

An Apple User Tries Ubuntu - rams
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/3742066

======
petercooper
This wasn't a bad article to read, although it doesn't really get anywhere. A
reasonably novice Mac user tries out Ubuntu, finds some pros and cons.. the
end. Quite well written though but some of his insights don't quite make
sense..

> I had heard that Linux users still use a command line. Instead of pointing
> and clicking, they actually type in obscure commands – a series of numbers,
> letters, and squiggly things. It’s very Russian spy, black hat, deep nerd.

So do most technically minded OS X users. Admittedly he says he finds the
command line quite useful on page 2, but Linux's command line offers no
benefits over OS X's.

> My test laptop was using the GNOME desktop interface. On start up, it
> offered me a choice of interfaces (KDE, GNOME, etc.) The oddness of this
> struck me: isn’t Ubuntu enough? It appears I still needed to select a
> separate desktop interface. [...] The Linux desktop needs to eliminate that
> extra choice if it wants to reach a mass audience.

That's what Ubuntu is attempting to do: enforce a standard. I don't recall
Ubuntu asking me this question with a default install. You're never going to
be able to eradicate the ability to choose though, because people on both
sides of the KDE/GNOME fence are pretty diehard. I can see why, because I
"quite like" GNOME and think KDE is a bloated, ugly, block piece of Windows-
inspired junk (basically, I respect KDE as much as I respect Comic Sans) and I
don't usually take sides on things like this..

~~~
ajross
I might quibble with the "Linux's command line offers no benefits" line. It's
true that the _shell_ is identical. But OS X, out of the box, is lacking huge
chunks of what you expect to find out-of-the-box on a typical Linux
distribution. That's a problem for anyone who wants to be able to portable
scripts, etc... Add that to the fact that the existing package managers for
the command line tools are kinda lacking, and I'd honestly put OS X behind
even cygwin as a good example of a OS command line environment.

The bit about Gnome vs. KDE is a sore point, alas. Canonical itself is clearly
a Gnome shop, and that's what they ship on their core Ubuntu Desktop
distribution. But KDE has a huge user base of near-fanatic volunteers, who
insist (how dare they!) on maintaining the Kubuntu distribution in parallel.
Both desktops work very well, and at this point neither is likely to
disappear.

FWIW, I use Gnome and prefer the architecture and API.

~~~
evgen
The stock OS X box comes with enough of the standard command-line toolbox that
if you are actually writing a "portable" script you are not going to have a
problem running that script on OS X. The biggest differentiator is probably
that OS X is a part of the *BSD lineage and so you will need to do more
tweaking of a Linux script to get it bsd-ready than you will need to tweak a
standard bsd script to move it from FreeBSD to OS X. While macports is closer
to the freebsd port system, it is close enough to apt-get that you should
really have no problems switching from one to the other.

~~~
ajross
It's been a few versions since I paid close attention, but as I remember OS X
ships with only the bare POSIX tools, plus a few extras from the FreeBSD
userspace. It lacks stuff like perl, python, curl, wget, ssh (maybe: not sure
about that one), tcpdump, etc... That's all stuff the poor user is going to
have to figure out how to get.

And as mentioned, the existing package systems for OSS software are really
primitive. There's just no equivalent for, say, the Ubuntu synaptic tool for
new users.

I'm not trying to make this into a flame war: clearly you _can_ achieve a
pretty solid command line experience in OS X if you know what you're doing.
But you're never going to learn it there without a bunch of headaches if you
don't already have that expertise.

~~~
nickd
I'm running Leopard right now, and I have python, perl, curl, ssh, and
tcpdump. I have no idea why wget is left out of the default install, but I
just get it with macports, which is just a download and double click install
away. Anyone who would be using these tools wouldn't have any problem setting
it up. A few revisions of OS X ago things did seem relatively odd to the
average Bash user. The shell was tcsh, and being based on BSD everything felt
a bit off to someone switching from Linux, but these days it's pretty much all
there. You should give it another look if you get a chance.

~~~
apgwoz
wget is left out simply for licensing reasons. curl is an MIT license, wget is
GPL.

edit: I second guess this now that I think about it. bash is GPL...

------
bouncingsoul
I think this is a normal Ubuntu review that's been spiced up by painting the
reviewer as an amateur user and Mac fan. I don't believe the last part though.

The amateur user thing just doesn't seem consistent throughout. And the way he
talks about his limitations as a user ("I’m not a software engineer; if I
can’t grab it off the shelf, I can’t use it.") just strikes me as reciting a
persona.

Two other obvservations:

* His experience with OS X must have been a long time ago because there's no mention of Exposé, Spaces, or Spotlight – which are all comparable features to the Ubuntu ones that impressed him. And if he was truly an OS X user all these years he'd know about them because they were the main features touted on the upgrade boxes. (Unless he's never upgraded from OS X 10.1.)

* From my memory and quick research Ubuntu doesn't come with KDE – you have to install it. I'm guessing the journalist read about the Linux war between Gnome and KDE and decided the throw it into his story even though it didn't actually happen to him. (Though it's possible Virginia Tech gave him a customized Ubuntu install to play with.)

------
apgwoz
> I know Ubuntu is free software, but I don’t care about that. It’s more
> important that my system be good, not cheap. (And if it was really that
> great, they’d charge for it, right?).

I wanted to stop reading right there, because the reviewer is ill informed by
what it means to be "free," however I stuck it out and he gives a favorable
review.

~~~
etal
The first 10 paragraphs seem to be intentionally echoing the usual gripes and
fears, in an ignorant-sounding tone. The author could have made it more clear,
but I think he meant for it to sound flippant or somewhat mocking, then rebut
most of it in the rest of the article.

It's a decent Mac-user-tries-Ubuntu anecdote, not so much a review. But he
does bring up one good point: Apple spends hojillions on advertising, and
Microsoft at least matches that. Word of mouth is great for converting power-
users, but there's a reason the advertising industry churns through so much
money -- it works.

~~~
felixc
While the point about advertising is interesting, I think it's a bit of a red
herring: Apple and Microsoft are trying to make money by having people use
their OS, so naturally they have to convert people, or convince them to not
switch to the competition. Linux on the other hand doesn't _need_ to convert
people.

Sure, the more users you get, the more potential developers there are, and the
better the system will end up being. And of course there are commercial Linux
distributions. But in general, Linux doesn't need advertising, because it
doesn't need to "win." It just needs to stay alive for those of us who want to
use it!

------
mdasen
He seems like a real novice Mac user.

Ubuntu is nice, but both Ubuntu and GNU/Linux aren't without flaws that don't
exist in the Mac/Windows world (that a novice might not notice).

Examples:

Software. I can grab off the internet or the shelf any piece of "Windows"
software and put it on my computer. Likewise, I can do the same with the Mac.
I can't say that about GNU/Linux. Why? Because each distribution (and new
version of a specific distro) has different dependencies taken care of by a
regular install. Distros get around this by providing repositories (and
Ubuntu's is excellent), but it's still different than being able to just grab
stuff. GNU/Linux is much more in a state of flux which means that it can
progress very quickly, but also that software requires more tweaking for each
distro.

Proprietary stuff. This has come a long way since I started using Linux in the
RedHat 9 days. Ubuntu 8.04 allows for easy installation of proprietary codecs,
but things like DeCSS (for DVD playback) is still a pain and flash (becoming
more important in the YouTube generation) is absolute crap. Not the fault of
GNU/Linux, but it does still lessen my enjoyment of it.

UI stuff. I like GNOME's HIG for the most part, but GTK+ is starting to look
old. Look at Adium and Pidgin. Pidgin is a fine piece of software, but it just
looks cludgy by comparison. Likewise, there are just somethings that no one
seems to want to fix (the minimize animation is crap). More abstractly, none
of the desktop environments seem to be hitting what I'll call the Firefox
level. Specifically, that nice balance between simplicity and complexity that
Firefox seems to hit. GNOME goes for simplicity to a fault while KDE will
throw every useless thing into the mix and tell you that you should just be
comfortable looking through a cludgy list of a million settings.

GRANTED, there are many thing that are simply superior about GNU/Linux.
Examples include software updates that don't require restarts, some of the
best multi-tasking I've seen (where Windows and Mac might make other processes
hang a bit in responsiveness), and of course being free. It's truly amazing,
but there are some annoyances.

If I were to lay out some milestone's in GNU/Linux's future, I'd have to argue
that these would be important: like LSB (Linux Standards Base) becoming the
norm (which I think will happen when developers start seeing the number of new
things they can add decline and they focus on environment stability); getting
consumers off proprietary codecs and environments (like flash or DVD - yes,
this is out there); and a change in one of the two desktop environment's
philosophies to be more Firefox-like in terms of verbosity and the like.

------
tlrobinson
As a Mac user, this article made me cringe.

 _> And that Safari can’t handle certain Web features, including plenty of
videos._

That's not really true, unless he's talking about crappy IE-specific sites.
Most videos will play with the appropriate codecs installed (Flip4Mac and
Perian cover most)

 _> ...and some even still use the command line. (The command line? Oh,
geez…)_

This says much more about your level of experience than your platform of
choice (though I imagine the average Linux user uses the command line much
more than the average Windows or OS X user). To his credit, it seems he sees
the light later in the article.

 _> First off, immediately, before anything: the rotating desktop. Damn, that
is totally cool. You click an icon in the screen’s lower right, and the
desktop rotates to a fresh view. Remarkably, you can have up to 16 different
desktops._

OS X has that too! Up to 16 different desktops! (it's called "Spaces") Granted
they copied it directly from Linux, but it's there, rotation and all (I think
OS X may have actually had the rotation effect first, with Fast User
Switching)

~~~
thwarted
No, most people only saw the effect first on OSX.
<http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/> I'm sure it predates that too.

Every so often, I come across some weird "new" effect I swear I saw
implemented in Enlightenment, which always seemed to have some cool eye-candy,
years ago, but the hardware just wasn't up to it at the time.

------
avinashv
> It’s not just cool, it’s great for workflow. You can have files and
> documents open on one desktop – maybe you’ve got four browser windows open,
> researching something – and a single click takes you to a fresh desktop,
> with documents and apps open as you like.

The article was written on May 2, 2008, well after the release of Leopard
which ships with Spaces.

> The results come up in different colors, which helps you locate things. (I
> think.)

The article is filled with little nibblets like this that scream novice user.

> And what the heck is ‘KDE’?” The Linux desktop needs to eliminate that extra
> choice if it wants to reach a mass audience.

Probably the most significant thing in this article: I wholeheartedly agree
that for _everyone else_ , it should ship with one desktop interface--likely
the more popular one. I imagine that would be Gnome. I agree with him that if
someone like my grandmother tried to start up Ubuntu for the first time would
see this and think she had done something wrong.

~~~
jcl
_Probably the most significant thing in this article: I wholeheartedly agree
that for everyone else, it should ship with one desktop interface..._

I don't know if this has changed recently, but when I installed Ubuntu, it did
not ask me to choose -- it defaulted to Gnome. If you later wanted KDE, you
had to install it separately (or you could have installed the KDE-only Kubuntu
in the first place). It makes me suspect that the friend that set up the
Ubuntu box went through the additional trouble of installing both
environments, so that the author was not playing with a vanilla install:

[http://www.watchingthenet.com/switch-between-gnome-and-
kde-d...](http://www.watchingthenet.com/switch-between-gnome-and-kde-desktops-
in-ubuntu-or-kubuntu.html)

~~~
avinashv
Actually, it's been a while since I had been on Ubuntu--I can't remember for
sure! I was going by what he said.

------
jdbeast00
i tried ubuntu over the weekend (this time for real, not on a VM). I was
severely shocked to see that in order to have multiple monitor support, I
would have to start editing config files. I'm a tad bit linux savvy (i know
what cd is, in other words) but this was just too much hassle. I stuck with
vista... :(

~~~
0x44
Knowing how to change directories isn't really evidence of "linux savvy",
considering the command is the same in Linux, Unix, and Windows.

As for multiple-monitor support, your hardware vendor will often have a GUI
configurator just like they provide for Windows. ATI's is called Catalyst
Control.

------
Angostura
Another Mac user here. I gave Ubuntu a spin the other week, running in
Virtualbox on my main machine.

I thought it looked slick and was very usable.

Then I tried downloading and installing Firefox 3.

I grabbed it, unarchived it and then.... then what? Where's the bloody
installer.

~~~
cstejerean
ubuntu hardy comes with FF3 installed, and typically you can install most
software you need using Synaptic (from the GUI, apt-get from the command
line). You might also be able to find a binary version on the site where you
downloaded from (look for .deb files).

If that's not an option (which is possible with FF3 if you're using an older
version of Ubuntu) then chances are you need to build the software you
downloaded from source and this is where it gets more complicated (although
not that complicated unless you happen to get errors).

In case anyone is new to Linux and curious here are the typical steps to
building a package from source.

    
    
      > wget http://example.com/somefile.tar.gz (or you can download with the browser)
      > tar zxvf somefile.tar.gz (or you can extract the archive using your desktop manager)
      > cd somefile
      > ./configure (if you don't see a configure and there is a file called Makefile present you can skip this step)
      > make (this will compile the software)
      > sudo make install (if you didn't get any errors during make you can use this to install the software)
    

Depending on the specific software you are trying to install you might need to
pass configuration options to ./configure, you should typically look for such
things in the instructions for the particular software you are trying to
install. Also note that on Ubuntu you should install build-essential first
(sudo apt-get install build-essential).

~~~
Angostura
Many thanks for the explanation. Much appreciated.

------
tptacek
"Granted, I was testing on the campus of Virginia Tech, which has a fire-
breathingly fast Net connection. But I’ve often checked out Web page load time
while standing in an Apple store – and you know that’s optimized for speed –
and it still wasn’t as fast."

Here I stopped reading.

------
pi3832
>There’s a reason that Apple has always been the choice of artists and
musicians. The machine itself is artful. Yeah, it’s expensive, and it crashes,
but it’s artful. And that counts for a whole lot.

What? Apples crash?! Unpossible--Apples are the greatest computers evar!

------
Kilimanjaro
He tries so hard to look like an Apple user that I hardly believe he really is
one.

------
swombat
I'm certain I've read this article before. Given all the anachronisms in the
article, that really points to this being an old article. Google didn't turn
up anything though :-/

------
lpgauth
"Eeek! It’s a Command Line! (Run, Hide…)"

If only he knew the power of the CL...

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
If he could be turned, he would be a powerful ally.

------
hs
ubuntu-desktop stays true to its name ... an OS for average users only for
desktoping

you know a unix OS is broken when you google "how do i compile / patch vim in
ubuntu?"

or when you can't ssh to ubuntu-desktop machine

Ubuntu is an OS designed by committee ... it's secure by being weak

The only thing good about ubuntu is its supports for new hardwares; however,
quality is questionable.

~~~
Tichy
Well on OS X I googled for "how to rename a file" and "how to copy a file" (OS
X file manager doesn't support cut+paste). On the other hand, I just installed
vim on Ubuntu the other day with synaptic, no problems whatsoever.

~~~
hs
"apt-get install" is not the same as compile from source

you are at the mercy of repositories

"make install" on the other hand, gives you more freedom

vim patching problem was kinda solved by using intrepid repo instead of
hardy's ... but also gave birth to other problems

To me, a unix system that is unable to compile from source (only binaries) is
on the same level as windows

even on mac, i can use port, it fetches the sources and dependencies, compiles
everything, beautiful!

NB: yes i did apt-get dev-compilers & libraries & dependencies

 _shrug_ I guess Ubuntu is not there yet

------
signa11
smith-n-wesson the 'original' point and click interface :o)

------
xlnt
Safari's video support and general works-well-ness was bad 3 years ago, but
it's just fine now.

edit: he doesn't seem to know that macs have a command line

~~~
hernan7
"edit: he doesn't seem to know that macs have a command line"

Yes, I found that bizarre. That, and the part where he writes that Ubuntu
"does everything that Windows does".

