Why Ubuntu Linux is now ready for primetime

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 excellently for software development in the future.

That said, I was young and had the time to deal with its inadequacies. I could spend a whole weekend getting a driver to work properly, and fiddling with kernel options. These days I get a few hours of free time when I come home from work, and then I have my weekend. If I am on the computer at all, I don't want to waste my time dealing with that stuff any more. It's either to sit down and knock out a sizable chunk of a personal project, or play some video games for entertainment.

I have a proper place for all three OS flavors. My desktop runs Windows (for gaming, heavy VM work, and games development), my primary development machine is a Macbook Air (running OS X), and any servers I have run Linux. I feel like these are the perfect tools for their respective jobs, now that money isn't a factor as a poor college student. Using OSX over Linux as a development environment was like night and day.

For servers, Linux is king. Having it be a usable personal OS (for the average user and programmer) will take a lot more time. While it's true that most of my time is spent either in the terminal or in the browser (I'd say about 75% of my computer usage), for the other 25% paying for a machine that runs OS X is completely worth every penny twice over. The quality of tools, utilities, and applications that aren't a browser or terminal is light-years ahead of anything that Linux offers, in terms of usability, UI, and functionality.

>Replace the post date with any year going back to ~ 2006 and it wouldn't be out of place

There have been breathless articles about this being the year Linux is ready for the desktop ever since the late 1990s.

This is one of the major reasons I don't suggest Linux to anyone. There was a time I'd get people to switch from Windows to Linux; now I tell them to either upgrade to Windows 7 (if they're not on Windows 7 already) or get a Mac.

I'm also concerned about three secondary issues. One, there is a lack of strong leadership in the Linux community. Shuttleworth is the only person who can shake things up, and whenever he does everyone whines as if Shuttleworth had caused them some grave personal injustice.

Second, of course, is fragmentation and the fact that Linux developers change things needlessly (see GNOME 3, KDE4, PulseAudio, etc.) The end result is different distros doing things in slightly incompatible ways. These days I see more and more people package their software for Ubuntu only, and provide a generic .tag.gz for other distros. I'm no Ubuntu fan, but I jump for joy every time I see this. Distros need to die.

Third is politics. I know people who contribute to a few high-profile open source projects and I've watched them waste their time on bikeshed discussions on mailing lists and IRC. I've even watched one guy work on a project for three months only to have the design team discard it because they had a different idea in mind. The result was a long battle between programmers and designers. I guess this is a direct result of lack of leadership.

I've been hearing talks about a GNOME OS. I sincerely hope the GNOME folks go ahead and build it. As I've said before, distros need to die. So much manpower is wasted on just packaging things for different distros. From a consumer standpoint, choice is okay if you have to choose between two or three things, each with their clear merits and demerits. Choice is fatal if you have to choose between ten things which are all nearly identical.

Sometimes I feel Linus is the only guy who knows how to run a project properly. He knows how to say "no". If only we could coax him into building a distro ...

I'm happy with Lubuntu and Xubuntu variants. Maybe give those a try.

I thought this was an old article, from a few years ago. Seriously, Ubuntu has been a decent OS for developers and also newbies for a long time. (I am prejudiced - I downloaded Stackware using a 2400 baud modem (in 1992?), and Linux has been core to my business since then.)

That said, Windows 7 and OS X are probably better for the consumer market. Non-techie friends just bought a Windows 7 all in one computer (like an iMac) and it is amazing what they got for $600 (including a touch screen!!), and it all just works for them. I tried to give them a Mac last month and they promptly returned it to me because of the learning curve for switching to OS X, and the switch to Linux would be even more difficult.