"A positive point about the new version is the booting speed: Feisty boots in 40 seconds on my laptop, while Vista needs about 50 (with McAfee turned off)." How does the current version of Ubuntu compare to this? I have a new laptop and it seems to take over two minutes (while plugged in) to boot up. Oddly, it takes ~1 minute to boot up when it isn't plugged in. I don't understand how that works, but alright. For comparision, Windows XP boots in about 45 seconds.

I decided to try Ubuntu (my first unix experience) two days ago. I spent two days trying to get it to use a proper aspect ratio for my main monitor and to use my second monitor as anything but a clone of the first monitor. All I could do was the former. I may go back to it someday to play but I just spent the evening learning how to get grub to boot into windows automatically and to hide the grub menu. Granted there may be an easy solution to all unix problems but they are not intuitive. I love (and use) many open source programs but until I have 9-5 job, I don't have the time to learn even Ubuntu.

It's amazing how, since Ubuntu hit the scene, that the Linux Desktop has just dramatically improved. Before Ubuntu, things were meandering along without much focus it seems, with the best out of the box experience being Knoppix, which unfortunately was too complicated for the average user to install (being focused as it was as a Live CD).

It seems now that every six months brings as more improvements as Vista has to XP. And for most users, I would consider the Linux desktop as "here", if not for some applications which have little to do with the distro itself but have me asking - when are developers going to step in and provide ports or at least make sure they run fine in Wine without much modification? Do we Linux users have to signal to them that we are more than willing to pay for some things? Will Click-n-Run, when ported to Ubuntu later this year, spur this on? Will CnR maybe bring up a new crop of Linux developers servicing the Linux community with specific pay-for apps in the vacuum of development houses staying loyal to MS? Not every App lends itself to having the developer do support contracts afterall.

It's frustrating to be ignored, I already "converted" 3 people to Ubuntu this year - but these are types who simply want to browse the web and one had their MS OS trashed by malware and wanted something secure but convenient (FYI I don't delete Windows, just shrink the partition if they ever need it). But these are side converts, it really doesn't matter what OS they use - they won't ever go out and buy software - so for all intents and purposes the development houses can ignore them.

I don't get it really. I use linux for quite some time. Occasionally I look around to see what suits me best. And yes we have come a long way.

Ubunto is...nice. I mean, there is nothing wrong with it (I even have it installed on one of my PPC machines). But lately it seems like every one and his mum is using it (or trying to). But it is neither the most powerful nor the most userfriendly distro out there. What is it that makes people want to use Ubuntu.

It is also not true that it just "works". As depending on your hardware each distro can have problems. And with respect to easy system installation or configuration Ubuntu is much much worse that for example SUSE or especially Mandriva (the config tools are sometimes a bit ugly, but they are OSS and the best ones I have seen).

So what is it about Ubuntu that makes ppl like it so much?

I'm a noob. I know little to nothing about Linux and just enough to be dangerous with Windows. I have tried several distros over the last 12 or 15 years and Ubuntu was the first time ever that everything worked, including my wireless card. Overall I found it fairly easy to navigate and wouldn't think anyone fairly proficient in an MS environment would have a lot of trouble figuring out how to use it.

I have gotten things running under other distros as well but Ubuntu's was the easiest I've ever encountered. If I can avoid having to manually do things from a command prompt I prefer not to and Ubuntu made that possible. I realize a lot of /.'ers live for the command prompt (or claim to) but the pool of potential converts consists of users who expect to click something and be on their merry way. It wouldn't hurt if games (games not featuring penguins) worked better. Seems a bit of a catch 22 when games and apps aren't often ported to Linux due to lack of demand, and that lack of commercial software might be a deciding factor for would be users.

I find it hard to believe I'm the only one who is going to find it hard to take an OS with the name Feisty Fawn seriously!

Unlike an OS that has serious codenames like: Snowball, Dolly, Longhorn Blackcomb, etc.

In case you did not know, Feisty Fawn is will officially be Ubuntu 7.04 once launched.

Theres already a few things that I like, although everyone is different of course these problems really bug me on Windows XP and wish/hope they fixed them in Vista or Vista+1..

- No need to defrag your system.
- Can have lots and lots of files in the same folder without limit (not so important for everyone I guess)
- When you cut and paste DVD movie files from one folder to another on the same Hard Drive its almost instant (as in doesn't copy anything just reallocates it).
- When you copy files from one location to another and theres no space left it doesn't delete all the files that you just copied.
- When you copy files to a new location it checks that there is enough space for it to copy all the files.
- When your doing something CPU intensive it doesn't slow down the GUI. You can watch a movie even though the CPU is at 100% doing something else.

I hope this is the "Firefox wakeup" moment for Microsoft to improve their Desktop with these features too. Also there are many bad points about Ubuntu too but this would be my wish list for Windows.

Also the file copying feature that doesn't delete the files you copied is something windows needs a lot. Yesterday I was doing some data recovery with Knoppix to a USB pen and my boss kept saying "Check how big it is before you copy it". I didn't understand why until I asked him and he explained that its because it would delete the files if its too big for the USB pen.

I had to explain to him that doesn't happen on Linux systems only Windows. Does that happen on the Mac? I don't think it does..

Really? What bugs are non-issues? Tell me and I will look into it for you and report them to the bug tracker.

I have had problems with Dapper Drake and Edgy because I am using a laptop and every bug I have reported has been taken seriously. Please tell me so I can look into it for you.

I hope you will give Ubuntu another go when the next Long Term Support release comes out. :D

I agree with you completely. GP's argument is that because Mac can run everything else inside it, it therefore is the ultimate OS.
Get VMware and Linux is the ultimate OS using the same argument.

The ultimate OS should be determined based on merits of the operating system itsself, not what other operating systems you can run to get required features.

Personally as a guy who has on average 6 - 10 consoles open at any one time, Mac OS X isnt flexible enough to be the ultimate OS.
You just cant get the necessary power from it when you need it.

Linux can on the other hand adapt to be n00b friendly or power user friendly.
The fact that you have distros like Ubuntu and Gentoo as two extremes is proof of that.

"Why is it that everyone is so focused on linux desktops, and not the core internals of the OS?"

Core internals? Hah, I know where you're from. So, a question for a question: where are all the Windows fanboys raving about the fantastic core internals of Vista? That is right.

"I hear many linux geeks whining about how bloated the windows vista system is"

You do? Well, it must be true than, eh? I remember geeks complaining about how bloated XP, 2000, ME, 98SE, 98 or KDE, Gnome, 2.6, 2.5, Red Hat, SuSE etc. etc. etc. is. So, when I hear someone complain about bloat, i don't take them serious, it really was the only thing they could think of. And it sounds really professional, like you actually only care about serious server-like stuff.

"Why do we then go and focus so much on the same aspects of linux?" Sorry, what's your beef??? I can't parse the logic of your comment. First you complain that linux geeks are preoccupied with Vista bloat, then you state we do the same with linux (or don't do the same)?

"I read the malloc man page, and the big memory mapping issue still remains, and as a result I still need to continually reboot to keep my ram defragmented....." Yeah, I read the same, you know how much work it is to keep that ram defragmented? I do it by hand(!!), can you believe how much work that is!

This isn't a Windows vs. Linux article. Its a Linux vs. Linux Article.

The screen resolution problem he was having was because he was using alpha software. Its like comparing Windows Longhorn as the final product for the end user. This version of Ubuntu still has a lot more testing to do before its being released.

So far we've had the following of Ubuntu Feistry Fawn: Herd 1, 2, 3, 4 and are currently on 5. These are "Alpha"s?

Next there is going to be "Release Candidate"s. These are "Beta"s? I can assure you that there are going to be at least RC1 and RC2 of Feisty before its released.

So any specific problems with Feisty Fawn should be commented on after its released not while it is still in Alpha. :D

This is a very serious problem of Ubuntu that is overlooked by the developers. Problems with specific hardware like those in the TFA, can be common especially these days with so many different combinations of monitors and video cards. I'd like to see some sort of "safe mode" that kicks in when there are problems, and a GUI to allow proper reconfiguration. If you expect a windows user to manually edit Xorg.conf, you're wrong.

"The year of Linux arrives the year Adobe ports their software to Linux."

We hear that all the time but i don't believe there's any truth in that
statement. I tried to switch MS office users to OO, and allthough it worked
they all demanded to have MS office back. Even though a newer version came
out and the company had to pay big dollars for the upgrades, the management
said. So what, even i tried OO , but everything is soooo much different
(meaning, language (dutch) was a bit inconsistent in comparison to MSoffice and
some functions where in a different location).

Now i even understand why one of the highest management guy's over there didn't
want to switch. He was kind of an Excel guru and used about every function in Excel,
and had 5 years of data in Excel documents. Not all of them converted the right way(tm).

But other users used Excel only as a calculator , or add adresses to a name, and MS Word
for birthday cards. And even they complained and bluntly refused to use OO. Management
agreed with them offcourse.

So it isn't just Adobe's products, it's the whole mindset of people. Not to mention
Desktop in the office where custom software has to run. Try bookkeeping on linux. The
company who makes that software (biggest in the netherlands, the only one that has all
the functionality we need) bluntly refuses to make a windows version. In the newest version
they even require a Microsoft SQL server, wheras previous versions would run happily of a
samba server.

Telebanking software. Banks refuse to make Linux clients.
Tax software, no linux clients.
Salary payment accounting software, No linux client, almost the same story as the
bookkeeping i mentioned.
Various government programs (automaticly transfer data about sick days, salaries, free time
, vacation, days off etc) to all the various government departments, all Windows only.

We don't use adobe products. Only PDF readers and they are a dime a dozen.

kind regards,

The first two items are general attributes of ext3 and reiserfs. The next two are part of the kernel's generic FS layer (if I remember correctly.) That last one is just due to Linux's thread scheduler being very intelligent.

Microsoft is not likely to adopt ext3 or ext4 support, much less reiserfs support. File copying is fairly old and not likely to be updated. It's feasible, though, that Microsoft could improve their thread scheduler, but it's not going to be a high priority because they will be busy for a while writing security patches for Vista and I highly doubt they will release kernel optimizations for the newly obsoleted XP.

Perhaps not entirely technical reasons. Why did Java take off at such tremendous speed and become so preeminent, when there are so many good languages out there? It's partly a matter of timing, but largely a question of mass psychology. For some reason, certain memes go howling into overdrive and enjoy a positive feedback loop that boosts their growth into the stratosphere.

When you find out exactly why these things happen, you can become the world's richest individual more or less overnight.

Only problem with the refreshing of the repositories is that each time you refresh them, you need to download 5 MBs of data (that's with the restricted and multiverse repositories enabled)

That is peculiar. APT introduced pdiff downloading long ago (in "experimental", in Debian); then in May 2006, in version 0.6.44, apt pdiff support from experimental was merged in the unstable version: so this feature will be available in Debian Etch. If Ubuntu Feisty is shipping a reasonably new APT, all they need to do is to start generating the appropriate pdiffs in their repository.... and no more 5MBs download.

And Adobe pre-loader. And the MS Office pre-loader. And all the "download assistants". And all the adware and spyware. And the boot-time tools that try to pre-index your file system, which will definitely slow things as your system gets more files on it.

The list goes on, and some of it is very hard to get rid of. I love SpyBot for blocking it: they don't have the legal fears of calling spyware and adware by their right names, even if it's "selected" by ignorant users who don't know it's incorporated into other downloads. Some commercial anti-virus packages have taken on this business of blocking adware, but it's a legally nasty business for them.

It is and it is a BAD idea to clear the prefetch folder.

From a performance standpoint, yes it does seem like that based on your accurate technical description of how the prefetch folder works.

However, it would seem that there might be some kernel of truth to the misconception that cleaning out this folder will improve performance. Here's what you said in your article:

If you're one of those people that tries a lot of programs in a 1-off fashion, much like writers for tech news sites might do, you will probably degrade your performance somewhat. Since Windows only ever keeps 128 files in the prefetch folder, as you describe it, the more 1-off programs you try, the more Windows will delete some of those files in the prefetch folder -- including ones for programs that you use regularly. Clearing out the prefetch folder will not actually help this situation much, if at all, but clearing it out if that's your scenario may actually cause some appearance of improved performance since Windows won't have to scan the files in that folder, nor will it have to delete any files out of the folder. In reality, you're probably hurting yourself more than helping, but it would explain why the myth exists.

I have had problems with Dapper Drake and Edgy because I am using a laptop and every bug I have reported has been taken seriously.

I have been reporting bugs whenever I run across them in every distro I've used, and only Ubuntu consistently follows up on the bugs. I used RHEL for many years and never got the kind of attention paid to the bug issues that I had the way Ubuntu does.

Applications! Applications! Applications! Applications! Applications!

Most people I know don't care at all about what OS they're running. Not one bit. That's something that we here at slashdot do. Most people will choose the OS that has the applications that they need. 90% of the time that's windows.

Let me go through the usual "selling points" of Linux and their typical response from a normal user.

Linux evangelist: "Linux is free"
Normal user: "So?"

Linux evangelist: "Linux is more secure"
Normal user: "So?"

Linux evangelist: "Linux is faster"
Normal user: "So?"

Normal user: "Does it run application X that I use?"
Linux evangelist: "Well, sort of, and if you combine this app with that and do this random hack then....." by which time the normal user have stopped listening.

In my humble opinion KDE4 is a great step in the right direction for Linux. In KDE4 (from what I understand) there shouldn't be any problems recompiling things for windows. This means that we can first hook them on free, secure, fast applications, and by doing that we have lowered the threshold for them to come over to our free, secure, fast platform.

.haeger

The problem is that there is a group of developers and a few end users who are so out of touch with anyone outside the technology field that they are working under the assumption that everyone has the same basic skill that they do.

Microsoft formed their Usability Labs for exactly this reason. Perhaps these guys [wikipedia.org] can work together on something like this?