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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?"
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.
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
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...)
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
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.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
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.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
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
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?"
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?
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 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.
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'
#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.
Kubuntu is much MUCH less poopy looking.
/lib directory. If I were a total newbie, how the hell would I be able to fix that?
/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).
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
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
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.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
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.
Beer! It's what's for breakfast!
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.