Examining gOS With Its Ubuntu Origins In Mind

An anonymous reader writes "The history of computing is that of giants being toppled. Right now, Ubuntu is the giant of the Linux world but some have been suggesting that gOS' latest release — 3.0 "Gadgets" Beta — might be a serious challenger. Can this be true? The truth is a little more complicated, as the Ubuntu Kung Fu blog explains in its review of the new release."

Comments

Blogspam?

[HeavensBlade23]

Is this blogspam? Such a sensational summary for an article that basically says 'Meh, I guess it's kinda cool'

Re:Serious challenger?

[Bandman]

Probably not?

Seriously, the reason Ubuntu has been as successful as it has is because Shuttleworth can pay people to work on it.

Free open-source developers who are volunteering their time work on problems that are fun, or are hard.

Paid developers work on what someone tells them to.

In the minds of most programmers I know, there's no glory or bragging rights in building a unified user experience. .

Re:Marketing

[Bandman]

You know, Robert Kiyosake, who is 99% full of crap, had a gem of wisdom in one of his books.

He told the story about how he met with a reporter who wanted to become an author, and she asked him for advice, since he had been published numerable times. His advice to her was to learn marketing. "You'll notice", he said, "that the cover of the book says 'best selling author', it doesn't say 'best writing author'".

There's a lot of truth in that statement.

Best is such a subjective term, but Ubuntu is the most successful distro in recent memory, in terms of users, name recognition, and having a unified interface.

It's certainly not perfect, but for usability and bringing Linux to the masses, it's a damn bit better than everything else out there

Sorry to all the Mepis, RedHat, Mandrake, Gentoo, Slack, and other distro fans.

Why I use Ubuntu and not others like Zenwalk

[KWTm]

In my mind, Zenwalk is, hands-down, a better distro. Faster, lighter, equally compatible, large library of pre-built software, easy to maintain. Running Zenwalk makes Ubuntu feel like Windows... it really *is* that much zippier. And there's probably other distros that are of the same calibre, but I simply haven't felt any need or desire to go looking.

Without thinking any less of Zenwalk, I would say that the reason I chose Ubuntu, and the reason I hope most people choose Ubuntu, is for the critical mass effect. Although it's perfectly alright for there to be an unlimited number of Linux distributions, I hope that one can emerge to be the flagship distribution, the de facto standard, so that the non-Linux world --vendors of Other Operating Systems, hardware manufacturers, and the lay public-- can have a standard distribution to see, experience and understand. If a hardware manufacturer decides that it can't possibly support all Linux distributions, at least it can say "we support Ubuntu Linux" and the other distro's can take it from there. If some noob-to-Linux goes crying for help, at least s/he there's a chance that some not-quite-geek has heard of the distro and can offer some help and support --including emotional support, where appropriate.

Red Hat had the chance to be that one flagship distro. They decided to cut it loose and focus just on big companies. Debian never really focused on the end-user experience. Mandrake (now Mandriva) came the closest to Ubuntu, in my opinion, but I guess they were missing a millionaire benefactor.

So, I hear you, and I don't think Zenwalk is any less because everyone's talking about Ubuntu. But I think Ubuntu has its place, and I think all the Linux distros benefit from Ubuntu's standing.

Having said that, can you tell me a bit more about Zenwalk and how easy it is to maintain? I briefly checked out the web page and couldn't tell if it was based on the Debian system, like Ubuntu. If it's not too far off from Ubuntu and it's able to benefit from ports to Ubuntu, then I might check it out. Because I find that one necessity in a Linux distro is the existence of a strong package maintenance institution, so that I can be confident that new software will be packaged and made available for (and compatible with) my distro.