I'd suggest at this stage Apple is probably amongst the best of the consumer electronics brands as regards worker conditions. Because they're pretty much all manufacturing in the far east, and Apple, given all the bad press they got on the issue, is the one who's doing the most to counter bad practices. And they are also not trying to compete in the bottom end - where there is no margin for improving worker conditions.
Bad suggestion. Come over in Zhengzhou, Henan, and see the weekly queue of 300 workers in the iPhone factory, that are replacing those who left because 2k RMB isn't enough to accept such working conditions (and we're talking about very poor people here for who 2k RMB is quite decent). It seems Apple is really successful with it's PR about all this, but reality is really different.
This is just not truth. Packages in Ubuntu are first uploaded to Debian SID and then imported to Ubuntu before they freeze the next release. So if you want to stay on the edge, use Debian SID. And if that's too much "on the edge" for you, then use Debian testing. This is where bugs are fixed first. The only thing who are updated separately and maintained by Canonical used to be popular packages like Gnome, PHP, and the like. Just to stay on these examples, nowadays, Canonical focuses on Unity, and their PHP package is still using PHP 5.3 because of compatibility problems. Things they don't care of are first fixed in Debian (for example: XCP).
The distro who is behind is Ubuntu, not Debian. And that's truth because of "their general process", who didn't change.
when someone prefers XFCE to Unity, they are still benefiting from enormous efforts by hundreds of people to make the core Ubuntu platform
I feel truly depressed. A quick look at some Debian packages with apt-get showsrc xfce4-terminal shows 2 uploaders, and the work being done mostly by Yves-Alexis Perez. Then having a look at the Ubuntu package shows that there's almost no work at all from Ubuntu on that package, but the rework of 2 patches, AND THAT'S IT.
So, instead of a self-satisfying self-congratulation, and telling about the "hundreds of people" behind it, Marc should truly thanks the thousands of Debian Developer doing the real work FOR FREE (and the other thousands of maintainers who aren't DD and get their package sponsored). These are the real persons that makes it possible.
If you’ve been arguing over software licenses for the best part of 15 years then you would probably be fine with whatever came before Ubuntu.
If what Marc is saying here is that Ubuntu doesn't care anymore that software should be free (as in Freedom), then yes, it's time that everyone stops using Ubuntu. By the way the recent global search spyware finished to convince more and more people.
Whether you’re building out a big data cluster or a super-scaled storage solution, you’ll get it done faster on Ubuntu than any other platform, thanks to the amazing work of our cloud community.
With all the due respect Marc, I believe my Folsom packages of Openstack, which I'm slowly uploading to Debian experimental (but also available on a non-official repo), are both better and more easy to use than the ones currently in Ubuntu. You'd better stop touching yourself, and remove these lintian warnings which are all over the place on the Ubuntu packaging.
Consider it a gift from all of us at Ubuntu.
That's it, now I want to slap you in the face... We are talking about COMMUNITY SOFTWARE, not Canonical. Neither XFCE or Openstack are (c) Canonical. If you want a list of the top committers in each project to show you are wrong, I can do that, no pb.
Right, but not everyone goes to school, that's the problem. In some (very) remote area, it's quite common that kids don't go to school because it's too far, and they can't physically go. Also, sometimes, the teacher also has a strong accent, or uses the local dialect, which doesn't help.
To some degree, I would say that Simplified Chinese (eg: written Chinese) is more unifying the country than spoken Mandarin.
There's few issues in this package. First, it seems to be i386 only. Then, it's setting-up a repository in/etc/apt/source.list.d without warning the users... Then, it's full of lintian warnings:
Freaking Chinese that you need to speak with the 1.2 billion people in china. You know what he means.
Sorry, no, I don't know what you mean... Why "Freaking" exactly? Also, the population must be closer to 1.6 billion. And not all of them can speak Mandarin (or read/write any language at all).
When you write just "Chinese", it's not very helpful. Are you talking about oral Mandarin? Or Cantonese? Or perhaps Simplified or Traditional written Chinese? Probably, you should first learn to know what you're talking about before thinking about learning it.
And of course equating a disagreement over the extent of privacy in a well-meaning Linux distro with Hitler is probably the most obscene occurrence of Godwin's Law I've ever seen.
Probably, you might be interested in the long threads about MATE in Debian, and the reasons why we don't have it yet. To make it short, MATE guys have forked many, many libraries, which they admit wont have the time to maintain. So many people inside the Debian community pushed them to use upstream libraries, and limit the number of forked projects.
I wouldn't use MATE just yet, it just feels too unsafe, even though it seems to work very well (I tried it too, but on plain Debian Wheezy, not with Mint).
Maybe because you care about your freedom, and you understand Debian's position about non-free blobs? The punishment is made by OEM vendors, not Debian. MiNT is just yet another non-free distro...
RMS wrote and said multiple times that freedom might have a cost. Well, that's exactly the case here! In Debian, we don't have non-free binary blobs on the "main" section, and as a consequence, on our CDs. For this, you should be complaining to your hardware vendor that he's not providing the source code. You shouldn't be complaining to Debian the fact that there are some non-free drivers. Also, I shall remind you that these drivers are (almost always) available from the (well named) non-free repositories.
I guess it all depends how much you care about freedom and privacy. Here you care more about your privacy than about your freedom, obviously.
Yes they, ( either China, on a lot of point, iran, etc, or USA, for Wikileaks, even if I must add that both cases are complex, and the USAs government has a much better track than China and Iran by several order of magnitude )
China has been very bad on the political censorship of the Internet. USA is very bad with copyright and patent laws, and has blocked websites worldwide by ceasing.com domains, even if they were registered, and hosted, elsewhere, with the busyness running oversea as well. I don't think making this a competition of who's the most evil serves any purpose. Both censorship must stop, and we should be fighting them rather than discussing who's scoring high.
If he succeeds in crushing Ubunto, that would not be respecting the freedom of those who like to use Ubuntu.
This is one of the most silly statement I ever read on slashdot (and I've read a few). If we go by your logic, then Americans didn't respect the Germans who liked Hitler...
Are you aware of the GNU project and the GNU tools? You know, these small utilities which are the basics of all Linux distributions? Do you know that RMS is one of the authors of these?
A huge chunk of "free software" actually generates its revenue by violating your privacy.
Could you care to back this statement with examples? I fail to find any of these from the top of my head...
Or perhaps you make a distinction with lower and upper case? In which case, please explain why adding a capital F and S makes a difference.
Privacy cannot imply FOSS simply because you can have software that respects a user's privacy that is non FOSS and FOSS software that doesn't. In RMS's world, the two go hand in hand, in the real world they are unrelated.
In the real world, I don't think a spyware wouldn't be accepted in Debian main. If such thing was to happen, I believe it would generate a monster thread on debian-devel, and some of us (probably me included) leaving the project.
You mean that crap, with a proprietary X-Window app, which requires about 30 clicks to switch monitor? My wife hates it, she can't even figure out how to switch screen, and I always have to help here with this stupid interface. And no, she's not stupid, the problem really is the stupid software.
On the other side, with my laptop running an intel chipset, I just plug the laptop to the TV, and... that's it! I don't even have to do a single click, my desktop resizes on the laptop screen (to match the one of the TV), and the output to the TV is activated automatically. That's a nice feature that came with Gnome 3 on Debian Wheezy, which of course, doesn't work with the NVidia proprietary drivers.
It could have been about "a rabit open source proponent", but it doesn't even have to.
An Ubuntu app should install on any reasonably recent Ubuntu and not be tightly coupled to a particular release. When people get windows apps, they are usually not called "XP apps", or "Vista apps" or "Win7 apps", they are just Windows apps, and in most cases install without problems even on 10 years old XP machines.
Windows app generally embed tons of outdated.dll, each of which possibly containing a security hole. I do not envy AT ALL the stupid model they have, and I think we are much much better with applications bound to a single version of each lib rather than having so many duplicates in the filesystem.
As for the release cycles of Ubuntu, I agree it goes too fast, and that nothing has enough time to stabilize.
I shall add to this that I bought a cheap ACER laptop to my wife that was pre-installed with the most stupid linux distrib I ever saw. No GUI, root access without password. This is because in China, all computers have to be pre-installed with an OS, and they picked-up a stupid Linux distro (I don't even remember the name of that distro) just so they could say "look, there's an OS in it". This laptop could have well be pre-installed with Ubuntu. Why it wasn't done? Is there some pressure from Microsoft so that no decent Linux distro is installed on OEM laptops, even those in China where it's mandatory to install an OS?
There has been a huge discussion on what init system Debian would switch from sysv-rc. Roughly, we have the choice between systemd, upstart, openrc and stay with this old sysv-rc. The problem with upstart, is that Canonical is forcing every contributor to sign an agreement. This is a blocker for Debian. Is there any way that this may change, that this mandatory contributor agreement goes away, so that Debian can finally adopt upstart as well?
Yeah, exactly! When all this isn't ready, I don't think it's a good upstream source code for Debian, with lots of duplication. I tried made on Wheezy though, and it built and runs well (but I'm still using Gnome3 in "classic" mode...).
OTOH, Gnome went out of it's way to make the fallback mode too ugly to use.
I found it quite ok, what do you dislike in it? What I don't like is the [ALT] - right-click thing for managing applets in the panel, and the new look which I find is a regression (eg: it was less ugly before). I can bare with the rest of the changes.
Note, however, that Gnome removing the fallback mode removes even the *possibility* that I might decide to use the Gnome WM.
For me as well, this is a show stopper. I just hate this 3D zoom in and out, it just disturbs me too much when I work. I don't like the new launcher either, I am fine with the top panel. If I wanted a launcher replacement, cairo dock is better.
Another thing which I think is annoying currently, is that you have everything in one set. Both Gnome, LXDE, XFCE and all the others are designed to be installed as one big piece of software. The panel with menu, together with a launcher, a notification area, and the tray. I would love to be able to use the file manager from one desktop environment, the launcher from another one, etc. The fact that we just have everything in one set isn't at all the Unix way. Back 15 years ago on my Atari computer running MiNT (as in Mint is Not Tos, not the silly Debian derivative), I could choose all of these component separately. Why isn't it the case nowadays in Linux? Why can't I use the KDE start menu, with Gnome panel and PCMANFM? Sure, it might be possible to do that with lots of efforts, but why isn't it the default that every component could be chosen by a user?
I'm not interested in a fork which uses libraries which aren't supported anymore. Mate needs to either adapt and support the latest version of GTK and such, or it should die.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd suggest at this stage Apple is probably amongst the best of the consumer electronics brands as regards worker conditions. Because they're pretty much all manufacturing in the far east, and Apple, given all the bad press they got on the issue, is the one who's doing the most to counter bad practices. And they are also not trying to compete in the bottom end - where there is no margin for improving worker conditions.
Bad suggestion. Come over in Zhengzhou, Henan, and see the weekly queue of 300 workers in the iPhone factory, that are replacing those who left because 2k RMB isn't enough to accept such working conditions (and we're talking about very poor people here for who 2k RMB is quite decent). It seems Apple is really successful with it's PR about all this, but reality is really different.
Whatever the design, it's if made in the Foxconn factory, I will never buy such product from slave labors.
This is just not truth. Packages in Ubuntu are first uploaded to Debian SID and then imported to Ubuntu before they freeze the next release. So if you want to stay on the edge, use Debian SID. And if that's too much "on the edge" for you, then use Debian testing. This is where bugs are fixed first. The only thing who are updated separately and maintained by Canonical used to be popular packages like Gnome, PHP, and the like. Just to stay on these examples, nowadays, Canonical focuses on Unity, and their PHP package is still using PHP 5.3 because of compatibility problems. Things they don't care of are first fixed in Debian (for example: XCP).
The distro who is behind is Ubuntu, not Debian. And that's truth because of "their general process", who didn't change.
when someone prefers XFCE to Unity, they are still benefiting from enormous efforts by hundreds of people to make the core Ubuntu platform
I feel truly depressed. A quick look at some Debian packages with apt-get showsrc xfce4-terminal shows 2 uploaders, and the work being done mostly by Yves-Alexis Perez. Then having a look at the Ubuntu package shows that there's almost no work at all from Ubuntu on that package, but the rework of 2 patches, AND THAT'S IT.
So, instead of a self-satisfying self-congratulation, and telling about the "hundreds of people" behind it, Marc should truly thanks the thousands of Debian Developer doing the real work FOR FREE (and the other thousands of maintainers who aren't DD and get their package sponsored). These are the real persons that makes it possible.
If you’ve been arguing over software licenses for the best part of 15 years then you would probably be fine with whatever came before Ubuntu.
If what Marc is saying here is that Ubuntu doesn't care anymore that software should be free (as in Freedom), then yes, it's time that everyone stops using Ubuntu. By the way the recent global search spyware finished to convince more and more people.
Whether you’re building out a big data cluster or a super-scaled storage solution, you’ll get it done faster on Ubuntu than any other platform, thanks to the amazing work of our cloud community.
With all the due respect Marc, I believe my Folsom packages of Openstack, which I'm slowly uploading to Debian experimental (but also available on a non-official repo), are both better and more easy to use than the ones currently in Ubuntu. You'd better stop touching yourself, and remove these lintian warnings which are all over the place on the Ubuntu packaging.
Consider it a gift from all of us at Ubuntu.
That's it, now I want to slap you in the face... We are talking about COMMUNITY SOFTWARE, not Canonical. Neither XFCE or Openstack are (c) Canonical. If you want a list of the top committers in each project to show you are wrong, I can do that, no pb.
Except that removing the pedantic flag doesn't remove the warnings, and that on my Debian Wheezy laptop, it doesn't work...
Right, but not everyone goes to school, that's the problem. In some (very) remote area, it's quite common that kids don't go to school because it's too far, and they can't physically go. Also, sometimes, the teacher also has a strong accent, or uses the local dialect, which doesn't help.
To some degree, I would say that Simplified Chinese (eg: written Chinese) is more unifying the country than spoken Mandarin.
There's few issues in this package. First, it seems to be i386 only. Then, it's setting-up a repository in /etc/apt/source.list.d without warning the users... Then, it's full of lintian warnings:
# lintian -Ii -E --pedantic steam.deb
W: steam: debian-changelog-line-too-long line 3
N:
N: The given line of the latest changelog entry is over 80 columns. Such changelog entries may look poor in terminal windows and mail messages and be annoying to read. Please wrap changelog entries at 80 columns or less where possible.
N:
N: Severity: normal, Certainty: certain
N:
N: Check: changelog-file, Type: binary
N:
W: steam: debian-changelog-line-too-long line 4
W: steam: copyright-without-copyright-notice
N:
N: The copyright file for this package does not appear to contain a copyright notice. You should copy the copyright notice from the upstream
N: source (or add one of your own for a native package). A copyright notice must consist of Copyright, Copr., or the Unicode symbol of C in a circle followed by the years and the copyright holder. A copyright notice is not required for a work to be copyrighted, but Debian requires the copyright file include the authors and years of copyright, and including a valid copyright notice is the best way to do that. Examples:
N:
N: Copyright YYYY Firstname Lastname
N: Copr. YYYY-YYYY Firstname Lastname
N: © YYYY,YYYY Firstname Lastname
N:
N: If the package is in the public domain rather than copyrighted, be sure to mention "public domain" in the copyright file. Please be aware that this is very rare and not the same as a DFSG-free license. True public domain software is generally limited to such special cases as a work product of a United States government agency.
N:
N: Refer to http://ftp-master.debian.org/REJECT-FAQ.html for details.
N:
N: Severity: normal, Certainty: certain
N:
N: Check: copyright-file, Type: binary
N:
E: steam: malformed-deb-archive found 4 members instead of 3
N:
N: The binary package is not a correctly constructed archive. A binary Debian package must be an ar archive with exactly three members: debian-binary, control.tar.gz, and one of data.tar.gz, data.tar.bz2 or data.tar.xz in exactly that order. The debian-binary member must start with a single line containing the version number, with a major revision of 2.
N:
N: Refer to the deb(5) manual page for details.
N:
N: Severity: serious, Certainty: certain
N:
N: Check: deb-format, Type: binary, udeb
N:
W: steam: extended-description-line-too-long
N:
N: One or more lines in the extended part of the "Description:" field have been found to contain more than 80 characters. For the benefit of users of 80x25 terminals, it is recommended that the lines do not exceed 80 characters.
N:
N: Refer to Debian Policy Manual section 3.4.1 (The single line synopsis)
N: for details.
N:
N: Severity: normal, Certainty: certain
N:
N: Check: description, Type: binary, udeb
N:
W: steam: extended-description-line-too-long
E: steam: description-contains-tabs
N:
N: The package "Description:" must not contain tab characters.
N:
N: Refer to Debian Policy Manual section 5.6.13 (Description) for details.
N:
N: Severity: important, Certainty: certain
N:
N: Check: description, Type: binary, udeb
N:
W: steam: extended-description-line-too-long
W: steam: extended-description-line-too-long
W: steam: extended-description-line-too-long
W: steam: extended-description-line-too-long
W: steam: extended-description-line-too-long
W: steam: extended-description-line-too-long
W: steam: extended-description-line-too-long
W: steam: extended-description-line-to
Freaking Chinese that you need to speak with the 1.2 billion people in china. You know what he means.
Sorry, no, I don't know what you mean... Why "Freaking" exactly? Also, the population must be closer to 1.6 billion. And not all of them can speak Mandarin (or read/write any language at all).
When you write just "Chinese", it's not very helpful. Are you talking about oral Mandarin? Or Cantonese? Or perhaps Simplified or Traditional written Chinese? Probably, you should first learn to know what you're talking about before thinking about learning it.
Probably, you might be interested in the long threads about MATE in Debian, and the reasons why we don't have it yet. To make it short, MATE guys have forked many, many libraries, which they admit wont have the time to maintain. So many people inside the Debian community pushed them to use upstream libraries, and limit the number of forked projects.
I wouldn't use MATE just yet, it just feels too unsafe, even though it seems to work very well (I tried it too, but on plain Debian Wheezy, not with Mint).
Maybe because you care about your freedom, and you understand Debian's position about non-free blobs? The punishment is made by OEM vendors, not Debian. MiNT is just yet another non-free distro...
RMS wrote and said multiple times that freedom might have a cost. Well, that's exactly the case here! In Debian, we don't have non-free binary blobs on the "main" section, and as a consequence, on our CDs. For this, you should be complaining to your hardware vendor that he's not providing the source code. You shouldn't be complaining to Debian the fact that there are some non-free drivers. Also, I shall remind you that these drivers are (almost always) available from the (well named) non-free repositories.
I guess it all depends how much you care about freedom and privacy. Here you care more about your privacy than about your freedom, obviously.
Yes they, ( either China, on a lot of point, iran, etc, or USA, for Wikileaks, even if I must add that both cases are complex, and the USAs government has a much better track than China and Iran by several order of magnitude )
China has been very bad on the political censorship of the Internet. USA is very bad with copyright and patent laws, and has blocked websites worldwide by ceasing .com domains, even if they were registered, and hosted, elsewhere, with the busyness running oversea as well. I don't think making this a competition of who's the most evil serves any purpose. Both censorship must stop, and we should be fighting them rather than discussing who's scoring high.
For each of such change we're seeing in Ubuntu, people are coming back to Debian. Welcome back!
If he succeeds in crushing Ubunto, that would not be respecting the freedom of those who like to use Ubuntu.
This is one of the most silly statement I ever read on slashdot (and I've read a few). If we go by your logic, then Americans didn't respect the Germans who liked Hitler...
RMS has never had much to do with "free software"
Are you aware of the GNU project and the GNU tools? You know, these small utilities which are the basics of all Linux distributions? Do you know that RMS is one of the authors of these?
A huge chunk of "free software" actually generates its revenue by violating your privacy.
Could you care to back this statement with examples? I fail to find any of these from the top of my head...
Or perhaps you make a distinction with lower and upper case? In which case, please explain why adding a capital F and S makes a difference.
Privacy cannot imply FOSS simply because you can have software that respects a user's privacy that is non FOSS and FOSS software that doesn't. In RMS's world, the two go hand in hand, in the real world they are unrelated.
In the real world, I don't think a spyware wouldn't be accepted in Debian main. If such thing was to happen, I believe it would generate a monster thread on debian-devel, and some of us (probably me included) leaving the project.
You mean that crap, with a proprietary X-Window app, which requires about 30 clicks to switch monitor? My wife hates it, she can't even figure out how to switch screen, and I always have to help here with this stupid interface. And no, she's not stupid, the problem really is the stupid software.
... that's it! I don't even have to do a single click, my desktop resizes on the laptop screen (to match the one of the TV), and the output to the TV is activated automatically. That's a nice feature that came with Gnome 3 on Debian Wheezy, which of course, doesn't work with the NVidia proprietary drivers.
On the other side, with my laptop running an intel chipset, I just plug the laptop to the TV, and
It could have been about "a rabit open source proponent", but it doesn't even have to.
An Ubuntu app should install on any reasonably recent Ubuntu and not be tightly coupled to a particular release. When people get windows apps, they are usually not called "XP apps", or "Vista apps" or "Win7 apps", they are just Windows apps, and in most cases install without problems even on 10 years old XP machines.
Windows app generally embed tons of outdated .dll, each of which possibly containing a security hole. I do not envy AT ALL the stupid model they have, and I think we are much much better with applications bound to a single version of each lib rather than having so many duplicates in the filesystem.
As for the release cycles of Ubuntu, I agree it goes too fast, and that nothing has enough time to stabilize.
I shall add to this that I bought a cheap ACER laptop to my wife that was pre-installed with the most stupid linux distrib I ever saw. No GUI, root access without password. This is because in China, all computers have to be pre-installed with an OS, and they picked-up a stupid Linux distro (I don't even remember the name of that distro) just so they could say "look, there's an OS in it". This laptop could have well be pre-installed with Ubuntu. Why it wasn't done? Is there some pressure from Microsoft so that no decent Linux distro is installed on OEM laptops, even those in China where it's mandatory to install an OS?
There has been a huge discussion on what init system Debian would switch from sysv-rc. Roughly, we have the choice between systemd, upstart, openrc and stay with this old sysv-rc. The problem with upstart, is that Canonical is forcing every contributor to sign an agreement. This is a blocker for Debian. Is there any way that this may change, that this mandatory contributor agreement goes away, so that Debian can finally adopt upstart as well?
Yeah, exactly! When all this isn't ready, I don't think it's a good upstream source code for Debian, with lots of duplication. I tried made on Wheezy though, and it built and runs well (but I'm still using Gnome3 in "classic" mode...).
OTOH, Gnome went out of it's way to make the fallback mode too ugly to use.
I found it quite ok, what do you dislike in it? What I don't like is the [ALT] - right-click thing for managing applets in the panel, and the new look which I find is a regression (eg: it was less ugly before). I can bare with the rest of the changes.
Note, however, that Gnome removing the fallback mode removes even the *possibility* that I might decide to use the Gnome WM.
For me as well, this is a show stopper. I just hate this 3D zoom in and out, it just disturbs me too much when I work. I don't like the new launcher either, I am fine with the top panel. If I wanted a launcher replacement, cairo dock is better.
Another thing which I think is annoying currently, is that you have everything in one set. Both Gnome, LXDE, XFCE and all the others are designed to be installed as one big piece of software. The panel with menu, together with a launcher, a notification area, and the tray. I would love to be able to use the file manager from one desktop environment, the launcher from another one, etc. The fact that we just have everything in one set isn't at all the Unix way. Back 15 years ago on my Atari computer running MiNT (as in Mint is Not Tos, not the silly Debian derivative), I could choose all of these component separately. Why isn't it the case nowadays in Linux? Why can't I use the KDE start menu, with Gnome panel and PCMANFM? Sure, it might be possible to do that with lots of efforts, but why isn't it the default that every component could be chosen by a user?
I'm not interested in a fork which uses libraries which aren't supported anymore. Mate needs to either adapt and support the latest version of GTK and such, or it should die.