If you don't mind, please say how the preupgrade turned out. I have Fedora 8 on my machine and will likely be upgrading it in the next couple weeks. It would be nice to try out preuprade (if it seems to work).
It may come as a surprise you, but small towns actually do have doctors! And stores! The only thing there that is likely true is the airport. I'd have to agree with this poster. Over last summer I lived in a small town not too far from my college. Most of the stuff was within walking distance (groceries, gas station, coffee shop, resturants, etc). Even better, you can then ride your bike on the backroads... I miss those days.
Or better yet, just call it "Linux." The funny thing is that is what Linus has been doing since the begnning. It is his kernel, he named it Linux. The kernel is referred to as Linux, the whole system is referred* to as GNU/Linux since most of the system depends on GNU tools.
For example, Debian GNU/Linux uses the GNU tools and Linux kernel. However, there are also ports to using the Hurd, NetBSD and FreeBSD kernels. They're, respectively, called Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/NetBSD, and Debian GNU/FreeBSD .
* I have to admit I refer to GNU/Linux as Linux to avoid weird looks from people.
In this case, yes there are too many choices. but would you rather have this spread: Windows Vista, MacOSX, OpenSUSE? Probably not, with the caveat that OpenSUSE would pretty darn impressive.
No. I would rather have to waste hours deciding which of the 100 linux distros to use. Even then, I would rather have the choice to decide between XP and Vista. To me, the freedom and flexibility having so many options provides, holds a higher priority than that of ease. No disagreement there. I totally agree with your logic. I still am of the opinion that all the myriad of choices isn't needed. I do think there can be a balance between too many choices and too few. However, it's mostly my frustration in trying to find distro that I know is the best (for me). And I know it won't change since the 'cat is out of the bag'.
If you don't want them, ignore them - or find some way (even arbitrary!) to filter them. That's what I do.;)
Or even trying to choose between the lesser of 5 or 10 evils What I find harder is to find the distro that works best for me. There's so many good choices that it's hard to decide which one to try. And to really know if it's good enough for you, you have to invest time using the distro. So then you're acclimated to all of the particular distro's nuances which makes you biased when you try others.
So I agree with you, the mantra of 'choices are good' doesn't always hold without caveats.
So I'd rather have a regular release schedule than have progress on Ubuntu held back until every little bug can be worked out. Disclaimer: I am currently running Fedora
I really like how Fedora handles new Features. For example, they are replacing the init daemon with one called upstart because in their words:
Fedora in particular has a very bloated set of bash scripts used to load its services. Upstarts more sophisticated notion of services and how to trigger them is a good step toward streamlining many of those services.
So their contingency plan on not making the deadline is to simply ship with the old daemon until upstart is ready. That's something I think Ubuntu could do. Why ship with unstable products when you have a handy update tool available to you?
I don't use Ubuntu so maybe they do this already... doesn't sound that way from this discussion but it wouldn't be the first time I was wrong.
Thanks for the perspective. Maybe when I graduate and have more time to kill I'll give slackware a try. The idea of having a robust and minimalistic install does resonate with me.:)
PS i fit into the above group because my brain is full of physics...no room left for CLI commands;o) Don't feed into that line of thought. The computer is simply a tool. I use Fedora because it stays out of my way for the most part. I'm a programmer not a sysadmin, I don't want to spend hours configuring my system that take away from my projects. I do know my way around the commandline because it makes me more efficient with what I do, NOT that I SHOULD to be a 'real' nerd. You use the tools that work the best (for you) and CLI is faster (for me). The same is true, in my opinion, with a person's choice of a distro.
Indeed, but that doesn't address the problem of most embedded development being Windows-centric, the Arduino being an exception. I find that most curious. I found that Linux distros (Fedora in my case) makes serial connection absurdly easy with udev in comparison to Windows. I assume the other UNIX-like systems (like Mac) have something similar?
I've been goofing around with Basic Stamps, largely because there is a really nice piece of software for programming it from the Mac through USB, made by Murat Konar. I've had good experiences (brief though) with working with the AVR micro-controllers from Atmel.
It'll be interesting to see how that plays out. I wish one of the Linux distros were POSIX certified like Redhat. Does anyone know if any of the distros are pursuing certification?
Also, readers of UNIX programming books would do best to practice their skills on a Mac or a Sun workstation, as neither Linux nor SCO are certified against current UNIX standard and entitled to claim that they are selling UNIX. Or to be more specific, ones that are fully POSIX Compliant and certified. It really does make OpenSolaris tempting...
> It's just an abundance of extra options would be > overwhelming" > >> Pick decent defaults, and hide the extra options >> under "advanced settings". If you pick decent >> defaults most normal users won't need to visit >> "advanced settings" and be overwhelmed by them
To a certain extent I agree with you, however I'll direct you to this post, which says what I want to say more eloquently then I could. If you reread my post, my beef was with the blanket statement that extra UI options is always ideal. I agree that taking the resizable textarea away was a wrong choice... but that wasn't what I was trying to say;)
The biggest problem I've seen with the younger people in charge of startups is that even the rare ones truly gifted with drive, vision, and creativity just don't understand business. I think you could say the same thing about any type of managerial (or leadership) position. For example, I'll soon be a college graduate. I tend to be pretty good with the technical stuff however I know I don't have the real-world experience to be in a leadership role. I could see myself being there in a couple years but not at this point.
So I can see what you mean. If I was to start a business I'd want to hire someone to do the managing of it so I could focus on the technical side.
Wow... I never knew that. I use microemacs just because it's snappier, but having a convenient set of download would be reason enough for me to switch back. Heck, there could even be an extension that cut off some of the fat.
Debian is not strictly free as in freedom, at least not to the point to be recommended by the fsf. The main reason is, it's still too easy to install non-free stuff through debian repos. Debian isn't free because it leaves you free to go non-free? I've always been stuck on that too. From reading RMSs messages on that he's stated that for any general purpose machine there is no way to stop non-free things being installed. What he (and thereby GNU and FSF) have a problem with is that distros make it too easy to install the non-free packages. For example, Ubuntu's restricted repos and I believe OpenSUSE (??) does the same thing.
I don't necessarily agree with that point-of-view however I don't think it's inherently WRONG to use non-free things. I'd prefer to use free stuff but I don't have the moral objection like RMS does. I think it's sufficient that distros give a warning that the packages are not free (like Ubuntu's restricted).
I really think RMS is splitting hairs... however I haven't devoted my whole life to free software so the nuances are likely lost on me. Though it would be pretty easy to argue that he's incredibly biased on the topic... Your mileage may vary.
Look at the excessive forking of Linux here. Nerds see this as a good thing. Users see it as confusing and just want to give up. That's crazy! As a nerd I wish there was less choices. Combining some of the distros wouldn't be a bad thing. I really think that it would improve the quality because you'd have contributors not duplicating each other's work as much. I'm also tired of hearing people say that certain distros 'dumb it down'. Just because the GUI tools and packages are available doesn't mean you have to use them. I think it would be more beneficial to the Linux community to have different 'spins' instead of the different distros. </wishful thinking>
Agree... and I wonder if this will hurt redhat in the long run. You have the same idea with a free desktop and a free server (Fedora or CentOS). However Ubuntu has the name recognition with keeping the Ubuntu name on it. I could see this adversely affecting redhat. I hope not since they seem to do a good job contributing.
I wonder if that's why Ubuntu went with debian as a base. If they (Canonical) went with a redhat base I could see them having a harder time being a corporation to make money. I wonder if that was the strategy from the beginning... to become a competitor to redhat.
Note: Moderators, he's clearly on topic. It's a counter-example to saying OSS companies can't make money
I can see why they're stuck on their solution, but I CANNOT understand why they don't understand that extra UI options are critical to a good app. I don't agree with bolded section. Giving users ALL the choices available would make it unusable. Though I did like the resizable area myself. It's just an abundance of extra options would be overwhelming. However, that's not to say that they're stuck with that decision. If there's enough of a response I would assume (and hope) that they would change they're minds. Maybe forking it will have that effect but it seems kinda early to be saying that FOREVER it will be unresizable by the user.
I used POSIX as my term of choice since there's a lot of closed source software that runs on proprietary UNIXes as well as linux and figured it would save me from being flamed. I guess I failed in that respect. I should have drew bigger attention to it, but my intention was to say IF that was the rationale for switching. I probably should have made the if more obvious. This is coming from a Fedora user, so obviously the POSIX isn't that important. And to be honest, I did C programming for a class, which was developed on Linux (Ubuntu dapper at the time). The box being developed FOR was Solaris and we were doing some POSIX. So Linux is still capable of some (most?) POSIX stuff.
So sorry my comment gave the wrong impression. It was not a flame in my head.:)
I'm getting ready to switch from apple to linux as soon as they fix the voicechat bug in wine for TF2. There are already lots of developers for posix compliant OSes. If your rationale for switching is POSIX, it would be better to stay on OS X. They're fully POSIX certified whereas Linux is not. Or... something like opensolaris...
Ubuntu (and Fedora) should take notes from OpenSUSE on this issue. I'm surprised that Ubuntu doesn't do something like openSUSE. I'm a Fedora user and understand that Fedora is a little geekier (and rough around the edges) so I wouldn't suggest it as a first distro. I was thinking though about getting my family to use Ubuntu. That brings me to my question. Would you consider openSUSE easy enough for normal users? If they can pay attention to giving a good label to a windows partition that suggests they may pay attention to other similar issues (though I am assuming).
Fedora 8 does the identical thing. On my desktop is a '19.5 GB Volume' icon. Fedora's a little geekier then Ubuntu so I expect those kind of things. I'm surprised (with Ubuntu's focus on computers for people) that Ubuntu doesn't add a better label. Maybe they just haven't had many normal users yet. I expect we'll start to see more stuff catering to these users.
a couple of extra bytes for a few CSS rules and a few lines of javascript. If the developers do it right, using CSS has the potential to decrease what you're downloading. Say you have 10 pages. It use to be that each of those 10 pages would have all the style information on each page. With external CSS external files, you only have to download that style information once for all 10 pages. Same with using external javascript...
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If you don't mind, please say how the preupgrade turned out. I have Fedora 8 on my machine and will likely be upgrading it in the next couple weeks. It would be nice to try out preuprade (if it seems to work).
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For example, Debian GNU/Linux uses the GNU tools and Linux kernel. However, there are also ports to using the Hurd, NetBSD and FreeBSD kernels. They're, respectively, called Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/NetBSD, and Debian GNU/FreeBSD .
* I have to admit I refer to GNU/Linux as Linux to avoid weird looks from people.
So I agree with you, the mantra of 'choices are good' doesn't always hold without caveats.
I really like how Fedora handles new Features. For example, they are replacing the init daemon with one called upstart because in their words:
So their contingency plan on not making the deadline is to simply ship with the old daemon until upstart is ready. That's something I think Ubuntu could do. Why ship with unstable products when you have a handy update tool available to you?
I don't use Ubuntu so maybe they do this already... doesn't sound that way from this discussion but it wouldn't be the first time I was wrong.
Thanks for the perspective. Maybe when I graduate and have more time to kill I'll give slackware a try. The idea of having a robust and minimalistic install does resonate with me. :)
It'll be interesting to see how that plays out. I wish one of the Linux distros were POSIX certified like Redhat. Does anyone know if any of the distros are pursuing certification?
> It's just an abundance of extra options would be
;)
> overwhelming"
>
>> Pick decent defaults, and hide the extra options
>> under "advanced settings". If you pick decent
>> defaults most normal users won't need to visit
>> "advanced settings" and be overwhelmed by them
To a certain extent I agree with you, however I'll direct you to this post, which says what I want to say more eloquently then I could. If you reread my post, my beef was with the blanket statement that extra UI options is always ideal. I agree that taking the resizable textarea away was a wrong choice... but that wasn't what I was trying to say
So I can see what you mean. If I was to start a business I'd want to hire someone to do the managing of it so I could focus on the technical side.
Wow ... I never knew that. I use microemacs just because it's snappier, but having a convenient set of download would be reason enough for me to switch back. Heck, there could even be an extension that cut off some of the fat.
I don't necessarily agree with that point-of-view however I don't think it's inherently WRONG to use non-free things. I'd prefer to use free stuff but I don't have the moral objection like RMS does. I think it's sufficient that distros give a warning that the packages are not free (like Ubuntu's restricted).
I really think RMS is splitting hairs
Agree... and I wonder if this will hurt redhat in the long run. You have the same idea with a free desktop and a free server (Fedora or CentOS). However Ubuntu has the name recognition with keeping the Ubuntu name on it. I could see this adversely affecting redhat. I hope not since they seem to do a good job contributing.
I wonder if that's why Ubuntu went with debian as a base. If they (Canonical) went with a redhat base I could see them having a harder time being a corporation to make money. I wonder if that was the strategy from the beginning... to become a competitor to redhat.
Note: Moderators, he's clearly on topic. It's a counter-example to saying OSS companies can't make money
So sorry my comment gave the wrong impression. It was not a flame in my head.
Fedora 8 does the identical thing. On my desktop is a '19.5 GB Volume' icon. Fedora's a little geekier then Ubuntu so I expect those kind of things. I'm surprised (with Ubuntu's focus on computers for people) that Ubuntu doesn't add a better label. Maybe they just haven't had many normal users yet. I expect we'll start to see more stuff catering to these users.
So that answered my question. Windows can't natively handle the different partitions. At least I'm not aware of Microsoft publicly saying they can...