobbyist"?

Sounds like a contradiction in terms.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[ProppaT]

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.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[jdh41]

I gave Windows XP Professional a try as my home desktop for 3 days a while ago, but switched back to linux finally for a number of reasons:

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.
2) A lot of software I like as a programming hobbiest is not easily available with a simple command like apt-get install
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
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.
5) Linux has far more easily accessible and non-crapware solutions available to be easily installed from a secure and trusted source.

The 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.

Windows is a best a memory hog of a contendor at this stage, while linux is fast and nible, but with the true power of unix behind it.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[xtracto]

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.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[wpmartin]

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.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[Jimmay]

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!

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[Vaevictis666]

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. ... 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.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[parvenu74]

Since when does a parody of a more serious post earn a mod score of 5? The original 5-point list (six if you count the video comments) addresses common issues that are going to be on the short list of complaints of anyone who is looking to switch from Windows to Linux for more than a few hours. And make no mistake: the benchmark by which Linux will be measured a success or failure as a desktop O/S will be how would-be refugees from Windows take to the experience.

Addressing only at this point the home users, if prospective Linux adopters can't do trivial things like burn CD's without jumping through hoops, then you have problems. What about some basic "life" applications? The Songbird project is a nice idea, but it's not ready yet and certainly nowhere near the level of iTunes and it almost certainly won't support Windows or Apple DRM, so any purchased tracks will either be lost or will have to be burned to CD and re-ripped into your music library. Video editing: there is nothing that remotely approaches Windows Movie Maker, much less iMovie.

Ubuntu is a nice O/S, but it's not quite there yet.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[14CharUsername]

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 ...

I think he was exagerating, but in windows, a lot of wireless cards come with thier own wireless configuration tool, which may or may not be in use. So it is fairly common for users to enter in their WEP key in the the netwrok wizard, have it not work and then have to enter it again in the wireless cards own configuration utility (which has disabled the windows wizard) in order for it to work. Now you could blame the wirless card manufacturer for this problem, but you can also blame them for not supporting linux, so there you go.

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.

Those codecs are proprietary so they can't legally be distributed with Ubuntu. And whoever you downloaded them from (even the windows version) is probably breaking the law. So its not ubuntu having religious problems with them, its that they chose not to break the law. OMG! Ubuntu is not breaking the law to make things easier for you! The bastards!

And it is far, far easier to to get them working under ubuntu too. The instructions are laid out on ubuntuguide.org and only take five minutes. when you're done, all the codecs are installed and will be updated whenever you update the system. Try that on windows.

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.

First why the hell are you using xubuntu and not the regular ubuntu? Xubuntu is more for people who know what they're doing which you obviously don't. The 8.3 format is the iso standard for CDs. This has been extended with Joliet (by MS) and Rockridge (for Unix). Rockridge allows long filenames and user permissions. Joliet just allows long filenames. Fortunately every cd burning app I've used in linux burns everything as a hybrid so that it supports both the Joliet and Rockridge extensions. You just fucked around with your cd burning app and made it burn pure iso CDs with no extensions.

Name 1 (ONE) programming language or software that you can run on Linux that can NOT be run on Windows XP. ...

How about sh script? Oh and maybe a cron daemon so my sh script will run daily. And my sh script will make use of commands like grep, find, sed. And I may need my sh script to check some system settings too. I can do that under windows, right?

I prefer Nautilus to browse my files. Some of my files are on other systems and its able to access these files using ssh. Also the text editor is able to save and load files using ssh too. Makes it really easy to make a quick change to a file on another system over the internet. That works in windows, right?

Sometimes I'm using my laptop and I want to play songs on my desktop which the speakers are connected to. So I just tunnel X over ssh and then my media player/organiser displays on my laptop, but when I press play the sound comes out of the speakers on the desktop.

All that would work on Windows XP, right? Hello?

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[hitmark]

cd burning will never be trivial as long as you have to fire up a seperate program to get it done right. for it to be trivial one should be able to just drag and drop files onto the burner from inside the file manager and thats it...

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[raddan]

My experience with Edgy (since late betas) and Feisty have been that it was not required to sudo to burn anything.

Same here. In fact, I was pleased to discover that in Ubuntu 6.10, all I needed to to was right-click on a disc and select "Copy disc" to make an ISO. Cool!

But if you do need to run a program with elevated permissions in GNOME, the right way to do it is with gksudo. You will get a prompt in the GUI to enter your password. If you add the NOPASSWD option to your /etc/sudoers file (remember to use visudo, folks), then gksudo will run without prompting you. A working permissions model is a feature, not a bug! And unless I'm confusing Linuxisms with BSDisms, you should also be able to specify in /etc/fstab which block devices require permissions or not. But, like I said, I didn't need to do any of this with Ubuntu.

My only complaint is that getting wireless going in Linux can be a PITA when things go wrong. The GUI tools lack the verbosity needed when there are problems, but the command-line tools are extremely complex. Windows XPSP2 is much better in this regard (SP1 blows), but even Windows can be a major headache-- ever try to find the right wireless drivers in Windows? IBM often has 3-4 different wireless chipsets for each 'machine type' (what is the f'ing point of having different machine types, then?), and it's up to you to find the right one. OpenBSD's config utility is the best in this regard; drivers are automatically loaded and you can easily configure them with ifconfig, which should be familiar to most Unix users.

That said, we're looking at Ubuntu as a serious alternative to Windows for our next round of desktop upgrades here at work. My impression is that there will be less of a learning curve than with Vista or the Mac OS, and we will get the additional benefit of being able to eek out a couple more years of life from our existing hardware.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[lahvak]

Exactly!

Lack of software used to be one of my main reasons for not using Windows on the desktop. It is no longer the case, thanks to Cygwin, and many other porting efforts. But as you said, even though most software I use is actually available for Windows, hunting it down, installing it and keeping it upgraded is a major pain. Stuff that's installed out of the box on Linux, or that is available for an easy installation from centralized repositories, has to be downloaded from 50 different websites and installed in 10 different ways on Windows. And then you have to keep track of upgrades, and with most upgrades, manually download them and install them again.

Another huge problem on Windows is integration. On Linux, all software I use on daily basis typically works right out of the box. On a new machine, I usually have to just copy few configuration files from an old machine to get the exact same configuration. Things work nicely with each other, and with the system, out of the box.

On Windows, some applications understand Cygwin paths, some don't. Each application has it's own user interface, different from all the other ones. After installing a new application, I have to find where it got installed, and manually add the directory to the $PATH. Then you upgrade to a new version, which installs to a different place, and you have to edit all the places that pointed to the old version. Some applications work with the TXmouse, some don't. Dtto with VirtuaWin. Each application that needs a scripting language, a shell, ghostscript or any other interpreter installs its own copy. As a result, I have maybe 20 copies of python, 10 copies of ghostscript, two versions of TeX, 15 shells, 5 different seds, each using different configuration, each behaving slightly differently, and you are never sure which one of them is going to be called. Lately some installers have been searching the system trying to find out if various pieces of supporting software are present, and installing them only if they cannot be found, but they mostly only find stuff if it is in some sort of standard location, and since there really is no such thing as a standard location on Windows, most of the time you still end up with several copies of everything, but I must say that it is an improvement. But still, to get work done, I'll pick Linux over Windows any time.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[grcumb]

cd burning will never be trivial as long as you have to fire up a seperate program to get it done right. for it to be trivial one should be able to just drag and drop files onto the burner from inside the file manager and thats it...

Why is this insightful? Both Windows XP and Ubuntu support exactly this behaviour.

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[MMC Monster]

The thing is, I think the poster that was using sudo for CD burning had done something to serious mess up his system.

I've installed various versions of Ubuntu from 5.04 to 6.10 on a number of computers, all with gnomebaker CD burning software. Not a single one ever asked me for password to run the application (only when installing it).

I have no idea how he managed to get Ubuntu to require a password to run without messing around with permissions of the CD drive or something like that (which would probably make the application fail rather than ask for a sudo password, anyway)

Re:These aren't the big issues at all

[aaronl]

So what does that make you? Hint: it might be a socially inept Windows zealot that doesn't know how the platform works. Cascade/tile windows only does that one time. It does *NOT* auto-tile or auto-cascade windows, as I have to do it every time I open a new window.

Ubuntu is my desktop

[jdbear]

While I am forced to use Windows in my work envirionment, while at home Ubuntu is my chosen desktop. I have never been one to insist on instant updates, so a few days delay in a patch does not concern me much.

Ubuntu (with some necessary updates and enhancements) is a perfectly capable operating system, and the Gnome2 desktop serves my needs just fine. I can do everything (and more) that my windows box can do, plus I get to use my choice of scripting languages to customize my experience.

Nothing is hidden away from me in cryptic registries, and I run only those things that make sense to me. On my Windows box, there are several programs that have installed themselves over the years, and seemingly cannot be uninstalled. I keep most of them disabled and beaten down, but can't seem to eradicate them entirely. Even tools from my huge international IT industry company don't seem to be able to keep the buggers off of my Windows machine. Number of virii or malware programs on my Ubuntu box? Zero.

So, yes, Ubuntu can be an effective and pleasing desktop.

Re:Ubuntu is my desktop

[Blakey Rat]

The Registry isn't any more crypt than Linux configuration text files or OS X plist files. In fact, at least the Registry and plist files have a common defined file format, so I'd say they were LESS cryptic.

Re:Ubuntu is my desktop

[walt-sjc]

How a "registry" can be more or less cryptical than a bunch of ini files?

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 .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.

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.

tried installing ubuntu for the past few weeks.

[DMoylan]

scenario.
i have one pc at home.
it's connected to a wifi network belonging to my landlord on a weak signal.
i have no control over the ap so i can't change any settings or its location
or improve the signal
or run a network cable to it.

so i look around to find a usb wifi adapter that will work with ubuntu. had tried a pci card but that will not get a good enough signal so it has to be a usb adapter which can be at the end of a 2 metre usb cable.

don't want to risk my windows partition so i buy a new disk.
then try ubuntu install only for a bunch of errors caused by the dvd rewriter
'hdc: ide_intr: huh? expected null handler on exit'
'buffer i/o error on device hdc, logical block'

curses. get my mitts on a dvd rom drive and over christmas i try that. it works! ubuntu installs! excellent! love the interface. boots much quicker than windows. try to access the wifi network and... no joy!

now i've gotten the following device onto the network
* nokia 770 internet tablet (signal so weak that it will only work when the metal sheath is off)
* nintendo ds web browser (the ap is considered unsupported and online gaming won't work but the browser can be coaxed into working with it)
* nokia e61 web browser (took the longest but now that it works i can access gmail and web pages anywhere, joy!)
* windows 2000 which the pc normally runs. about once a week the usb adapter has to be moved to pick up a better signal.

so i don't consider myself a wifi newbie. i tried everything i can think off. couldn't find any software builtin to ubuntu to search for wifi networks, using ubuntu 6.10. i eventually got the thing transmitting packets but not a one came back. then there are 2 adapters listed wlan0 and wmaster0. which to use? other people have reported this and gotten no answers.

i will keep trying as windows is getting more annoying with wga and assorted viruses and crap but until i can get it working i cannot recommend it to family which is really what i want to start doing. might pop out and buy a linux mag with a few distros on it and give them a shot instead.

sorry for the saga, just venting annoyance,
moylan

Yes it is ready for its coronation.

[Eideewt]

Looking at Ubuntu (and other distros I suppose), Windows, and OS X the match seems pretty even. All suck pretty hard in significant ways, but all have their strong points as well. Linux would be a great fit for the browse the web/write papers/listen to music crowd. Not so much for the gamers, due to the lack of commercial development, and not so much for the artists (due to the elitism), but it does what a lot of people need. The problem is, as always, getting to those people. Even if they have by some miracle heard of Linux, most will see the work required to switch as too scary or too much of a hassle for the benefits they would gain (a snappier system, better security, package managers that can pull down updates for the whole system, and so on). Oh well, maybe next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

Re:Well

[DivineOmega]

I must try this 'Linuz' OS sometime. :P

Desktop is the last place for linux adoption

[porkThreeWays]

I've realised after all these years linux on the desktop for the masses probably will happen last. While some people have seen this as a goal to de-throne microsoft's desktop, others have been sneaking linux into our daily lives. This is the important frontier for linux. Everything but the desktop. Servers, embedded devices, control systems, etc, etc. There are MUCH more of these sorts of devies than there are desktops. The desktop goal has been important to many people because it's what they see everyday, but these sneaky devices are a much more important.

Why Ubuntu? Why not......

[B Man]

I have wondered this for a while and this article highlights it. With all the distributions out there, why so much hype this year for Ubuntu? I downloaded both the Drake and the current, and I have neither time been impressed with it. I don't understand what makes people think its better than Debian, which by the way always seems to work better and with more success. I'm sure there has to be a contender better, anyone would be better. The distributions that get the most exposure (preloads, etc) are not the ones that are getting recognition d(remember we are talking desktop usage). I used Caldera Linux (ack I know) all the way back in 1997 and it was better than the current flock of Desktop OS's. I wonder why someone couldn't bring it back, limit the crap in the install, but make it available (you dont need emacs or vi, you need Write or a notepad). Keep many common services that people may just want on their pc like httpd, ftp, ssh, but get rid of SQL servers and the like for advanced users. Give a good browser (firefox with alot of preinstalled extensions) with a good starting page. Links to office apps, browser, drives, on the desktop. DONT SLACK ON THE NETWORKING (more IM's, browsers, clients, etc). DONT GIVE ME 5 MEDIA PLAYERS, just one really well maintained one would be great (vlc if the comment above werent true). And for gods sake, drop all the extra games, apps, etc. If someone needs anything in particular for a desktop os, they WILL download it. I mean come on who of us uses linux for a desktop that doesnt have access to updates?
*rant mode off*
This reply should have been a ASK Slashdot, but we all know we miss actual articles. So I wont put us through it.

Ben

sure, but..

[robzon]

Keep in mind that Ubuntu is Free Software.
And Free Software is not always about being better, it's about being Free.
After a few years of using only Linux (various distros, Ubuntu for past year) I would never install a proprietary system on my computer.
Just look where proprietary software is leading - DRM, spyware, adware... It's much easier to hide these "features" in closed-source software.
Ok, Windows supports all the hardware, Linux does not - oh well, I just check hardware for Linux compatibility before I buy it.
I just believe that Free Software is the only way we should go. Things like DRM just hurt customers, they simply haven't realized that yet.

Re:sure, but..

[DaveV1.0]

Keep in mind that Ubuntu is Free Software.
And Free Software is not always about being better, it's about being Free.

That statement sums up why Ubuntu, and probably Linux, will never be a suitable replacement OS on most desktop systems.

Re:ummm...

[gutnor]

Exactly no much doubt about the average reply here on slashdot. Probably the same level of objectivity as asking the same question on MSDN.

Some other insightful questions for the next 'Ask Slashdot':

"Is Microsoft evil?"
"Is OSX beter than Vista?"
"IE7 or Firefox on Mom's PC?"

fud, notfud, yes, no, maybe

[Klaidas]

Well, it depends. A contender to who? Windows - no. Fedora, Gentoo - yes. Servers - maybe, but debian is still the leader there.
Ubuntu has a potential, but it's not some kind of magic distribution.

ATTENTION SLASHDOTTERS

[linvir]

• mikert
• jdbear
• dmoylan
• el lobo
• eideewt
• porkthreeways
• robzon

For fuck's sake, this is not a Windows/Linux article. Please at least read the first sentence of the posted article in future, before taking the opportunity to vent your Windows vs Linux obsession.

Now, does anyone have anything to say about the Enterprise Linux desktop?

Re:ATTENTION SLASHDOTTERS

[kripkenstein]

Thank you for that calm voice of reason. Here is my answer to the actual question put forth:

The only evidence given for the claim is the issue of 4-5 day delays for Firefox patches on Ubuntu, versus same-day response for Red Hat. Now, this is a good point, and Canonical should improve in this respect. However, 2 things should be said: (1) Microsoft does not seem to reply very quickly to critical vulnerabilities - not that this is an excuse, but it does go to show that a few days' wait isn't enough to make something 'not a serious desktop' (even when 99% of vulnerabilities are for that particular platform), and (2) Canonical has recently reached an arrangement with the Mozilla people about using Firefox on Ubuntu; unlike Debian, Ubuntu will ship with a nearly-identical version of Firefox to the original Mozilla code. This may allow faster security responses in the future (by distributing the Mozilla patches more or less directly - Debian will have more work to do, since their version is more different). However, in the long term, Firefox 1.5 (shipped on Ubuntu 6.06) will eventually not be supported by Mozilla, leaving the burden to Canonical. Whether they can deal with backporting security patches (or writing completely new ones, if needed), for various versions of Firefox simultaneously, is an open question. Yet, Debian will be doing so (and for even longer periods of time), so they may be able to lean on that.

Re:ATTENTION SLASHDOTTERS

[Andyham]

OK, I will give an answer to the question as best as I can. I suspect that all depends upon the longevity of the Ubuntu organization itself. And how it matures.

People have noted that it takes longer than the usual amount of time for Ubuntu to issue patches, that perhaps has to do with compatibility testing and dealing with their package management system.

I have installed Ubuntu for a few people and generally like what I see in terms of usability for your average computer user who really is not all that computer literate. However, there are a few issues that will occasionally come up and could stymie an unassisted home installer. In an enterprise setting with a full-time IT department that has thoroughly "vetted" the install, I suspect that this would be less of a problem than it would be for Joe home user. Updates and maintenence for an enterprise are generally a lot more tricky than for the home user, due to specific applications that are used in an enterprise setting, conflicts, etc.

Ubuntu as an organization has lots of valuable experience when it comes to home users. Little when it comes to enterprise situations. Despite there being some very good things I can say about Ubnutu, my best answer would be to go with the "devil you know", so to speak. Red Hat has tons of experience with enterprise support, and have no doubt already entountered (and solved) a lot of the problems that Ubuntu has yet to see.

So for the short term, unless you want to be part of a grand experiment that someday will probably work out well, it is best to stick with The Hat as they are pretty good at what they do (maybe that's why they are a tad expensive). And keep in mind that Ubuntu is now where Red Hat was (in terms of enterprise) in 1997 (or so).

Ubuntu may be cheaper right now (I really don't know), and you do get what you pay for in some situations. But saved money is no comfort when it don't work and you are the guy charged with making it work.

Re:Maybe..

[VJ42]

Somone in another article mentioned Linux Mint which is based on Ubuntu, from the screen shots it's much better on the eyes.

Firefox critical updates?

[bazorg]

I'm struggling to understand what kind of Firefox security updates can be deemed critical for a linux user... what kind of malware and exploits are they talking about there?

LinuxMint is the new Ubuntu

[kobol]

LinuxMint makes Ubuntu usable. It has plugins and codecs that are missing from Ubuntu 6.xx. I can finally say that I have found a version of Linux that installs properly and is usable as well! Try it, you'll like it:

http://www.linuxmint.com/

Yes, with reservations

[petrus4]

Of all the Linux distributions I've seen, Ubuntu is the only one which has produced a sneaking feeling that it might just have a vague chance of achieving critical mass on the desktop.

However, it's a double edged sword. The Ubuntu people have apparently thought out a number of different usage scenarios, and an end-user following any of those can do so quickly and easily. The down side is when you're trying to do anything (and I do mean anything) outside of the box...it becomes a nightmare.

For people who want their computer to be an appliance, with only a few highly specialised uses, Ubuntu could meet their needs...and given that this description fits most end-users, that is the reason why I could see it becoming/remaining the most popular Linux distribution. For anyone who wants anything more versatile, however (and for anyone who cares about a system which follows UNIX design philosophy - I'm talking about the stuff here) both Ubuntu and Debian are to be avoided, in my own mind.

Ready for the desktop?

[NorbrookC]

Ubuntu is a fairly good Linux distribution, with a pretty good set up. The Firefox update issue is probably not a fair consideration, since it's not actually Canonical, it's a function of Debian's issues with Mozilla.

The problem I have with Ubuntu's push is that it isn't really being pushed as a desktop for business so much as it is a desktop for the average user, to replace Windows or Mac. Unfortunately, it isn't ready for that, and it may actually be hurting itself because of it. If you're saying to people "Just download the CD's, and install it, it'll work with no problems.", you're asking for trouble. The people that are willing to give it a try are not expecting a Windows/Mac clone, but they do have certain expectations! Principally, that they're not going to spend the next three months learning how to debug, compile, edit configurations, and spend hours searching through various wikis, FAQ's, and web sites to actually use their computer for something.

These are the "first adopters", and the more unpleasant their experience, the harder is to get Linux out of the server/geek realm and into the home. It's been my experience that server OS's tend to make mediocre desktop OS's. That's been true whether it's Linux or Windows or (fill in the blank). The things you need to do on a server are different from what you need on most desktops. There's also a difference in needs between a business desktop and a home desktop. I think Linux is (mostly) ready to be a serious contender on the business desktop. Unfortunately, it isn't ready to be one on the home desktop. I think it could be one, but the community needs to listen and to look at what the average user actually is running into.

Here's a quote I found about Linux on the desktop on one of the other boards I frequent, that really helps summarize what needs to happen: "Come on nerds, would it really be such a terrible thing to spend $180 for a Linux will full hardware drivers and software codecs plus telephone support or even to pay $50 for a CD that gives you everything in the way of proprietary drivers and codecs ready to go for all your hardware and multimedia as opposed to spending hours and hours and hours downloading just bits and pieces of the solutions from all over the place and fighting to get them working? It's not like people who really want to couldn't still do that, but a simple, truly easy, less expensive alternative to the $400 Vista for the average Joe is what it is going to take to get the average Joe to come over from the dark side--and no one is ever going to have a prayer of winning the fight for open standards as long as all those ordinary Joe's are still living on the dark side."

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[Trelane]

full hardware drivers

This will never happen until Microsoft's monopoly diminishes to the point where it's no longer feasible to provide individual drivers for each of the main operating systems since they can't count on selling enough units solely with Windows drivers, and the vendors must fully implement standards supported by the most popular OSes, and/or a common driver framework is implemented (if there's a market, there's most certainly a way (hint: there's no market until Windows marketshare diminishes substantially)). Until that glorious day of level playingfield bliss, the best you can do is check for Linux compatibility when you buy hardware even if you have only a vague inkling that you might someday install Linux, and if you intend to install Linux, buy a Linux system instead of a Windows one. Or at least one that doesn't come up as a Windows sale. Stand up and be counted. Yes, I'm a hypocrite because it wasn't easy 3 years ago (and it's likely not an immediatley simple task, although it seems much better nowadays at least with a No OS option).

pay $50 for a CD that gives you everything in the way of proprietary drivers and codecs ready to go for all your hardware and multimedia as opposed to spending hours and hours and hours downloading just bits and pieces of the solutions from all over the place and fighting to get them working?

I couldn't agree more. I'd give my right arm for a fully-licensed, fully-supported QuickTime, WindowsMedia, Real, MPEG, CSS, and other format CD. I don't know why someone doesn't do this!

That said, your portrayal of hunting down codecs isn't accurate for Ubuntu at all. Most of the software you're looking for is available in the Metaverse--if not the Universe--repository, which is only a few short clicks away (it's included by default, but not enabled). The few remaining, legally questionable codecs (namely libcss and win32codecs) are readily documented and generally require only one more repository, so it's not like "spending hours and hours and hours downloading just bits and pieces of the solutions from all over the place to get them working," it's more like searching the Ubuntu community wiki for the locations of the repositories (it's even in the FAQ!) and spending a few minutes adding the repository in. Rather, the quote reminds me of the peanut butter and jelly in a squeeze bottle comedy routine: Regarding assembling a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the apparent necessity of combining the peanut butter and jelly in a squeeze bottle, Regan remarks 'Some guy going, "You know I could go for a sandwich, but uh, I'm not gonna open TWO jars! I can't be opening and closing all kinds of jars... cleaning, who KNOWS how many knives!?!"'

All of that said, if any Linux vendors are listening, PLEASE put the proprietary codecs in the pay-for versions of your software!!!!, if not the free ones

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[Kjella]

Here's a quote I found about Linux on the desktop on one of the other boards I frequent, that really helps summarize what needs to happen: "Come on nerds, would it really be such a terrible thing to spend $180 for a Linux will full hardware drivers and software codecs plus telephone support or even to pay $50 for a CD that gives you everything in the way of proprietary drivers and codecs ready to go for all your hardware and multimedia as opposed to spending hours and hours and hours downloading just bits and pieces of the solutions from all over the place and fighting to get them working?

No, it'd be great. Call us when you get permission to redistribute all those "bits and pieces" that aren't in the repositories (even debian with their DFSG has a non-free section) exactly because you don't get permission to redistribute them, not even those that are free as in beer. Same goes for binary driver blobs. Even if you paid patent licenses like mp3, mpeg2 and mpeg4, there's plenty Windows codecs and drivers you couldn't even pay for if you wanted to. Don't forget that two of the most important formats, WMA and WMV are controlled by a corporation that has absolutely no interest in licensing them for Linux. And crappy companies like Macromedia who can't even keep their Linux flash player from falling several versions behind the windows counterpart.

In short, it's very nice to talk about "in an ideal world" but it's not going to happen and that has nothing to do with the nerds. Go ahead, try it and you'll find the problem isn't that noone would buy it, the problem is it can't be produced. The closest you'll get are "automators" like EasyUbuntu, Automatix, debian-multimedia etc. which all ignore the legal issues.

Why compete against Red Hat?

[RingDev]

RH has a tiny market share. Even if Ubuntu replaced every single RH desktop, it still wouldn't even make a blip on the radar. The competition that (still) matters the most, is Windows. And a 4 day turn around on defects is a heck of a lot better than the once a month for Windows.

-Rick

Re:Why Ubuntu? Why not......

[Kjella]

I used Caldera Linux (ack I know) all the way back in 1997 and it was better than the current flock of Desktop OS's.

I'll call that "selective memory".

I wonder why someone couldn't bring it back, limit the crap in the install, but make it available (you dont need emacs or vi, you need Write or a notepad).

Actually, no. I don't want any of those because for me there's really two types of text editors - plaintext (config files, code, small notes etc.) and formatted text (OpenOffice/KOffice style). I'd like just the one advanced text editor please.

Keep many common services that people may just want on their pc like httpd, ftp, ssh, but get rid of SQL servers and the like for advanced users.

Huh? People want to run a http deamon, but not any SQL database for a LAMP or similar setup?

Give a good browser (firefox with alot of preinstalled extensions) with a good starting page.

Let me guess - this customized Firefox should contain the extensions you like, right?

Links to office apps, browser, drives, on the desktop.

Again, your preferance. I prefer having commonly used apps in a toolbar.

DONT SLACK ON THE NETWORKING (more IM's, browsers, clients, etc).

More browsers? You just wanted one!

DONT GIVE ME 5 MEDIA PLAYERS, just one really well maintained one would be great (vlc if the comment above werent true).

Right.. so everyone will just agree that vlc is better than mplayer (with frontends) and xine.

And for gods sake, drop all the extra games, apps, etc. If someone needs anything in particular for a desktop os, they WILL download it.

Ten of the same I can understand. But if there's one app, what's wrong with it being installed? Is it the extra 5MB of HDD space killing you? The menu link? And it's always possible to not preselect any package. Been there, done that... install debian base and apt-get your way from there.

Basicly, I never understood this. If I got one or fice or ten applications which do the job, great. My problem is when the number is zero.

Not yet.

[Perseid]

I'm a Windows user. XP does everything I need it to and does it well. Occasionally, though, I test out Linux to see how things are going. Every time I try things are much better and much closer to awesomeness. But not yet. My last experience was Kubuntu. Auto-detected all my hardware, set up my Internet access for me all automatically. Amarok is incredible. But once something breaks you're back to cryptic /etc files and other obscure things. Given time to research I can handle this, but the average person cannot. Linux is still more complicated to maintain than Windows, and that is going to be deciding factor for your average schmo.

And hardware support is still not as good as Windows. There are still a lot of things with no drivers. That never will have drivers. Yes, hardware manufacturers are to blame for this, but that doesn't matter to my computing experiece. And software support is still lacking. Few games are getting ported and while Amarok is at least as good of a music player as WinAmp, there is still no Linux equivalent to the beauty of Media Player Classic.

So why should I switch? Why should anyone switch? So my answer to your question is still no. It's getting closer. Maybe in a few years. But not now.

Re:Not yet.

[tinkerghost]

[blah][blah][blah] But once something breaks you're back to cryptic /etc files and other obscure things. Given time to research I can handle this, but the average person cannot. Linux is still more complicated to maintain than Windows, and that is going to be deciding factor for your average schmo.

How exactly do you fix things that break in Windows? I ask because it's usually registry edits and magic downloads that end up fixing the problems I have. While there isn't a set format for those cryptic /etc files, there are usually headers that tell you what to do, along with those wonderful MAN pages. With Windows, I have no choice but to google the problem & hope someone else has come up with a solution. Even the few times I've called MS support, I usually get the 'we can't help you - reinstalling should solve your problem' response from the phone droids.

Also, do you consider the prevelance of spyware on the average home Windows machine to be a maintenance problem that should be included in the discussion on how easy it is to maintain a computer?

My wife likes it...

[Yaddoshi]

My wife, who knows almost nothing about computers beyond web-browsing, e-mail and instant messaging, prefers Ubuntu to Windows. For her the system is more reliable, she doesn't have the same fear of accidentally going to a bad website and infecting her computer with spyware or viruses, and it does everything she wants it to do. She's been using Ubuntu since version 5.04, and does not even want Windows installed on her laptop.

That being said, I absolutely despise ndiswrapper, which is the only way to get her Broadcom based PC-Card wireless NIC to work properly. Ubuntu 6.06 sees the card and attempts to use its own driver and fails miserably when trying to connect to the network. Not only do I have to use a driver written for Windows instead, I also have to blacklist the default Ubuntu driver as well, and I have to redo it each time a new kernel is released. Word to the wise, use terminal when setting this up, not the GUI ndiswrapper utility.

On the flip side my notebook with an Intel wireless NIC connected to the network during installation with no additional work from me whatsoever. I've been using Ubuntu on my laptop as my primary OS since version 5.10 was released, and I have been very satisfied with my experience. But I have kept a Windows partition so that I can take advantage of HP's photo software, and also for those DirectX games that just won't run properly in Wine. Ultimately I still use both, but I use Ubuntu more.

Re:My wife likes it...

[Ash-Fox]

Most Linux distros don't even have the relevant codecs, and while you can get them, how many people *want* to spend their time that way?

It takes me less time to install w32codecs and ffmpeg (less than a minute -- just two packages after all) to get support in xine and mplayer engines, than it does to install the DVD software and codecs under windows (about 40 minutes -- yes, I did time myself -- mainly because I'm taking my own time to help other people).

Besides, the multimedia applications themselves are simply not of the same quality.

Huh? What's wrong with Kaffeine, VLC etc?

And this is an evolving area: even Microsoft has trouble keeping up with iTunes (Windows Media Player, for example, has no RSS/podcast support)

I wonder if that Zune player application does.

and the Linux stuff is nowhere near.

Yeah, I agree. Amarok went far beyond iTunes in what it can do. Apple is going to have a hard time to catch up with features alone. Nevermind the interface.

And, of course, iTunes won't run on Linux while it will run on XP.

Well, actually, it runs under Crossover just fine.

You think, these days, people want a system that can't play MP3s or DVDs out of the box

Yeah, Windows really needs to catch up with DVD support out of the box (Linux mint definitely beats windows out of all the support out of a clean install, even wireless support).

a system that can't sync with a portable MP3 player easily?

It's a shame windows can't actually synchronize stuff out of the box like I can with many linux distributions.

You think they want to mooch over to YouTube and find they can't watch the vids, because they have't got Flash. (And some geek telling them to install Wine so they can use Flash just won't walk.)

Actually, if you didn't have it preinstalled, they'd tell you to install it through the package manager... There is a Linux version of Adobe's Flash after-all...

But non-enthusiast home users? No way. Maybe the odd person who only does web and email, but that's not the norm now.

There aren't many, but I know at least a handful of non-enthusiast home users in real life who do more on Linux than just web and e-mail.

Don't forget the others.

[khasim]

#1. People who are already using Ubuntu (like me) as their desktop.

#2. People who are using some other Linux distribution as their desktop.

#3. People who are using a Mac or *BSD or whatever.

#4. People who are using Windows because of reasons A, B, C and/or D.

Whether X is a "serious desktop contender" really depends upon what YOU consider to be the requirements for a "serious desktop contender".

Do people ask the same question in other areas of their life? Do they go to a pizza place and question when pineapple and Canadian bacon pizza is "suitable" for dinner?

Do they go to a Ford dealership and ask whether a Ford is "suitable" for driving?

And so forth.

Yes, plain and simple

[ubergenius]

My first ever non-Windows system was Ubuntu, and I haven't looked back since. I'll admit that I was never an amateur in the computing world, but the system was clearly very easy to use, cleanly coded, fast and well designed. It's few drawbacks, such as the obvious "no Microsoft software" and such are outweighed by the immense support offered by the community and the huge number of powerful applications available for free and easily using the package manager.

If any Linux environment is going to gain serious market share away from the Windows-only non-experts of the world, it's going to be a free and easy-to-use system like Ubuntu.

Re:Maybe..

[John Courtland]

Kubuntu is much MUCH less poopy looking.

To contribute to the main topic: no. I use Kubuntu at both home and work. At home I have a AMD Barton 3000+ w/ 2GB RAM, at work I have an Intel Core Duo laptop. Both with NVIDIA cards, thank god. With Kubuntu 6.10, the laptop has what I would consider a serious showstopper bug in the wireless driver where it would halt the CPU during boot with an informative message: "BUG: Soft lockup detected on CPU#0" about 70% of the time. The fix was to install a patch, but I couldn't be bothered to deal with it so I just deleted the module from the /lib directory. If I were a total newbie, how the hell would I be able to fix that?

Also, installing updates to the proprietary NVIDIA kernel module in Kubuntu doesn't work quite right for me. I have to manually remove the module from /lib/modules/`uname -r`/volatile/ so that it doesn't try loading the wrong thing. Again, no newbie is going to be able to figure that out and they will capitulate and go back to windows. I realize this isn't necessarily Kunubtu's fault (although the NVIDIA installer complains that pkg-config isn't working right) but it needs to be addressed (I understand they're trying to deal with this topic in the next release, Feisty Fawn or whatever it's called).

I also managed to get one of my coworkers to move from Windows to Kubuntu, and let me just say that ATI can go to hell. That driver is so amazingly bad and complicated to install, that I will never recommend that someone install any distro of linux on a modern machine with an ATI card. Yeah the open source radeon driver 'works' but you don't get any acceleration. While that may not be a showstopper for many, it is impeding desktop acceptance.

Re:Not Linux for Humans (yet)

[Technician]

(I'm not going to Format my C: drive straight away).

So have you tried to run off a live CD? Freespire comes with the codecs that are not included in most Linux distributions that can be installed later. The problem is they are not installed when you run most live CD's so much online content won't play such as flash, MP3's, PDF's, and many movie formats.

You have got to be kidding.

[Dion]

The registry is a piece of shit compared to plain text config files, there are several reasons for this, but two of the big ones are:

1) Comments, you can actually add comments to text config files.
2) You can use a normal text editor, normal version control (ever tried putting the registry in subversion?) and other well-honed text tools to work with text based config files.

Burning a CD on Ubuntu *doesn't* require sudo

[Colin Smith]

CD burning on Ubuntu is trivial.

I have no idea why he requires sudo, but I have no problem using GnomeBaker to burn CDs without sudo.

The permissions look correct to me, out of the box. I've never touched them.

cdrom:x:24:haldaemon,colin
brw-rw---- 1 root cdrom 22, 0 2006-12-27 14:07 /dev/hdc

Is Ubuntu ready for the enterprise desktop?

[JanStedehouder]

My first response would be: definitely. But I would say that for all of the top mainstream Linux distributions. I have been using Ubuntu full time for the last four months and I use it for writing, designing and editing documents, answering and writing emails, accessing my websites and editing PHP files, play some music in the background, edit screenshots, burn my DVD's etc. etc. There are no issues, none whatsoever. In all honesty, Ubuntu Linux is very boring when you use it every day. No surprise glitches. Nothing.

I agree with the issue of updates, most notoriously FF2.0. Dapper Drake still doesn't have it and -as far as I understand- will not have it in the foreseeable future. That could be a security risk but since most companies still run IE6 even Dapper Drake with FF1.5.x should be a major improvement. I do understand that the choice for stability comes at a price. If you want to stay current with all innovation (and there are major innovations under way in Linux) Dapper Drake is not the distribution to use (nor is Debian for that matter, but only few complain about that).

Dapper Drake is a stable, secure and solid desktop distribution perfectly suitable for common office tasks. Will it still be around in five years time? That will depend on it's actual use. If the home endusers continue to follow the upgrade trail and move away from Dapper Drake and the number of companies rolling out Dapper is minimal, I can see the LTS version being dropped prematurely and replaced by another stable version. Canonical is a business like many others: young, but with a lot of traction. We should give it the benefit of the doubt and start pushing adoption of Ubuntu in our workplaces.

Re:ummm...

[lpcustom]

For the love of whatever you hold holy, just shut up already. Is there a webpage that has messages like yours on it so you can just copy and paste it to a slashdot thread about Linux????
There are just as many Slashdot users out there saying "Linux users need to realize that if they want their OS to survive blah blah blah" like you. Could you muster up an original thought? I've seen your post thousands of times on Slashdot. Funny that you are reading a LINUX thread and you are bitching about Slashdot's Linux users always talking about how amazing Linux is. Perhaps it's because you are READING A LINUX THREAD...
If you don't like Linux that's fine, but don't assume you know what Linux needs to survive. You're obviously retarded if you can't figure out how to click on "Applications" instead of a "Start" button, so why are you assuming you know what Linux needs to survive.
This article is stupid none-the-less because it's basically flamebait in itself. There are many people who have been using Ubuntu as their desktop OS for at least a year. It does everything I want it to do, so YES it's definitely ready for MY desktop. If it's not ready for yours, fine....don't use it. Stop pretending you know something that no one has thought of or said before though. Linux users don't need to realize anything. You need to realize something. We don't care if you use Linux or not. We aren't going to make a dime off it if you decide to use it. We like it. We've got the right to say we like it. You have the right to say you hate it, but realize that the things you may want from a desktop OS is not exactly what everyone else wants. For some people, Linux has been ready for the desktop for years. For some of us it's the perfect OS. Why would we want to change it so it's perfect for you. You already have your perfect OS that you love. Should we make Linux more like what you want? Blah this flamewar has been going back and forth for years. Just get over yourself and realize that You don't realize what Linux needs to survive. You know what your OS needs to survive. So just STFU, and read something other than a thread completely about Linux.

Re:I wouldn't say that

[lpcustom]

Try Arch...Gentoo is only faster if you optimize your machines compiler settings. Most everything has to be compiled from source in Gentoo. Arch is compiled optimized for 686 and up. It's a lot faster than Ubuntu on my machine. I use Ubuntu currently but Arch is impressive for speed. It's not as easy to set up for most people. I'm not advocating my distro of choice here. I'm just saying that you'll notice a speed difference between Arch and Ubuntu. Ubuntu isn't bad but the mainstream distros you are talking about are probably Fedora, SuSE and the like. Arch is not as mainstream as those but it's still pretty popular.
The most popular distros are those that are easy to setup up out of the box. They recognize your hardware for you and use a generic kernel that supports a lot of things. Meaning it supports stuff you don't need it to support usually. These distros are easier to use but they get there by sacrificing resources and speed usually.

Honey, not vinegar.

[Unlikely_Hero]

There's that old saying "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar". When most people think of Linux...well...most people to be perfectly honest don't know what it is, and more importantly, they don't care. Most who have heard of Linux have the impression that it's kind of like a treefort for the geeks who still havn't outgrown their victim complexes. Now while I don't think this is true for the majority of Linux users (after I waded through and became more accustomed to the culture), it is simple to see how a vast majority of users would not want to be anywhere near a culture so hostile. Most people are accustomed to being able to call a number, wait on hold for an hour or so, and then slowly work through their problem with a technician, some of whom are more polite and or better at communicating than others. Getting help for their problem with a technology does not involve having to learn a new technology (IRC, Froums, etc. And yes forums can be new to people). It involves picking up a phone and dialing a number. For those who have read Neal Stephenson's "in the beginning there was the command line", you will recall the analogy of the vehicle dealerships. Remember how he described Linux as a tank with people who were building them for free and yelling "if it doesn't work we'll come fix it for free! while you sleep!" to which the response from the prospective buyer was "stay away from my house you freak!"?. That's not really the case anymore. The tanks are still free, but the "free support" if you will, lives in a system of caves and revile the surface dwellers; insulting them for asking questions unless they do the secret handshake first.
Now obviously not all, not even a majority of linux people are going to do that to new folks, but enough do that we have the unfortunate reputation to most folks of being the caricature of the jackass IT guy best described in the "Nick Burns, your company's Computer Guy" sketches on Saturday Night Live.
One of the responses to this is "well I learned this the hard way! I read all of these man pages and read all of these forums and spent a year learning to code!". Congratulations, that is a great accomplishment, and no one is trying to lessen it. Those methods might not work for everyone, or even most people who are trying to learn. I, for one, found the man pages to be horribly inaccessible. Most of them don't even have examples.
Time to open the treefort, people learn a lot better when you're nice to them.

Sure they do.

[khasim]

Now obviously not all, not even a majority of linux people are going to do that to new folks, but enough do that we have the unfortunate reputation to most folks of being the caricature of the jackass IT guy best described in the "Nick Burns, your company's Computer Guy" sketches on Saturday Night Live.

Pay attention to that.

Most of the computer users are using Windows. Therefore, that caricature is about a Windows support person and Windows users.

The tanks are still free, but the "free support" if you will, lives in a system of caves and revile the surface dwellers; insulting them for asking questions unless they do the secret handshake first.

...and...

Most people are accustomed to being able to call a number, wait on hold for an hour or so, and then slowly work through their problem with a technician, some of whom are more polite and or better at communicating than others.

And "most people" are not going to try Linux because "most people" use whatever OS was installed when they purchased the computer from Dell or HP or such.

Very few people will even try Linux. Those few are (aside from the trolls) the few who understand how the system works (hardware / OS / apps / etc).

The trolls simply want Microsoft Windows ... for free. Or they want something to complain about to show how superior they are to the geeks who prefer Linux.

Phone support for Linux is available to those who need it. Red Hat provides it. Canonical provides it. The reason you don't hear about it that much is because the people who use it are usually supporting corporate servers, not home desktops. The people who run Linux on their home desktop already know how to use the Internet to find the answers they need.

Phone support for home users of Linux will be necessary when Linux is pre-installed on machines sold to home users by Dell and HP and so forth. And when that happens, Dell and HP and the others will provide the phone support.

But that is a long ways away. Look for Linux to gain in the corporate/government desktop market first. And the phone support for those will be the same as it is today. They will have their own IT staff trained on Linux and the specific apps that they use.

Ubuntu on the desktop is ready, today, for those people who have requirements that are met by Ubuntu.

Other people have different requirements. It's as simple as that.

I use Ubuntu

[dtfinch]

My main complaint has been the sluggishness of gtk2 apps. Mainly text rendering is 20-50x slower than it ought to be, as though glyphs aren't being cached or something silly like that, making apps like gedit feel like they're running on a 486.

Wine works pretty well for some Windows apps and games, but I use the latest version from Wine's deb repository, not Ubuntu's. I haven't needed to use Wine recently, as I don't play a lot of games anymore.
I've avoided using the Firefox in Ubuntu because in the past it has always been much slower and more problematic than the official builds I download from mozilla.org.
Ubuntu Edgy for me has been less reliable than Dapper, in exchange for more experimental features, hence the name Edgy. Everything so far has had a workaround though.
Totem is a surprisingly good DVD player, when playing discs that don't require libdvdcss.
I use MPlayer for playing most videos. I naturally had to get the win32 codecs from a third party source, but otherwise it works well.
On one system I had to configure grub to boot with the noapic kernel option to prevent Ubuntu from freezing at random times. It's a hardware related problem.
I was able to add kubuntu (kde) and xubuntu (xfce) to my ubuntu system without much difficulty, apart from them overwriting each other's artwork. Even with all that, I was able to upgrade from Dapper to Edgy without losing anything, though it took some careful work.
DosEMU runs dos programs natively in a window with better performance and compatibility than Windows could ever offer, though I think it took some extraordinary measures to get it installed right on Dapper. I can't remember what though.

At home I have Ubuntu on my main desktop (which I bought with no OS) and Windows Server 2003 on my second (cheaper) desktop for the sole reason that I got a free 1 year msdn subscription a few months ago. If being a serious desktop contender means you can use it professionally as your primary (or only) desktop, then Ubuntu has been since its first release. But having been previously comfortable with Visual Studio, I must admit I've been less productive than I was before, lacking a good (imho) alternative, even though Linux solves the main complaints I've had about Windows. Linux is less stressful and easier to administer at least. I don't curse at it every hour. And I don't plan to give MS another dime after all they've done in recent years.

Watch me get modded as a troll

[synthespian]

I think it's time people just abandon such high hopes with this Debian-derived Linux. We have read recently how Debian developers were stalling once again...And Ubuntu depends on Debian. Good luck with that.

Besides, Linux distros, as a whole, are a sort of a mess. If you ever had to buy proprietary software for Linux, you know what I'm talking about - unreliable. You better pray that on your next upgrade your expensive software will work. There are too many differences between distros for ISVs to keep up...

Right now, it seems the best choice for an open source desktop would be PC-BSD, with its install as easy as a Windows or a Mac OS install. PC-BSD, fortunately, is based on FreeBSD and is not a fork or a distro. Just a solution on top of FreeBSD. BSD developers work on the system as a whole. Linux is made of bits and pieces. Some say that it's what makes it evolve faster. I'm not so sure. Of course, we have to keep in mind what firms like IBM invest in Linux development...Apparently, the fallacy that GPL protects your business investment seems to hinder BSD devlopment (20th-century limited material resources type of thinking...)

I've used Debian for over 5 years. I tried Ubuntu. Ubuntu has has too many problems for my taste, like problems in upgrading, documentation problems, etc. I thought the whole Ubuntu experience was disorganized, in fact, and I thought PHP web forums for support was the most pathetic you could get (hey, NNTP is nice!). SuSE and RedHat have per seat licenses, so where do you go for a decent Linux? We're not in 1996 anymore, we expect shit to work.

The whole typical Linux experience that made me switch to OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Mac OS. I am not going back to that ever...

Re:ummm...

[lpcustom]

Well I haven't seen a Linux user forcing Linux down a Windows user's throat in a long time, but I see complaints of it daily. It's getting to the point that by just having a thread that's talking about Linux we are forcing it down people's throats.
It seems like every discussion I read....where Linux is the topic, there are at least 20 posts putting down Linux and Linux users. To make things worse, these comments are usually +5 insightful. Yet people still complain that Slashdot is full of Linux Zealots. Maybe it's because I don't read many Windows discussions. I follow my own advice and only read the discussions that pertain to me. Though I wouldn't be in the wrong if I did, because I use both. Maybe there should be a slashdot poll to find out just how the community is divided. If I had to guess, I would say that slashdot is 75% Windows lovers these days at least.

My experience: It's the "little" things ...

[isolationism]

I've installed and configured a couple Ubuntu systems now; one with the 64-bit Ubuntu and another with 32-bit Kubuntu, both Dapper (although the former I -- painfully -- upgraded to Edgy, at which point the computer started crashing often, which is why I switched back to Gentoo on my desktop -- Kubuntu is a temporary desktop for my dad while I do some maintenance on his PC).

A few of my personal experiences with running Ubuntu:

• Installation, I grant you, is pretty easy. On modern hardware, almost all of my devices installed and worked just fine with no screwing around. The video driver was an exception; it worked, but the driver was generic VESA (when I had an integrated nVidia chip on an mATX motherboard). Not a deal-breaker, although the performance sucked until this was resolved.
• Fonts are still a mess, not least of all because of Apple's patent on freetype's Byte Code Interpreter. I recently wrote a little article on my blog about how to improve font rendering in Linux, but this is far from a perfect solution--and it still involves a lot of fiddling around to get right. They should just render beautifully out-of-the-box given how particular Shuttleworth is about appearances.
• Application choice. I understand there is the question about support, but shouldn't I be able to readily install what I want without having to jump through so many hoops? Users are forever editing their sources.list file to include repositories that contain the package they want, then you have to use Adept or Synaptic (no not that Adept/Synaptic, that one, which is much more cluttered and difficult to read/use). I'm not talking about the latest and greatest version of Beryl, either -- just stuff like browsers, mail clients or office utilities that didn't make Ubuntu/Kubuntu's "short-list".
• There's always another package to solve functionality problems. For example, I had to install some user-created deb package just to get !@!&* FLAC working in Amarok. The same got replaced as soon as Ubuntu updated the library with something slightly newer--which of course had the FLAC functionality disabled again. Excuse my ignorance, but why the hell wouldn't FLAC support be included considering it's relatively commonly-used, compatibly licenced format? Why am I installing a user-compiled libraries to get this basic functionality so I can do "everyday user" stuff in Linux, like listening to music?
• Suspend/Sleep/Hibernation. I know this still isn't well-supported under Linux, but again I would expect Ubuntu to do a better job. I've seen articles out there blaming Microsoft for wasting millions of dollars worth of the world's power because of their operating system's power management policy--but really, that's the user's fault for not employing the clearly visible feature, not the operating system's: At least sleep/suspend/hibernate works well on modern hardware under Windows. I can't say the same for Ubuntu: even on brand new hardware I can't get it to work, no matter how much time I spend tinkering with installing and configuring various packages. I confess, none of this was on a laptop (the primary support target for this functionality), but does that mean it shouldn't "just work" anyway? It's the desktops that are wasting >100W of power by being on all the time, not the laptops that draw perhaps 20W during heavy loads when plugged in.
• Remember that time a couple months ago when Canonical pushed out a package that prevented X from loading properly? I do. A lot of Ubuntu users who had never seen the console (and never want to) filled their pants that day. I cringed when it happened; it wouldn't have bothered me much (inconvenienced, perhaps) but I doubt the same could be said for most of Ubuntu's target audience.
• And then, there is the speed. I know performance isn't everything, but Ubuntu is almost painfully/embarassingly slow. I have only limited experience with Linux desktops; I've used Ub

I don't see that.

[khasim]

Well, the free support I was referring to was the IRC channels and Forums. I probably didn't make it clear but I was saying that the people who do venture into IRC channels and forums for the first time looking for help usually get informed fairly quickly that they should stfu and figure it out themselves.

I tend to hand out on the Ubuntu channel and I don't see that.

That's a surefire way to scare off people who could otherwise be great examples of how linux can work for anyone who tries. Note that difference. What is said about linux is "it works for anyone who will try", what that really means is the old joke of "linux is only free if your time is worthless".

No. Linux is free (as in speech, as in beer).

Accomplishing a specific task in Linux takes effort, the same as it does in Windows or any other system.

But most people have already invested the time to learn how to accomplish that task in Windows and they no longer remember the effort it took.

I've taught people who have never used a computer before. I know the effort it takes for them to learn. My best example was a woman who could not double click with a mouse. She had to hold it still with one hand and click the buttons with her other hand.

A week of playing solitaire and she had mastered the double click and fine mouse control.

Compare apples to apples, okay?

"Very few people will even try linux". Yes and that is why we should try to retain those people, instead of basically saying "are you good enough/smart enough to use this OS?".

Again, those are the ones who already know how their systems work and how to do research online. Those are the ones who switch to Linux and stay there.

"Or they want something to complain about to show how superior they are to the geeks who prefer Linux." I'm unclear what you mean by that. If you're referring to people complaining about things not working in Linux and then acting like they've just "shown them", maybe it's because the hype makes Linux out to be the second coming of Christ?

Well, that's a pretty good example of what I was saying. Linux is a kernel. Even a whole distribution is just an OS.

Who would hype it (and who would believe that hype) to the same level as "the second coming of Christ"?

I'm sorry I find this to be inaccurate.

What is inaccurate?

That most people use Windows? Nope, the facts contradict you.

That most computer support people are Windows support people? Nope, the facts contradict you.

Therefore, the caricature is of a Windows support person. Whether you want to accept that fact or not.

The caricature is of a jackass who decides that he has the right to mock people because he has a skill they don't. This is made worse in a lot of the sketches with the choice for the user being either "figure it out yourself" or "MOVE!" and having him do the whole thing.

Nick Burns isn't supporting their Linux boxes. He's supporting their Windows boxes.

The caricature is OS-independent. You could have a Nick Burns in Windows, Linux, OSX or in your refrigerator repairman.

No. If he was doing Linux support he would be a lot less amusing because far fewer people would have experienced that type of Linux support.

Which is the reason you don't see "Nick Burns, jet engine mechanic" as a comedy routine. It wouldn't be funny because very few people would have any experience with that situation.

Nick Burns is funny to so many people because so many people have had similar experiences with Windows support personel.

Not with Linux. With Windows.

Trolls complain about Linux simply because it is different from Windows and they don't want to re-learn their "computer skills". But the reality is that they don't have "computer skills". All they have is "Windows skills".

Re:ummm...

[logicassasin]

"There are just as many Slashdot users out there saying "Linux users need to realize that if they want their OS to survive blah blah blah" like you. Could you muster up an original thought?"

it's been done over and over. Here's a few of my own thoughts on the subject: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93340&cid= 8018882

Linux still needs commercial apps. Linux still needs to be made easier for the newbie. Linux still needs people like you to get off their high horse.

If linux is ready for YOUR desktop, fine, you're not asking much of it. I, on the other hand, need more than Linux currently offers. I CAN do a great deal of my work under Linux (FPGA development, Java and C dev, word processing, anything server related, email, web browsing, music/video playback), but not all of it. There's still no ProTools or Cubase for Linux (No, Rosegarden and Ardour don't cut it), still no FL Studio, Rebirth, Reason, or Serato Scratch and support for any Digidesign hardware will likely never materialize. While my console emulators usually have Linux versions, the vast majority of my commercial games don't (ID games are the notable exception). I still can't work with my Flash projects under Linux. The Gimp is nice and all, but I'm far faster (and therefore more productive) in PhotoShop.

Linux is coming along. It'll be there one day.

CD burning on Linux

[alizard]

is trivial at this point. Use K3b, as I am doing right now. (I'm burning the second DVD-R of a 10-disk backup volume) I haven't had trouble with setting it up since Fedora Core 2.