Fuduntu: Back to Fundamentals, Gets it Right | Hacker News Reader

Fuduntu: Back to Fundamentals, Gets it Right

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I never understand why people spend ages trying out fifty different distros if they could get just what they want if they spent half that time actually installing/adapting one distribution with a reasonably broad package base.

Or, put differently: Given the relatively high dimension of preference space (desktop environment, window manager, file manager, icon set, web browser, editor…), it appears strange to me to assume that more than just a few users will be satisfied with the default DE, WM, file manager etc. installed by a distro. Just five different DEs, five different WMs and five different file browsers already give 125 possible choices. How, then, is it sensible to judge a distribution by its default programmes, especially since these can often be easily swapped out against others.

Surely, the main points in considering which distribution to choose should be the low-level ingredients (package manager, for example) and update policies rather than the default icon theme.

While that ought to be the case, a lot of novice-intermediate level users often fail to take these points into consideration simply because they are unaware of the fact that the default DE+WM etc can be easily swapped out. Often, many people tend to give more weightage to higher visibility points like the DE+WM etc, rather than package manager and release schedules.

I ran Ubuntu with cinnamon for a little over a year but finally moved over to Mint. There is just a lot more support and stability for using the default DE+WM and a lot of programs can have problems outside of the expected.

"I never understand why people spend ages trying out fifty different distros if they could get just what they want if they spent half that time actually installing/adapting one distribution with a reasonably broad package base."

Because if you have to do it more than once, or, say onto 100 desktops in a work environment, the time spent searching for a distro will pay off. Besides that, some people want stuff to work the first time - and every subsequent time - without having to worry "oh I need to install this on another computer, but I can't remember all the steps I took" in order to get to real actual work.

If you just want the same programs on your laptop and desktop, use something like dpkg --get-selections and dpkg --set-selections (for APT, I’m sure RPMland has an analogue). If you also want the same configuration, copy over your homedir or the dotfiles therein and be happy.

Futhermore, testing n distros is not really my definition of ‘work the first time’, nor can you expect that what worked a year ago still works two releases later.

Your point about 100 desktops in a work environment also strikes me as slightly odd, given that I would consider using Puppet, Chef or possibly NFS mounts (depending on the exact setup) rather than configuring/installing 100 desktops individually.

Point taken about Puppet/Chef.

As far as same programs, I would still have to load them the first time and know what to look for. So in addition to stuff I need for work (e.g. LAMP stack), I would have to Google around (more than once) for stuff that I know comes with other distros (example of slight annoyance: vim vs. vim-tiny: thanks, Ubuntu). It's just a little bit less work.

But the beauty of Linux is that we can make these choices willfully :)

This is the kind of thing that should be automated anyway. Write a script to do everything you're doing in the process of setting up your system, and you won't ever have to do it by hand again.

Certainly anyone managing 100 corporate desktops will be deploying a customized image to those machines, rather than using a distro's default installer on each one. In which case, it still doesn't matter what the OS defaults are.

well, you just described why there are even distros to begin with.

otherwise everyone would spend 'half the time' reading the LSF guide and having the perfect distro.

Distros, at least in my opinion, are not about choosing default settings, but about making all the different components (Kernel, whatever else you like) work together nicely and distributing them together (hence the name Distribution).

It therefore makes sense to classify a distribution by its mean of distribution (duh!), i.e. the package manager and by the set of things it distributes (the packages).

You may also note that I did not say that everyone is capable of collecting software from ~50 different upstreams and then compiling said software in half the time it takes to install five distributions – but installing the packages of one’s choice from the archive of the distribution is probably roughly as easy as installing the distribution in the first place.

It might well be that I misunderstood something you said, so please feel free to correct me.

you got it wrong and right at the same time. Right when you say the distro must centralize the work of making the several pieces work. Wrong when you think those pieces are only "kernel, whatever else you like" and think that "whatever else i'd like" does not include the desktop.

The fact is that linux on the desktop barely works without some work still, and that's by using the defaults! without using the defaults it's even harder. heck i spent hours trying to get sound to work on a eeepc with ubuntu 12.10 just because the distro decided to put pulse audio on top of alsa and when i connected the headset it muted the speakers, but when i disconnected it it never moved the sound to the speakers again (turned out a gnome component was doing that, and i didn't have that running)

i could point you to several of the pages i've create on http://www.linlap.com/ most mention more than one solution based on the desktop environment, same distro.

> Wrong when you think those pieces are only "kernel, whatever else you like" and think that "whatever else i'd like" does not include the desktop

Eh? Of course ‘whatever else you like’ includes the DE, WM, Editor and really, whatever else you like. Furthermore, I didn’t have many problems with Linux in the desktop in the default stable installations of Debian during the last few years, nor in deviations from said stable installations[0] – of course, if you want to change/adapt things, those changes are not going to happen magically.

Really, my point is: Ideally, the distribution packages everything and picks some reasonably sane defaults. Then, it is easier[1] for a user to install their preferred applications from the archives of this distribution rather than testing out many different distributions hoping that one of them, by chance, picked their preferences as defaults.

[0] There was some trouble way back in 2005 with encrypted root devices on software RAIDs for which I had to hack together a little extra initramfs script, but apart from that, everything major worked the way I expected it to work.

[1] In terms of time spent, not necessarily in terms of additional exercise by playing around with installation CDs.

ideally is the keyword above.

but in reality even trivial stuff like changing the brightness will not work in ubuntu if you change the DE.

also, buy a newer laptop with the new intel sound drivers (the architecture that is replacing AC97) and tell me sound works out of the box. There's dozen of implementations and none follow the standard correctly. the driver code is a spaguetti hell. and on top of that, most mixer apps tries to add more decision logic...

Well if you’re using a broken system, that’s not really reason to extend your argument beyond said broken system. Sound works just fine on my T410s with

    00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio

(assuming that’s what you meant) and ALSA. The same goes for changing the brightness, though I have to admit that I don’t quite know what actually changes the brightness – it might well be implemented in hardware for all I know. Nevertheless, as this particular installation started out with Gnome 2.x, then got changed to a mostly-Gnome-some-Xfce mix and now is at mostly-Xfce-with-Nautilus, switching DEs obviously doesn’t necessarily hurt functionality.

as i said, look at the code for intel audio driver that you are using and see the spaghetti to support every bogus implementations.

mine works until it tries to handle the audio channels for the HDMI, then it sometimes route audio there instead of the speakers.

and my point is that, under ubuntu with gnome3/unity, they took care to test this machine (most sold win8 ultra portable) and made it work around those bodus audio channels on the gnome mixer.

using xfce gives me silence everytime i plug and unplug a headphone (have to fiddle with alsamixer, or use gnome3/unity's mixer which will not work on my setup)

i don't even know what we were discussing :)

Defaults matter because they're sat in a juicy little feedback loop: more people have them installed, so they get more eyeballs and bug-effort, so they get better and have better support, so more people use them.

At least, in theory.

Indeed, there's a delicate balance between customization and fragmentation that can't be ignored.

In practice, developers are usually ‘power users’ that adapt the system to their liking, i.e. don’t use the defaults?

Everyone might customise something. Very few people customise everything.

A lot of my Linux use is similar to sitting in a garage and taking apart an old car. It's fun to install different distributions and play around with them, and then blow it away and start all over. With a fast internet connection and a handful of USB drives you can try all the major distributions in one afternoon.

I wish I could find it fun to install linux distro's, then I'd find pretty much anything in life entertaining!

It’s fun the first few times (or if the alternative is revising for ‘Symmetries, Fields and Particles’ exams…).

I think people basically carry over their Windows habits, treat each distro as a completely separate OS offering a certain look & feel and app selection.

I like that someone else spent the time trying to figure it out so that I could read about his experiences, then spend only 10 minutes figuring it out. I don't know if that was the purpose at the outset (probably not) but I still find it highly worthwhile.

I am a Linux user that likes to stick with distro defaults for everything that isn't part of my core tool set because it seems like my system is less prone to breaking when updates happen, and because I get more updates that way. It's nice to see others' reviews of those distros so that I can make a better decision without doing all of the legwork, so I say kudos to this guy for doing it. I might try Fuduntu now based on his review, and I wouldn't have bothered otherwise.

It seems like my system is more prone to breaking when I use obscure distros. I might think a distro's choices were totally awesome but if not many other people are using it and/or the development is not that active, and I expect it to 'just work,' then I'm going to have a bad time.

Yeah, that's a good point as well. These days, I tend to stick with stuff that's based on apt on the theory that it hopefully requires less effort on the part of the maintainers to keep it up to date because they can piggyback on the larger community. Not foolproof, but good enough for me. I got tired of the unfriendly (to me) UI changes in straight Ubuntu, so I switched to Lubuntu. So far it's been decent enough. I've been thinking about giving slackware another round though, as I haven't used them for about 10 years and have mostly positive memories of the experience. Maybe on an experimental box.

Point taken: you're a 1337 user, but seriously? If you can't see why people want a distro to be _usable_ out of the box then maybe you haven't given much thought to the whole thing.

Y34h, t0t4lly 1337 – I can see why people want a distro to be usable out of the box. I could even see why people want a distro to have their exact preferences as defaults, had you made that point. I cannot see why people prefer opening fifty boxes over properly unpacking one.

Sounded great until I read that Fuduntu does not come with Apt or Deb and uses Yum/Rpm instead...

"Apt is not installed with Fuduntu. Yum (Yellowdog Package Manager) is the replacement. For more help on yum, "man yum" from a terminal, or google "yum howto"."

"The "debi" package installer is not included. Instead, the "rpm" command can be used to install .rpm packages. For more help on rpm, "man rpm" from a terminal, or search the internet for "rpm install howto"."

Speaking as a former Debian fanboy, current avid Debian/Ubuntu user, Yum isn't too bad. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had rollbacks. And with 3rd party repos, you can get just as current, if not more current than Debian Sta(b)le, software.

I'm a fan of pacman, but find apt/dpkg acceptable (barely). My biggest two beefs with yum/rpm are that it does not track "explicitly installed" vs "installed as a dependency" (dpkg does, but it's fuzzy), and that when processing dependencies, it does a brute-force recursive crawl instead of building a tree.

Modern Yum does track explicit vs. dependency installs, though this is not very visible in the UI. There are ways to query the Yum database for it, though.

Yum also has an option (disabled by default) to remove unneeded auto-installed dependencies when removing packages (set clean_requirements_on_remove=yes in /etc/yum.conf)[1]. This option does not remove manually-installed packages (though the docs are not clear on this point, unfortunately).

1. http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/56056

That's good news! My latest experience was with CentOS and Fedora installs at my last job, but most of the installs there were a bit older.

Pacman is the Arch Linux standard right?

I was fond of Arch when I first heard of it, because back then I was still a BSD fanboy. But as time has progressed I find the use of rc a bit stale and I actually like the initiative of LSB.

Arch has moved on to systemd these days, if that changes anything for you.

I always had nightmarish experiences with rpm...

Last time I checked, circa 2006, the db got corrupted three times in 1.5 years and I had to dance the hell-dance in order to get a working system back...

[EDIT] And that's primarily why I love apt / dpkg

That didn't sound "fundamental" to me. The author likes the distro, and it sounds good to me too. But I missed how any of his favorite features were fundamental to the Linux desktop.

Absolutely my feeling too. The review fairly swiftly turns into a list of what programs are installed. Let's face it, all of these are available in the repos of pretty much all distros. The rest of the features seem to be visual tuning and customisation.

I haven't tried Fuduntu, but may be tempted at some point, and I can appreciate the amount of work that has gone into it, but this review doesn't really sell it for me.

Under-the-hood decisions aside, this distro seems to fairly closely match the philosophy of Elementary OS [1] (which, admittedly, seems to be "follow OSX"). One main difference is that, whereas Fuduntu uses rpm/yum, Elementary OS is an Ubuntu fork and uses its repositories (dpkg/apt).

[1] http://elementaryos.org/

Wow, that's by far the best looking Linux distro I've seen. Judging from the screenshots, Fuduntu, like most distros, is pretty fugly. ElementaryOS actually looks like it has someone making UX choices and creating a consistent design language. The system font isn't great and type could really use some font smoothing, but that's the case with all Linux distros I know of.

They're even working on a curated App Store: http://elementaryos.org/journal/introducing-appcenter

I think this is exactly what Linux needs to become a platform consumers like to use. Once it's out of beta, I'm definitely going to install ElementaryOS.

Screenshots: http://elementaryos.org/journal/when-its-ready

I don't care for the desktop shell they're making, but the applications I have tried are really high-quality. The screen-capture program is really great and feature-full.

Looks like a gnome-shell clone with burnished aluminum frames. It may be pretty in the abstract but it's apparent lack of usability makes it ugly to my eyes.

As others have noted, a lot of their efforts have been going into developing new (or new forks of existing) tools and applications, with much attention to implementing a simple "do one thing and do it right" solution for each item, and making all of them cohesive. You can still quite easily replace their file browser, their dock, their terminal, etc. with ones you prefer quite easily (this is becoming difficult within Unity), but I've found myself not wanting to. The OS is very cohesive and kind of a joy to use, I've found.

>Wow, that's by far the best looking Linux distro I've seen

Have you seen any Window Manager only (without Desktop Environment) desktops? They're very nice, even nicer than OS X or Windows. Examples:

http://www.anony.ws/i/2013/03/28/3BtzL.png

http://www.anony.ws/i/2013/03/28/dV2Ac.png

Yah, sorry, don't like it one bit. I don't understand how you could think that works better for consumers than OS X or Windows. I do think the desktop metaphor is on its way out, though (see iOS and Win8)

>better for consumers than OS X or Windows

I didn't mean to imply that. I just said it looks nicer, but I guess it doesn't appeal to some people. I like a desktop-style workflow more than a mobile one, but I guess it may be worse for normal consumers, but that's not what I am.

I am pretty happy using Debian testing with xfce4. It also gives you a minimalistic and traditional desktop. It's perfect for me because I am actually too lazy to configure some fancy window manager and other stuff. Also, everything just works out of the box.

I have an Aspire One Netbook (Edit: different model, mine is a 722 with 4GB Ram, 1.333 dual core processor, 320GB HDD) like the OP and run Xubuntu on it which works perfectly fine (in case someone is looking for alternatives to Fubuntu).

Might give Fubuntu a try some day for kicks, wasn't aware it existed. I'm perfectly happy with Xubuntu though, I also run it on my beefy desktop.

The name choice seems bizarre to me. It's like a portmanteau of Fedora and Ubuntu, yet has very few of the features of Ubuntu. Judging by the default GUI, Facintosh seems more appropriate.

I keep reading it as FUDuntu -- Ubuntu for spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Same here, I just assumed it was a stripped-down Ubuntu variant. Maybe Fundora would have been a better choice (though I do like Facintosh).

Distrowatch reviewed it a while back at http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20130121#feature

Off topic, but Linux Advocates, your "Cloud Categories" widget is morbidly obese. It's a mass of swirling red letters that looks like it's straight out of a 4chan Zalgo-Text thread. It's using more memory than all my other Chrome tabs combined.

Everyone has own opinion what is "right".

This distro needs a better name. The current one is kind of unfortunate...

My experience with the designs used by Linux desktop environments is limited, but haven't the dock and some of it's (folder-)icons shown in the article[0] borrowed a little too much from OS X?

I would much rather see them go about improving the GUI in their own way rather than trying to imitate another OS.

[0]: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iQDB5aZg__U/UVHDwY33wAI/AAAAAAAAHb...

Cairo is a project to make a OS X-like dock. It's not enabled in any of the main distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu...), but you can add it if you'd like.

I see. If that's the case, it seems they are doing a good job ;-)

Not at all!

Cairo is a vector graphic renderer for X (and others, but i think only for X now)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics)

I'm sorry, the full name is 'Cairo-Dock' (http://www.glx-dock.org/)

If people like that particular feature of the other OS, why not imitate it? There were also themes for Metacity (Gnome 2.x window manager) looking like Windows XP floating around – if people like that sort of thing…

You still get plenty of diversity and ‘improving’ even though some elements are borrowed sometimes.

why not replace the window manager?

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Well, the first three letters are FUD.

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