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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

#51

Post by hlfshell »

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.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#52

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

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.

But when Microsoft change the GUI (as they did between 3.1 and 95, 2000 and XP, XP and Vista and will between Vista and Windows 8) so there is always going to be relearning as technology advances.

Shouldn't people have the choice which new GUI they learn?

And the relearning curve doesn't seem to be hindering the Mac, or the iPad, both of which face the same challenge and yet are taking market share.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#53

Post by spurgu »

vibrunazo wrote: post #8
moylan wrote: post #5

i'd rather pay an ubuntu tax than a microsoft tax so i really look forward to buying a new machine with the option of ubuntu even if it costs a little more. but my main concern will be the those who buy an ubuntu machine and then expect to run ms office or other windows only piece of software on it. i will be getting those calls. thankfully most of the home users aren't as dependent on windows only apps anymore.

Just rename their libre office to Word and Excel. I've tried it with 2 relatives and so far it's working, no complaints :)

Haha yeah I did that too, I installed Firefox and renamed it to Internet Explorer. :)

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#55

Post by bookwormAT »

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…

I don't think that Ubuntu needs a mobile strategy, and related to this, it probably does not need games either.

Input methods have a huge impact on application design. A app for touch devices is significantly different from a mouse and keyboard device.

Since touch devices are invading the living room and become premier gaming platforms (also in combination with gamepads and large TVs), the classic desktop does only need to focus on applications and use cases that are optimized for Mouse and Keyboard input.

That's why I think Ubuntu should stay with the classic desktop, and Android should keep its focus on devices with less precise/fast inputs like touch/trackball/remote controls

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#56

Post by lloeki »

gouranga wrote: post #33

I don't believe the figures until after they've been sold. The demand for Ubuntu is pretty much non-existent outside the technology enthusiast arena. Ubuntu is just not as polished as Windows either. OEMs also know there's an easy way out if they don't sell - chuck windows on them and shift them out through clearance sales. This is all marketoid speil from their marketing VP at the moment.

> The demand for Ubuntu is pretty much non-existent outside the technology enthusiast arena

Government and public services.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#57

Post by wazoox »

kalleboo wrote: post #49
b0rsuk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ubuntu =/= Debian. I have several servers that have been upgraded from Woody up to Squeeze (that's 5 consecutive dist-upgrades in 9 years) and it's less problematic with each release. The only serious difficulties were switching from xf86 to xorg, then apache to apache2. Switching kernels (2.4 -> 2.6) or libc was quite painless.

Since Etch (Etch to Lenny to Squeeze) except for a couple of minor glitches going with the defaults "just works".

From what I've seen Ubuntu often fails upgrades because of the GUI (at some point during upgrade one or other part of the GUI fails/restart and kills the upgrade process itself). Simple advice: dist-upgrade in a text console (not a gnome-terminal!), and it should work fine.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#58

Post by wazoox »

fierarul wrote: post #29
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…

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…

My advice is to use "apt-get dist-upgrade" in the text console (Ctrl+Alt+F1, not a gnome-terminal!) and it should go fine. I've upgraded 4 machines from 10.04 to 12.04. Only one failed to auto-upgrade and needed to fall back to the console to complete installation.

The most problematic part IMO is Evolution. This program almost always causes trouble during upgrades, not only on Ubuntu (I had problems upgrading Slackware GSB at home too). Use Thunderbird or Claws or whatever other mailer if you can...

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#59

Post by drchaos »

dsirijus wrote: post #7

What percentage of PCs ship with FreeDOS? And how's that indicator of the popularity of the FreeDOS system? Most of Ubuntu preinstalls won't even live to boot. A shame really.

The obvious difference is that you cannot use FreeDOS for typical desktop activities (like surfing the web, reading mail, Facebook), whereas you can use Ubuntu for almost everything, except Gaming and Photoshop. From my experience with "normal" (non-techy) users, they don't bother switching OSes as long as they can use it for what they want to do, which is in many cases little more than running a browser.

Re: Ubuntu To Soon Ship On 5% Of PCs

#60

Post by josefonseca »

redthrowaway wrote: post #27
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…

>Here's hoping widespread desktop Linux finally becomes a reality. If it did, it would be doing so on the downswing of the desktop as a platform. People will still do work with traditional computers, but mobile looks set to replace them for entertainment and browsing.

> If it did, it would be doing so on the downswing of the desktop as a platform.

This may be true, but I'd like to point out that I've been hearing this since 1980something.

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