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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.'"
Hm, I guess it seems Gutsy Gibbon isn't quite up to stuff. Prolly oughta wait for the next edition, the more refined Hairy Hardon.
Ubuntu isn't successful because it's an operating system for advanced users only (like Gentoo). It's successful due to being user friendly to people who are Windows users who are curious about Linux.
With Linux I've noticed that user control is inversely proportional to user-friendliness. 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.
Similarly, Gentoo gives the user complete control over what applications, drivers, daemons are installed but is by no means user-friendly.
The writer of TFA really did a whole lot of whining about how little control he had over the installation and initial software packages. What did he expect? It's Ubuntu.
The game.
Who's to say that any name is lame or not? More importantly, who cares? A cursory glance beyond whatever moniker a distribution has is really needed before a decision is made to adopt it. If you judge based on a name, you probably shouldn't be in a position to decide anyway!
If you are really worried about the name as it relates to non-geek circles, use their numbering scheme instead. Gutsy Gibbon is Ubuntu 7.10 (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GutsyGibbon).
Personally, as long as the Ubuntu guys continue to churn out an excellent product, I could not care less about the name.
df -h
When dealing with the PHBs, feel free to use the version number instead, as that is the official name -- 7.10 for Gutsy Gibbon.
I just refer to it as Gibbon when necessary; when questioned about why the name Gibbon was chosen, I tell them it's to recognize the hard work of all the codemonkeys.
I haven't yet been challenged on the fact that Gibbons are apes, not monkeys, so I'm sticking to my story.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I agree with you.
TFA is not wrong in what it says, but perhaps it misses a point. For years people were begging for a "user-friendly" Linux distribution, where the user would "not be inundated with choices" and so on. Ubuntu arose with the aim to be "Linux for human beings," where an ordinary person would be able (with some guidance) to install, learn, and productively use the OS. The aim of Ubuntu is to fill that niche.
TFA discusses needing to find the balance between "simplicity for beginners" and "power for advanced users." But he seems to think that each Linux distro should be finding that balance--rather than accepting that the point of having multiple distros is that each one can strike a different balance. Ubuntu, clearly, is a distro that favors simplicity, because it is trying to capture some of the "mass market" of beginners. If you want the installation to expose lots of details to you, then there are distros that will make that happen (e.g. Debian).
Now, having made the case that each distro can and should strike a different balance, I still find the argument misses the mark. I like to consider myself a "power user" who tries to do technical things (run webservers, programming, etc.), and Ubuntu (Kubuntu actually) is my distro of choice. Frankly, once you "know Linux" it's trivially easy to find and modify all the hidden features. Once you open a terminal, you have access to all the power, customization, and advanced features of any other Linux distro.
Furthermore, many experts may prefer Ubuntu's simplicity, because it lets you get to the tasks you actually care about (and care about customizing) faster. It's nice to be able to complete a full install in 15 minutes (yes, I timed it), with no hassles, and then fine tune it as needed. As I said before--it's not like the customizations are not there. Just open a terminal, edit a config file, just like any other distro.
I actually wonder why there is still this big iron thinking about root and "unprivileged users", especially around a desktop distro like Ubuntu. I am the only user of my system. If someone breaks into my normal user account and deletes all files there it is the worst possible scenario. If it is done from root, there is not much of a difference. And unprivileged users can also serve as spam bots, they have all the access to a heap of scripting languages and whatnot -- so really, what is the difference?
Just because it happens to be Unix, some people seem to have a sysadmin reflex that tells them root is more worthy than others.
Gibbons are apes, not monkeys.