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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
We could link to Mark's actual blog post http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/517 instead of linking to some crappy IT World "article."
Do you think it might have something to do with the fact that Ubuntu also has more users than those other distros combined?
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?
Further, it probably has the least number of technical users because it's probably the most popular "plug-and-play" (or close to it) distro there is. Thus, there may be fewer people who can trouble-shoot their own problems.
Table-ized A.I.
heh I applied for a membership on the DSL fourms 4 years ago just to post a question, and have still not been approved I spent nearly an hour today on slackware trying to see what options I had with a no cd no usb boot system, finally on some 3rd party blog I found a 5 page walk though that read like Russian stereo instructions so yea they may seem to have more problems, but its honestly hard to get any other distro's to even setup a localized place to ask questions, I love it on my home machines, hm how do I do that, Oh I know... google XYZ on ubuntu and there is a half dozen threads all pointing me in the right direction and that is a good thing, no matter how much the hardcore nurds want to spin it
Okay, Gnome is part of the GNU project, I'll admit forgetting about that when I posted that comment. Never mind.
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.
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.
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.
Blech, there's no worse "statistic" than counting the number of Google results for various terms.
If you compare "bible" with "quran", you can see that there are about 10x the results for "bible". What does that indicate, are there 10x more Christians, or readers of the bible? You can also see that Malawi, Swaziland, Ghana, and Zimbabwe have the highest regional interest for "bible", so what can you conclude about that? Are those the most "Christian" nations? The US isn't even in the top 10, in fact all 10 are African nations. I see that Indonesia is ranked #8 for regional interest in "quran", can we conclude that Indonesia is the 8th most "Islamic" nation?
If you went on only those numbers, you would conclude that followers of the bible greatly outnumber followers of the quran. The actual difference is about 2x, not 10x. You would also conclude that Pakistan, Gambia, and Somalia are the worlds largest Islamic countries, but the largest (by population) is Indonesia.
Google "stats" are pretty useless.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Odd. Myself and a couple of my colleagues recently got laptops preinstalled with SLED at work. The experience was generally less positive than with other (free) distros. The SLED repos are only installed after you register with Novell, and trying to get any sort of multimedia setup going on it was a nightmare. OTOH we have openSUSE on several desktop machines, works like a charm.
I guess the only advantage of SLED would be that it plays nicer with Microsoft solutions, but we don't use those too much at work.
You are getting trolled. Just thought you wanted to know that.
LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment.
Comes with http://lubuntu.net/
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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
They want to put other stuff on the right side. I just wish we could kill the whole title bar idea. It serves no purpose other than to waste space. Just put the buttons right on the same bar that says File Edit View in 90% of apps.
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!
Well, neither "A Glass of Coke" is actually a recipient made of a sugar-flavoured drink. It's a common grammatical rule called Metonymy, and it's commonly used to exemplify the language to avoid excessive verbosity.
The same could be said about the idea of prepending GNU to Linux, giving to the name the dubious function of being considered somewhat an homage or representation of the intentions of the author. Personally I'm not offended if my friends just call me "Sal" without citing everytime my father's and my grandfather's name like some aristocrat used to think. It would just make every conversation tiring, ad would give an idea of self-importance more annoying than anything else to my speaker.
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.
This is a combination of poor targeting to your market, and poor communications of what the end user is to expect "as good as windows" (which is a lie. linux is better than windows, but it is not a drop-in replacement, and anyone who says otherwise is a troll).
Apple doesn't market OSX as "as good as Windows". They're not stupid. The real advantages of linux are not price or as a windows replacement, and until the people who pimp ubuntu get a clue and realize that this is NOT the way to push linux, you're going to see 100x more complaints about ubuntu than about other distros.
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?
Novell is one of the biggest corporate contributors (of actual code) to open-soruce projects like GNOME and the Linux kernel. They are behind probably only behind Red Hat in total contributions.
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.
You want a non-standard install on a no usb and no cdrom system and you wonder why you have issues finding help.
At that point you are far into the realm of advance because you have to use an alternate means such as staging the contents on disk or using a pxe based install. The latter isn't terribly difficult if you haven't done it before, but the first time setup isn't for the novice.
That is a really awful example of a problem solving situation.
With that said it is very unlikely that you need a distribution specific solution. There are many differences between distributions, but I have had little issue navigating the various system types. The exception for myself being Gentoo which made me do a triple take when reconfiguring some very legacy host I once found hiding in a rack.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many men choose their GFs on visual aesthetics rather than life skills, even counting "looking sexy" as a life skill (the aspects of sexy that can't be defined by a tape measure).
I've heard all the complaints about the Ubuntu colour scheme before.
Tell me, when you look at the Italian flag, do you see snot, blood, and semen?
Now that you point it out, I think I'll move to Estonia. They seem to have gone to extra trouble to avoid colours based on bodily fluids. Gotta like that. Unlike the Italian white, the Estonian white is very pure.
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.
User-installed Linux != manufacturer-installed Windows. Not what you were saying - directly - but its worth pointing out.
I have installed Ubuntu Linux on a number of clients computers, and I've done it properly. All set up to do common tasks (DVD movies, music, flash, WINE, etc) with proper remote support. These same clients have spread the word to the point where people from all over my continent are shipping me their laptops and desktops to have it installed with Ubuntu 'properly'. Kind of overwhelming actually.
My point is, vanilla Ubuntu needs some minor tweaks (software installed) before its completely ready for Joe Blogs, but once done - they love it.
What fixed that for you? I think you're missing an "I".
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
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 ?