
Ubuntu 10.04: The Perfect Consumer Operating System? - gibsonf1
http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7740/1.html
======
jrockway
For what people use personal computers for these days, I agree that Ubuntu is
a good choice. Everyone's favorite web apps work, you can play movies, and you
can make Word documents. Add a little eye candy, and people are happy.

What's even nicer is not needing CPU-sucking anti-virus protection scanning
every file in the background, draining your laptop's battery life. If you want
to install software, you don't have to go to some random website; you just
open the software installation control panel, type a keyword, click a button,
and start using the software. Even Apple realized this was a good idea, and
copied it in the form of "the App Store".

There will never be a perfect desktop OS (ever use OS X or Windows!?), but
Linux is certainly becoming a great competitor these days. I no longer shy
away from recommending Ubuntu; it meets most people's needs, and it's easier
to maintain that Windows or OS X. Who would have thunk it!

~~~
AngryParsley
While it does succeed in areas where other OSes are weak (package
management!), Ubuntu still has a lot of annoyances.

For example...

Copying and pasting is broken in some apps:
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/11334>

Desktop icons cannot be auto-arranged:
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/nautilus/+bug/20284>

Screensavers can't be customized:
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-
screensaver/...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-
screensaver/+bug/22007)

Context menu for an USB pendrive shows "Unmount", "Eject" and "Safely Remove
Drive": <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gvfs/+bug/453072>

There are a lot of others listed here:
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/+bugs>

Checking off features on a list isn't enough to make a good operating system.
Like baseball, you have to work on the fundamentals to win.

(Jeez that last sentence sounds corny.)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Did you just list bugs specifically shortlisted by Ubuntu as minor, easily
fixed interface issues and use that very work to argue that they're not
focussing on these things?

~~~
AngryParsley
The first three bugs I linked to have been open for 5-6 years, so yes I'm
saying they're not focusing on these things.

It's not solely Ubuntu's fault. A lot of the issues are upstream. The
screensaver settings bug was closed as WONTFIX in gnome:
<https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316654>

Says the maintainer of gnome-screensaver: _I don't have any plans to support
this. My view is that any screensaver theme that requires configuration is
inherently broken._

Yes, because it's not like I'd ever want the pictures screensaver to grab
images out of a directory besides ~/Photos/.

------
pierrefar
I've heard this sentiment before. Every year since 2000 has been proclaimed
the year of consumer Linux. Yeah, sure, 2010 is the one and Ubuntu will do it.
I've been testing every single release of Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE on my
laptop for the past few years and never did any last more than a few weeks.
It's just too abrasive an experience.

Sadly, I will download and try this year's crop and, predictably, they will be
rubbish.

And next year, it will be the same story again.

~~~
rufugee
Apparently you live in an alternate universe. I've been using Linux for my
desktop OS since 1999, and Ubuntu since 2004, and it's been a consistently
great experience. Sure, there are warts on occasion, but that's true with all
OSes. Ubuntu has been solid enough to keep me productive by day (as a CTO of a
company of over 1000 employees), and by night (as a consultant). I even bought
a MacBook Pro last year and gave OS X a try. It lasted around a month. My
frustration with its completely odd UI design decisions, dismal package
management (ports, fink), and second-class treatment of open source software
led me to install Ubuntu on the laptop and wipe OS X. Couldn't be happier with
it now.

2010 may not be the year of Linux on the consumer desktop, but it's another
year of Linux on _my_ desktop, and I couldn't be happier.

~~~
pierrefar
I'm very happy you've found that Linux serves your desktop needs. For me, I
would never host on anything but Linux or FreeBSD, and my phone is a G1
Android.

But your desktop is only one of ~1-2% of desktops that use Linux. The
"alternate universe", i.e. the 98%+ of the world, are happy with Windows or
OSX, some of them by choice. Your clearly a very happy with Linux, but don't
project this happiness on others.

The open source world could learn a lot from the story of Firefox. When the
market was frustrated with a slow and insecure IE, Firefox came along being
very fast and secure. Us geeks loved it, recommended it to non-techie friends
and, these benefits were important to them too. What benefit does desktop
Linux give me? The only real new benefit coming in Linux is the fast boot up.
That is a real consumer benefit. I can't think of another real benefit in the
current crop of distros.

~~~
matclayton
The other real tangible benefit is $$$ certainly compared to the top end
Windows releases, although the snow leopard price is hardly a deal breaker.

~~~
pierrefar
In terms of absolute money number saved, yes absolutely. But how much do you
value your time in terms of learning and setting up a different OS?

~~~
jorgecastillo
I live in a third world country so at least my time is pretty cheap compared
to a license.

Some hours reading the manual, web searching or asking in forums vs (26
8-hours working days) x ($15[The average income in my region]).*

Most people use Windows but have it unlicensed. I am not rich so yeah Linux
look dirt cheap to me and I don't even use Linux I use OpenBSD. I definitely
think the government should push open source in all areas we would be better
off. Right now kids are learning to use Windows XP, Microsoft Office, Coral
Draw, Flash and Visual basic 6. I have to remark that they are learning all
this stuff in fairly mediocre way. Also don't forget government and public
institutions sites that are non standards compliant and flash heavy.

*In my comparison $1 = 10 Pesos. The price of Windows 7 Ultimate is 4,004.17 Pesos in Mexico.

------
kellishaver
I made the switch to Ubuntu a bit ago and I know I'm not the "typical user"
since I do design/dev work, but I see nothing about the OS that the average
person couldn't pick up on in terms of its operation vs. Windows, and it's
even more similar to OS X with regards to how it functions.

From my limited experience talking to people who've tried linux, what confuses
them the most is the linux file structure, which can look a bit confusing
until you come to understand it.

The average person probably doesn't need to know a whole lot about that,
though.

Also, the UI and font rendering aren't quite there yet, but they're getting
better all the time.

The biggest problem that I see, while I love Ubuntu, getting it to a point
where I'm totally happy with it as an OS has taken more work than the average
user would be able or willing to implement, i.e. doing things like cleaning up
the UI and improving font rendering, and fixing some issues I had with Flash
out of the box. I had to ditch Pulseaudio because it performed very poorly
with my HD audio off my motherboard. Disabling that and installing/configuring
ALSA was a bit of an ordeal that anyone not really comfortable with computers
probably wouldn't want to undertake.

For me, the attraction to Linux (other than having a more productive work
environment) is that I _can_ customize the hell out of it and make it however
I want. Most people won't want that flexibility and will want it to "just
work" perfectly out of the box. Ubuntu doesn't quite do that yet.

------
kingkilr
Eh, I use Ubuntu as my primary OS, and I have for a number of years. I'm
running 10.04 now, and it's good (obviously, or I wouldn't use it day to day),
but I don't think it's any more than incrementally better than 9.10.

------
djb_hackernews
I made the "switch" a few months ago to Ubuntu 9.04. It's not smooth at all.
It regularly hangs (The current window fades gray). All I am doing is hacking
django and browsing the web. Flash doesn't work. That might be a Firefox
issue. Flash does work in FF 3.5, which I installed, but it installed as a
separate browser, not an upgrade.

Also, my volume is too low to listen to music or watch movies, which was a
bummer because I just moved and don't have a way to do either of those things.

~~~
kellishaver
Here's how I ended up fixing my low volume level issues in 9.10:
[http://kellishaver.tumblr.com/post/447122874/alsa-in-
ubuntu-...](http://kellishaver.tumblr.com/post/447122874/alsa-in-ubuntu-9-10)

And here's how I fixed Flash:
[http://kellishaver.tumblr.com/post/451068353/while-were-
on-t...](http://kellishaver.tumblr.com/post/451068353/while-were-on-the-
subject-of-fixing-things-in)

~~~
djb_hackernews
Where do I send the check?

~~~
kellishaver
LOL glad I could help. :)

------
gwern
Not even close. The 'cloud' is half-baked (I was rather embarrassed when I
sent out share links for a PDF to a bunch of people, and it turns out that
none of the share links worked, ever), no one cares about the music store when
audio doesn't reliably work, etc.

------
furtivefelon
In my experience, most linux distro's battery management doesn't even match
windows xp out of the box (no clear way to tune it). It is the only thing that
is stopping me from transitioning to linux full time.

~~~
cdavid
Looking at the battery management on the 10.04 beta, the options seem very
similar to the ones on my mac book. What do feel is missing ?

~~~
AngryParsley
It's not the options, it's the actual power management. I have a netbook with
XP and Lucid beta. The battery lasts 6 hours on XP and only 4:30 on Lucid.
Both OSes are set to dim the screen and spin down the hard disk on battery
power. The fan also comes on a lot more often when I'm running Lucid.

~~~
papachito
The opposite happens here, when I switch from Lucid to Vista. Did you try with
a 10 year old version of linux? I think XP is 10 years old now.

------
graywh
Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1218613>

------
JeremyChase
Why are we so fixated with getting 'the consumer' on Linux?

The only thing I can imagine is that more people using the software might
increase the financial donations to FOSS organizations. I doubt it though.

In any case, if you can, please donate some money to any open source groups
that you use regularly.

------
VBprogrammer
I've just installed Ubuntu 10.4. I didn't spend much time in the new theme. I
found it just looked ugly against the background of most website backgrounds.
It didn't have any delimiter between different parts of the toolbars etc.

I was very impressed with the work thats gone into the boot time though. I
don't have any timings certainly feels like my anemic old Pentium M 1.4Ghz
laptop seems to boot in half the time it used to! Firefox 3.6 seems very
snappy. Terminals load in less than a second. I'm not sure how much of the
difference is just having removed all the accumulated crud though.

I'm glad I upgraded, though I was running an old 7.10 installation with a
2.6.24 RC Kernel which was the first one to support my Broadcom wireless card
reasonably well.

------
theschwa
When will Ubuntu get an integrated backup solution? Sure rsync combined with
cron works, but it keeps it out of reach for your average user (or even your
lazy one).

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Does Ubuntu One (their version of Dropbox) count?

------
samd
A regular user should never have to go to the command line to do anything, but
I can't seem to avoid that with Linux.

~~~
ricree
Out of curiosity, what do you find yourself having to use the command line
for?

I tend to use it out of preference, but I can't offhand think of any "regular"
tasks I do that would require it. Some more obscure bits of troubleshooting
might occasionally require it. But even there the gui options seem to have
almost everything covered unless you start going a lot deeper than any regular
user will care to.

~~~
samd
It was during troubleshooting, I couldn't get my dual monitor configuration to
save unless I launched the config menu as sudo from the command line. Of
course it didn't tell me this was the problem either.

~~~
gloob
A regular user doesn't have dual monitors, though.

That said, I've had some issues with previous versions of Ubuntu that took
some mucking around to fix, especially with sound and occasionally with
wireless (though the latter has always worked fine on my laptops).

~~~
andrewvc
Regular users? No. Gamers, Graphic Artists, People who work with anything
involving large amounts of on screen data, yes.

None of these people should have to know how to use the CLI just to get two
monitors working.

I had the same problem with dual monitors for the record.

------
PostOnce
Linux will be used by regular people when the manual editing of configuration
files is no longer necessary.

~~~
cdavid
That has been unnecessary for a long time. The only time I edit config files
is for things that an average user would not use (vim, shell, etc...). Which
file do you feel are necessary to edit by hand in Linux ?

~~~
pchivers
-/etc/fstab --> needed to get secondary hard drives to automount during boot

-/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist --> needed to install my wireless card

~~~
e1ven
I'm curious- What advantage is there is to using the external drive on boot,
rather than have automounter do it on login?

Also, the Ubuntu Restricted Driver's manager did't handle the card? How
unusual. I've had it handle the majority of WiFi cards I've thrown at it. I
suppose that's a compatibility issue- If Windows weren't pre-installed on a
new PC, people would have to install drivers there, too.

------
brent
Once again: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=928726>

------
kierank
Not until they lose the Fisher-Price look.

~~~
kylec
Did you even read the article? The whole first page is devoted to the
improved, more professional look of the OS.

~~~
peyton
This release has a different menubar color. That's nice, but it doesn't
address the fundamental ugliness and disunity of the OS.

What Ubuntu needs is a change the magnitude of, say, OS9 -> OSX or XP ->
Vista.

------
sailormoon
_The social networking client Gwibber is now built right into the desktop._

Argh! There's nothing I hate more than seemingly cool open source software
being saddled from birth with _ridiculous_ names! Gwibber!? What was the
author thinking!?

~~~
e1ven
Twitter isn't exactly the poster-boy of great naming. Names grow on you when
you use them more. GIMP, I'll give you, though...

