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Ubuntu Continues to Grab Market Share
slasher writes "MadPenguin.org discusses the future of Ubuntu and confirms Ubuntu's growing market share in the Linux market. Author Matt Hartley writes, "Now, for the biggest question: do high numbers mean that Ubuntu is the best distribution out there? Some will argue that this is an impossible point to make, as each person has different needs from their distribution. But for the sake of this article, we will be considering the average user, not the Slackware crowd, who is obviously much more comfortable within a command line environment than mainstream users."
http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/faq
Before a vowel sound, you use 'an' instead of 'a'.
Anyhow, doesn't matter cuz Kubuntu is better.
I used Debian (long ago) and then more recently Slackware. When Kubuntu Dapper came out, I switched to that and never looked back. It had everything that Slackware did, but the ease of 'apt-get install x' for almost all the software I wanted. Slackware worked well and all, but any time I wanted to install something, I was expected to configure and make it, or download a slackware package from some third-party site that had stuff that worked about 2/3 of the time. (My definition of not-working includes compiles that leave out options that are pretty necessary as well as just plain broken.)
2 versions later, I can't imagine using another OS as my primary OS. There are drawbacks, like proprietary drivers for the major video cards, and lacking the fancy interface of certain fruit-oriented OS's, but I'm more efficient on Kubuntu than any other OS I've used.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Obviously. And Ubuntu is no exception to that. On old PCs that have less than 256M RAM, you can't use the standard Ubuntu live/install CD. Laptops have always been a little behind desktops, making it even harder to find a suitable distro for an old laptop. If one of the brags of Linux is that old hardware isn't left out in the cold, many of the distros make that untrue by building for Pentium IIs at a minimum. Embedded is even harder-- there are few enough options that you can be pretty much stuck heavily modifying and compiling some sort of Gentoo style distro, or even making up a distro yourself. A 386 with 4M of RAM isn't a usable computer anymore, but it's not because it can't do useful work, it's because software has become so much more demanding. I used to surf the Internet on just such a 386, with Netscape 3 running in X.
I've been trying distro after distro, trying to find something lightweight and full featured not just because I have old computers, but also because I like fast response times. Slackware derivatives seem most promising, so have tried Zenwalk, Vector, and Slackware itself. Also tried Xubuntu. Next on my list of distros to try is KateOS.
Someone asked why Mandriva wasn't more popular. In 2 words, nagging and blinders. Mandriva by default points a lot of things to various nag messages, like the default browser homepage. Lot of the help functions launch a browser which, guess what? Loads up another part of the Mandriva web site with both a) nagging, and b) blinders, as in a search function that searches only Mandriva's stuff. Once you get tired of not finding answers there, you forget their help functions, and try your luck with a real search engine, or the Howtos from linux.org, or (gasp) the docs from the homepage of whatever generic app you're trying to use.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Unless I'm horribly mistaken, I'm pretty sure that Gutsy Gibbon is NOT a LTS release.
n ounce/2007-April/000276.html
from https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-an
"Gutsy will not be an LTS (Long Term Support) release, but it will nonetheless see a lot of server work and be useful for fast-moving server deployments. "
I agree with everything you said, however. I use the LTS edition for servers that need to be stable, and use the latest version for desktops. The Long Term Support is long enough that you can be confident with it (and easily upgrade to the next LTS when it comes along). Upgrading Ubuntu (e.g. from Edgy to Feisty) has always been painless in my experience. (Yes, YMMV.)
I'm very pleased with the speed (and predictability) of the Ubuntu release schedule, and with the quality of what gets put out.
Debian and Ubuntu have compatibility binaries available to support running x86 binaries,
but these are NOT installed by default. There are ways to run various x86 binaries on
both Debian and Ubuntu, and you can search the Ubuntu forums for this.
BTW, Gentoo is similar to Debian in being a 'true 64' bit, but in Gentoo the compatibility
libraries are found in a more logical directory tree structure. In all three distro's
a bit of shell script skulldugery is required to launch a 32 bit binary in a 64 bit world.