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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.'"
The IT world link takes you to an interstitial ad, followed by a godawful mishmash of crap.
Here's a link to the original post: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/517
That is all.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Ubuntu is not Linux - it is a distro BASED on Linux.
We could link to Mark's actual blog post http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/517 instead of linking to some crappy IT World "article."
Ubuntu users haveStats say that more problems than all the other main distros combined, so I'm not buying it.
I'd rather the window managers worked.
From my experience, the distro that gives less back to the community is Suse.
I have Suse systems at work and there's always some catch, it never works seamlessly unless you go to a full (paid) Suse solution.
Ubuntu, OTOH, is nearly transparent, you never feel like you are being obstructed by it. In the worst case, if everything else fails all you need to do is to fall back on some Debian solution that will almost always work in Ubuntu.
Is it his opinion that the [default] desktop environment that Ubuntu provides is better for the Linux desktop ecosystem than all other environments at the moment?
Having tried the few options available, I hereby submit that there is an environment that in my opinion, is better for desktop Linux in functionality and license as compared to the default. I leave names out on purpose.
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 thank you Mark for all your great work. We all have our short comings and people will never miss an opportunity to point them out.
...the GPL to inflict moral responsibility and karmic debt upon the user to require them to contribute tithes to the holy priests of "free" (which is to say highly encumbered) software, then ya should have written that into the license.
I'm going to have to go with boo-effing-hoo on this one.
G.
A lot of Ubuntu's critics say what they say because they think they are "too good" for it since it comes with training wheels on. Ubuntu, being a distro, has no obligation to write source code -- that is done by thousands of programmers elsewhere, and they are doing a damn fine job. A distro is meant to package the work of those programmers in a way that people can use it without needing a CS degree, and Ubuntu is getting that right imo.
So, the critics need to stfu and stick with their obscure distros.
This is the "cool people" phenomenon, like we see in music. These people will go round telling everyone how much they like X niche band as long as nobody knows about it, but if/when that band becomes popular, they'll start saying "Oh, I don't like that any more!". Same here, except with niche software.
you, sir, are and
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I love Ubuntu, and more with every release except... What the hell is the deal with moving the window buttons to the left?
Thank goodness its not hard to move them back otherwise Ubuntu would have made itself "not an option" for me.
Ubuntu is without a doubt the best distro for most users. Yeah, I know I could have more customization with Debian, yeah, I know I could be faster if I ran Gentoo, yeah, I know I could be more on the bleeding edge if I used Fedora, but when it comes down to it, Ubuntu is the best distro for most people. I -like- the fact there is a forum where I can post a question and it is answered in about 15 minutes, I like the fact I can do 99.999% of the things I need to do without using the CLI, and I like the fact that I have a lot of software in the repository.
And the best part is there isn't really any sacrifice. Is there anything that I can't do with Ubuntu that I can do with Debian? Just because I don't have to use a CLI for everything doesn't mean I can't if I want, etc.
Yeah, so Ubuntu doesn't have the nerd "cred" that I'd be getting if I ran Gentoo, but I have a usable system that is nearly infinitely customizable without having to sacrifice usability.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
So he's the guy who has been comparing my bits and telling me if they match all these years!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Ubuntu is a very popular Linux distro, which I can only assume is pulling quite a bit of interest to Linux. A fraction of these new Linux users are also logically speaking developers. And these would then be potential Linux contributors.
I have a hard time seeing how spending a lot of effort into making the most popular desktop Linux distro on the market could be a bad thing even when going as specific as Linux contributions. Developers are just a subset of users! Any successful distro is a good distro for Linux, and heck, it's not even important to be successful. That's kind of what this whole open OS is about. Play around and have fun. If you're doing well too, well, that's a nice bonus for Linux!
And Ubuntu is among those that are doing well.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I've done a little back reading on this now to see what it's all about. And all I can say is for goodness sake, don't bite the hand that gives you free stuff. Personally, I usually choose gentoo or fedora. But I still recognise the value of Ubuntu.
Funnyhacks - Wierd, unusual, and fun hacks
I am an old school user from the beginning with Slackware and such. I settled on Redhat because it felt the best to me. This was before Ubuntu came out and Debian was on the map but no competition yet for Redhat. (I'm sure that will be a matter of opinion for many though.) In spite of all the great things about Ubuntu, I'm stuck with Redhat because I simply know it too well. It is largely quite predictable in the way they do things and in their philosophies. That they are active contributors to the source and supporting software is nice but not the reason I continue using and supporting Redhat.
I was dismissive of Ubuntu at first. One of the biggest turn-offs to me was the fact that nearly everyone refuses to say the name properly. (Damnit! The U makes the same sound each time! Ooo-boon-too! Why is it so frikkin hard?!) To me, that aspect alone makes me think idiots will use it. (I know I am WRONG as hell about that, but at some level, I tend to tie intelligence with linguistic skill) On top of that, I don't like the colors the defaults are using. Moreover, the naming convention? What plans have they after "Zippy Zebra?" And really? Are they intentionally copying famous comic books where the first letter of the first and last names have to be the same? (You know, like Peter Parker, Bruce Banner and all that?)
But you will notice I make no TECHNICAL complaints about Ubuntu... (well, there is one... apparently the way they set up their Avahi daemon doesn't work well with my SME DNS server... turn that off and it works fine.) That is mostly because I don't have any.
As far as the response of Shuttleworth? He's right on all counts. I completely agree with his responses. If any one distro helps make Linux a household word, it's Ubuntu. It's slick. It's polished. It seems to perform well everywhere I have seen it. And it is especially true about the source for information for the most solutions. It is the Ubuntu forums... good for me that I don't have much trouble translating from Ubuntu to Fedora. In some extremely important ways, Ubuntu is a huge contributor.
If Linux is being taken more seriously by the various industries out there, you can thank Ubuntu for a big part of it.
Is it possible for something to be crap, shit, messed up and awesome all at the same time?
Almost all of the vocal critics of Ubunutu I've seen have been trolls, FUDsters, and other worthless people. Has anyone raised serious legitimate criticism of Ubuntu?
what's up with doing things their own way, instead of the standard way? On every other apache distribution I've seen httpd.conf is the main config file, but not on Ubuntu... it's apache2.conf. I had to look that up. Ubuntu is full of things like this.
Mind you, their way works, and Ubuntu has great support and lively community and so on... but why do they insist on being different?
Specifically, the complains have been that Canonical ...
Is this usage meant to be cute, or just plain illiterate?
The verb is complain (3rd person singular present = complains), the noun is complaint.
I hope you read that Marky Mark. Your ego needs to be taken down a notch.
Most people don't seem to understand the criticism that Shuttleworth is responding to.
The open source community does not begrudge Ubuntu's success at all. The issue is that the Ubuntu project fixes a lot of bugs from "upstream" open source projects, but has so far done a poor job at submitting these patches back to the upstream projects.
I can understand why this happens: It's very, very hard to manage a project as big as a complete operating system, and very, very time consuming to have to adhere to every single protocol for contributing patches to every single upstream project. If the point is to get things done for the end user, then it happens that the upstream packages lose here. And that's where the bitterness comes in: because the upstream packages don't get these patches, it means that other operating systems that use these projects don't get these patches, either. It thus seems as if Ubuntu is only patching for itself.
I'm sure this isn't the intent, though. Some of the critics have gone a bit overboard in accusing the Ubuntu project of doing this on purpose. I think that's shortsighted and unhelpful, and that's what Shuttleworth is responding to here. Though, as eloquent as he is, he's not doing a good job in this post of addressing the critique.
My own opinion is that the fault is not with Ubuntu, but with the staggering diversity and fragmentation of the open source world. It's hard enough to create a distribution that consumes all these projects, to produce back to them is monumentally hard.
What should be done is create a more uniform way for projects to receive patches. Perhaps a central repository where these patches could be places, and project maintainers can pull these from and merge in, if they think it's appropriate.
Fat change this will happen? Maybe, maybe not. I'm very impressed by Ubuntu's leadership in getting the open source world to think more about diverse end users. I think there's an opportunity to use this leadership to try to create a more streamlines path for "upstream" contribution. Projects would benefit from bug fixes and patches, other operating systems will benefit, and everybody will just be so happy forever.
That is why I left Ubuntu. I game a lot on my PC, and I couldn't stand PulseAudio. I don't give a rat's behind about slinging audio over the network, or bluetooth support. I just want the sound to come out of the speakers ASAP with low resource usage. Debian is my new distro of choice. For a time, I contemplated just going back to Winflaws, but then I had to re-install XP on another box the other day and I was reminded how MS treats it's customers like ****.
That said, even if they made PulseAudio an option (rather than a requirement) in Ubuntu, I doubt I would go back. I generally prefer a compact system with as few unnecessary things running as possible. My debian installs use much less memory because of it.
I guess Ubuntu and I have gone in different directions over the past 5 years.
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.
Ubuntu did contribute something: getting Linux to 5% of Internet traffic on OS Statistics. Isn't the increase in notoriety enough?
When you challenge the world saying your post is worded precisely as intended, does that include misspelled words?
This I can definitely agree with
There Fixed That For Ya!
So now, mod me down!
But goddamn it, consult a dictionary or using a spelling checker before challenging the world!. Particularly if you tend to misspell words (I count at least three such mistakes, without going into proper grammar and such.)
Now get off my lawn!
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
Anyone denying that Ubuntu has significantly contributed to Linux is pretty much being an idiot. But the sentimental crap in that post ("miracle of human generosity"... please) makes me want to ditch it entirely and move to Gentoo or OpenBSD. Come on, Shuttleworth, you're not going to convince programmers of much by telling us about kids in New Zealand. And you're not going to convince the sentimental types either; you've got to talk about kids in sub-Sarahan Africa or Central America or Detroit to get them to notice.
Getting past that part, the bit about crushing Microsoft was nice, of course. But perhaps too good to be true, considering no names were named and Microsoft always has a backup plan.
Grammar Nazi Karma strikes again...
It only took a quick scan of your post to see that you fucked up your punctuation and misused the word "using."
There's probably more there if I cared enough to read more closely.
I recommend a new day job.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
http://www.binplay.com/2010/07/cent-vs-ubuntu-for-web-serving.html
Says the person who used "There Fixed That For Ya!" in the same post. Surely, you meant "There, fixed that for you" ?
By criticizing ONE mistake in someone's spelling, you managed to commit THREE mistakes yourself. Namely, you omit a comma, capitalize all the words for no reason, AND misspell 'you' as 'ya'.
Keep up the good work, Mr Pot, and soon you'll be as black as Mr Kettle.
Ubuntu just happens to be the most popular distro. If it didn't exist the majority of that 5% would be using a different distro.
I used to be the neighborhood computer nerd. I just installed Ubuntu on all their machines and not have had a support call again. I like helping out other people, and in the past 5 years I've been installing Ubuntu on their machines I haven't had a call once after installation.
I use Ubuntu on my media server and my laptop, it has made my life a lot easier and I am grateful for this distro. It's polished, easy to use and easy to maintain. Congrats Mark, you've shown us what Linux can do if prepared properly.
It isn't a community developed distro, they accept outside help but the direction of the distro is set entirely by Shuttleworth
Just look at what happened when he moved the buttons to the left and the community protested. Did he care? Not at all, the left side buttons are part of his plan to copy OSX.
Shuttleworth talks about the contributions of others but doesn't use the word 'linux' once on the Ubuntu home page. He wants to make an OSX clone and then keep all that nerdy Linux stuff in the basement.
We are computer geeks, we are not English majors. You are on the wrong site.
Now, Mr. six-digit ID, get the fuck off of my lawn.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
... I already have an opinion on the topic. Ubuntu has clearly made a whole slew of poor design steps. The system works well over all, and the derivatives (Mint), clearly show the potential of some of the architectural choices that Ubuntu made early on. But Ubuntu itself? Brown? With crappy wanna-be mac buttons on the wrong side? With some heinous orange and piss colored icons scattered to and fro?
Ubuntu is actually a good OS. And their upstream involvement with Debian, and the hugely varied community of (mostly excellent) remixes are a testament to the solidity and correct design decisions of the actual code.
Maybe Shuttleworth is really a genius and was trying to foster all these remixes by branding his Linux after african language, painting it orange and brown, and implementing features that nobody wanted. In this way he was FORCING all the Ubuntu remixes to come to fruition, and in turn be truly the year of Desktop Linux (I'm looking at YOU Linux Mint Debian Edition)!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Linux Mint is much easier for beginners, especially the myriad of people coming from Windows.
It's more stable, it's faster (in cases), and has better default apps.
Though I'd personally like to see them commit to VLC rather than the alternatives, and other default apps in addition.
The real existing problem that I see is a lack of games for Linux that really run well, but honestly, after watching the train wreck that was GTA 4 for Windows, well, I still enjoy Urban Terror AND it runs flawlessly on almost every recent Linux.
Still, I'd like to see a fully performing Dolphin on Linux, currently it's half the speed of it's Windows build. There's not even a commonly solid N64 emu that has updates or runs really well for most distros. You have to hunt all over Jesus for a .deb.
That being said, BSNES, arguably the best SNES emu in existence runs as well in Linux as it does in Windows. But maybe that was under wine. Fuck it I can't remember.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Shuttleworth's a parasite. Remember when the idiot tried to demand that Red Hat synchronize its kernel releases with him?
Ubuntu takes the work of thousands of others and tries to take credit for it. Period.
I've not read the article, but as a long term linux and ubuntu user, I would say their contribution to community building and documentation that is the ubuntu forums kicks all kinds of kernel arse, to be honest.
1. The probability of you being the first or only person to have experienced this problem is approaching 0.
2. The probability of the problem either [solved] or in the process of being solved, by nerds that speak human, is approaching 1.
This is the Ubuntu forums. This is why you can put moderately techy people on linux and let them troubleshoot themselves.
... is that as soon as anyone starts using the Freedom everyone so highly touts, the community starts bitchin' that successful person needs to give them something.
Either it's truly Free or it's not, folks.
(Thus why most folks who need true Freedom, and have been around the block more than once, just use BSD for their products and systems, and are done with it.)
+++OK ATH
I don't know what (the others) are complaining about. Shuttleworths mission was not to make a version of Linux that anyone could use, his goal was to make a version of Linux that anyone would WANT to use. There is a difference between 'ok, I think I can get this to work' and 'hey! that works really well!'. Before Ubuntu, NO LINUX DISTRIBUTION was up to the task of making a general-purpose well rounded Linux distribution, concentrating on the DESKTOP. RedHat had theirs for a while, then killed it, then tried to bring back a community version of what they once had (Fedora). Debian was all things to all people, but it fit in the 'ok, I think I can get it to work' category. Others are more utilitarian (I did run Slackware for about 5 years from about 1994 to about 1999.... the first kernel I recompiled was 1.2.13 ...oh and the last one I compiled was 2.6.36-rc4-git1). Ubuntu fills a great need to have a Desktop version of Linux actually trying to compete on the desktop. They do contribute to Debian (again, not as much as the Deb folks want, but they contribute none the less). I think of Ubuntu as an olive branch from the Linux community to the wider world. If Ubuntu attracts people to Linux, and some of those people are developers, or some of those people are companies trying to service the needs of some of those people, and the developers contribute to the kernel or the business contributes to the kernel (all because Ubuntu attracts more people to Linux), does that count?
One thing all the whiners overlook is that while Canonical and the Ubuntu community have done diddly squat to contribute anything back to my project, my project actually gets developed primarily on Ubuntu boxes. We have a few people running other odd distros, but all our core people are on Ubuntu.
We have a mild preference for our users to be running Ubuntu, because that makes it much easier to repeat bugs. We get a lot of weird, unrepeatable reports from Slack and Gentoo users, for example, and what do you want me to do about it? I don't have time to dick around with every distro in the world. I need a distro I can install and have my development environment up and running in short order, and Ubuntu is the best I've found so far.
I'm a Debian guy originally, and I love Debian, but it's just too hard to develop on, because the stable version is always out of date. It's almost impossible to stay with Ubuntu LTS too, but their interim releases seem to be a lot less trouble than trying to run an un-released Debian.
I have used and toyed with Linux as a desktop OS since the mid 90's, beginning with Slackware, then including distros such as Red Hat, Debian, Suse, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mepis, Gentoo, Mandrake, Sabayon, and several others. I settled on Linux Mint a few years ago, which is known as a "more complete" and better derivative of Ubuntu; Mint is Ubuntu-based but includes a number of independently developed tools and a great user interface, though it is developed by a small group of fanatics. For a change, the Mint team recently released an excellent Debian-based version, in addition to their usual Ubuntu-based releases, which has been met with a lot of excitement.
I am already using Linux Mint Debian Edition as my main OS, but I still have a ton of respect for Ubuntu and Canonical. They have done a lot to raise awareness for Linux, and have developed a very usable OS that non-expert enthusiasts can use, as well as providing a great base for many other distros. Ubuntu is not an ideal server OS, or the be-all end-all OS that is absolutely perfect, but Canonical have done a great job with it and have worked admirably to promote free and open source software. If nothing else, they have inspired their competition to make things easier for home desktop users.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Shuttleworth maintains that Red Hat produces a proprietary distribution, and whines when people complain about his company's product.
There's a word for guys like that...
Well, if you're going to copy something, isn't it better to copy OS X than to copy Windows? After all, KDE very heavily copies the look and feel of Windows. Before anybody jumps me, I'm not dissing KDE; I like it a lot and the only reasons I recently stopped using it is because of how broken the dual-head support is, and that AWN works a lot better in GNOME (I decided to copy the Mac way). As you may have noticed, Apple continues to sell tons of computers, and it's not the hardware driving that (lots of companies make excellent high-end hardware), it's OS X that's driving the sales. After I replaced my wife's old notebook with a MacBook Pro, she found out for herself that it's true: once you go Mac, you never go back. At least not to Windows; I do now and always will prefer Linux to Mac overall.
As for GNOME, well it goes its own way on some stuff (these are usually the parts of GNOME that suck the most) sort of copies Mac on some stuff (top panel) and Windows on some stuff, but I think overall it feels more Mac-ish than not.
Now, if somebody wants to really push the envelope of UI design and come up with something that leapfrogs both Apple and MSFT, I certainly support that and would definitely try it. If I liked it, I'd switch. I'm very What Have You Done For Me Lately? about desktop environments. Over the years I've used FVWM 95 AfterStep, Window Maker, GNOME 1.x, KDE 3.0 - 4.4 am currently back on GNOME, and I'm pretty sure I'm leaving out at least one DE or window manager, maybe two. Oh, yeah; Enlightenment!
However, the current state of the art of What Works Best For Me is the Mac UI. That doesn't mean the Mac itself is best for me, although I do have one at work and it's pretty darned good, but the UI design. That's why my Ubuntu desktops at both home and work look a lot like a Mac and use the AWN dock. A dock with integrated task and launcher items is really the way to go, at least for me.
What fixed that for you? I think you're missing an "I".
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
It isn't a community developed distro, they accept outside help but the direction of the distro is set entirely by Shuttleworth
Which is a good thing, as the community is pretty much incapable to fix anything that would divert from the "standard" way of doing things. They want what they are used to and most of the time what they are used to is the ugly and complicated way to do things.
Just look at what happened when he moved the buttons to the left and the community protested. Did he care?
So you want people that are to stupid to type a single line into their terminal to call gconftool to change that stuff back to design your OS? The button order is a 100% total complete non-issue for anybody who has a little bit of a clue.
Not at all, the left side buttons are part of his plan to copy OSX.
Probably, but there are worse things to copy.
Shuttleworth talks about the contributions of others but doesn't use the word 'linux' once on the Ubuntu home page.
Linux is only a tiny part of the whole system, no need to plaster its name all around and create confusion. Don't you remember the "My Linux 6.0 is broken" posts from people who couldn't tell the difference between Linux and their Distribution? Beside, it is not like they hide it, its right there on their About page.
I don't really care what Shuttleworth has to say. A man who tries to poach developers off competing distributions has no credibility. Fuck Ubuntu, Canonical and their leeching practices. I'll stick with Red Hat and Debian, thank you very much.
-- Linux user #369862
I think Ubuntu is a good player, if it comes to contributions to the community.
What we refer to as Linux, is made up of many tools around the Linux kernel. Here are just the informations I found on programs running on nearly every distribution
The biggest player in contributing to Linux kernel is still RedHat. Here are the top contributers:
Within that field, Red Hat topped that chart with 12%, followed by Intel with 8%, IBM and Novell with 6% each, and Oracle 3%.
Whereas the GNU (ls, pwd, sort, head, gcc, bash etc.) is done by the FSF (Free Software Foundation). Here is a list of contributors: GNU
If I put those programs together and make my own startscripts with e.g. init, systemd or whatever, I get a distribution. How close is Ubuntu to the actual version of the program in their distributions, which is necessary to contribute at all?
Here is an interesting statistic, how close distributions are with the upstream version: oswatershed.org
I believe the top distributions here are also the ones with the most upstream patches to get the used programs working.
When you are speaking about yourself in the first person, there is usually little need for the "I am", "I will", "I should" etc. It is implicit that you are talking about yourself.
Example.
Q. "Where are you going ?"
A. "To the mall"
There is absolutely no need to use the expanded "I am going to the mall". Unless you are six. How old are you by the way ?
Running user forums, bugfixing packages, and maintaining consistency are ungrateful jobs. I think many free software people somehow expected that society will recognise their efforts once the software gets mainstream. They see Mark Shuttleworth as the typical business guy who takes credit for all their work.
But there is a need for sustainable business models in many areas of FOSS development. If you look at the job market, most of the jobs are dead-ends for FOSS. I.e. you will use whatever free software is there but you will not get the permission to contribute back. Canonical is one of very few companies where a software developer can get a job without legal harassment by copyrights and non-disclosure "agreements".
I'm waiting for the day, where our biggest complaint is, that Canonical is helping customers migrate from Debian to Ubuntu. But at the moment there is bigger fish to fry.
Blah. They should STFU.
I've followed Linux since 98 or so, usually dual booting one of the more popular distros and Windows.
I'm no geek but still an IT pro, and if I can be fussed, I can fix most things rather quickly. Thing is, I rarely had to when using Windows, most things just normally worked or could be gotten to work with a few clicks. In all this time, that was *never* the case with Linux. Not at all in the beginning, where everything from 3D to printing and sound, scanners etc took hours and was simply a pain in the ass to get working or didn't work at all. Later on, things gradually improved, but whenever I thought 'that's it, it's there', I ran into a new big show stopper that made me think 'ready for the Desktop, uh huh'. It didn't change until Ubuntu came about, and then not until 10.04. For me, it's there. Maybe for others it was there before, maybe for others it isn't yet, but I'm, for the first time, so completely happy and content with my Linux environment that I've flipped the switch. *EVERYTHING* works. No more dual boot. Still a windows VM for absolutely essential Windows stuff, granted, but it's rarely used.
ONLY thanks to Ubuntu. I'm sure if it werent for canonical, I'd still boot my box up and run into some shit that made me think 'yeah guys, the others fixed that 10 years ago' or 'gee if that happened on Windows the Linux guys would laugh their heads off'.
So Canonical, let them yap and hats off to you.
gnu/linux is a richard stallman fantasy. Linus Torvalds came up with Linux he has naming rights he does not use "Gnu" anything.
He specifically thinks the gnu title is silly.
The ugly fact is Stallman and his buddies have been working on gnu/hurd for a decade with really nothing beyond
a 12 year old alpha to show for it.
http://www.topology.org/linux/lingl.html
http://xercestech.com/linux-not-gnulinux.geek
http://atulchitnis.net/writings/why-linux-and-not-gnulinux/
Well, so to sum up: * You tried the tailored Operating System to your Hardware.* You tried Ubuntu* Ubuntu was worse, than the tailored Operating System to your Hardware. If your Hardware has errors, or some specific quirks, which may not be detected by an overblown Debian fork (which however wasn't in the summary of tried Operating Systems - only the tailored Operating System to your Hardware was) you blame Ubuntu for not being userfriendly, as response to a post describing he was glad, that Ubuntu tried to f
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
I'm now running Jaunty, and have been for probably the last four months, since the video card in my FreeBSD box died.
I give Jaunty credit for not pissing me off to the extent where I've been actively motivated to get rid of it, but that is about the most positive thing I can say for it. Pretty much all Ubuntu is good for is either listening to mp3s, maybe doing some scripting after making my own build of vim, and vegetating in front of Firefox. It's got even better since I wrote my own xsession and got back under Ratpoison.
If I try and do literally anything else however, frustration is usually the result. Multimedia editing in particular is virtually impossible in Linux, although that is not Shuttleworth's fault. The Ubuntu community also are not people who a sane individual would want to go anywhere near, but then again, that is also standard for Linux.
I have also always considered Debian to be one of the primary sources of emotional pain in my life, and it still underpins Ubuntu. Even doing something as fundamental as changing my $PATH is a source of frustration; I cannot find out where it is set. It is predictable that Debian's developers feel that /etc/profile is not good enough for them.
If you want to use Ubuntu, and you know what you are doing, follow the instructions here in order to avoid GNOME, ubuntu-desktop, pulseaudio, and associated eldritch horrors. Ubuntu's binary packaging is generally extremely dubious, but then again, FreeBSD is the only system where I've ever felt entirely comfortable installing pre-built binaries; quality binary packaging apparently does not exist for Linux at all.
If you carefully flilter the well-spun bleeding-heart marketing crap out with a pair of tights you get Shuttleworth saying:
"we do damn all except improve our own distribution - which we invest in so much - purely because we are altruists that want to improve adoption"
Focusing exclusively on improving the adoption of his own distribution, sucks money from the whole ecosystem of other vendors that have contributed far more to GNU/Linux than him. Canonical's contribution is pititful, and -worse- their massive marketing and polish focus (while needed) has sucked funding and users away from those distributions that used to fund development.
Talking of watching the code flow in - is just crud; Canonical steals the credit (why are people writing to thank him ?) for other people's work - while trying to put them out of business by undercutting them on price (Zero dollars) for their work. They totally screw up the economics and social compact around the code - and apparently have no shame: Adoption (of Canonical controlled stuff - not even called 'Linux' cf. their homepage) is apparently a good in itself that justifies poisoning the well: go for it.
and its company policy not to mention gnu or richard stallman in any context. We don't terminate employees, but we'll dock them 500 dollars for each infraction. We have everyone sign a memo to this effect so that the monetary fine is agreed to as a term of employment, and while theres been a few holdouts (who we subsequently let go), everyone else seems to be on board.
The reason we do this is not necessarily anything against the gnu project (ok, richard stallman is a flippin joke), we've just found that those folks who insist on this 'gnu-linux' crap have without fail turned out to be obsessive jerks that can't ship projects in a pragmatic manner consistant with running a business. I highly recommend tactics like this to filter out the useless nerds from your IT department.
You're kinda stretching here, confusing two usages. Which language was your first language? The answer in your post is a prepositional phrase, not a sentence. And if there is any implied subject it is because there is a direct question and context in which the subject is unambiguous. It is acceptable informal grammar, but not preferred.
Languages such as Japanese and Spanish have the implied subject rule for discrete sentences without any other context. "Walking to the subway" is a complete sentence which conveys "I am walking to the subway." In English that assumption does not exist without aditional context, and it is a fragment. You seem to have provided an example with context to prove a point about context-free grammar.
"Fixed that for you" does not by itself say who fixed it. The poster's sister might have corrected it, and yelled at the poster until he posted her correction. We know the poster, or at least the account the poster used, not the fixer. Poster could have pasted it into Google, which then replied with "Did you mean....?" with the corrected text, and Google fixed it. You can argue that the post included context, as in the person who posted was also the fixer. But that doesn't support your primary assertion. Outside of context, if you do not make it obvious through context that you are talking about your self, you can't invoke the "when talking about yourself" rule. People have to know you're talking about yourself first. Other languages do this, English does not.
"Left my wallet in El Segundo," is an example. Do you think the speaker left her wallet in El Segundo? You might think it's a reference to the song "I Left my wallet in El Segundo." Or if you're watching The Ladykillers, it becomes obvious later that Mrs. Munson is talking about that song, but The Sheriff does not know who left their wallet in El Segundo. Being unfamiliar with the song, a viewer might think that Mrs. Munson left her wallet, or that a neighborhood boy left her wallet. The context is intentionally ambiguous, a situation which could not have happened unless you were dead wrong about the implied self rule.
Vintermann is correct. And "There Fixed That For Ya!" was tongue in cheek, emphasizing the use of a trite phrase or meme.
I've been a professional developer for nearly 15 years, and before that I was developing as a hobby. I stopped using windows on my own computers shortly after windows 98 and started using slackware. It was fun, it was interesting and it appealed to me because I was able to dig into it and see how it worked, and then change the way it worked to suit my needs. The computer was mine personally once again. Over the years I tried various other distributions and particularly enjoyed gentoo as it allowed me to configure my entire software environment to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the aging hardware that I had. As the computer allowed me to do more and more of the things I wanted to do, I found more and more interesting little projects and became less interested in what the underlying software was doing.
When OSX came along I switched to a mac because the things I was doing seemed easier to do on a mac then they did on Linux, and numerous working environments had showed me that windows was still, at least to my mind, as horrific as it had always been. I don't want to say that osx is better than linux, or better than windows, or any of that nonsense (yes I know this is slashdot), because "better" is such a subjective thing. My personal computer is my "Personal" computer. It is there to allow me to work in the way that is best for me, not best for you, and certainly not best for Microsoft, whose software I still find to be completely counter-intuitive and proscriptive.
I pick the software that allows me to do what I want to do with the minimum amount of effort. When VMWare became available on OSX I thought it would be fantastic as I would finally be able to run linux on my mac alongside osx. Dual booting was too disruptive. I immediately installed my favourite distribution (gentoo) and was frustrated by how much technical knowledge I had to apply to get it working. During the course of configuring my virtual machine to suit my purposes, I scoured the internet for documentation and support with various problems and was amazed to find that most of the relevant documentation and support I need was provided by ubuntu. While I had no problem taking what the ubuntu docs said and applying it to gentoo, it was an extra step that I needed to take with absolutely no payout. I switched to Ubuntu.
What ubuntu does is allows me to get on with the stuff I need to get on with. The same could be said of any linux distribution, but ubuntu lowers the barrier of entry. Yes I could install Linux from Scratch, and have done in the past, but why bother when I just want to get my work done? Lots of my non-technical friends use Ubuntu, and thankfully they hardly ever bother to ask me any kind of technical support type questions as they are usually able to figure things out by themselves through the ubuntu forums. Which leaves both me and them with more time to get on with what we need to get on with.
Ubuntu would be nothing without debian which, in turn, would be nothing without GNU/Linux. Having better tools to do the job I need to do is far more important than who makes the tools, but if those tools come with clear documentation and fantastic support then even better. I don't want to spend my life hunched over a keyboard. The time I spend on a computer pays for me to spend time doing other much more interesting things, so anything that let me do my job easier is fine by me. Linux and the whole OSS ecosystem amazes me, but what Ubuntu have done is made it so much easier for anybody to benefit from that ecosystem, and consequently enriched the lives of everybody that uses it.
Thank you, Canonical, and thank you to the wider OS community. You really are changing the world for the better. Keep up the good work.
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
1) Admit that 9.10 was a broken release and just because Mark didn't see any "issues" on his very own laptop didn't mean tons of folks didn't have issues.
2) Apologize for foisting pulse-audio on us with a horrid config file in 8.04, right before you rushed it out the door (you always do this with LTS releases, you seem to be afraid of being stuck with something you don't like for 5 years). pulse-audio sucks all by itself for a lot of folks, but when you add in a config file that even the lead dev of pulse-audio says is completely broken, that is beyond the pale. Go ahead and try googling today for a solution, it's not simple and many of the threads conflict. You never did fix it and in fact in subsequent releases (I'm looking at you 9.10) managed to launch with a mostly working pulse-audio config and then messed it up during some stupid security update for a lot of machines (especially netbooks, like the Dell Mini 9, probably the most popular Linux netbook on the market). I almost forgive you for tying the earliest pulse-audio packages to a scary sounding package named ubuntu-desktop (which was a meta-package that you could actually safely remove, but you wouldn't know that from the name) since you stopped doing it later, but I'm still abit annoyed about that one as well.
For what it's worth I do use several versions of Ubuntu. I use Debian too. I recall RPM dependency hell all too well to really love Redhat and its children (I know RPM dependency hell is now in the past, but it was a really big pain for a lot of us). I do think you guys are doing a good job generally, but you have got to lose the "We can do no wrong!" attitude, it sucks, especially when you guys do screw up (we all screw up at times). Also, get your Paper-cuts initiative working again, this was the single, best idea you guys have had in 2 years and you let it die as far as I can tell (and perhaps I'm wrong and it's really going full steam ahead, but it doesn't seem to be).
The button order is a 100% total complete non-issue for anybody who has a little bit of a clue.
It goes beyond a trivial preference because there are programs that don't use the native interface and have buttons on the right. So he is actually causing some interface consistency issues with the change.
The community clearly didn't like the change so why keep it? Because Shuttleworth cares more about cloning OSX than the collective opinion of the community. He is in his right to use GPL software to clone OSX but he should drop any pretenses about Ubuntu being a distro that is community driven.
I'll tell you what needs to happen. All these grateful and passionate Users need to band together and organize a conference.
Once that happens, invite all the Developers to 'come down from their cloud' to visit and participate in this conference.
The list of workshops you'll want to develop will include 'The life of a Bug; From Discovery to Patch', 'Version Control for Laypeople', and a three parter on 'How Open Source Works'.
Get off your cloud? How about 'get off your duff'?
Just like Shuttleworth started Canonical to address userspace conditions, someone needs to get going on the meatspace support structure. Even older than your xfree86.conf file are the arguments 'Devs don't understand Users' and 'Sales doesn't understand Engineering'.
Now, how about stepping up to the plate?
Who says you can't be both?
Use a compiler to check the spelling in your programs.
Use a dictionary to check the spelling in your posts.
I don't understand how you can be in programming (where every character counts) and not be good at spelling. I don't understand how you can be a developer or designer and not be good at grammar and other language rules. There are patterns to both.
When I retire from being a developer and architect, I'll give the Great American novel a go. I, for one, can get both sorts of spelling right. And English isn't my first language. Go figure.
Now get off my lawn.
So now, mod me down!
Bee carefull what u wish four.
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Post worded as intended. Any "Fixed that for you" jokes will be modded into oblivion. Yes, I know I can't post and mod.
The big problem with Ubuntu is that it's trying to make Linux easy to use. You can't actually do that and still have it remain Linux.
Actually, some of us our English majors. I have a BS and MS in English Education and the MS includes a concentration on Educational Technology. Don't leave us English folk out just because ...