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Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

releases.ubuntu.com

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Re: Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

#271

Post by 6d0debc071 »

vacri wrote: post #257
6d0debc071 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most popular desktop operating system on earth returns 2.5 billion hits. So what? Large numbers without basis for comparison are meaningless. I can't think how you'd get that basis here. The only thing you can really say on that basis is that less than 100% of users had no problems. # I didn't pretend that people never needed help with Windows. I said I hadn't had any real problems with it since 98 and asked what…

You clearly aren't the "computer whiz" in your family, who has to field all the "can you help me? Microsoft isn't working. I think I've been hacked, do you think it's a virus? Why is my computer so slow? Why is fixing it taking so long?" issues. As for your ubuntu issues - you booted off a liveCD. Good for you. Now, how many liveCDs have you seen of Windows? How widespread are they? Anyway, the same problems apply in…

> You clearly aren't the "computer whiz" in your family, who has to field all the "can you help me? Microsoft isn't working. I think I've been hacked, do you think it's a virus? Why is my computer so slow? Why is fixing it taking so long?" issues.

There's a limit of naivety beyond which everyone will need help, yes. I simply believe that you can get away with being more naive with Windows most of the time. I don't have to fix my mother's Windows problems, or my sister's - from time to time I have to fix my father's, but even then not just for setting the thing up.

> As for your ubuntu issues - you booted off a liveCD. Good for you. Now, how many liveCDs have you seen of Windows? How widespread are they?

I think I've seen two or three versions over the years, mostly as repair tools environs. Why?

> Anyway, the same problems apply in setting up the system regardless of Windows or *nix - you need a power user to get you through the humps. Good luck installing XP as a normal user when you run into the ever-present problem of no appropriate network drivers. Basically you're comparing apples and oranges.

Windows Xp network drivers - that's three versions out of date. And really, where are your discs? If you got it ready made they should have sent you the drivers along with their bloatware and if you didn't then they should save sent you the mobo drivers with the mobo.

Re: Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

#272

Post by nl »

pekk wrote: post #234
mindstab wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Actually, having a workaround by definition lessens the severity, as if someone wants to still run Skype, they can." I don't think everyone is on the same page about Ubuntu being a consumer distro and not a hacker's only distro... I have definitely noticed a decrease in the stability of Ubuntu releases over the years and it's attitudes like this that seem to be in part responsible for it. EDIT: Oh I kept reading, th…

Ubuntu has no control over the Skype project. They aren't obligated to support every third-party product when it is impossible to do this. I don't think this is the problem with recent Ubuntu releases.

Ubuntu has no control over the Skype project. They aren't obligated to support every third-party product when it is impossible to do this.

That's an interesting attitude.

Backwards compatibility is a generally regarded as a feature. If you read Raymond Chen's blog about the length's Microsoft went to in order to support old software on new versions of Windows you'll see how important some operating system vendors regard it.

Linux generally seems to have an interesting attitude to backwards compatibility. "It works on old hardware" is something that used to be regarded as a huge benefit of Linux.

These days - especially for Ubuntu - it doesn't seem to be regarded as a feature at all. Additionally Ubuntu seems to introduce breaking API changes in every release. I find that to be quite a surprising route to take for an OS that is trying to build desktop share.

I'd be quite interested to hear why people think they do this. Is backwards compatibility just not seen as important at all or is there a bigger strategy here?

Re: Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

#273

Post by claudius »

Stratoscope wrote: post #219
omegaham wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you seem to be saying is that in order to use a personal computer, you should be an expert. I disagree, and I'm glad that most people disagree as well. User-friendliness is important regardless of what system it is, even Linux. Have you noticed that the most successful distributions of Linux are the ones that are most friendly to beginners? This elitism is destructive and serves only to make the "experts" smug a…

I had a taste of those elitist attitudes a few years ago when I was looking up how to add a user on an Ubuntu server and the top result for a search on "ubuntu add user" was this page: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/add-a-user-on-ubuntu-s... Ubuntu has two commands for this, useradd and adduser, where adduser is the easier one for newbies, while useradd is more flexible but has a lot of ways you can get it wro…

Of course, you tacitly skipped over the other helpful comments and instead chose to concentrate on the worst comment in that thread. However, that doesn’t render the message delivered there wrong in any way – read the whole article/how-to before starting, just as you read the whole recipe before starting to cook.

So, yeah, you

a) didn’t read the manuals supplied with your distribution

b) instead went directly to a random third party site via Google

c) blindly trusted said site without fully reading it

d) messed up while doing so.

You should have gotten a computer-literate friend to help you, just as you don’t fix your car by looking for an howto online and dismissing the manual you can usually find in the glove compartment.

Re: Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

#274

Post by claudius »

sirclueless wrote: post #202
claudius wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you seem to be saying is that in order to use a personal computer, you should be an expert. No. What I am saying is that a) using a device is different from administrating it and b) in order to administrate a device you have to be an expert. You don’t expect to buy a car and never ever go to a workshop with it, because, you know, you shouldn’t have to be an expert to service your car. Similarly, expecting to b…

I would argue that popularity is actually a great indicator of the quality of an OS and your experience with it. I am what you would consider an "expert" (or at least, I can definitely competently administer a linux computer) but I don't use linux distributions for day-to-day computing. The reason is that linux computers, even ones running "popular distros" such as Ubuntu, are considerably more prone to interoperabil…

> The reason popularity matters, even though I have the technical skill to administer any OS competently, is that popularity is the single best incentive to encourage third parties to iron out the kinks on a particular platform.

I prefer a working platform that forces me to read the manual beforehand over a platform where I don’t have to read the manual but random third parties iron out kinks.

Popularity is a measure of quality, but only of quality wrt to the usecases of the people among which the product is popular. My computer usage is very different from my mum’s, and likely from 95% of the population, hence, the popularity of a product among 95% of the population is rather irrelevant to me.

If you’re a single person with a tight budget looking for a car, you don’t look at car popularity among large families owning oil fields, but among people similar (in the relevant ways) to yourself.

Hence, popularity among a large user base is an indicator that the OS is optimised for use by a large part of the population. If you find that this is indicative of the quality you’re looking for, fine.

Re: Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

#275

Post by AnthonBerg »

socceroos wrote: post #254
kunai wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't leave the Linux world because I didn't like Ubuntu dictating a desktop environment to me. I left because OS X suits my needs better than any Linux distribution (except perhaps OpenSUSE) could.

Logical fallacy. You've built a strawman, based your argument off it, and then contradicted yourself.

No they didn't. Where?

Re: Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

#276

Post by claudius »

omegaham wrote: post #262
Karunamon wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's shit-talking the newbies, and then there's refusing to lower your system to the lowest common denominator by dumbing it down. Not being careful of that second one gets us things like the GNOME 3/Unity/Windows 8 design-by-committee that seems to be loathed so much by power users. Is it so wrong to expect some basic minimum level of competence in a system before someone uses it? And then suggest that some…

You're definitely right that there is a fine line between user-friendliness and "The user is an idiot" in UI choices. Right now I'm using Lubuntu; I dislike Unity immensely. Remember that everyone starts out incompetent. They ask dumb questions, and in some cases entitled newbies expect the experts to bend over backwards for them. But one thing that's nice is that a lot of questions have been answered before by patie…

Try giving the ‘decent’ answer to the thousandth person asking that very question without any sign whatsoever of the work they put in. Or to the person who obviously did not read the rules for the mailing list they signed up to and instead ‘just asks a simple question’. There are, unfortunately, many more entitled people than you think.

Fortunately, you can easily killfile people in mailing lists, and doing so quickly (i.e. after one wrong post) helped me greatly.

Re: Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

#277

Post by jdstrand »

dguido wrote: post #172

Are there any security improvements worth mentioning in this release? Ubuntu used to be at the forefront of security on Linux and kept track of improvements made per release on their wiki. This effort seems to have stalled after the departure of key personnel and nothing has changed in a year or more. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features

The Security/Features page remains up to date (mostly, see below) and while new security features did not land in 13.04, a lot of work was done on client application isolation and better supporting using AppArmor with LXC. Many of these features will land in 13.10 and 14.04 LTS.

The list of applications compiled with PIE is not currently up to date, but is being worked on (part of the problem is a lot of developers started compiling their packages with PIE and we now have to find them. A nice problem to have :). Also note that incremental security features are not usually mentioned. For example, seccomp2 is used in a number of places now and AppArmor improvements such as mediation of mount or the upcoming DBus work are/will not be specifically mentioned.

Re: Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

#278

Post by JeremyMorgan »

This version isn't so bad, only by comparison of the last two. I usually download and run each version for a few weeks for fun, I ran some beta builds of this one and didn't have any major problems.

The Unity interface still sucks but they're making some subtle changes that make it better. I still don't like it.

What worries me most about Ubuntu's rising popularity is the fact that they're trying so hard to nail the tablet market. I would like to see a good Linux distro reach the popularity Ubuntu has, but offer more flexibility and focus on the desktop. Linux Mint is making strides in this direction, and looks to be a very nice candidate for it.

My prognosis is much the same as it has been for a while now:

For goofing off / watching movies/ checking email - Ubuntu 13.04 will be great.

For productivity I'm still using Mint, Gentoo or Ubuntu 10.04

For a server it's Gentoo all the way.

Re: Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

#279

Post by Poyeyo »

pekk wrote: post #234
mindstab wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Actually, having a workaround by definition lessens the severity, as if someone wants to still run Skype, they can." I don't think everyone is on the same page about Ubuntu being a consumer distro and not a hacker's only distro... I have definitely noticed a decrease in the stability of Ubuntu releases over the years and it's attitudes like this that seem to be in part responsible for it. EDIT: Oh I kept reading, th…

Ubuntu has no control over the Skype project. They aren't obligated to support every third-party product when it is impossible to do this. I don't think this is the problem with recent Ubuntu releases.

Actually, they should try.

They are not obligated, but it is in their best interests to build a reputation of not breaking things.

I do think that Linux lacks a reputation of not breaking existing programs as much as it lacked a reputation of ease of use before Ubuntu.

Now, ease of use, and not breaking things? I bet that kind of reputation is worth millions of dollars.

Even Linus agrees about it, when it comes to the kernel breaking userland programs. The kernel developers have no control over userland programs. Nonetheless, the kernel developers try very hard not to break userland programs.

Re: Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released

#280

Post by Poyeyo »

jebblue wrote: post #237
anoncow wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both bugs appear to be things which a future ubuntu or chrome/skype update should fix. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Linux haters can't stand that Ubuntu can release new OS versions so often. OTOH, I'm tired of the chase and from now on will just stick with the LTS releases. If I were a some years younger though, I'd be there in the thick of every release. Kudos to the makers and the doers of Ubuntu. RedHat, where were/are you.

I have noticed that Ubuntu haters are not Linux haters at all, they are previous Ubuntu users, or simply fans of other distributions.

P.S.: RedHat is selling server versions and support for millions of dollars. Ubuntu still is not profitable despite all they have done for the community. It's unfair to me.

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