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Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

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Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#61

Post by bokchoi »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #32
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #28

I'm not sure it's a great idea to distribute Ubuntu too widely in its current state. It's not fit for end users. Yesterday I had to fix my third broken Ubuntu installation in a year or so and it's always for the same reason: Failed upgrades. Upgrades leaving the system in an unbootable state has to be an extremely rare event and it's not. How can this be fixed? I think the entire package management system has to be b…

If they are doing deals with OEMs, they can fix it by being the Apple of Linux distros. You can still install it on your own machine, but as far as official support goes, you're on your own.

That's funny because Apple has a very pleasing OS upgrade experience. Even better, the machine upgrade experience was amazing to me when I bought a new macbook and was able to migrate installed applications and settings from the old machine seamlessly. Doing something like that on windows or linux is still a pain.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#62

Post by krakensden »

hlfshell wrote: post #51
padobson wrote: post #50

As far as when Ubuntu will be back at Best Buy here in the United States, or "When at Best Buy down the road?" Kenyon said, "We're working on it and I'm confident we're going to get there." A better question is whether Best Buy will still be selling computers or anything at all down the road. I'm happy Ubuntu is starting to gain this type of traction, but it needs two things to really make the leap: 1) Mass market ga…

Xubuntu is your "lite" release for old hardware. It's shipped with XFCE instead of Unity so it doesn't require much to run. I believe Xubuntu 12.04 is released same-day as the 12.04 release.

The latest Unity 2D is actually quite snappy on my machine, for what it's worth. More so than Unity, in fact.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#64

Post by uvtc »

glesica wrote: post #3

Doing deals with OEMs actually seems like a better strategy today than it was even just a few years ago when Canonical did their original deal with Dell. For one thing, Ubuntu has (for better or worse) made significant progress toward their UI vision. Unity has been polarizing, but many users (especially the "normal" people who are likely to buy an Inspiron or similar) seem to like it. Even more importantly, a signif…

> Unity has been polarizing, but many users (especially the "normal" people who are likely to buy an Inspiron or similar) seem to like it.

To anyone who doesn't like Unity, I recommend [Lubuntu](http://lubuntu.net/). Still has the Ubuntu user-friendliness, but no Gnome & Unity.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#65

Post by uvtc »

freehunter wrote: post #9

Here's the big question on my mind: why can I not go on Amazon right now and buy an Ubuntu laptop? There is one I have seen (and I have searched for a while), where someone is reselling used laptops with Ubuntu installed. There are so many device makers out there trying to replicate the feel of a MacBook Pro with Windows. Seems like it would be easier with Ubuntu. The success of Apple sprang mostly from marketing and…

You can get ThinkPads loaded with your distro-of-choice from [Los Alamos Computers](http://laclinux.com/gnu/Start).

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#66

Post by dgudkov »

fierarul wrote: post #31
joejohnson wrote: post #12

...when I talk with OEMs and others about Linux pre-loads, I commonly [sic] here a "significant percentage" of these Linux pre-loaded systems usually get wiped by their customers and replaced with pirated copies of Windows -- especially in the Asian markets, where customers are just going after the Linux PCs due to the lower sales cost. Can anyone confirm this?

In Romania it's common practice to sell cheaper laptops running FreeDOS or some Linux (say, Acer with Linpus) with the expectation that people are just going to wipe it and install a pirated Windows on it. If you look at the online review for them, the first remark people have is about how Windows drivers are hard to find. Or they ask about the Windows score. I once called the Samsung hotline asking about Linux suppo…

Not that hard. E.g. http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/

From my experience -- ThinkPads usually work quite smoothly with popular linux distros.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#68

Post by sukuriant »

pjmlp wrote: post #26
jrockway wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that people will get their Windows install media from the same place they get their Blu-Ray rips.

But at least the sale counts as a Linux sale, which is positive. I've also seen people that replace Mac OS X with Windows or Linux on their Apple laptops.

I completely forgot about people installing Windows on their Macs, even though anecdotally this is very common.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#69

Post by fierarul »

dgudkov wrote: post #66
fierarul wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Romania it's common practice to sell cheaper laptops running FreeDOS or some Linux (say, Acer with Linpus) with the expectation that people are just going to wipe it and install a pirated Windows on it. If you look at the online review for them, the first remark people have is about how Windows drivers are hard to find. Or they ask about the Windows score. I once called the Samsung hotline asking about Linux suppo…

Not that hard. E.g. http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/ From my experience -- ThinkPads usually work quite smoothly with popular linux distros.

Oh, it's not hard to find which model is certified. It's hard to actually find it selling in a store!

Also, I don't want to buy a ThinkPad if I have to buy it with Windows then wipe that.

So my choices are laptops that come with FreeDOS or Linux and that are actually certified for Linux. Because, rumor has it, even some laptops that do come with Linux don't have proper Linux support for all their components -- they are built with the assumption of a Windows install.

At this point you don't have that many choices and if you also want a particular hardware configuration (say, i5) the choice narrows down a lot.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#70

Post by pjmlp »

sukuriant wrote: post #68
pjmlp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at least the sale counts as a Linux sale, which is positive. I've also seen people that replace Mac OS X with Windows or Linux on their Apple laptops.

I completely forgot about people installing Windows on their Macs, even though anecdotally this is very common.

This can be easily observed in any Games Development Conference (GDC).
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