Ubuntu: What They're Doing Right and Wrong | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu: What They're Doing Right and Wrong

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The idea that "parental controls" are needed is contradictory to the entire philosophy of Open Source and Free Software. Parental controls - or, as it should be called, parental censorship - is a "feature" that treats the user as an ADVERSARY.

It belongs in the exact same category of "features" as mandatory wiretapping on telecom networks and mandatory tracking on cellphones, and other inventions that treat the user as an adversary. It also belongs in the trashcan.

To people who want this to babysit their kids - no, you don't get to abdicate your parenting to a piece of code doing censorship.

Yes, much like "passwords" and "file permissions." Good thing Ubuntu doesn't support either of those anti-freedom "features."

You've conflated owners and users. FOSS movements are advocating owners' rights, and only users' rights when the "real" owner of a piece of software or a computer has been demoted to a user.

That's why FOSS software like NFS respects file permissions, and web servers include HTTP-Auth.

I am in two minds about the "community" aspect of Ubuntu. It is true that Ubuntu has many users. Subsequently, whenever you run into a question, you will get lots of Ubuntu-specific posts. The problem I see with this is, however, that with a higher volume comes a higher number of a) unanswered or b) duplicate or c) redundant questions/answers, and since Ubuntu markets itself as "the distribution for everyone", many questions are very basic (→ "signal-to-noise", etc.).

The Arch wiki, on the other hand, often offers in-depth writeups, guides and howtos, simply because that is its philosophy and it is geared towards a more proficient but therefore also significantly more specialised userbase.

Now, I use neither Ubuntu nor Arch, yet I find the Arch community's work infinitely more helpful and transferable than the documentation churned out by the Ubuntu machinery.

Size is a double-edged sword, you have a better chance of finding something, yet finding good solutions becomes substantially harder,

I concur. I use both Arch and Ubuntu in various contexts and the Arch resources are a vastly better experience. Not just the wiki and bbs but also (significantly) the AUR which is a superior experience to the rats nest of PPAs.

Agreed. Often when I'm searching for a problem I stumble on the Arch wiki (I don't use Arch) and it has often been the perfect thing for me.

I'm confused by Ubuntu being called out as specifically having "great [..] hardware compatibility". I've been using SUSE for 10 years now and I've never had a single peripheral which didn't work out the box. This is down to the great work of the Linux and driver developers rather than Ubuntu itself.

The great hardware support is indeed provided by the kernel, but out of the box it's nowhere near pain-free. In particular when you have to setup your wireless or video drivers. Sadly, these two still often require binary drivers and picking from several options. One specific example (mentioned in the OP as well) is with the wireless drivers - there usually are at least two options that provide some support and usually one of them is better. I've had to configure some Broadcom WiFi support and there are three different solutions - ndiswrapper, binary blob provided by Broadcom and the driver in the kernel. Picking one of the three is a time consuming and complicated process on other distros and nowhere near easy and accessible to new users.

Ubuntu on the other hand, with their driver manager, picked the correct driver, downloaded the required bits and pieces, and configured them all without needing to do anything else. The same can be said for eg. NVidia support.

This in my book is a clear win for Ubuntu.

The article probably written for non-Linux user who looking forward to switch side. Hardware compatibility, [almost]malware-free, software center (heck, just say repo), backup and migration, those shinny things mostly become concern of migrating user. I remember few of my friend going crazy and try Arch after they see my setup (mouseless workflow, mpd, tmux), and end up installing Ubuntu because the learning curve was too steep. That being said, despite poor decisions that being taken lately, I still consider Canonical and Ubuntu to be fairly successful embracing new user.

Ubuntu's kernel is often ahead of upstream in terms of drivers. Being open source, all distributions get the benefit.

Parental controls and migration wizard are the only things the author cited as needing improvement? Come on! Here's my two cents: Ubuntu, and other Linux distros, have the technical side locked up. Now they need to adopt some sort of a design-centric approach to their development efforts. This is where the failure has been. The frontend experience has never sparked anyone's imagination. I'm sure all the major distros are well put together but they all look like they came from the windowsXP era. There's also a tendency to copy windows and mac desktop look-and-feel almost to a fault. The funny thing is that both Microsoft and Apple have shown to be willing to make drastic changes to their flagship products. It makes them look like trailblazers and the open source guys look conservative.

It is very clear that you have not used the latest Ubuntu with Unity.

In fact, Ubuntu is the only distro that has done anything innovative in that area. Some old linuxers hate it but that's life.

Right now I'm using Ubuntu precisely because of that. It is the first Linux that looks better and really different to the old Mandrake I used to run back then.

I have used Ubuntu since 2008. I have seen it grown increasingly more user friendly over the years. I have always been impressed with it's stability and would never go back to running Windows. If you want something that is easier on your equipment then this is a great option.

The article doesn't cover the server side of things, which is a shame.

I've been experimenting with Ubuntu due to their native JeOS tools and so far so good. I'd be curious as to how different Debian Wheezy and Ubuntu Precise are these days, from a server point of view.

The complaints about the parental controls options suggested are stupid. That's the Ubuntu wiki.

Why are parental controls even on this list? Is this really such a pressing issue? I think he should have taken a different angle on this, seemed to me like he just ran out of things to criticize.

What is the Windows solution for parental controls?

The built-in "Parental Controls" are pretty rough. You can set time limits on user account, set maximum ESRB ratings for games, and block specific programs. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/What-can-I-contr... Microsoft also has a first-party program with slightly more refined capabilities called Family Safety. You have to sign in to a website for that though. The one feature I like about it is that a kid can send a request for specific exceptions that can be reviewed by the parent.

Do people actually use Parental Controls? Why?

You've never been a parent, have you?

I'm seriously trying to understand why they would be used. I see them focused on nudity and porn, but neither has harmed any child. Very rarely are they focused on violence, but that's available readily anyway.

So the answer is "no, not a parent".

I'm not a parent.

Why would you want your child to not see nudity? I've seen nudity as a child and I'm fine.

Regardless of how you feel about the matter, you must be aware that a large amount of the world feels that children should be sheltered from sex & nudity in general.

Also there are a lot more offensive / graphic things on the internet than simple nudity. No parent, no matter how liberal, wants their child to see 2 girls 1 cup.

Or not someone in America. May be someone from a Scandinavian country.

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