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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

#41

Post by Lednakashim »

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.

Thats nonsense, a broken Linux distro is not cost effective to fix because the number of breakpoints is innumerable. Zounds of configuration files, buggy software any an extremely branching entry point and shared dependencies make it quicker to wipe your install and start again. This is what I do with my installs; if it breaks wipe it.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#42

Post by naich »

Lednakashim wrote: post #40
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…

Fact: normal people invested significant time learning MS Windows. They will not be happy about the loss of productivity involved in switching GUIs.

s/fact/my opinion/

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#43

Post by k_bx »

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…

Yeah. Maybe btrfs (and it's snapshots) is a good option for system-upgrades which end into non-booting situations, but generally I think it is possible with growth of community and QA infrastructure to minimize situations like these (also, if there is not enough space, the best option is not to allow upgrade in the firstplace).

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#44

Post by k_bx »

josefonseca wrote: post #15

The latest Ubuntu desktop is absolutely stunningly beautiful. The first time I saw it couldn't tell if it was an improved Windows 8 or some new release of Mac OS X. The fact is I think this may have a shot with the masses. If the latest rumors of EA being in talks with Ubuntu are true, then if massively successful games start appearing for the platform, it may well signify a turning point for desktop Linux. Here's ho…

Hmm, I think I am seeing this not for the first time..

(hint: "Year %s, the year of desktop linux?")

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#45

Post by k_bx »

moylan wrote: post #11
sk5t wrote: post #10

My honest first thought: hasn't Ubuntu's share of the Linux market been dropping since their introduction of the universally-reviled, highly unintuitive Unity UI? I tried out 12.04 a couple months ago, tried to use it for a few weeks, and very enthusiastically retreated back to CentOS.

i hate unity. it's nothing but distracting eye candy. a non standard waste of resources. but i like ubuntu overall so at the mo i use xubuntu. suits all my needs without unity. but ubuntu is still an organisation to support especially in terms of them helping produce hardware that will be 100% linux compatible no matter what distro i choose to run.

> a non standard waste of resources

I don't know what resources you are talking about, but it's definitely not wasting my screen resources as others do.

My vertical spaced is saved my menu-on-panel integration, on fullscreen title goes into panel too. Left-panel is also nice, it doesn't do "minimize on second click" as docky or others, it does nice "overview" on click on multi-window app. And finally, it also saves space by combining launcher and app-switcher.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#46

Post by tuxychandru »

sk5t wrote: post #10

My honest first thought: hasn't Ubuntu's share of the Linux market been dropping since their introduction of the universally-reviled, highly unintuitive Unity UI? I tried out 12.04 a couple months ago, tried to use it for a few weeks, and very enthusiastically retreated back to CentOS.

I guess I'm in the minority then. Unity is one of the few desktops which gets completely out of your way and uses minimum screen real estate while still remaining usable by non-technical users.

With HUD in 12.04, it's the only widely-used DE I can control almost entirely with keyboard.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#47

Post by bergie »

naich wrote: post #42
Lednakashim wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fact: normal people invested significant time learning MS Windows. They will not be happy about the loss of productivity involved in switching GUIs.

s/fact/my opinion/

Also, I think this is slowly becoming less of an issue. A substantial number (10-15% of global PC market share, depending who you ask) of users have made the jump to Mac, which is quite different from Windows. And on top of that, many now use iPads or Android tablets, with even newer UI paradigms.

When you combine this with much of your data now being available through cloud services, the barrier for trying something like Linux should become lower.

5% share for Ubuntu would be significant. Compare that to 2.9% for iPad, and it could mean a lot better application support. The current desktop Linux share is about half of iPad's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#48

Post by archangel_one »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #39
forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Microsoft never waited until DOS or Windows were perfected, they just released them once they thought they were adequate" NEVER WAITED??? I bet you were too young to remember those days because Micorsoft(Bill Gates) promised Windows(3.11) like 6 years before it was ready. Windows was coming "soon", and "soon" and "soon", for years. And better we don't talk about DOS. DRDOS was much better than MSDOS, but MS made win…

I think you miss the grandparent's point: when DOS first came out, it only supported 8 character file names and didn't support directories.

Exactly, thanks. I said they didn't wait for perfection, not that they never waited at all.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#49

Post by kalleboo »

b0rsuk wrote: post #34
fierarul wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we easily forget just how broken the rest of the OS were. If I evaluate Linux as if I am a few years back in time, I don't mind the lack of good QA. I've also broken an install because I tried an upgrade and there wasn't enough free space. But that doesn't mean Ubuntu isn't fit for end users. My mother and my sister are running Ubuntu on their laptops and do just fine. And they are in no way technical: they j…

Debian upgrades never break for me.

I'm not great with linux (just use it for home fileservers and the like), and for me it's generally a rule that debian distupgrades go catastrophically wrong (libc going out of sync and half the binaries on the system wouldn't run, that kind of thing). It's not foolproof like an OS X or Windows upgrade.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#50

Post by padobson »

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 game compatibility. The mainstream computer user needs office tools, a browser, email, music, video, and games. Games are the only absentee from Ubuntu. Some major upgrades to Wine could solve this.

2) A mobile strategy There's definitely been attempts to put Ubuntu on mobile devices, but nothing concrete from Canonical. If they had been more forward thinking, they could have been Android instead of Android being Android.

Finally, I'd personally like to see a lite version of the latest Ubuntu releases. The reason I got into Ubuntu in the first place was to bring new life to my old hardware. Unity doesnt work at all on old hardware, and the fallback is not as good as the old Gnome 2 experience. I'm still running 10.10 on a number of machines because it was my favorite release.

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