Ubuntu: Desktop Linux's Success Story 68
Johhny writes "What is it about Ubuntu that has enabled it to grow so much? This distribution has clearly built on Debian's success but it has more than a few other things going for it. Ubuntu has become one of the most popular versions of desktop Linux despite its many differences from some of the other popular versions out there, including its scheduled releases and its counterpart, Kubuntu. The article takes a look at this distribution and tries to find out how Ubuntu defied the odds. This article generated a really informative comments page at OSnews."
Easy but not completely easy (Score:5, Insightful)
let me put it this way: you get a fresh clean install and there's nothing at all to configure or fuss with. seems great but you can't play mp3's. hunh? it's a small thing, you can figure it out. so you go and do a little search at Ubuntu [ubuntulinux.org] and they explain that it's not free. you're a newbie to linux and you don't understand how it's different here than on your windows box. so you drift over to GNU [gnu.org] and do a little reading. maybe you learn about free-as-in-beer vs free-as-in-speech.
then you go back to the friendly forums and find a nice step by step on how to add in extra repositories. wow, all this stuff is free, and hey look how much there is in the Universe, and then in the Multiverse. yoiks! this linux thing is amazing. and it's not so tough.
and i think that might be the whole point. someone waltzing into a full distro with everything in the world (even a program that will time how long your tea steeps) is a lot more intimidating than most of us really think. and of course the exact same goes for a distro that you're compiling from scratch. if there is any single thing i think Ubuntu has going for it, it is that it gives you everything a complete OS really needs to have (office, web, photos) but somehow sneaks in just a small lesson here and there about what the linux world is really about. if your parents can read a help menu (and the Breezy Badger help is one of the best i've ever read) they can figure out those little things that will eventually convert them to being true penguin lovers for life
Re:Does this mean that a successfull distro must b (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, usually both Ubuntu and Redhat are very high on any use list; on distrowatch, Gnome-based distros have frequently been at the top. The vocal people - the ones that are very visible and audible - are a fairly small group, and not representative for the large group of users. You have to be both passionate and fairly knowledgeable to bother to vote or fill in survey results about such arcane things as the choice of desktop. Most people just don't care that strongly either way.
And I think that is exactly what Ubuntu is getting right. Yes, apt is nice, the distro has a lot of spit and polish applied, and it has a wide and current selection of packages to choose from. But most important, Ubuntu is inclusive. People on the mailing lists and forums really _don't_care_ if you're running Gnome or KDE; or if you prefer Vi or EMACs, or
Since that attitude is fairly pervasive on everything from mailing lists to Wiki docs, people feel welcome, they feel appreciated. It's easy to get help because it's easy to _ask_ for help; you can feel nobody is going to call you an idiot for asking a dumb question. I think that is really what sets it apart and what makes it so popular.
Re:wtf (Score:3, Insightful)
not to be a complete troll but most applications that have security exploits exposed are also used in other distros
and ubuntu is the only one brave enough who gives out warnings and security updates at the same time to keep you safe. other distros just leave you in darkness or provide you with packages that are safe, but sadly older than my grandma. if you compare the number of codelines in package sources to the number of ubuntu/debian developers/packagers, you will find out that there developers and packagers are always and forever hopelessly outnumbered. it's impossible for them to create distro from opensource packages which is 100% secure, but unlike redhat and it's colleagues, debian/ubuntu people have the guts to tell you that "hey, there's a bug or a security flaw here".
if one company in redmond doesn't have the staff to check it's 100 applications for flaws, how do you suppose a bunch of opensource workers or a few hundred redhat people can pull the security checks off for thousands of applications ? it's pretty clear that they just can't. you are no safer with any other linux distro.
i use ubuntu on my laptop because i'm a fan of debian, but a raw debian on a laptop is hardly as nice as ubuntu. so this is the "gui version" of debian for me. i know how to keep it safe and i know how to keep it clean. most commercial distro users have no idea about any of this on their machines. and this successfully nullifies their idea to go on linux for better security. ignorance may be bliss, but it won't protect your files.
nothing can protect the computer from the ignorance and stupidity of the end user, not even the "supermegabest distro".
Re:Does this mean that a successfull distro must b (Score:5, Insightful)
A sad article based on a near-meaningless survey (Score:3, Insightful)
It's sad to see an opinion piece based on a news story about a survey that doesn't really tell you anything concrete about what the opinion piece claims to be about. If you look at the survey, you see that only 50 percent of the respondents claim they have already deployed Linux on the desktop. The question about distros asks which distro they're considering or currently running. So there's a good chance half the people are doing rectal extrapolations based on what they've been mulling over after reading something somewhere in the mainstream media about easy-to-use versions of desktop Linux.
And the survey choices can be questioned. They list quite a few distros, but don't have three -- Mepis, Slackware and Damn Small -- that have been in the Distrowatch top 10 for a while now.
Worse, the guy who wrote the opinion piece goes out of his way to lump Kubuntu in with Ubuntu (which seems fair, given the Kubuntu respondents would probably pick Ubuntu), but doesn't lump the two versions of Suse and Red Hat together. Maybe he was put off by the fact Suse would have ended up with 60 percent of some imaginary number (seeing as respondents could apparently choose as many distros as they wanted) and beat out Ubuntu. I can see why they would want paid-versus-free information on the survey, but if you're doing an opinion piece strictly about popularity, I think you should lump them together.
But popularity is the point. And the little note about the survey getting more attention in some communities than others is, I think, the telling point. I use Slackware and Ubuntu, and as somebody who lurks in both communities, my take is that Slackers are busy keeping to themselves, solving their own problems and doing stuff, while those Ubuntu guys set aside some time in their days for evangelism. They're everywhere, and they're apparently writing and voting all the while. Reminds me of when I was a Mac user and certain sites would link to online surveys to make sure the Mac platform wasn't left out. You could watch the numbers change as the word spread in the Mac community, skewing the results.
So the article is air, and not even hot air at that. That said, I use Ubuntu on my laptop after getting several distros (Gentoo, Slackware, FreeBSD...) almost there (damn suspend and CPU frequency scaling). I popped in Ubuntu and everything worked out of the box. It's not my main machine, so it's the path of least resistance. And we all know how appealing that is to most people.
Re:Is it a success? (Score:5, Insightful)
My theory on that is that there is a group of linux users that swarm to whatever is new and different and are very vocal about it. Gentoo was new and different for a while, now it's not and those users have left, leaving users who use Gentoo because it fits their need better than the alternatives. These users tend to be less vocal and so it appears that Gentoo has largely disappeared from slashdot/fark/whatever even though the gentoo community continues to grow (at least according to forum statistics, netcraft surveys, etc).
It will be interesting to see if all the buzz surrounding Ubuntu lasts once it is no longer a novelty and the swarming users have moved on.
A Shared Philosophy (Score:3, Insightful)
Ubuntu's release cycle can feed that. (Score:3, Insightful)
And so on.
It's the 6 month cycle that feeds the journalists' need for new material.