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Shuttleworth Answers Ubuntu Linux's Critics
climenole writes "Technomancer wrote: 'Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu Linux's founder, maintains that he and Ubuntu are doing right by the Linux community and the even larger open-source community. In recent weeks, Ubuntu has been criticized for not giving Linux enough support. Specifically, the complains have been that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, doesn't do enough for producing Linux source code.'"
Ubuntu has encouraged me to submit bugs and even maintain a ppa for packages I couldn't find on ubuntu. Ubuntu has encouraged me to contribute because the community is active and friendly. Redhat never did that for me.
I have Ubuntu installed on 8 machines and agree. It solves all my problems and...whenever I mess it up, which I sometimes do, the huge community or the ease of use helps me repair it. I once even deleted the entire MBR + parts of the partition table and then managed to restore it before I rebooted.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
I like this article even better: http://blogs.computerworld.com/16651/ubuntu_vs_red_hat_who_really_contributes_the_most_to_linux
To summarize:
Atari vs. Commodore!
ST vs. Amiga!
Nintendo vs. Sega!
Mac vs. PC!
PS3 vs. Xbox 360!
Ubuntu vs. Debian!
All stupid and silly arguments that serve no purpose. Especially when Debian and Ubuntu are both part of the same family. (Of course that didn't stop Catholics and protestants from fighting.)
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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I've been paying attention for a long time. I've done the distro hopping dance for years, and I've been advocating Linux all the while. In 15 years of Linux use, for me personally, Ubuntu comes second only to OpenSUSE as far as getting out of my way and letting me get my work done. Ubuntu is the clear favorite among family and friends whom I have foisted Linux upon over the years. I've gotten far fewer "tech guy support" calls than any other distro, spent less time dealing with computer issues over the phone and I have definitely gotten fewer complaints. Therefore, I *am* inclined to believe the stats. They are doing something right, as much as it pains some to admit.
In the blog entry, Mark writes about "... a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there." From my experience, problems are not chased down but rather the Ostrich algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich_algorithm is applied.
While running karmic (9.10), I noticed a bug with the network-manager pertaining static IP addresses and wireless connectivity, which made it unable to connect to certain configured wireless access points. Lets take a look at the network-manager released with 9.10: http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/net/network-manager , it is (0.8~a~git.20091013t193206.679d548-0ubuntu1).
Now lets look at the updates for karmic at http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic-updates/net/ , there is not a single one (!) for network-manager. For the whole six months until the next release of 10.04, not a single update for it has been provided! They just took the git snapshot and left it in 9.10.
Just compare it to Fedora 12 and their updates on http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=172857 , karmic (9.10) was released at October 29th, and one can see the fixes and updates through Oct, Nov, Dec, Jan for F12.
I do not care about the marketing strategies and public image of Linux distributions, but rather about exactly what Mark said, about " ... a willingness to chase down the problems that stand between here and there."
For me, Ubuntu did not deliver that.