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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."
Does their marketting team have anything to do with their success?
nope, everyone i know that uses ubuntu uses it because its easier to install/use and/or its nicely integrated.
I've done this about five times on Slashdot. Someone asks me what I don't like about Ubuntu, I get modded down troll for answering a question, etc. I don't really feel like arguing, but if you really want to go point-by-point:
No, Kubuntu.
Kubuntu is a separate project worked on by seperate devs. It doesn't get the baseline Ubuntu features for precisely that reason.
I have no idea what you're on about here.
Fire up a Knoppix CD, or Kubuntu and you'll basically see a vanilla KDE desktop. They don't customize the packages, install addition patches, or do anything. Now fire up Mandriva, or openSUSE, or PCLinuxOS, or Arch's KDEMod, or Sabayon, etc. You'll see they've added other patches to expand functionality, fix bugs, backport features, etc. What is the point of 20 million distros if they all ship the same packages?
Many Ubuntu packages are largely the vanilla, upstream package with no changes. (Ubuntu has a decent number of kernel patches and toolchain patches, like many other distros, but they largely inherit these from Debian). openSUSE (my most common example recently, because it is my new favorite of all the major distros I've tried recently) hires devs to backport features, and make the best possible packages they can. Again, many Gnome users praise openSUSE for putting out a bettter Gnome desktop than Ubuntu, because they don't ship vanilla packages.
You get what is needed and you can do your customization after the install process. This is the best decision ever made by the Ubuntu community.
I'm not saying Ubuntu is wrong. I'm saying I don't like it. I want options in my install process to customize it. Ubuntu is targeted at a certain audience. I'm not a member of it. I used to recommend Kubuntu to people who weren't computer savvy and wanted something very simple, and yet I discovered that other distros were just as simple to use, while providing better packages to boot.
It's a theme, you can change it.
I always change the theme on any desktop, but you asked what I don't like. I really don't like Ubuntu brown and orange. A recent poll on the openSUSE forums showed most responders saying they never bother changing the default theme. I don't understand that. Why wouldn't you customize your desktop?
Thousands of others have no problem. Can you install these drivers by clicking "yes" to an option on these other distros?
openSUSE offers a 1-click installer. Sabayon includes them by default. Heck, Mint (a nicer fork of Ubuntu) includes them by default. I followed the instructions on Ubuntu's wiki, yet they never worked. I asked for help and was repeatedly attacked for attempting to use ATI. Mind you, on the exact same laptop (my wife's old laptop) I ran Gentoo with the ATI drivers (custom kernel, -viper release), Sabayon with the ATI drivers, and openSUSE 10.1 with the ATI drivers. The only distro I had problems with was Ubuntu.
If you do advanced things you're expected to know what you are doing. This is the same for any linux distro.
You're not seeing what I'm getting at. I know how to compile my own kernel. I've been doing it for years. Since I'm impatient, even on binary distros I compile my own kernel and manually patch in drivers rather than wait for distros to releasing updated packages. On Ubuntu and Kubuntu, after I made my own kernel, it would not load the ATI module at all. It gave me an error about how it could not load the module because it was missing a restricted modules .deb package. They've gone out of their way to patch into their kernel sources a measure to stop you from using proprietary modules. I've never seen another distro do this. For the stock Ubuntu kernels, this package exists. For custom kernels (I downloaded a -mm kernel and then patched in the Ubuntu diff. I normally always patch in that distro's patches to the kernel in case they are important). If I never patched in the Ubuntu patches, the ATI driver would
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I've done this about five times on Slashdot. Someone asks me what I don't like about Ubuntu, I get modded down troll for answering a question, etc.
I can see why. You're wrong and you seem to be uninterested in learning this.
Kubuntu is a separate project worked on by seperate devs. It doesn't get the baseline Ubuntu features for precisely that reason.
No it isn't. What gave you that idea?
Fire up a Knoppix CD, or Kubuntu and you'll basically see a vanilla KDE desktop. They don't customize the packages, install addition patches, or do anything. Now fire up Mandriva, or openSUSE, or PCLinuxOS, or Arch's KDEMod, or Sabayon, etc. You'll see they've added other patches to expand functionality, fix bugs, backport features, etc. What is the point of 20 million distros if they all ship the same packages?
Many Ubuntu packages are largely the vanilla, upstream package with no changes. (Ubuntu has a decent number of kernel patches and toolchain patches, like many other distros, but they largely inherit these from Debian). openSUSE (my most common example recently, because it is my new favorite of all the major distros I've tried recently) hires devs to backport features, and make the best possible packages they can. Again, many Gnome users praise openSUSE for putting out a bettter Gnome desktop than Ubuntu, because they don't ship vanilla packages.
Oh, so "vanilla" means "like debian".. that's ok, I like debian. Sounds like you have a different personal preference. This is probably the most legitimate thing you have said in this thread.
I'm not saying Ubuntu is wrong. I'm saying I don't like it. I want options in my install process to customize it. Ubuntu is targeted at a certain audience. I'm not a member of it. I used to recommend Kubuntu to people who weren't computer savvy and wanted something very simple, and yet I discovered that other distros were just as simple to use, while providing better packages to boot.
Again, personal preference, good for you.
I always change the theme on any desktop, but you asked what I don't like. I really don't like Ubuntu brown and orange. A recent poll on the openSUSE forums showed most responders saying they never bother changing the default theme. I don't understand that. Why wouldn't you customize your desktop?
I like the default theme, personally. I also don't really care too much about it. You obviously do and that's your preference.
openSUSE offers a 1-click installer. Sabayon includes them by default. Heck, Mint (a nicer fork of Ubuntu) includes them by default. I followed the instructions on Ubuntu's wiki, yet they never worked. I asked for help and was repeatedly attacked for attempting to use ATI. Mind you, on the exact same laptop (my wife's old laptop) I ran Gentoo with the ATI drivers (custom kernel, -viper release), Sabayon with the ATI drivers, and openSUSE 10.1 with the ATI drivers. The only distro I had problems with was Ubuntu.
When was this? I have a machine with ATI drivers, Ubuntu installed them by default and alerted me that it had done it.
You're not seeing what I'm getting at. I know how to compile my own kernel. I've been doing it for years. Since I'm impatient, even on binary distros I compile my own kernel and manually patch in drivers rather than wait for distros to releasing updated packages. On Ubuntu and Kubuntu, after I made my own kernel, it would not load the ATI module at all. It gave me an error about how it could not load the module because it was missing a restricted modules .deb package. They've gone out of their way to patch into their kernel sources a measure to stop you from using proprietary modules. I've never seen another distro do this. For the stock Ubuntu kernels, this package exists. For custom kernels (I downloaded a -mm kernel and then patched in the Ub
How we know is more important than what we know.
Speaking of DragonFly, here's this doc http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/nanosleep/index.shtml about how they managed to get rid of an important timing bug to minimize the sleep/wakeup delay in nanosleep() calls. Very interesting for those in multithreaded apps.
Yet judging from the screenshots it's running the exact same apps that Ubuntu uses (ghex, gcalc, etc).
This seems like a case of you just wanting to be different from the "norm" and I very much doubt Zenwalk is any better then any other Linux OS that uses the exact same software.
Unfortunately that won't work with envy:
https://answers.launchpad.net/envy/+question/23594
The only way to get a working binary for the older cards is to install an ATI blob from version 8.28.8 http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/radeonprevious-linux.html or before. A lot of laptops use 9100s, they were dropped along with a heap of other models after this release.
You just have to give up in the end and lose most of your acceleration, or install a old distro from cd and not update it.
Debian the community was broke in 2004. I know because I was there watching them. In 2004, they seemed to be holding a competition with XP for longest running stable release. Except XP got SP2, essentially making Debian the winner. They hid from users, they had no focus on the desktop. They did have a lot of great stuff that was just going nowhere, because they were paralyzed by vote. #debian was nearly a cess pool of wrath from people who felt they earned the right to it. They refused to integrate new technologies like Knoppix, even though it's based on Debian. The greatest worry at the time was how they were losing user and developers to Gentoo, and rightfully so.
However you feel about Debian today, there was previously a large void in Debian that Ubuntu brought to the table. Many of the changes Ubuntu has made are in Debian today. I know quite a few current Debian contributors that started on Ubuntu, but found it easier to work with Debian directly and let Ubuntu sync changes. It's a bit strange, but I can see why people might do that.
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