Ubuntu 10.04: The Perfect Consumer Operating System?
linux-mag.com
linux-mag.com
What's even nicer is not needing CPU-sucking anti-virus protection scanning every file in the background, draining your laptop's battery life. If you want to install software, you don't have to go to some random website; you just open the software installation control panel, type a keyword, click a button, and start using the software. Even Apple realized this was a good idea, and copied it in the form of "the App Store".
There will never be a perfect desktop OS (ever use OS X or Windows!?), but Linux is certainly becoming a great competitor these days. I no longer shy away from recommending Ubuntu; it meets most people's needs, and it's easier to maintain that Windows or OS X. Who would have thunk it!
For example...
Copying and pasting is broken in some apps: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/11334
Desktop icons cannot be auto-arranged: https://bugs.launchpad.net/nautilus/+bug/20284
Screensavers can't be customized: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-screensaver/...
Context menu for an USB pendrive shows "Unmount", "Eject" and "Safely Remove Drive": https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gvfs/+bug/453072
There are a lot of others listed here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/+bugs
Checking off features on a list isn't enough to make a good operating system. Like baseball, you have to work on the fundamentals to win.
(Jeez that last sentence sounds corny.)
It's not solely Ubuntu's fault. A lot of the issues are upstream. The screensaver settings bug was closed as WONTFIX in gnome: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316654
Says the maintainer of gnome-screensaver: I don't have any plans to support this. My view is that any screensaver theme that requires configuration is inherently broken.
Yes, because it's not like I'd ever want the pictures screensaver to grab images out of a directory besides ~/Photos/.
Sadly, I will download and try this year's crop and, predictably, they will be rubbish.
And next year, it will be the same story again.
2010 may not be the year of Linux on the consumer desktop, but it's another year of Linux on my desktop, and I couldn't be happier.
For a CTO, like you, with technical skills I think Ubuntu really can work, specially if open source software is important. But as a consumer operating system? I think the iPhone OS is closer to what my mom needs than what Windows 7 or Mac OS X is. Of course, consumers gets more tech savvy as time goes...
Because of the package manager and repositories I think Ubuntu is the best OS for mums: all the updates happen automatically.
What special needs does your mum have?
She has been using Ubuntu for 4 years now. Granted, I administer it for her remotely. But she goes online, reads email, chats, uses Skype, and so on.
No alternate universe needed. Different people don’t have to have the same requirements and preferences. No one right screw for the one right nut. People and Operating Systems are sadly|luckily quite a bit more complicated than that.
That’s just why discussions about the general superiority of any one Operating System are always so horrendously stupid. (This sentence is a general comment and not a response to you. You specifically write about your needs and your needs only, no claims of general superiority involved. Just to clarify.)
But your desktop is only one of ~1-2% of desktops that use Linux. The "alternate universe", i.e. the 98%+ of the world, are happy with Windows or OSX, some of them by choice. Your clearly a very happy with Linux, but don't project this happiness on others.
The open source world could learn a lot from the story of Firefox. When the market was frustrated with a slow and insecure IE, Firefox came along being very fast and secure. Us geeks loved it, recommended it to non-techie friends and, these benefits were important to them too. What benefit does desktop Linux give me? The only real new benefit coming in Linux is the fast boot up. That is a real consumer benefit. I can't think of another real benefit in the current crop of distros.
Some hours reading the manual, web searching or asking in forums vs (26 8-hours working days) x ($15[The average income in my region]).*
Most people use Windows but have it unlicensed. I am not rich so yeah Linux look dirt cheap to me and I don't even use Linux I use OpenBSD. I definitely think the government should push open source in all areas we would be better off. Right now kids are learning to use Windows XP, Microsoft Office, Coral Draw, Flash and Visual basic 6. I have to remark that they are learning all this stuff in fairly mediocre way. Also don't forget government and public institutions sites that are non standards compliant and flash heavy.
*In my comparison $1 = 10 Pesos. The price of Windows 7 Ultimate is 4,004.17 Pesos in Mexico.
I'm sitting at my Arch laptop right now.
1) get bored at their day job. 2) need it to pay the bills. 3) can't get motivated to try out new technology, unless there is a REAL customer willing to pay.
there's enough room in the world for people to like ANYTHING. Just because a minority likes something (say, eating human flesh?) it doesn't justify it as 'right', 'good' or even 'common'....
Are we working on the assumption that Linux is unusable, and we have to provide sufficient proof of the opposite? Why would we approach the issue that way?
So that adds 3 more people to HIS alternative universe. I say, let's have another HN OS poll to see how many alternate universes there are, and which one is bigger.
As for your comment itself, you've been using Linux since 1999, of course the current state of affairs is going to seem fantastic to you. In 1999 installing linux was a big console-based adventure full of unknowns and question marks... things today are obviously much, much simpler.
Point being, your perspective on "Linux for the Consumer Desktop" is highly skewed.
I mean, if asked a year ago, or two years ago, would you have said much differently?
Except it wasn't with distros like Mandrake (now mandriva), no matter how much linux haters like to repeat that lie, Linux has been easy to install for the last 10 years. Now try to install OSX on anything else than a Mac, you'll have fun. If you don't want to have installation issues, get a pre-installed machine.
I'm not a fan of arbitrary window docking - I have my own layout system based on cascading - while Cygwin rxvt provides most of what I want out of a terminal, shell etc.
If you want to install Komodo IDE for Linux you download the tarball and double-click the excutable (or start it from a console).
Want to install github firewall install? Download tarball, double-click excutable.
People have been overly optimistc in the past, but I think even the less tech savvy can use Linux by now.
From my limited experience talking to people who've tried linux, what confuses them the most is the linux file structure, which can look a bit confusing until you come to understand it.
The average person probably doesn't need to know a whole lot about that, though.
Also, the UI and font rendering aren't quite there yet, but they're getting better all the time.
The biggest problem that I see, while I love Ubuntu, getting it to a point where I'm totally happy with it as an OS has taken more work than the average user would be able or willing to implement, i.e. doing things like cleaning up the UI and improving font rendering, and fixing some issues I had with Flash out of the box. I had to ditch Pulseaudio because it performed very poorly with my HD audio off my motherboard. Disabling that and installing/configuring ALSA was a bit of an ordeal that anyone not really comfortable with computers probably wouldn't want to undertake.
For me, the attraction to Linux (other than having a more productive work environment) is that I can customize the hell out of it and make it however I want. Most people won't want that flexibility and will want it to "just work" perfectly out of the box. Ubuntu doesn't quite do that yet.
Also, my volume is too low to listen to music or watch movies, which was a bummer because I just moved and don't have a way to do either of those things.
But when I had to reluctantly install the 10.04 beta on my new netbook because it was the only way to get support for the crappy broadcom chipset, I was very pleasantly surprised. Everything works, including suspend to disk, sound, decent battery support (last as long as officially reported on windows).
And here's how I fixed Flash: http://kellishaver.tumblr.com/post/451068353/while-were-on-t...
The only thing I can imagine is that more people using the software might increase the financial donations to FOSS organizations. I doubt it though.
In any case, if you can, please donate some money to any open source groups that you use regularly.
I was very impressed with the work thats gone into the boot time though. I don't have any timings certainly feels like my anemic old Pentium M 1.4Ghz laptop seems to boot in half the time it used to! Firefox 3.6 seems very snappy. Terminals load in less than a second. I'm not sure how much of the difference is just having removed all the accumulated crud though.
I'm glad I upgraded, though I was running an old 7.10 installation with a 2.6.24 RC Kernel which was the first one to support my Broadcom wireless card reasonably well.
I tend to use it out of preference, but I can't offhand think of any "regular" tasks I do that would require it. Some more obscure bits of troubleshooting might occasionally require it. But even there the gui options seem to have almost everything covered unless you start going a lot deeper than any regular user will care to.
That said, I've had some issues with previous versions of Ubuntu that took some mucking around to fix, especially with sound and occasionally with wireless (though the latter has always worked fine on my laptops).
None of these people should have to know how to use the CLI just to get two monitors working.
I had the same problem with dual monitors for the record.
-/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist --> needed to install my wireless card
Also, the Ubuntu Restricted Driver's manager did't handle the card? How unusual. I've had it handle the majority of WiFi cards I've thrown at it. I suppose that's a compatibility issue- If Windows weren't pre-installed on a new PC, people would have to install drivers there, too.
Linux people always come out and say everything is perfect and linux is ready for the desktop. Sit someone down at a linux box who has never used a command line and they will demand a change of OS in a few days or less, simply because you are required to have esoteric knowledge just to make the damned thing usable.
What Ubuntu needs is a change the magnitude of, say, OS9 -> OSX or XP -> Vista.
Argh! There's nothing I hate more than seemingly cool open source software being saddled from birth with ridiculous names! Gwibber!? What was the author thinking!?