Ubuntu - Brave New World? Or Jumping off a Cliff? | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu - Brave New World? Or Jumping off a Cliff?

blog.herlein.com

8 pointsgherlein12 comments

Phrases like 'has to convince the market' always turn me off an article. Especially when dealing with FREE stuff. What exactly IS the market for 'free'?

People will use Ubuntu as long as it is good, and Canonical will make money supporting it as long as people use it.

Personally, I prefer Kubuntu... But that doesn't really make much difference, does it?

I've used other distros in the past, but they all came up short in ways I couldn't deal with. Slackware always seemed to be needing something hand-compiled... Debian always seemed to be years in the past, which generally meant I had to hand-compile things there, too. RedHat and I just never got along.

Then along comes Kubuntu and improves Debian in the one way that mattered to me: It was current.

I like that Ubuntu stays edgy and always uses new things as soon as they are ready for use. (I will admit, sometimes they do it a bit -before- they are ready.) Seeing them move away from X, I actually considered trying it instead of KDE for the next release. We'll see how it goes when it's here.

And it's not like this affects Ubuntu servers at all, either. They don't even use X.

Have you tried debian testing? It is rolling release and generally as stable as ubuntu.

I have and the reason I stick with ubuntu is because I use a laptop and ubuntu is actually the least hassle to configure to work well (usually just involves me downloading wicd, as the free drivers for ati seem to work fine).

I did however go back to LTS as I didn't like 10.10 because as always the .10s seem to perform awful for me.

The last time I tried Debian Testing, it was still WAY behind Ubuntu. I moved to Ubuntu because it had things I wanted already in its repositories that Debian Testing didn't.

I even ran Debian Unstable for a while and still wasn't happy.

Mind you, that was my only complaint about Debian. I think it's a great distro, just a bit dated due to stability concerns.

It's bizarre for me... I see every single release better in general, but worse in details. I just keep a list of things to unbreak after installation. Even though I like the whole system, they seem to be going for the new and shiny stuff too much and I don't think they'll ever going to produce a mature system.

Some examples: F-spot was replaced with Shotwell instead of fixing F-spot's problems (if there were any, I was happy with it). My scanner worked out of the box with xsane (even launched it after plugging in), now with simple-scan not only I cannot change resolution, but it doesn't detect the device until I install xsane itself. On top of that, there are silly issues like the "Play log-in sound" checkbox, which is broken for the last 2 years, even though there were many bugs reported for it. Or automatically enabling 3'rd mouse button emulation with no way to disable it via GUI (non-starter for FPS gamers) - there's a different way to disable it for every single version because of the xorg -> hal -> udev -> xinput (broken xorg-snippets) -> working xorg-snippets migration.

Ubuntu seems to be going for the new and shiny and noone cares what regressions will it cause. This is not something "normal users" will let them do. I can fix it by hand, report a bug (and silently be angry that it's ignored for years), but a typical user will say "it's broken" and that will be the end of his ubuntu experience. If they don't bring quality to the table soon, they'll just annoy new potential users.

F-Spot was dropped for a single reason, which turned out to have both political and practical backing: it requires Mono to be part of the default Ubuntu install.

That's unlikely, since tomboy is still included (so Mono is included too). There is also a plan for another .net application to be added to the default (can't recall the name now).

Google web cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=ubuntu&#...

Thanks, it seems somebody is breaking the internet today. This is the second hn article that doesn't load.

I think they realized what Apple realized a long time ago. Wayland/Unity could be Ubuntu's Quartz Compositor/Aqua.

I certainly hope so, I just hope that they manage to pull it off.

I expect the next couple of releases to be garbage though, I just can't see them having enough time to make it fast and stable enough to be work using. If I'm wrong I'll be delighted.

"If [Microsoft] grows some courage (doubtful) they could change the game in a big way – perhaps by acquiring companies like Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth could be crazy like a fox."

That Microsoft would acquire Canonical is crazy like a crazy person. Anything particularly unique Canonical does would be poisoned by GPL code, or copy-able without a buyout.

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