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Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

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Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#111

Post by xyzzyz »

mindslight wrote: post #66
gerggerg wrote: post #26

Canonical is genuinely trying to make linux the most user friendly it's ever been and make it ready for real mass adoption. It's not going to be easy and not everyone is going to like every change but you can't get so down on them for trying so hard. Saying the solution is to go backwards is the same as telling canonical to just stop trying all together. There's no point in stagnating and sticking with gnome. New use…

The problem, like everything Ubuntu, is that it may be 'user friendly' when everything works perfectly, but when you want to do something different or something fails, it's anything but. You're left fighting multiple levels of indirection, trying to figure out what the system is actually doing so you can fix it . Much of the indirection comes from Debian, but it seems Ubuntu finds a single use-case, and then builds m…

Obviously, you're not the target user of Ubuntu, so there's no point in complaining. Ubuntu is not meant for people who want to edit grub/menu.lst by hand. There are plenty of other distributions for that.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#112

Post by jronkone »

gerggerg wrote: post #26

Canonical is genuinely trying to make linux the most user friendly it's ever been and make it ready for real mass adoption. It's not going to be easy and not everyone is going to like every change but you can't get so down on them for trying so hard. Saying the solution is to go backwards is the same as telling canonical to just stop trying all together. There's no point in stagnating and sticking with gnome. New use…

> Canonical is genuinely trying to make linux the most user friendly

Either you, Canonical, or both are on drugs.

> There's no point in stagnating and sticking with gnome.

If the options are "stagnating" with Gnome, or going over 9000 steps backwards with Unity, I'm choosing to stagnate.

> If you really care, get involved.

Why? What's the incentive for me? Canonical has continuously proven to not care about it's current users.

> Write some code. Ubuntu is foss.

FFS, this is the same old tired propaganda of FOSS-apologists, aren't you ashamed of regurgitating it?

FOSS is doomed since it doesn't match the economic realities of producing high-quality end-user software.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#113

Post by jronkone »

Terretta wrote: post #63
ChuckMcM wrote: post #56

Personally I found it a bit snarky. By the same token I find that UI wars are the most vitriolic, after all they are the way you talk to the machine day in and day out. Screwing with that, screws with everything. I have found Ubuntu's strategy interesting because it seemed clear that while KDE was following general guidelines around Microsoft OSes to be more accessible, and Gnome was following general guidelines arou…

I really like your phrase "drove off the road to a new place ".

"off a cliff" isn't exactly a new place. Plenty of companies have been there, done that.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#114

Post by diminish »

keithpeter wrote: post #100
unalone wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well-said! The great thing about Linux – its killer feature compared to Windows or Mac – is that it's open-source, meaning each user is free to tweak it however they see fit. Ubuntu has been an interesting experiment in whether such an open-source system can also be designed to be competitive with a casual market; they're finding that the casual market's extremely difficult to penetrate, and so they're trying to inno…

"I think it's beautiful how Linux is capable of branching and splitting so painlessly." You've nailed it for me with that quote. Thanks. Points up the difference between commercially packaged OS and a free (ish given Ubuntu's binary blobs) one.

in the past 2 months i used extensively gnome2,3, unity, xfce, kde4.6 etc and i am so happy for such a small market share there are many choices. this is the power of open source.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#115

Post by rookiejet22 »

cletus wrote: post #81

It honestly boggles my mind that people can't read things like these and see that it's "choice" here that's why Linux on the desktop is doomed to be nothing more than a niche product for us geeks. Desktops succeed because they're consistent. Possibly the most important thing is to have a consistent API. X at this point is venerable. Nascent Linux desktops come complete with cruft. Lots of cruft. Honestly I can unders…

I am going to take a wild guess and say the sluggishness you are encountering is caused by the IO scheduler. It's the main cause of sluggishness on my desktop. In fact it's choking /right now/ as I type this due to a large file copy process in the background. BFQ, the other desktop scheduler for linux, is not included in the default kernel, and in my use has not fared any better.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#116

Post by lvillani »

keithpeter wrote: post #89
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't ever want Linux on the desktop to succeed then if I have to sacrifice choice. I'm thrilled with Ubuntu every day, and if I had to sacrifice any of the flexibiltiy and customization I enjoy... well, I'd just use OS X. Also, I have no freaking idea how your Ubuntu feels sluggish. Being in Ubuntu on my Quad/8GB is vastly faster than being in Windows.

cletus and drivebyacct2 I've discovered recently that its the video hardware and how that interacts with the precise (sic) choice of graphics driver that governs Unity speed. cletus: you can test my hypothesis by logging in with the Unity 2d session and seeing if the UI becomes more responsive. Scaling (super-s) will be 'ragged' without 3d effects but should be faster. drivebyacct2: what is your graphics card and wha…

You might be affected by:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/763005

There is a series of known bugs where the window manager picks the wrong refresh rate resulting in choppy animations.

I noticed that this happens consistently with all compositing window managers (compiz, xfwm4, mutter) except kwin.

Disabling VBlank syncing may help. The bug report above has instructions to disable VBlank syncing with Compiz/Unity.

If you are using mutter (gnome-shell) you can put this line in /etc/environment, restarting your X session afterwards

  export CLUTTER_VBLANK=none
However, in my experience, Unity/compiz becomes sluggish again after a certain amount of clients are displayed on any (virtual) desktop.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#117

Post by LarrySDonald »

thwarted wrote: post #45
gerggerg wrote: post #26

Canonical is genuinely trying to make linux the most user friendly it's ever been and make it ready for real mass adoption. It's not going to be easy and not everyone is going to like every change but you can't get so down on them for trying so hard. Saying the solution is to go backwards is the same as telling canonical to just stop trying all together. There's no point in stagnating and sticking with gnome. New use…

New users aren't going to switch to ubuntu because there's a start(or applications) menu. Perhaps, but one of the traditional excuses new users have given for not switching, or switching back after trying, is that Linux desktops are too different, even though they've traditionally not been all that different. Creating something unique, compared to tools users have used in the past, like Windows, isn't going to make p…

Seconded. I showed a guy Ubuntu a bit back and it is now on his map and being used (not as primary, but it may be heading that way) because it has a start menu. He knows a tiny bit of linux (more like generic nix) and has interacted with various server solutions for fifteen years or so, but it's kind of "that thing you have to deal with" and most of the interaction involves calling me. That's ok, I'm mostly in charge of that. But Ubuntu now.. it has a start menu. And, like, through it you can find things. And they look familiar. Not all the way, but kinda. You can click them and they do stuff. He's actually finally getting into it a bit. He really, absurd as it may sound, would never have gotten anywhere if it looked exactly* like now, except with no start menu.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#118

Post by mindslight »

xyzzyz wrote: post #111
mindslight wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, like everything Ubuntu, is that it may be 'user friendly' when everything works perfectly, but when you want to do something different or something fails, it's anything but. You're left fighting multiple levels of indirection, trying to figure out what the system is actually doing so you can fix it . Much of the indirection comes from Debian, but it seems Ubuntu finds a single use-case, and then builds m…

Obviously, you're not the target user of Ubuntu, so there's no point in complaining. Ubuntu is not meant for people who want to edit grub/menu.lst by hand. There are plenty of other distributions for that.

So Ubuntu is for people who aren't willing to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, but are willing to edit /etc/default/grub ? I've run (K)Ubuntu for six years, coming from Debian, and Slack before that. I don't want to tinker, and I'm not even that picky on my desktop environment as long as it looks reasonably good and I can setup some hotkeys. But any distribution has to be serviceable, or you wind up with MS Windows where the fix for all problems is forum folklore, and failing that, reinstall.

And furthermore, why would I recommend Ubuntu to new users knowing that I'm not going to be able to help them as easily? A bit of an exaggeration right now, but an inevitable result of the path Ubuntu is on. A user friendly distribution should work with existing conventions, not discard them by creating a whole new layer on top.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#119

Post by jamesbritt »

Zephyr314 wrote: post #77
ChuckMcM wrote: post #56

Personally I found it a bit snarky. By the same token I find that UI wars are the most vitriolic, after all they are the way you talk to the machine day in and day out. Screwing with that, screws with everything. I have found Ubuntu's strategy interesting because it seemed clear that while KDE was following general guidelines around Microsoft OSes to be more accessible, and Gnome was following general guidelines arou…

You can still use KDE with (K)ubuntu http://www.kubuntu.org/ I find that it is a stable solution and allows you to sidestep the Gnome/Unity wars.

And if KDE 4 isn't for you there's also Trinity's KDE 3.5 remix (my preference).

Lot's of options out there.

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