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Ubuntu Turns 10
Scott James Remnant, now Technical Lead on ChromeOS, was a Debian developer before that. That's how he became involved from the beginning (becoming Developer Manager, and then serving on the Technical Board) on the little derivative distribution that Mark Shuttleworth decided to make of Debian Unstable, and for which the name Ubuntu was eventually chosen. On this date in 2004, Ubuntu 4.10 -- aka Warty Warthog, or just Warty -- was released, and Remnant has shared a detailed, nostalgic look back at the early days of the project that has (whatever else you think of it ) become one of the most influential in the world of open source and Free software. I was excited that Canonical sent out disks that I could pass around to friends and family that looked acceptably polished to them in a way that Sharpie-marked Knoppix CD-ROMs didn't, and that the polish extended to the installer, the desktop, and the included constellation of software, too.
I was running Gentoo on my desktop and laptop to get the latest performance optimizations since most distros at the time were optimized for older processors. Ubuntu was really the first distro that was optimized out of the box for performance desktops. I don't miss debugging compilation issues with "emerge world".
when I distributed my Knoppix-based desktop demo I had a licensed logo (Sitting Baby Tux by Nicolas Rougier) and 8cm printed discs. That thing was insanely popular, probably not least because SQUEEE! factor.
http://www.labri.fr/perso/nrou... -looks feckin' fantastic in a frame.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Linux advocates say they want Linux to take over the desktop and become more supported and accepted, but anytime some distro gets even close to breaking into the mainstream, they all turn against it.
Discuss
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I didn't realize it was only 11000 months old. I thought it was more like 1010 times that age.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Whopse, this was meant to go on the Microsoft watch page...
Casio can't save me from this...
Epic Fail!
In my case, Ubuntu was very close and 10.04 was working great for some very non-technical people who wanted to check facebook and gmail and write the occasional paper.
Then the gnome3/unity crap started....
Now they are very happy with Mint and the MATE desktop.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Actually there was no end to the whine about GNOME2 which Ubuntu 10.04 was based on.
Anytime you have freedom, people are free to disagree. Don't you agree?
Between Unity and Mir, it's considered cool to Bash Ubuntu these days, but even their most stalwart detractors have to admit they raised the bar for desktop Linux from the first day of their release. There's a reason it's become both a popular distro and a popular base for derivatives.
Thank you, Ubuntu, and Happy Birthday.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Yep, everybody hates Ubuntu these days, the only linux distro that had a chance gets hated into oblivion. Open source is anti success. They did everything to stop them from ever getting market share.
Why do people always forget about kubuntu? Its Ubuntu the way it should be, minus the amazon spyware and unity crap and with best desktop environment around.
http://debianfork.org/
Agreed. Gnome3 user here; and I like it! Me no likes Unity; although I can start to see how I might use it, due to recent evolutions.
Also FWIW, every single non-techie, former Windows XP refugee I've turned onto Ubuntu Gnome3 likes Gnome3/Ubuntu also. They tell me they can't believe they used to live that way.
Except they're not chasing the mainstream, they're chasing the hype wave of Apple/Google/Microsoft trying to be the "big next thing" instead of what is actually mainstream today with Win7/OS X. Instead of picking a market and staying on target to finish the job they still haven't finished on the office desktop from 1999 or the laptop from 2004 or smartphone from 2009 or tablet from 2014. And at this rate I don't think Ubuntu will stay in one place long enough to be relevant to anyone outside the ~1% of the desktop market Linux owns today.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Kubuntu nearly died with Intrepid, because of the not-ready KDE4 debacle.
KDE is awesome again, but it may be too late for a lot of former Kubuntu users.
(Kubuntu's been the only OS on my computers since Edgy).
Oh, people are turning against Linux Mint? Last I checked, they were abandoning Ubuntu for that, and for good reasons.
Then the gnome3/unity crap started
I used GNOME 2 during 11.04 when this Unity crap started getting included. Once GNOME 2 became "fallback" in 11.10, I put up with Unity for a month, but after that I did sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop and never looked back. The only drawback is that I can't think of what the f in Xfce is supposed to stand for after the decade-old migration from XForms to GTK+.
Actually, plenty of mainstream companies support Linux. You may have heard of some of them: IBM, Mathworks, Autodesk?
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Actually you can polish a turd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Ubuntu changed everything we've come to expect about free, general-purpose operating systems.
People don't give Launchpad enough credit: for the first time, we have an integrated build/test/deploy process for the whole operating system. It takes the solid Debian root and adds a layer of modern quality assurance that we've never seen before. There's still a ways to go, and I'm sure people will complain about one or other package being broken, but the fact is that Ubuntu raised the bar of what we've come to expect.
Slashdotters and others also love to complain about one particular package or another. Obviously, the desktop environment (or just the shell) is the first thing that most people see. But it's also a small project in the larger scope of Ubuntu. Don't like Unity or GNOME 3 or KDE or Xfce or LXDE or Enlightenment? You have lots of options. Don't like systemd? Well, Ubuntu devoted a lot of time and effort to Upstart, but made the mature decision to abide by Debian's decision to go with systemd (for now). Don't like either? Yeah, well, life these days must be truly hell for poor little you.
And now, Ubuntu may do for mobile what it did for the desktop. In 10 years, I hope we can celebrate the existence of truly free devices, onto which we can install any package we want -- including alternative UIs for those who will undoubtedly not like Unity.
People are choosing other distributions for a reason, actually two.
Get rid of Unity and stop collecting search information, or fade into obscurity.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Yes, there was no end to the whine, there where bugs, badly designed UI, etc. . That is the basic state of every Software in wide spread use - if you have users you have complaints. Gnome 3 set out to fix the whining by borrowing Apples design philosophy and reality distortion field - it failed badly and broke everything that worked.
With the Gnome 3 introduction I moved to XFCE 4 which had half the features of Gnome 2, which is more than could be said about Gnome 3.
The problem is that there are way too many ideas of what should go into a "mainstream" linux distro. Whether you want to hate Microsoft and Apple or not they make a OS, put things they want in it and tell the consumer that those are the options. Without a clear, single focus on what would make a mainstream distro work there will never be a distro that gets the support enough to become accepted by the masses.
Sent from my TARDIS
Yes, there was no end to the whine, there where bugs, badly designed UI, etc.
Well, to recap, the basic arguments against GNOME2 were that it significantly reduced configurability over GNOME1, that it was bloated, and that the "Applications / Places / System" menu structure felt uncomfortable. I guess one could relatively easily dig up the large Slashdot discussions where all the complaining takes place.
There's Ubuntu Mate Remix (ubuntu-mate.org) now :)
VS my example, people using computers for, I don't know...what's the word....work?
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
It's just a Zune...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
"Mainstream" in this context is the average homeuser demographic, not the custom workstation demographic. Show me a popular desktop or laptop computer targeted to parents, grand parents, or gamers that have Linux installed by default.
This comment 100% hits the nail on the head. It's say that Android has become the best Linux "distro" now because of all this gnome3/unity garbage.
Ubuntu 10.04 had a lot of problems, but that's because the software it was based on was not mature, and Ubuntu took to rolling their own UI rather than working with upstream. That being said, upstream Gnome was busy committing suicide, so it wasn't too bad for Ubuntu to look in another direction.
A lot of users (including myself) jumped soon after to Linux Mint with Cinnamon UI and that's why it's the top at distrowatch now.
Only time will tell if Linux Mint Cinnamon is going to self-destruct. I think the next step for them would be to partner with a hardware manufacturer such as System76.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
In which case I'd have to point to Chromebooks and Android devices.
I'd like to make a nice long rant next against GNOME and Red Hat, but to keep it short GNOME shot everyone in the foot with GNOME 3.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Is it too late to mod this up as both insightful and a troll at the same time? That in asking 6 Linux users "What is the best distro" you'll get 7 answers?
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Unity did not arrive until 11.04 and I would say that the mass movement to Mint did not happen before 12.04.
Systemd you had one job... oh wait.
I have less and less time to tinker with linux to make it work. Started using KDE, but kept running into issues where it refused to let me login - just get a blank desktop. Went to Xubuntu, but half the time I suspended my laptop it would refuse to wake completely unless I restarted lightdm, which restarted my session. What a productivity killer. I recently went back to Ubuntu and Unity and haven't had such problems. I gotta give Ubuntu credit, they make it a nice and easy experience, which Joe Schmoe who just wants to check his email likes.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Mint has achieved some mainstream success, non-geeks use it and like it. I haven't abandoned it yet, so answer is "probably not if Clem and the team keep paying attention to user needs and wants", which is totally the opposite of Ubuntu philosophy
The problem was never that Ubuntu became popular. Geeks everywhere rejoiced!
The problem was simply the Gnome3/Unity fallout which left a lot of users with no easily accessible default desktop. Each has interesting ideas and strengths but neither are the stalwart that Gnome2 was. Anyone who was already on the KDE track with Kubuntu wasn't bothered though... until Canonical dropped official support for Kubuntu.
Personally, I still run Kubuntu. KDE plasma has evolved from a bloated pig into something pretty and acceptably fast. There are still quirks, but they're less than what I have to deal with on any other platform. Kubuntu is my "daily driver", as it were, with a dual-boot to win8 for games (those not found under Linux; a number which is diminishing) and when I really want to use Visual Studio (usually work reasons). I used Mint for a while, but learned the hard way that a distro which recommends a re-installation over an upgrade is a bad choice for a desktop which is expected to be alive no-matter-what.
You are trolling.
Discuss.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen