Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime

#41

Post by nzonbi » Sat, Aug 27, 2011, 2:50 PM UTC

mvts wrote: post #28

Ubuntu is great, I have it up and running on my laptop since about 2 years. But I have WinXP, too. Just because I need Fireworks (I absolutely can't get along with PS or Gimp) and Wine is okay, but it makes the applications so slow... That is really the only damned reason, I still have to switch between Win and Linux on my Laptop. If Adobe's products would run flawlessly on Linux, I'd never touch Windows again.

I used to be like that, until I tried Inkscape in Ubuntu.

Past the learning curve, and you will never need Fireworks again.

Re: Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime

#42

Post by acabal » Sat, Aug 27, 2011, 2:51 PM UTC

rjbond3rd wrote: post #29

acabal wrote: post #20

Nope. Ubuntu won't be ready until upgrading Firefox (or any individual package) doesn't force insanity like opposite window controls or Unity without asking. Regular people aren't interested in seeing drastic and seemingly nonsensical changes like that for no reason, and almost certainly aren't interested in being part of some grand OS experiment. They want something that is consistent and works. While package manage…

> Having to swallow upgrades to every single package on the system just to get one package ... [means] ...instability... Just curious, have you really experienced instability by installing all updates on any mainstream distro? If so, could you share what happened? I've not had that experience but would like to know about it.

Yes. For example when Ubuntu switched to Pulseaudio, it borked my sound. Even with the release after that one (can't remember which one it was), I had to have a shortcut on my desktop for 'killall pulseaudio' because just playing music for more than 15 minutes would end up in garbled sound. Or in Karmic, when a regression in the Intel video drivers made even dragging windows stutter on my laptop with 4GB of RAM. Or when Lucid broke hibernate for my laptop. It was fixed in Maverick, then broke again in Natty. Literally every distro upgrade of Ubuntu for me has resulted in more than one serious regression in something that used to work.

Re: Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime

#43

Post by joelhaasnoot » Sat, Aug 27, 2011, 2:52 PM UTC

Tried Ubuntu 11.04 yet? Try that and write back to us. Their new unity launcher isn't very good. Yes, there's ways around it, but that's the default...

Re: Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime

#44

Post by ori_b » Sat, Aug 27, 2011, 2:53 PM UTC

Pewpewarrows wrote: post #31

I used Linux (Ubuntu primarily, but I dabbled in the other distros from time to time) as my only OS on my netbook for 5 years (through college and my first few internships / job). For that atmosphere is was great: it taught me the UNIX philosophy, I can work a command line shell and vim like a beast, I knew a lot more about OSs and programming in general than if I was using Windows, and it overall prepared me excelle…

> I could spend a whole weekend getting a driver to work properly, and fiddling with kernel options.

I haven't done that stuff since around 2005. I just install a standard distro, and leave it to do what it does. It Just Works out of the box. It even detects my Raid5 and sets that up for me. Debian is my choice because of the rolling updates in testing -- I don't even want to think about version numbers.

I use Linux because it means I don't have to think about package versions, I don't have to worry about finding drivers after installing, I don't have to search around for software, etc. Thanks to distro choice, I don't even have to think about what version I'm running.

Re: Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime

#45

Post by wazoox » Sat, Aug 27, 2011, 2:54 PM UTC

acabal wrote: post #20

Nope. Ubuntu won't be ready until upgrading Firefox (or any individual package) doesn't force insanity like opposite window controls or Unity without asking. Regular people aren't interested in seeing drastic and seemingly nonsensical changes like that for no reason, and almost certainly aren't interested in being part of some grand OS experiment. They want something that is consistent and works. While package manage…

> Nope. Ubuntu won't be ready until upgrading Firefox (or any individual package) doesn't force insanity like opposite window controls or Unity without asking.

Last time I checked, Ubuntu kept existing setup, desktop etc. when upgrading. Anyway your rant is nonsensical: where is my good ol' "Start" menu organisation when I upgrade to Win 7?

> The only big one is Debian/Mint, but from what I hear that's still too unstable for even power users.

I'm speechless, you seem to know nothing of Linux but quick to make judgements. Debian is the most stable (too stable, may be argued) system; I have several machines that were upgraded flawlessly from 3.0 to 6.0 without ever breaking. On the other hand, if you like rolling release, there are many distros that work just like this, like gentoo, archlinux, etc.

Re: Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime

#46

Post by acabal » Sat, Aug 27, 2011, 2:55 PM UTC

ori_b wrote: post #40

acabal wrote: post #20

Nope. Ubuntu won't be ready until upgrading Firefox (or any individual package) doesn't force insanity like opposite window controls or Unity without asking. Regular people aren't interested in seeing drastic and seemingly nonsensical changes like that for no reason, and almost certainly aren't interested in being part of some grand OS experiment. They want something that is consistent and works. While package manage…

I'm guessing that you also think web apps are also not ready for the average user? After all, there you don't even get to have a say when the upgrade happens. And you have no way of delaying, cancelling, or undoing it. As far as users are concerned, random stuff changing for reasons unrelated to their actions are all the same.

Upgrading Basecamp doesn't force an upgrade to Gmail. Your comparison doesn't really apply here.

Re: Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime

#47

Post by padobson » Sat, Aug 27, 2011, 2:56 PM UTC

I switched from a Mac with OSX to Ubuntu about a year ago, and I haven't looked back. I'm a developer, and I have found that everything in the Linux world seems to be set up with me in mind.

Dependencies are easier to install, there is a larger, more knowledgeable support network (compare the Ubuntu forums to any Mac forum, it's not even close), and I have discovered how powerful the command line is as a development tool.

Also, when I run into a hitch during development, Google takes my operating system into account. Googling answers to development questions provides me much more relevant results on Ubuntu than it ever did on the Mac.

Plus, being able to develop web apps on the same or a similar operating system to the environment it will be deployed on is incredibly convenient.

I will say that most of my leisure time now goes to developing personal projects, rather than to gaming or other multimedia - things I often did on my Mac. But I think that's a good thing. When I do invoicing or I need to work with clients' data on spreadsheets, OpenOffice and LibreOffice, respectively, have served me just fine.

If you live in a multi-computer household like I do, I think it makes sense to have one machine that dual boots the latest Windows and Ubuntu to be able to take advantage of games and other multimedia. However, for the PCs that are only being used for day-to-day things like email, web surfing, and office tools, then Ubuntu is the best value there is.

Re: Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime

#48

Post by wazoox » Sat, Aug 27, 2011, 2:58 PM UTC

acabal wrote: post #42

rjbond3rd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having to swallow upgrades to every single package on the system just to get one package ... [means] ...instability... Just curious, have you really experienced instability by installing all updates on any mainstream distro? If so, could you share what happened? I've not had that experience but would like to know about it.

Yes. For example when Ubuntu switched to Pulseaudio, it borked my sound. Even with the release after that one (can't remember which one it was), I had to have a shortcut on my desktop for 'killall pulseaudio' because just playing music for more than 15 minutes would end up in garbled sound. Or in Karmic, when a regression in the Intel video drivers made even dragging windows stutter on my laptop with 4GB of RAM. Or w…

Ubuntu and Fedora, though the most common desktop distros, also are notoriously NOT very stable. Fedora is RedHat beta-test playground, and Ubuntu is built from a Debian-unstable snapshot. OTOH many people complains that Debian, RedHat or CentOS are too long to implement the latest features, but this is the price to pay for extreme reliability. Know your needs, choose accordingly.

Re: Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime

#49

Post by acabal » Sat, Aug 27, 2011, 2:58 PM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #45

acabal wrote: post #20

Nope. Ubuntu won't be ready until upgrading Firefox (or any individual package) doesn't force insanity like opposite window controls or Unity without asking. Regular people aren't interested in seeing drastic and seemingly nonsensical changes like that for no reason, and almost certainly aren't interested in being part of some grand OS experiment. They want something that is consistent and works. While package manage…

> Nope. Ubuntu won't be ready until upgrading Firefox (or any individual package) doesn't force insanity like opposite window controls or Unity without asking. Last time I checked, Ubuntu kept existing setup, desktop etc. when upgrading. Anyway your rant is nonsensical: where is my good ol' "Start" menu organisation when I upgrade to Win 7? > The only big one is Debian/Mint, but from what I hear that's still too unst…

> Last time I checked, Ubuntu kept existing setup, desktop etc. when upgrading.

Have you ever dist-upgraded an Ubuntu distro? Upgrading to Lucid moved your window controls. Upgrading to Natty turned on Unity. While it's true that upgrading from, say, XP to Win7 will change your start menu, the point is that you can still upgrade your "packages" on XP, WITHOUT having to get the new Win7 start menu.

> I'm speechless, obviously you're babbling without even knowing what you're talking about; ignorance and hate won't lead you anywhere.

Obviously YOU don't know what you're talking about; Debian Mint (LMDE) is based on Debian-testing, which is supposedly HIGHLY unstable.

Re: Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime

#50

Post by ori_b » Sat, Aug 27, 2011, 3:02 PM UTC

acabal wrote: post #46

ori_b wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing that you also think web apps are also not ready for the average user? After all, there you don't even get to have a say when the upgrade happens. And you have no way of delaying, cancelling, or undoing it. As far as users are concerned, random stuff changing for reasons unrelated to their actions are all the same.

Upgrading Basecamp doesn't force an upgrade to Gmail. Your comparison doesn't really apply here.

Does that matter? In both cases, stuff still gets changed under you at more or less random times. With web apps, you don't even have control over when random stuff could possibly change.

In Linux terms, that would be like your package manager constantly and silently updating everything in the background all the time. How dependent or independent packages are doesn't matter in this sort of scenario.

I'm not entirely sure that it makes much of a difference. Chrome shows that gradual silent updating works for local apps. Linux needs to handle that better, sure, but I think that's the way to go.