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

[Enderandrew]

1 - Gnome only
2 - Fairly vanilla packages
3 - Really ugly themeing
4 - Basically zero options in the install process. I get the default packages, and that is it.
5 - I could never get the ATI drivers to work well with Ubuntu on my wife's laptop, but they worked great with Sabayon and openSUSE.
6 - I compiled a custom kernel by hand, but then I couldn't get the ATI driver to load at all, because Ubuntu demands that there be a restricted module package for the kernel, and I couldn't make one for a custom kernel.
7 - Never could get madwifi to work on Ubuntu well, when it worked out of the box with openSUSE and Sabayon.
8 - When I asked for support in the forums I was repeatedly flamed in PMs, and on the IRC support channel. I was told that I needed to install the 32-bit version, even when I asked for help the in the 64-bit forums. I was repeatedly told the 64-bit version is unsupported, even though Cannonical sells commercial support for it.
9 - Asking about restricted formats also provoked several flames, and Ubuntu fights methods that allow people to easily install them.
10 - I eventually tried out Kubuntu to find arguably the single worst KDE desktop I've seen in a distro.
11 - I was repeatedly instructed not to install a toolkit or attempt to compile anything manually. "I might screw something up, and frankly you shouldn't ever try to to do things on your own."
12 - At every turn Ubuntu removed choice. It was the most simplistic, straight-forward distro I've ever tried. There is a target audience for that, and it isn't me.
13 - Ubuntu supposedly "simply works" just like Apple. Fans would like you to believe neither Apple nor Ubuntu ever have problems, and yet Ubuntu has had some serious bugs with their last four releases I've witnessed.
14 - Kubuntu is a bastard child that not only receives little developer attention, but it is usually a release behind Ubuntu on *buntu features.
15 - A forum moderator actually told me I was an idiot for owning ATI hardware, to which I replied "it is the laptop my wife bought" to which he later replied "then you should divorce the bitch." I expect better from moderators. It is the single worst community I've ever dealt with. I really got spoiled on the Gentoo forums. I really love reading those.

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.

Re:gOS....

[Narpak]

Though if you press the "gOS" button at the top bar you come to http://thinkgos.com/new/gos.php which states:

gOS 3 Gadgets BETA is based on the solid Linux distribution base of Ubuntu 8.04.1.

and also

Designed for NetBooks & NetTops

Re:Marketing

[Enderandrew]

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

Re:Marketing

[Enderandrew]

ATI hasn't released code for those drivers actually. They've released specs and technical documents on newer, high-end Radeon cards.

When you attack someone and say that they're wrong, next time try to have facts on your side.

That doesn't change the fact that when I tried the distro, they were the only ones that had issues with those drivers.

And despite your claims that Ubuntu is the best community (seriously, check out a real helpful, knowledgable community like Gentoo) that doesn't change the fact that people attacked me for asking for help.

The facts are the facts. Your comments don't change them.

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.

Re:Why I use Ubuntu and not others like Zenwalk

[KillerBob]

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.

It's Slack-based. But unlike Slack, it has a package-management system with dependency checking, and uses a modern 2.6 kernel. It still uses the same .tgz package format as Slack, meaning it's essentially a tarball and you can install Slack packages, as well as coming with utilities that let you convert rpm and deb packages to tgz so they can be installed, and installs packages very quickly. I can't fault apt... it is a very good tool for system management. But Zenwalk's netpkg brings all of that functionality to a Slack-based system. Like Ubuntu, Zen has restricted packages for drivers like NVidia and ATi, as well as DVD playback and MP3 encoding (which aren't actually needed most of the time). I have not yet run into a software that I use which isn't in the repo, but unlike Ubuntu, I didn't have to configure *anything* on my laptop. Everything worked out of the box (well, for performance reasons I did choose to install the NVidia binary blob driver: I play games). Even MP3 and DVD playback, and the wireless card (Intel 8945g) worked out of the box without any need to be installed or configured.

That did mean that I had to accept a non-GPL license at install time (if you decline, the non-GPL blobs and software are uninstalled), but the idea is simplicity for end users. It's designed around a one-app per task, zero configuration philosophy, and it achieves that *very* well, choosing apps that are both stable, and lightweight, and coming with driver functionality out of the box that you simply don't see on any other distro. And it's got software out of the box for everything the average user does with their computer. Finally, it's a smaller ISO, so a faster download, as well as being faster to run in general.

Bottom line: It's better for desktop linux than Ubuntu. :)

Re:Serious challenger?

[KillerBob]

The difference is in the compilation options. Just because it's the same software doesn't mean it's the same build, and anybody who's compared performance/benchmarks under Gentoo as opposed to Ubuntu can tell you what a huge difference it can make.

Gentoo can be faster than Zenwalk (though in some benchmarks isn't), but Zenwalk is much easier to install and maintain, and they're both *hugely* faster than Ubuntu.