5 years later, 5 ways that Ubuntu has made Linux more human | Hacker News Reader

5 years later, 5 ways that Ubuntu has made Linux more human

arstechnica.com

24 pointsdragonquest17 comments

Ubuntu was the first distribution that successfully put a "regular" end-user first. Everything works out of the box and configurable options have sensible/auto-detected defaults and are hidden away. They successfully did away with the editing text-files paradigm for getting Linux to run, while keeping the familiar infrastructure from Debian in place just under the cover for power-users.

There is literally zero effort in installing Ubuntu on almost any post-2000 hardware, and it just keeps ticking for years.

I think netbook remix comes the closest to putting a "regular" end user first.

Ubuntu pre-dates netbooks by quite a few years. And, sure, a "plain" software distribution will always play catchup to an integrated hw/sw bundle in terms of ease of installation.

I always thought (until some years ago) that Red Hat would do what Ubuntu (or Canonical) has done to bring a friendly Linux Desktop to "normal" users.

It's the classic start-up dynamic: you might have money and a vision, but if you can't pull off the execution, you loose.

It seems that RH somewhere along the way decided that it's OK that you need a competent IT-guy around to get the software running correctly.

It's more likely the RH looked at the market for a consumer desktop OS and decided that they couldn't make money there. I have no doubt that RH could produce a consumer OS at least as nice as Ubuntu, but once you have investors and shareholders you have to start to do what is most likely to earn you money. I don't know what Canonical's books look like, but I have a hard time imagining that Ubuntu is bringing them the sort of money that RH gets from its more business oriented OS offerings.

How is this different from this previous submision:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=894176

This one got comments? ;-)

Now, on a more serious tone: not all HN users are in the same timezone. Sometimes, a story gets posted and few people are up to read/upvote it and it then gets buried by the constant influx of stories. My website gets lots of referrals from HN, mostly in California, but a lot also comes from NY and Europe through HN.

The dupe was not flagged because the URLs are different: the first one had a couple URL parameters ("?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss") this one hasn't. HN could, conceivably, flag dupes by content, but that would require it to be more clever and I don't know how much free time to teach it this trick pg has.

  > This one got comments? ;-)

8-)

  > The dupe was not flagged because the URLs are
  > different: the first one had a couple URL parameters

Agreed - I said something very similar here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902882

(which is somewhere else in this item)

Question is:

    > ... not all HN users are in the same timezone.
    > Sometimes, a story gets posted and few people are
    > up to read/upvote it and it then gets buried by
    > the constant influx of stories.

Is this something to be fixed, tolerated or ignored? In the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter, but I'd become less obsessive about reading HN if I knew I'd at least seen the title of all the items.

There are all sorts of things I'd like to try, because I don't have the time to make sure I see everything that might be interesting, and I have ideas, but I don't have time to try them.

Very frustrating.

Conceivably, it could use bayesian logic to rank new submissions based on your previous upvotes and generate a list of submissions that you may be interested in.

But I bet pg will have less and less free time if we keep suggesting improvements like these. Is anybody else maintaining the code behind HN?

Conceivably, it could use bayesian logic to rank new submissions based on your previous upvotes and generate a list of submissions that you may be interested in.

It has been expressed in the past that HN explicitly makes the front page look the same for everybody because the moment you start hiding some items for some people, then community and voting become far less effective at maintaining the level of content.

I'm not really sure what happened here. Usually when the URL matches the submission simply upvotes the previous story, in this case that didn't happen for some reason. As a clarification, I never saw the previous submission.

As said somewhere else (currently immediately above, but that could change!) possibly the other was sbmitted at a different time of day.

Also, the other URL has additional parameters - RSS feed, something else - so the URLs don't match exactly.

The other attracted no comments, maybe this one is better timed. It's one thing I wish could be fixed on HN. It's one thing for submissions to be ignored, but having them not seen at all seems a bit of a waste.

I really like this Ubuntu forum http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/

Maybe I'm slow here, but I didn't know that bug #1 is still unresolved. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

I posted this article last week and someone killed it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=894571

its almost entirely about the installer, or lack of in previous linux versions.

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