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No Wine for Dell Ubuntu Users, Says Shuttleworth
yuna49 writes "News from last week, but still worth noting: Mark Shuttleworth told eWeek in a May 3rd interview that Dell will not include open-source software such as Wine with the PCs it plans to bundle with Ubuntu Linux. Says Shuttleworth: 'I do not want to position Ubuntu and Linux as a cheap alternative to Windows ... While Linux is an alternative to Windows, it is not cheap Windows. Linux has its own strengths, and users should want it because of those strengths and not because it's a cheap copy of Windows ... Often we see proprietary software companies just completely fail to understand not only the motivations of the Linux community, but also the processes. It's very practical, there's a way to get things done, and it's different. The VMware guys have really engaged with us completely and worked to the agenda set by the Linux community, which is not an ideological agenda but a practical one.' Does that mean Wine won't even be listed in the package manager?"
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Linux has its own strengths, and users SHOULD want it because of those strengths and not because it's a cheap copy of Windows
And men SHOULD give a fat girls a chance because of their personalities Don't tell the market what the market once, let consumers decide.
Yes! Like when I installed Ubuntu a few days ago.
I wanted to play some music while I tweaked it. Applications -> Add/Remove -> Audio...lets see what we have here. The first on on the alphabetical list I forget the name of, Audio something or other.
I install it. Run it. Ask it to get my MP3s off a Windows share. It give me no indication that it is doing anything all all, but I assume it is because Slashdot told me that FOSS 'just works'. I give it some time before I click Play. Nothing happens. No error message, no change in appearance, no music, nothing. I figure maybe this is Windows' fault so I copy a few MP3s over to my Home folder. Again I tell my new music player to play them. It does not. I ask it to play one of them. It does not. Nor does it give me any indication of why it will not or even that it understands any of my instructions at all. I hunt around on its bland UI, blindly clicking buttons that are not described by any text but have strange graphics drawn on them, unlike any I have ever seen before. Finally I find some kind of menu system and locate some list of errors, which is quite long. All relating to the application's inability to play MP3 files because it cannot locate the appropriate plugin. There is no indication of how I might assist it, no links, no nothing. An application described in the repo as being an audio player, yet it does not play the most common audio file format on earth. Why does this not suprise me?
So I uninstall it and go to the next one on the list. Infuriatingly, it cannot play my files either. I did not bother to figure out why, not wanting to brave its just as obscure but totally different UI button drawings. I uninstall.
Looking through the repo again I find, almost all the way wat the end, XMMS. Install. Ask it to play a file. Magically it does. The UI is still imbecilic, looking like a poor copy of WinAmp from 1995, but at least it actually works.
So yes, you can do most of the stuff in Linux that you can in Windows. If you have 100 hours to spend.
says it and proceeds by putting its own ideology onto the agenda.
Ha!