

Ubuntu - Brave New World? Or Jumping off a Cliff?  - gherlein
http://blog.herlein.com/2010/11/ubuntu-brave-new-world-or-jumping-off-a-cliff/

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wccrawford
Phrases like 'has to convince the market' always turn me off an article.
Especially when dealing with FREE stuff. What exactly IS the market for
'free'?

People will use Ubuntu as long as it is good, and Canonical will make money
supporting it as long as people use it.

Personally, I prefer Kubuntu... But that doesn't really make much difference,
does it?

I've used other distros in the past, but they all came up short in ways I
couldn't deal with. Slackware always seemed to be needing something hand-
compiled... Debian always seemed to be years in the past, which generally
meant I had to hand-compile things there, too. RedHat and I just never got
along.

Then along comes Kubuntu and improves Debian in the one way that mattered to
me: It was current.

I like that Ubuntu stays edgy and always uses new things as soon as they are
ready for use. (I will admit, sometimes they do it a bit -before- they are
ready.) Seeing them move away from X, I actually considered trying it instead
of KDE for the next release. We'll see how it goes when it's here.

And it's not like this affects Ubuntu servers at all, either. They don't even
use X.

~~~
BCM43
Have you tried debian testing? It is rolling release and generally as stable
as ubuntu.

~~~
wccrawford
The last time I tried Debian Testing, it was still WAY behind Ubuntu. I moved
to Ubuntu because it had things I wanted already in its repositories that
Debian Testing didn't.

I even ran Debian Unstable for a while and still wasn't happy.

Mind you, that was my only complaint about Debian. I think it's a great
distro, just a bit dated due to stability concerns.

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viraptor
It's bizarre for me... I see every single release better in general, but worse
in details. I just keep a list of things to unbreak after installation. Even
though I like the whole system, they seem to be going for the new and shiny
stuff too much and I don't think they'll ever going to produce a mature
system.

Some examples: F-spot was replaced with Shotwell instead of fixing F-spot's
problems (if there were any, I was happy with it). My scanner worked out of
the box with xsane (even launched it after plugging in), now with simple-scan
not only I cannot change resolution, but it doesn't detect the device until I
install xsane itself. On top of that, there are silly issues like the "Play
log-in sound" checkbox, which is broken for the last 2 years, even though
there were many bugs reported for it. Or automatically enabling 3'rd mouse
button emulation with no way to disable it via GUI (non-starter for FPS
gamers) - there's a different way to disable it for every single version
because of the xorg -> hal -> udev -> xinput (broken xorg-snippets) -> working
xorg-snippets migration.

Ubuntu seems to be going for the new and shiny and noone cares what
regressions will it cause. This is not something "normal users" will let them
do. I can fix it by hand, report a bug (and silently be angry that it's
ignored for years), but a typical user will say "it's broken" and that will be
the end of his ubuntu experience. If they don't bring quality to the table
soon, they'll just annoy new potential users.

~~~
sp332
F-Spot was dropped for a single reason, which turned out to have both
political and practical backing: it requires Mono to be part of the default
Ubuntu install.

~~~
viraptor
That's unlikely, since tomboy is still included (so Mono is included too).
There is also a plan for another .net application to be added to the default
(can't recall the name now).

------
zith
Google web cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=ubuntu&#...</a>

~~~
tomjen3
Thanks, it seems somebody is breaking the internet today. This is the second
hn article that doesn't load.

------
jarin
I think they realized what Apple realized a long time ago. Wayland/Unity could
be Ubuntu's Quartz Compositor/Aqua.

~~~
Incubus
I certainly hope so, I just hope that they manage to pull it off.

I expect the next couple of releases to be garbage though, I just can't see
them having enough time to make it fast and stable enough to be work using. If
I'm wrong I'll be delighted.

------
lhnn
"If [Microsoft] grows some courage (doubtful) they could change the game in a
big way – perhaps by acquiring companies like Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth
could be crazy like a fox."

That Microsoft would acquire Canonical is crazy like a crazy person. Anything
particularly unique Canonical does would be poisoned by GPL code, or copy-able
without a buyout.

