From the article: "...according to Reg tipster Rob, Window Server Update Services forced Windows Desktop Services 3.01 on the fleet of machines...". So it's not the standard Windows Update, it's the enterprise-managed Windows Server Update Services that is normally used by Admins to push updates silently to networked machines that has been used by MS without authorisation.
The author did a sample size N = 1 comparison too, and concluded that Vista sucks because of one machine he saw it installed on.
No, the author said that it didn't work on his machine even though XP worked fine. The GP said that the author's "...problems about restoring from sleep and hibernation are NOT Vista..." based solely on the fact that his own machine restored OK. One is giving an example of frustration upgrading XP->Vista, the other is making a ridiculous catagorical statement based on data n=1.
If you had the latest version of XP it would have been a fairer comparison. It takes me less than half an hour to patch from a recent SP2 disc.
Well, a slipstreamed disk is a third-party modification, so I think it's a little bit shakey using it as a comparison. I did try to create one a year ago but found it tediously difficult command-line sourcery (ironically what people often accuse Linux of) so I gave up. I've found a little utility now so I'll give it a go. I do appreciate that if I walked into a shop and bought a boxed XP I would get an SP2 disk, but then that would cost me a lot of money to be able to easily install and OS I already own.
Your complaint against Vista is that its expensive? Really?
Yes - really. I have piles of old boxes sitting around with XP license stickers on them. Vista will cost me money, big money that I don't have. Remember that I'm talking about what these OSs mean to me. Remember that the convesation started over frustration about articles where people change to Linux because they don't like Vista and I'm trying to explain why, from my point of view, some people might want to do that.
Your last compaint against vista is absurd: that its 'different than XP'. Well, la-di-da. Ubuntu is arbitrarily different from XP too, yet you don't complain about that.
It's not absurd, it's the whole point of the story. Some people feel that Vista has a lot of changes, but not many actual new features from the end-user point of view. Ubuntu cannot be "arbitrarily different" becuase it was never the same in the first place, it's different for at worst historical reasons. Vista started from XP, so each change should be for a good reason, but nevertheless people are looking at XP->Vista and XP->Ubuntu and seeing less difference in the amount of effort each change would take than they had previously believed and seriously thinking of giving Vista a miss.
Don't forget that in my fist post in this thread I said that I'm actually quite excited about giving Vista a go (I'm getting a boxed Ultimate in a couple of weeks time). I am a biased die-hard Linux fan, although my recent frustrating experience of installing XP was for my sister's Christmas present, so I'm not so far down that path that I don't see the need to let people use what they're comfortable with. What interests me is that I'm hearing XP users say they might be more comfortable with Ubuntu than Vista when the time comes to make the switch. Microsoft should be very worried about that.
Sorry but you're installing an OS that has been in the wild for a little over a week. You can't expect to "set aside an hour" and be sure that it will just work. For may people it would - and has - but for some it won't. If you've managed to use sucecssive Windows versions without ever getting help online then you've done very well.
For my part I've had far more trouble upgrading major versions of Windows. I wouldn't even consider upgrading a Windows box without backing up all my data. I've taken the chance with each successive Ubuntu release since Dapper and never had a problem, so I was pretty confident last week. You say "people everywhere are irresponsibly claiming that this OS is tailored for average users and works at least as well--if not better than--Windows. I call BS on every account" in the context of a badly failed major OS upgrade. I feel your pain - we've all been there - but are you really implying that if this was 2000 to XP or XP to Vista you could have handed the DVD to your next door neighbour and they could have done the upgrade without a hitch? For sure?
Were you using a disc from circa 2002? A lot has changed since then. XP has had a lot added and fixed since then... I dare ya, grab a Ubuntu Breezy Badger disc as your starting point, install it, and then patch it up to Gutsy. See how long that takes you.
Right now when I have an empty machine in front of me, what shall I do with it? I need to access the web, write spreadsheet and text documents and sync my iPod. The comparisons are valid - right now Microsoft actively sells two desktop operating systems: XP (grudgingly) and Vista. XP is old, out of date, a pain to install and keep working properly. Vista is expensive, is a resource hog, and as the article said is different for difference' sake. Ubuntu is up-to-date, easy to install, easy to keep working properly and comes with a ton of applications right out of the box.
I don't need to compare Breezy with XP because I'm comparing what's available now - the two supported MS desktop OSs and a Linux offering. Comparing 'the Live CD doesn't boot' stories is an unfair comparison - there's plently of dodgy hardware that has problems with XP. If you compare installs on working mainstream hardware Linux versus XP you will always get a fully-loaded Ubuntu system up and running whilst XP is still rebooting for the nth update.
I have a little hobby gathering old PCs, sorting them out and redistributing them to impoverished family members, students and even some local charities. I'm beginning to really wonder what OS I will send them out with in a year's time. I do now have a slipstreamed XP SP2 CD but I'll eat my hat if that's up and running fully patched before Ubuntu on the same box.
Ahhh, well you were talking about files in common - of which there are many hundreds - when in fact you meant proprietary DLLs (of which there are but a few). I would hope that sensible application developers would statically link libraries that are only needed by one app. I guess they make them shared libraries so that if you have multiple apps from the same vendor they can all share the same library.
as if somehow Window is the "baseline" for this benchmark
Yup, it is. It's the most popular desktop OS on the planet. Other than some killer apps (which I admit is a big 'other') and certain hardware, most Linux distros will exceed the baseline of Windows by some margin in a number of areas. It's good to compare and see where Windows is winning or losing. It's certainly not about seeing how far Linux has managed to copy the features of Windows. That's what Wine is for.
And his problems about restoring from sleep and hibernation are NOT Vista. I have a brand new Vista box at home that comes out of hibernation in less than 20 seconds, boots in less than 40, and both of those numbers how long until I have a fully usable desktop environment (HD has quieted down, etc).
Thanks for your accurate study, sample size n=1. Anyone else do any groundbreaking research today?
Please can you post links to where you have raised these issues in the Ubuntu support forums? If you were having such severe problems I am sure you can get help.
It's worth remembering that Ubuntu ships on a Live CD so if you managed to install it then as a matter of fact it certainly can boot on your hardware, so it should just be some relatively simple troubleshooting to get things working for you.
On rare occasion, such as the one you listed here, there will be an absolute need to use the CLI in Linux. Some people just can't handle that.
On rare occasions, there will be an absolute need to use regedit in Windows, some people just can't handle that. On other rare occasions there will be a need to boot the machine from a dos disk and rewrite the MBR because Windows has borked it, some people won't handle that either. On OSX there's sometimes the need to boot the machine whilst holding down arcane combinations of keys in order to disable something or other... people might struggle with that too.
And that is the problem with Linux. What non-nerd user wants to do or even would know how to do this sort of thing?
Hang-on: think about this. What would happen in Windows? It wouldn't boot. Believe me, I've been there, and if you're a nerd/geek then so have you. In the end you would have had to take the sledgehammer approach and reinstall Windows. The same approach would have worked in Linux too, but Linux (because it's designed that way) has the option of editing a config file to fix it. By the way, changing the xorg.conf file is something that any experienced Linux user would have gladly walked you through on a support forum. It's not that hard to edit a file (much easier that... ooh... regedit maybe?)
Re:"The greeter application appears to be crashing
on
Vista Vs. Gutsy Gibbon
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· Score: 1
Have you tried posting to the Ubuntu support Wiki? If you have then post the URL here and I'm sure some Slashdotters, including myself, will be pleased to go over and help you. Don't forget to include full details (was that a clean install of Feisty, were you using unofficial repositories, Automatix etc., what method did you use to upgrade...)
It's hilarious that he can't seem to figure out how to shut down the computer... But these "opinion articles" with their "I can't be bothered to figure out a slightly different Control Panel - instead, I switched operating systems!" matra are just annoying and stupid.
His point isn't that he couldn't figure it out, it's just that things were "arbitrarily different" - changed for the point of change rather than any great enhancement. Sure he could figure out a different Control Panel, but it's annoying to have to do that for no actual gain.
I think what we're actually seeing here is people who don't have any particular need for the unique strengths of Windows (and it does have some) and could do well with any of the alternative mainstream OSs. See, they already "switched operating systems" going from XP to Vista, and the feedback I'm hearing is that the effort of relearning familiar things makes the jump from XP to Ubuntu seem no worse. Actually, I even get the impression that for some the idea of injecting some excitement into their computer usage by exploring a new OS with different strengths and weeknesses is quite attractive compared to relearning Windows in order to go back to what they already new.
Am I way off the mark here? I've been using Debian then Ubuntu near exclusively for 6 years so I'm actually quite looking forward to having a play with Vista just to see if there's anything about a new Microsoft OS that I find attractive. I installed XP on a machine for my sister 3 weeks ago and it took 4 hours worth of downloading drivers and updates just to get to the stage where I could start installing apps (c.f. Ubuntu less than 1 hour for a fully loaded OS+apps) so I'm pretty sure XP is of no value to me from the 'enjoying using the computer' viewpoint unless I need to run some Windows-only software.
If you use a computer for fun, or for work but like to have fun, Ubuntu is great. Quick to install on new hardware, new release every 6 months with new features, improvements and eye candy if you like that sort of thing. Loads of little apps to choose between for virtually any task, all ready to install from official repositories, properly signed etc.
Hmmm... let's see...
glibc - almost all of them
libpthread - yup, all of them
libgnome - all the gnome apps
libsocket - anything that uses sockets (in otherwords, almost everything)
should I go on?
OK, I know that's an example from my Linux box, but the same applies to Windows. If your principle of "programs should never share files" were put into practice, all of the code that lets a program draw a window, load and save to disk, access the networking stack etc. etc. would be repeated again and again for every single process. Not every single application (i.e. Word, Notepad etc.) but every service running in the background too.
The use of shared libraries has been a feature of multi-tasking operating systems for decades, and with good reason: modern OSs start with dozens, if not hundreds, of processes even before you've launched an application to do anything, and statically linking all of these would be a huge waste of resources. DLL-hell is an unfortunate side-effect of this, but in a properly package-managed system (hint: most Linuxes) this can be avoided. The reason why Windows apps write to the Windows sytem folder is that they have newer versions of DLLs (e.g. Visual Basic runtime) that are needed for that app to run, but that should be backwards-compatible with the other installed apps that may already be using those files.
Absolutely. When I have 40 different processes running I'd much rather each had their own statically linked versions of all the necessary libraries rather than using DLLs, I'll just upgrade my machine to 16Gb of RAM.
It may be the corporate IT staff who are "dealing" with it, but the user still has to wait until their computer is fixed before they can get any work done.
Well... yeah... but really if a corporate user decides to swap out their own graphics card then they really don't have anyone to blame but themselves.
Where as with Windows it's a simple matter of finding a setup.exe file or sometimes right-clicking an.inf file.
But you need to understand that the "simple matter" you describe is not intuitive, it's just familiar. The only way this could "improve" would be to make Linux more like Windows or OSX - and indeed some distros do attempt to do this, like Linspire for example.
Personally I've been using Debian then Ubuntu as my primary OS for so long that I'm pretty disoriented when I sit down at a Windows box. Typically I'm at a friend's house, tired and have had a good meal and a beer or two so not at my best. They ask me to diagnose a networking issue, I open a DOS box and type ls. Brings up an error. I do that a couple more times then realise the command is dir. Then I want to view a file: cat randomscript.bat do that a couple more times before remembering that the command in DOS is type.
Same thing with the GUI - trying to find all the different properties to configure networking on the various flavours of Windows takes me a while now, although I could do it easily 4 years ago. The other night a friend wanted me to set up Windows ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) - took me ages and in fact still isn't working. I've been messing with computers for years and have a degree in Computer Systems Engineering but Windows is just different to what I'm used to. There are inconsistencies in the Windows GUI that ought to be fixed, but the point is if I was supporting Windows boxes for 8 hours a day again then I would remember all that stuff.
The problem you're describing is software for a relatively obscure piece of hardware which has obviously not been set-up to use the Ubuntu package management system. If it did, it would install when you double-clicked the.deb file. That's not Ubuntu's fault - any more than it would be if the Windows version were distributed as a.rar file with 30 different dlls that you had to manually copy into the correct directories. The setup.exe file you describe is something that has been provided by the software company because they've followed the Windows convention. If they had followed the Debian/Ubuntu convention with the Linux equivalent you wouldn't have a problem. The fact that they've ignored the Debian/Ubuntu convention is their fault, and if the hardware claims to support these OSs then I would complain to them, just as you would if the Windows version were similarly confusing.
How is this a bad patent? They're basically saying "pay us this fee and you're free to use any of our 900 billion patents in your own work". Sounds like they're opening it up.
Because it's effectively money for menaces. "Pay us this fee because you might infringe on one of our patents, and you wouldn't want anything nasty to happen to you, would you?"
The article isn't advocating not doing appendicectomies for appendicitis, it's simply proposing a useful role for part of the intestines that is generally held to be vestigial.
The lifetime risk for acute appendicitis is 8.6% for men (http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/a/acute_appendicitis/prevalence.htm) so 91.4% of people never have a problem with their appendix. It's good to know that it's serving a useful purpose for those people.
The tech-ignorant media has been suggesting the purpose of the update was to turn unlocked iPhones into iBricks, but there has been no proof of that.
And how could we go about getting proof... hmmm... maybe... how about a lawsuit? Isn't that what they're for - a group of people have a strong suspicion of foul play and would like to know if it indeed happened as they believe and if there is a legal remedy for it.
No company wants to compete with a Free product. Even one which is merely gratis is problematic (look where Netscape went). Since a proprietary product can only charge for their value adds, they don't get anything by taking the code continuously while never giving back.
You're right if you consider taking a large software application/package, adding some minor features and distributing as commercial software - most people would be very happy with the free offering and not bother with the commercial one.
Imagine if, e.g., GIMP were BSD-licensed. Microsoft takes the package, adds CMYK support and calls it MIMP, and sells it for 30 dollars. Because of the CMYK changes, the file format is slightly different from GIMP. The GIMP developers want to stay 'compatible' because now everyone is sending.xcfm files which can't be opened under Linux because MIMP is Windows-only. So the developers are now 'chasing' a near-equivalent superset of their own code, which a commercial enterprise is making money off.
GIMP still doesn't have CMYK-support but they're working hard on it. Every new feature or bugfix the GIMP developers code goes into the next MIMP release, but none of the MIMP bugfixes or features get handed back to GIMP, except by the 'kindness' of Microsoft. Imagine then that Microsoft gives away MIMP with Vista Home Premium and above as an extra to differentiate it from Home Basic - high market penetration, near-ubiquitous usage... how much developer time will GIMP attract now? What if MS released MIMP for Linux?
"Very unique" is not a tautology, because "very" does not express an identical or simlar concept to "unique", rather the adjective "very" is nonsensical becuase it implies degrees of uniqueness. "Singularly unique" would be an example of a tautology.
I suppose it's arguable that degrees of uniqueness are possible in the sense that a person, object or idea could be unique in some properties but not in others, however I don't think this applies to a non-complex entitiy (e.g. a method for selling an album).
Slashdot Mirror
From the article: "...according to Reg tipster Rob, Window Server Update Services forced Windows Desktop Services 3.01 on the fleet of machines...". So it's not the standard Windows Update, it's the enterprise-managed Windows Server Update Services that is normally used by Admins to push updates silently to networked machines that has been used by MS without authorisation.
No, the author said that it didn't work on his machine even though XP worked fine. The GP said that the author's "...problems about restoring from sleep and hibernation are NOT Vista..." based solely on the fact that his own machine restored OK. One is giving an example of frustration upgrading XP->Vista, the other is making a ridiculous catagorical statement based on data n=1.
Well, a slipstreamed disk is a third-party modification, so I think it's a little bit shakey using it as a comparison. I did try to create one a year ago but found it tediously difficult command-line sourcery (ironically what people often accuse Linux of) so I gave up. I've found a little utility now so I'll give it a go. I do appreciate that if I walked into a shop and bought a boxed XP I would get an SP2 disk, but then that would cost me a lot of money to be able to easily install and OS I already own.
Yes - really. I have piles of old boxes sitting around with XP license stickers on them. Vista will cost me money, big money that I don't have. Remember that I'm talking about what these OSs mean to me. Remember that the convesation started over frustration about articles where people change to Linux because they don't like Vista and I'm trying to explain why, from my point of view, some people might want to do that.
It's not absurd, it's the whole point of the story. Some people feel that Vista has a lot of changes, but not many actual new features from the end-user point of view. Ubuntu cannot be "arbitrarily different" becuase it was never the same in the first place, it's different for at worst historical reasons. Vista started from XP, so each change should be for a good reason, but nevertheless people are looking at XP->Vista and XP->Ubuntu and seeing less difference in the amount of effort each change would take than they had previously believed and seriously thinking of giving Vista a miss.
Don't forget that in my fist post in this thread I said that I'm actually quite excited about giving Vista a go (I'm getting a boxed Ultimate in a couple of weeks time). I am a biased die-hard Linux fan, although my recent frustrating experience of installing XP was for my sister's Christmas present, so I'm not so far down that path that I don't see the need to let people use what they're comfortable with. What interests me is that I'm hearing XP users say they might be more comfortable with Ubuntu than Vista when the time comes to make the switch. Microsoft should be very worried about that.
For my part I've had far more trouble upgrading major versions of Windows. I wouldn't even consider upgrading a Windows box without backing up all my data. I've taken the chance with each successive Ubuntu release since Dapper and never had a problem, so I was pretty confident last week. You say "people everywhere are irresponsibly claiming that this OS is tailored for average users and works at least as well--if not better than--Windows. I call BS on every account" in the context of a badly failed major OS upgrade. I feel your pain - we've all been there - but are you really implying that if this was 2000 to XP or XP to Vista you could have handed the DVD to your next door neighbour and they could have done the upgrade without a hitch? For sure?
Right now when I have an empty machine in front of me, what shall I do with it? I need to access the web, write spreadsheet and text documents and sync my iPod. The comparisons are valid - right now Microsoft actively sells two desktop operating systems: XP (grudgingly) and Vista. XP is old, out of date, a pain to install and keep working properly. Vista is expensive, is a resource hog, and as the article said is different for difference' sake. Ubuntu is up-to-date, easy to install, easy to keep working properly and comes with a ton of applications right out of the box.
I don't need to compare Breezy with XP because I'm comparing what's available now - the two supported MS desktop OSs and a Linux offering. Comparing 'the Live CD doesn't boot' stories is an unfair comparison - there's plently of dodgy hardware that has problems with XP. If you compare installs on working mainstream hardware Linux versus XP you will always get a fully-loaded Ubuntu system up and running whilst XP is still rebooting for the nth update.
I have a little hobby gathering old PCs, sorting them out and redistributing them to impoverished family members, students and even some local charities. I'm beginning to really wonder what OS I will send them out with in a year's time. I do now have a slipstreamed XP SP2 CD but I'll eat my hat if that's up and running fully patched before Ubuntu on the same box.
Ahhh, well you were talking about files in common - of which there are many hundreds - when in fact you meant proprietary DLLs (of which there are but a few). I would hope that sensible application developers would statically link libraries that are only needed by one app. I guess they make them shared libraries so that if you have multiple apps from the same vendor they can all share the same library.
Yup, it is. It's the most popular desktop OS on the planet. Other than some killer apps (which I admit is a big 'other') and certain hardware, most Linux distros will exceed the baseline of Windows by some margin in a number of areas. It's good to compare and see where Windows is winning or losing. It's certainly not about seeing how far Linux has managed to copy the features of Windows. That's what Wine is for.
Thanks for your accurate study, sample size n=1. Anyone else do any groundbreaking research today?
It's worth remembering that Ubuntu ships on a Live CD so if you managed to install it then as a matter of fact it certainly can boot on your hardware, so it should just be some relatively simple troubleshooting to get things working for you.
Your use of that phrase is currently the only one in this story.
On rare occasions, there will be an absolute need to use regedit in Windows, some people just can't handle that. On other rare occasions there will be a need to boot the machine from a dos disk and rewrite the MBR because Windows has borked it, some people won't handle that either. On OSX there's sometimes the need to boot the machine whilst holding down arcane combinations of keys in order to disable something or other... people might struggle with that too.
Let's go back to the abacus, guys.
Hang-on: think about this. What would happen in Windows? It wouldn't boot. Believe me, I've been there, and if you're a nerd/geek then so have you. In the end you would have had to take the sledgehammer approach and reinstall Windows. The same approach would have worked in Linux too, but Linux (because it's designed that way) has the option of editing a config file to fix it. By the way, changing the xorg.conf file is something that any experienced Linux user would have gladly walked you through on a support forum. It's not that hard to edit a file (much easier that... ooh... regedit maybe?)
Have you tried posting to the Ubuntu support Wiki? If you have then post the URL here and I'm sure some Slashdotters, including myself, will be pleased to go over and help you. Don't forget to include full details (was that a clean install of Feisty, were you using unofficial repositories, Automatix etc., what method did you use to upgrade...)
His point isn't that he couldn't figure it out, it's just that things were "arbitrarily different" - changed for the point of change rather than any great enhancement. Sure he could figure out a different Control Panel, but it's annoying to have to do that for no actual gain.
I think what we're actually seeing here is people who don't have any particular need for the unique strengths of Windows (and it does have some) and could do well with any of the alternative mainstream OSs. See, they already "switched operating systems" going from XP to Vista, and the feedback I'm hearing is that the effort of relearning familiar things makes the jump from XP to Ubuntu seem no worse. Actually, I even get the impression that for some the idea of injecting some excitement into their computer usage by exploring a new OS with different strengths and weeknesses is quite attractive compared to relearning Windows in order to go back to what they already new.
Am I way off the mark here? I've been using Debian then Ubuntu near exclusively for 6 years so I'm actually quite looking forward to having a play with Vista just to see if there's anything about a new Microsoft OS that I find attractive. I installed XP on a machine for my sister 3 weeks ago and it took 4 hours worth of downloading drivers and updates just to get to the stage where I could start installing apps (c.f. Ubuntu less than 1 hour for a fully loaded OS+apps) so I'm pretty sure XP is of no value to me from the 'enjoying using the computer' viewpoint unless I need to run some Windows-only software.
If you use a computer for fun, or for work but like to have fun, Ubuntu is great. Quick to install on new hardware, new release every 6 months with new features, improvements and eye candy if you like that sort of thing. Loads of little apps to choose between for virtually any task, all ready to install from official repositories, properly signed etc.
glibc - almost all of them
libpthread - yup, all of them
libgnome - all the gnome apps
libsocket - anything that uses sockets (in otherwords, almost everything)
should I go on?
OK, I know that's an example from my Linux box, but the same applies to Windows. If your principle of "programs should never share files" were put into practice, all of the code that lets a program draw a window, load and save to disk, access the networking stack etc. etc. would be repeated again and again for every single process. Not every single application (i.e. Word, Notepad etc.) but every service running in the background too.
The use of shared libraries has been a feature of multi-tasking operating systems for decades, and with good reason: modern OSs start with dozens, if not hundreds, of processes even before you've launched an application to do anything, and statically linking all of these would be a huge waste of resources. DLL-hell is an unfortunate side-effect of this, but in a properly package-managed system (hint: most Linuxes) this can be avoided. The reason why Windows apps write to the Windows sytem folder is that they have newer versions of DLLs (e.g. Visual Basic runtime) that are needed for that app to run, but that should be backwards-compatible with the other installed apps that may already be using those files.
Absolutely. When I have 40 different processes running I'd much rather each had their own statically linked versions of all the necessary libraries rather than using DLLs, I'll just upgrade my machine to 16Gb of RAM.
Well... yeah... but really if a corporate user decides to swap out their own graphics card then they really don't have anyone to blame but themselves.
But you need to understand that the "simple matter" you describe is not intuitive, it's just familiar. The only way this could "improve" would be to make Linux more like Windows or OSX - and indeed some distros do attempt to do this, like Linspire for example.
Personally I've been using Debian then Ubuntu as my primary OS for so long that I'm pretty disoriented when I sit down at a Windows box. Typically I'm at a friend's house, tired and have had a good meal and a beer or two so not at my best. They ask me to diagnose a networking issue, I open a DOS box and type ls. Brings up an error. I do that a couple more times then realise the command is dir. Then I want to view a file: cat randomscript.bat do that a couple more times before remembering that the command in DOS is type.
Same thing with the GUI - trying to find all the different properties to configure networking on the various flavours of Windows takes me a while now, although I could do it easily 4 years ago. The other night a friend wanted me to set up Windows ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) - took me ages and in fact still isn't working. I've been messing with computers for years and have a degree in Computer Systems Engineering but Windows is just different to what I'm used to. There are inconsistencies in the Windows GUI that ought to be fixed, but the point is if I was supporting Windows boxes for 8 hours a day again then I would remember all that stuff.
The problem you're describing is software for a relatively obscure piece of hardware which has obviously not been set-up to use the Ubuntu package management system. If it did, it would install when you double-clicked the .deb file. That's not Ubuntu's fault - any more than it would be if the Windows version were distributed as a .rar file with 30 different dlls that you had to manually copy into the correct directories. The setup.exe file you describe is something that has been provided by the software company because they've followed the Windows convention. If they had followed the Debian/Ubuntu convention with the Linux equivalent you wouldn't have a problem. The fact that they've ignored the Debian/Ubuntu convention is their fault, and if the hardware claims to support these OSs then I would complain to them, just as you would if the Windows version were similarly confusing.
There's a very easy way to find out...
Because it's effectively money for menaces. "Pay us this fee because you might infringe on one of our patents, and you wouldn't want anything nasty to happen to you, would you?"
Gutsy Gibbon beta, up to date with the latest packages, running on Pentium 4:
lee@paul:~$ dmesg | grep hpet
[ 16.394101] hpet0: at MMIO 0xfed00000, IRQs 2, 8, 0
[ 16.394107] hpet0: 3 64-bit timers, 14318180 Hz
The lifetime risk for acute appendicitis is 8.6% for men (http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/a/acute_appendicitis/prevalence.htm) so 91.4% of people never have a problem with their appendix. It's good to know that it's serving a useful purpose for those people.
And how could we go about getting proof... hmmm... maybe... how about a lawsuit? Isn't that what they're for - a group of people have a strong suspicion of foul play and would like to know if it indeed happened as they believe and if there is a legal remedy for it.
You're right if you consider taking a large software application/package, adding some minor features and distributing as commercial software - most people would be very happy with the free offering and not bother with the commercial one.
Imagine if, e.g., GIMP were BSD-licensed. Microsoft takes the package, adds CMYK support and calls it MIMP, and sells it for 30 dollars. Because of the CMYK changes, the file format is slightly different from GIMP. The GIMP developers want to stay 'compatible' because now everyone is sending .xcfm files which can't be opened under Linux because MIMP is Windows-only. So the developers are now 'chasing' a near-equivalent superset of their own code, which a commercial enterprise is making money off.
GIMP still doesn't have CMYK-support but they're working hard on it. Every new feature or bugfix the GIMP developers code goes into the next MIMP release, but none of the MIMP bugfixes or features get handed back to GIMP, except by the 'kindness' of Microsoft. Imagine then that Microsoft gives away MIMP with Vista Home Premium and above as an extra to differentiate it from Home Basic - high market penetration, near-ubiquitous usage... how much developer time will GIMP attract now? What if MS released MIMP for Linux?
I suppose it's arguable that degrees of uniqueness are possible in the sense that a person, object or idea could be unique in some properties but not in others, however I don't think this applies to a non-complex entitiy (e.g. a method for selling an album).