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A Gut Check On Gutsy Gibbon
jammag writes "Linux pundit Bruce Byfield looked inside the pre-release of Gutsy Gibbon and found what he calls 'Windows thinking.' His article, Divining from the Entrails of Ubuntu's Gutsy Gibbon, notes that Ubuntu is the dominant distro, having achieved a level of success that might be leading to complacency. He opines: 'Only once or twice did I find a balance between accessibility to newcomers and a feature set for advanced users. At times, I wondered whether the popularity might be preventing Ubuntu from finishing some rough edges.'"
The 8.04 release will be Hardy Heron.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardyHeron
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
With Linux I've noticed that user control is inversely proportional to user-friendliness.
That's not so. A user who expects a large amount of control is going to find a "user friendly" OS that limits him to be very unfriendly.
Operating systems like Ubuntu are made with user-friendliness in mind and that comes at the price of user control. It's quick and easy to set-up and use which garners alot of favor from the Windows crowd.
Except that it doesn't come at the price of user control. A Ubuntu system can do pretty much everything a plain debian system can. The shell is still there and fully functional, same with apt-get.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I, much like you, grew up on RH and was mocked and ignored whenever I had issues. I also use FC7 now. But Ubuntu offers something to newcomers today that we didn't get 10 years ago: a community that doesn't suck.
Perhaps it is dumbing Linux down. My response: so what. People who find Ubuntu to be useful may be likely to try more advanced distros in the future. This is a foot in the door; the gateway drug so-to-speak.
The game.
You have a command line, emacs, vi, the gcc suite, perl, clisp and sbcl. What more could you possibly want?
As long as there's a terminal available and gcc, you just can't complain about lack of power user features in Linux.
He complains about the multiple package management programs. There's no problem here, since they all use the same underlying database, and a newbie would never know about the command line ones, and wouldn't need to.
A new user will get along just fine with the simplicity of Ubuntu on the desktop. A power user will hit the command line and have no problems.
It seems like this guy knows just enough about Debian to be dangerous, and is now cranky that Ubuntu is slightly different.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
So many people like to proclaim that Ubuntu is for the novice Windows convert. I contest that assertion! I have been managing a fairly large and quite diverse network for a few years now. Our servers range wildly from Debian varieties, to Windows 200x, and Solaris. Personally, I have been using Linux for several years and am not afraid of any "advanced-user" functions. I recently switched to Ubuntu (about a year ago) and won't be going back to my Debian roots anytime soon. Some like to spout that Ubuntu is the *nix O/S that "just works" - I feel differently about that too. Gentoo, Slackware, Red Hat, ... the all "work," it's the operator/administrator that "just doesn't." The question is should the administrator have to? Should time be spent in making the O/S work; or should time be spent configuring the Services and Applications to work?
The answer is simple - Ubuntu gives me a well-secured, base system with excellent hardware support and updates. On more then one occasion I have found the need to break the default Ubuntu base system (removing a default package in favor of another system) and was shocked to see a seamless transition. Try messing around with udev, hal, dbus, and hotplug on any other Linux distro and see what happens. Try swapping out X servers and welcome to Linux hell!
Lastly, Ubuntu has achieved what no other Linux distro ever has and that is their Exceptional support community. The Ubuntu forums (coupled with their online Community contributed docs) is one of the single greatest achievements in the Open community (IMHO) in the last 3 years. The support on the Ubuntu forums is not limited to Ubuntu and I see several non-Ubuntu users linking to Ubuntu forum threads, or asking questions there directly. The support I have received from the forum rivals all other *nix support I have ever dealt with including paid support for Red Hat and Solaris. I even ask questions on the forums non-Ubuntu related. I have asked Perl programming questions and got answers faster then I could through any other Perl or Linux forum. This is the true power of this Distro!
The Distrowatch ranking is only a count of how many people click through distrowatch.org to get to a distribution.
Because the Ubuntu name is so well known, the vast majority of people downloading Ubuntu do it by going to ubuntu.com directly, or get directed to ubuntu.com by Google.
PCLOS, on the other hand, is practically unknown. I would imagine that most people have never heard of it until they went to Distrowatch and saw it near the top of the list, and decided to click on it. In fact, that is how I first learned about PCLOS.
Since most people are discovering PCLOS through Distrowatch, while most people are downloading Unbuntu via ubuntu.com, it makes sense that PCLOS would show up higher on the Distrowatch ranking.
In fact, if you look at Google Trends more and more people are searching for "Ubuntu" on Google, even as the amount of people searching for "Linux" is dropping. You could argue that Ubuntu is becoming a replacement for Linux in the common lexicon. Meanwhile, "PCLOS" and "PCLINUXOS" hardly even show up in any Google searches.
"Janus"? "Frosting"? "Wolfpack"? "Hydra"? How about "Sixpack"? "Ides of Buster"? "Pigs in Space"? You're either a troll or an imbecile, I can't decide which. The codenames for Ubuntu are no more or less "weird" than they are for any other company, and all things considered, significantly less weird than many.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Sensible defaults and the ability to make changes later on is much preferable.
Now how about installing ntp by default.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I think that you have misunderstood what SELinux is all about. It is not a replacement for su or sudo, it is a completely different system. It allows the vendor/administrator to explicitly specify what privileges a specific process should have in fine-grained detail. Even though e.g. the apache account has read access to every file that everyone can read, SELinux enables you to specify that the apache process should be denied access to anything beyond its configuration file, its plugins and the web tree, even if it would have access according to the ordinary permissions system.
By restricting rights on this level of detail, a cracker exploiting a security hole in the apache process would not be able to access any file beyond those explicitly specified in the SELinux policy.
Exactly. I recently installed Ubuntu on my dad's computer because I finally got tired of reinstalling Windows because he downloaded some virus/trojan/worm, and having the anti-virus shit not work time again. After going through the install, I know he (a mostly computer illiterate old fart who can e-mail and readily find virus laden porno sites--and not much else) could have installed it on a fresh drive, but I did it because I wanted to make sure his Windows partition was preserved, and because I was putting Ubuntu on a second drive.
It has been a long time since I tried any of the more user friendly distros, I was surprised at how easy and straight forward it was, and that most of the good stuff was there by default. Linux newbies don't really know what they need, so why bother confusing them with five (or more) different, but vaguely related apps that all do basically the same thing? If they want, they can use the add/remove programs dialogs to search for what they need, after the install is complete. After a few minutes of moving his Thunderbird and Firefox profiles over, it was done.
He's loving it, and he rants and raves to his friends about how easy Ubuntu is--even though he can't pronounce the name. I for one think the Ubuntu guys have done an excellent job. The one thing I think they could have done is made firestarter a default app, configured to get the firewall running by default. Come to think about it, I'm not sure if the firewall is enabled and working before installing and using firestarter; could be for all I know, I didn't test it. If it's not, I think a firewall rule or two should be default.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
You should be able to add an
Option "Rotate" "UD"
To your device section to show the display upside down by default. It'll work with most X.org drivers.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
If you want gentoo use gentoo , If you want debian use debian, please don't expect every distro to follow your own ideas of the perfect distro and for god's sake, don't even think that your idea of the perfect distro should be considered dogma.
I think that as much as the author blames ubuntu for complacency out of popularity, the things the author is complaining about are not specific to this release which kind of destroys the whole article, as if the guy didn't know the things he is complaining about are exactly the reason ubuntu is so popular.
I RTFA this is a summary:
Color me unimpressed by this article.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
No! Please let this myth die! Read this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo In
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
first of all, the only user that gets sudo by default is the user that actually sets the os up. every other added user has to be given sudo permissions manually. how is this different to the first user having the root password (which they had to know to install it in your 'better model'.
your example above is no different from one user with root access changing the root password. if you don't trust them implicitly then DONT give them sudo/root access.
the advantage of sudo is the ability to do things like allow a user to use sudo to run some specific backup task or whatever ONLY. no access to rm as root etc. this way if a user requires root access for one program they can be given it without compromising anything else (provided, of course, the program they are given access to is trustworthy and secure in itself).