Ubuntu Continues to Grab Market Share 427
slasher writes "MadPenguin.org discusses the future of Ubuntu and confirms Ubuntu's growing market share in the Linux market. Author Matt Hartley writes, "Now, for the biggest question: do high numbers mean that Ubuntu is the best distribution out there? Some will argue that this is an impossible point to make, as each person has different needs from their distribution. But for the sake of this article, we will be considering the average user, not the Slackware crowd, who is obviously much more comfortable within a command line environment than mainstream users."
But I Thought That Was Pointless? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm so confused, I don't even know what to believe anymore!
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My experience (Score:5, Interesting)
A more important question. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've had a much easier time getting my boss to look at it because when I install it, it just works..
All the distributions are like that these days, despite Bill Gate's best efforts.
What you noticed though raises the more important issue. It's not if Ubuntu is gaining share from other distributions, it's if Ubuntu is gaining users from non free software. Once the user goes free they lose their M$ bad habits and blinders and then can move to other distributions without problems.
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I just can't wait (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the main reason Ubuntu is doing so well is that it has a consistent and relatively quick release cycle, so it always has the latest drivers/software/utilities and more importantly, it has great package management build on Debian. That was always what I disliked about Debian, that it to
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from https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-an
"Gutsy will not be an LTS (Long Term Support) release, but it will nonetheless see a lot of server work and be useful for fast-moving server deployments. "
Re:I just can't wait (Score:5, Informative)
I agree with everything you said, however. I use the LTS edition for servers that need to be stable, and use the latest version for desktops. The Long Term Support is long enough that you can be confident with it (and easily upgrade to the next LTS when it comes along). Upgrading Ubuntu (e.g. from Edgy to Feisty) has always been painless in my experience. (Yes, YMMV.)
I'm very pleased with the speed (and predictability) of the Ubuntu release schedule, and with the quality of what gets put out.
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I forget - is it supposed to be Gusty or Gutsy Gibbon?
Maybe he starts out as Gutsy, but after the 'release', he's Gusty?
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This is incorrect. Shuttleworth says here [ubuntu.com] that it will not be a LTS release. I remember him saying somewhere that it will probably be gutsy+1.
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My Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
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Big money advertising.
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Simple: Ubuntu has a charismatic millionaire behind it. That's really all there is to it. Marketing is everything.
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Oh. I thought he misspelled Paris Hilton.
Re:My Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Also installing programs was always so easy with XP and a pain with most linux distros.
Now with Ubuntu, I've for the VERY FIRST TIME ran into a distro that is in many respects better than XP! I'm astounded by how much better the usability is.
Not only that, but it's the first distro that's totally agreeable to the "don't click that, computer will explode" -crowd.
Re:My Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm posting this from a Mandriva install that shares a drive with a Gentoo install and used to be where I had an OpenBSD install. The other disk has CentOS on it and probably will have OpenSUSE shortly. I try new distros and new releases of old distros on a regular basis. I'll probably try Ubuntu again in a couple months.
Mandrake tried to do what Ubuntu does, but it tried to do it years and years before Ubuntu existed. It did a decent job of starting on the path toward a newbie friendly desktop Linux distribution. Unfortunately, it has had times where the entire system was unstable, where the hardware either didn't work as expected or didn't work at all. I don't recommend Mandriva because I don't trust it to stay as stable as it appears to be in it's current incarnation and also because I know that people have an easier time finding other users with similar questions and issues if they use Ubuntu.
I think that Ubuntu sits where it does in terms of popularity because it came on the scene at the right time with the right goal, make it easy and got the interest because it was new and shiny. It isn't at the top because it is necessarily better in terms of software or functionality, but it is the best in terms of community for the new Linux user right now and that is what sets it apart.
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On the Ubuntu site, such posts are far fewer and are oft removed/discouraged/beat down upon by the others in the forum.
Also, the free disks, the philosophy behind it, the actual inclusion of 'evil' closed source drivers(though still
Re:My Opinion (Score:5, Funny)
Uhh, no, it has to do with being called "Feisty Fawn". I mean, what's hotter than Bambi being naughty?
Dude (Score:4, Funny)
Re:My Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a load of horse hockey.
I started out using Mandrake, back in '98 or so. I wanted a distro that "just worked" and it was fine in that respect...until it wasn't. Once I was comfortable enough with linux I used Gentoo for a few years. Then it started crashing and burning, even on the "stable" configuration. After that, Ubuntu was the choice for a distro that "just worked," and it's served that purpose for me for the last few years. Marketing had nothing to do with my decision to use Ubuntu. Zippo. It has value on it's technical merits alone. Just because it's publicized and wrapped in a pretty package does not mean it's value is decreased. Marketing and technical merit are not mutually exclusive.
Re:My Opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, no. For a lot of us, Ubuntu has Debian behind it. It's like the pretty, desktop-oriented version of Debian for people who want relatively recent software without running "unstable". Should Ubuntu cease to exist today, I'll point my sources.list to debian.org and crossgrade back to the parent system.
I like Gentoo and Slackware and FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but Ubuntu is what I use when I want a Debian system with a little bit of polish. It really hit the sweet spot for a lot of people.
Mo than money (Score:3, Insightful)
But what really did it was the support tools. I tried mandrake, suse, redhat and fedora and ubuntu had the easiest to use support tools. Mandrake's support forums abso
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Re:My Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm foregoing modding you (it would have been +1 Insightful) in order to reply.
I used to be a Mandrake "subscriber." I paid my yearly dollars, because Mandrake was really the best distro out there that I had tried. Even when Fedora came around, I gave that a whirl and it wasn't up to the Mandrake level in my opinion.
It is true that Mandrake pioneered most of the user-friendliness that Ubuntu now capitalizes upon. However, in my time with Mandrake there was always something that didn't work right. It changed from release to release, but it was always something. Like they had 98% of everything nailed down, but that one thing just bugged me to death, because it would be something like, oh, printing. I frequently built custom kernels under Mandrake in order to get things to work, and even then there were often a few things that were broken beyond my ability to repair. Now when Ubuntu came around, I installed on a test machine (I do this often with new releases of distros I'm not using just to see how they fare). I was so happy -- there was nothing that didn't work, straight out of the box. No fiddling, no custom kernels. They had closed that last 2% of functionality. It was almost zero configuration for printing and wireless networking, two things that historically have been a problem.
So yes, Mandrake was (and is) a leader in making an easy-to-use desktop distribution. But Ubuntu blew the doors off with its "it just works" quality. That's why people love it, and that's why it's on all my desktops to this day.
Re:My Opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
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Unfortunately, it won't be going on any laptops, because it still sucks. I recently gave Feisty Fawn a try on a T40, T43, and
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I stopped using Mandriva (was still Mandrake maybe) when I couldn't get the AMD64 build with my bargain basement club membership (in their defense they said it was worthless and not to get it).
I was building a new computer and buying OEM XP for $70.00, I realized I payed well over $100.00 for Mandrake, was still paying, and after many months still didn't have the version that ran native. XP was going to last me years, and Mandrake was another 60.00 every year (5.00/month).
I then pirated the full vers
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Automatic installation of restricted codecs. Easy installation and removal of as well as information about proprietary drivers. Very smooth handling of removable media (not Ubuntu-specific but a Gnome feature). Easy setup of 3D eyecandy for supported cards. Great attention to little details. A pretty polished Gnome (not meant as flamebait, but KDE does overwhelm casual users).
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Because I could not always get the answers I needed with Fedora and after playing with a (Debian based) Knoppix install I went with Kubuntu.
I find the biggest attraction of *ubuntu lies in the very helpful user base.
Of course all the effort Ubuntu has and is putting in hardware support and ease of install is a big bonus too.
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7 words: Naked people on your desktop by default.
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It works. No monkeying around, no driver hunt or configuration issues, it works. I can pop Ubuntu in my Acer Aspire 5670 laptop and it loads the wireless, loads the ATI Video drivers, EVERYTHING and it gives me no grief. Fedora, Mandrive, Suse, etc.. all give you grief when you're installing the OS. Fedora 6 is the next best thing but getting the wireless to work is painful, and while *I* can accomplish it, I've spent a great
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Plus, Mandrake didn't have a shit brown theme 3 years ago...
What does Ubuntu have that Mandrake doesn't? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's more that Mandriva has something Ubuntu doesn't, something that drives people away. RPM-based distributions are not popular with users. That's because in spite of band-aids like Yum, the user experience for RPM still sucks.
Lots of people have been saying so for years, but the denial in the RPM camp is amazing.
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apt-get and the repositories to go with it has always been the Debian "killer app".
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Now Ubuntu chose GNOME as default desktop interface (but you can have Kubuntu and KDE, if you want to). When users look
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So Mandr[ake/iva] has still the same problems than before? I used to be a Mandrake fan from the 5.0 times. Unfortunately is became so unstable at each next iteration that I had to look for some other distro. I went through Red Hat, Fedora Core and Suse but now I have settled with Ubuntu as well. As you have stated it
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I have not tried Mandrake, but I still like your point. Ubuntu just does what the users want, and it does it properly. It is not so much that Ubuntu is perfect, but it does not have a strong argument going against it. Every other distribution seems to have that:
RedHat is very expensive, or Fedore is very incomplete.
SuSE used to be a good choice, but since Novell is trying to "improve" it, it is going do
Is it the best distribution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Power users love extra work? (Score:3, Interesting)
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http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/esl/esliar
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Re:Power users love extra work? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/faq [ubuntu.com]
Before a vowel sound, you use 'an' instead of 'a'.
Anyhow, doesn't matter cuz Kubuntu is better.
I used Debian (long ago) and then more recently Slackware. When Kubuntu Dapper came out, I switched to that and never looked back. It had everything that Slackware did, but the ease of 'apt-get install x' for almost all the software I wanted. Slackware worked well and all, but any time I wanted to install something, I was expected to configure and make it, or download a slackware package from some third-party site that had stuff that worked about 2/3 of the time. (My definition of not-working includes compiles that leave out options that are pretty necessary as well as just plain broken.)
2 versions later, I can't imagine using another OS as my primary OS. There are drawbacks, like proprietary drivers for the major video cards, and lacking the fancy interface of certain fruit-oriented OS's, but I'm more efficient on Kubuntu than any other OS I've used.
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I don't believe he is saying that a power user enjoys it, but it is expected that when the hand holding doesn't work you, as a power user, can work your way through it yourself. A beginner will be incapable of working their way through an install or maintenance when the hand holding fails.
I.E. I recently installed Ubuntu on a system with 4 SATA drives and 2 PATA drives setup with multipl
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Average user? (Score:5, Insightful)
Slackware crowd? (Score:2)
Re:Slackware crowd? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is kind of confusing to me that the excluded the 'Slackware crowd's preferences. If there exist Linux distros that the 'Slackware crowd' prefers (not rhetorical - I really am not aware of Linux user preferences), then isn't there scope for improving the user interface of these distros to make them more accessible to the common user and trump Ubuntu?
Being an Ubuntu user who is also part of the "Slackware crowd" (you insensitive clod!), I think there's also a danger in running too far with the notion that a particular distro suits a particular number of users. I am but one user with multiple tasks to perform; I don't have requirements - my tasks do. I use Slackware on my servers, because I have evaluated it to be the best tool for the jobs I need the platform to do. I use Ubuntu on my desktop workstations because I think it is the best tool for those jobs.
I understand the need for simplification when doing an article like this, and maybe that's why the author just wanted to start by moving pains-in-the-ass like me off the table and stick with ye-average-joes who have perhaps one PC that they use. It drastically limits the complexity of the issue; but it inexorably limits the relevance of the article at the same time.
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Maybe... (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe I'm missing something about this article, but it's very short, makes no real points and doesn't back up its claims. How can we ever know which distro is the most used? Distrowatch? Their methods [distrowatch.com] are hardly reliable!
Sadly it seems this article has been written to get people arguing on social networking sites instead of bringing anything new to the table. Yes, I know: I must be new here. :)
Yes, the best distribution. (Score:5, Insightful)
So even if Ubuntu isn't ideal for all Linux users, it has the opportunity to greatly increase the Linux user population, bringing more and wider-ranged development to the OS, which will benefit us all regardless of our distro of choice.
My take on Ubuntu and its derivatives (Score:3, Insightful)
No doubt, the (*)Ubuntus are great distros. One thing continues to baffle my mind in the general Linux world:
Why won't the fonts look beautiful by default?
Why, after all these years Linux has existed, do we have to seek help from Microsoft with its fonts in order to have a desktop that is a pleasure to look at?
Why is it that there is still debate as to whether wizzard like setps would be good for the desktop or the server? On this point, a wizzard like setup routine to handle an application like the Apache web server would make things easier for a lot of folks.
What makes me mad is that those who have the skills do do the needful, still refuse to see what seems to be obvious. Time will tell.
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Basically because the people who are responsible for the current 'popular' font libraries are determined to emulate Windows. We don't need to do things this way, but they've made it very difficult to do things any other way.
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I have Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) and XP installed on the same computer. The fonts look better on my 17" LCD in Ubuntu, by default, than they do in Windows. I'm not entirely sure why this is, as I've even compared the same fonts, taken screenshots. I've tried tweaking the way fonts look in Windows but can't. They just look like crap there.
So, really, maybe it's perspective/taste, or you've not seen Linux fonts lately. Before I delved into Linux again last year, t
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Why won't the fonts look beautiful by default?
Why, after all these years Linux has existed, do we have to seek help from Microsoft with its fonts in order to have a desktop that is a pleasure to look at?
I'm going to assume here that you prefer to look at aliased Arial and Verdana rather than a modern anti-aliased font family such as DejaVu/Bitsream Vera? That's personal opinion, and any Mac user, graphic artist, or people with good eyesight would prefer to have anti-aliased font families, and in the case of graphic artists, especially ones that aren't a cheap ripoff of Helvetica that don't look good on paper nor displays.
Besides, if you want to have your Microsoft fonts, you go to "Add/Remove Programs",
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Why won't the fonts look beautiful by default?
Because good fonts are expensive. If you want beautiful fonts then I suggest you head on over to Adobe, or Monotype or ITC and buy some. For sans-serif Cronos Pro [adobe.com], Gill Sans [monotypefonts.com] and Optima [adobe.com] are all excellent. For serif fonts there's always the classics like Caslon [adobe.com], Garamond [itcfonts.com], or New Baskerville [itcfonts.com]. Of course some of those cost a fair amount of money for the complete font set, but you'll end up with far more beautiful fonts than Windows fonts give you. If you're not actually willing to pay for nice typefaces then yo
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What skills would those be? I have the knowledge necessary to host all of my own services (DNS, e-mail, etc) and the one thing that requires almost zero effort on my part is Apache. Why would it be different for someone else? You're making it sound like there's so much to do other than start the daemon.
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This Just In: Ubuntu is Not Dying (Score:5, Funny)
One more encouraging sign hit the already triumphant Ubuntu community when MadPenguin confirmed that Ubuntu market share has risen yet again, now up to to some number that would actually make this parody much easier to write had been cited in the fucking article.
Coming with a hotlink to a recent MadPenguin.org article which plainly states that Microsoft Does't Care About Destroying Linux, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. It's simply a matter of numbers, despite it being a sore spot with Fedora and SuSe users who've failed to get over it.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Ubuntu's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Ubuntu has won the hearts of common users. In fact there won't be any future at all without Ubuntu because Ubuntu is not dying. Things are looking very good for Ubuntu. As many of us are already aware, Ubuntu continues to gain market share. Take a cold, hard look around.
Debian is the most endangered of them all, had a much slower development cycle than many of us would amit. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Fedora communicy relations issues only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Ubuntu is not dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
If there were any in TFA, I'd have talked about the number of users Ubuntu has, made a few wisecracks about Theo and FreeBSD, and compared the number of Ubuntu vs FreeBSD articles on Slashdot, divided by the number of modpoints used. So let's just skip that bit and call it as done. Throw me a frickin' bone here, I haven't even had my morning coffee yet.
All major surveys show that Ubuntu has steadily risen in market share. Ubuntu is very healthy and its long term survival prospects are very good. If Ubuntu is to triumph at all it will be over Vista itself. Ubuntu continues to grow. Nothing short of a disaster could kill it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Ubuntu is alive.
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"Welcome to Slashdot!"
Actually, I liked the article (although I would have preferred it if the claims on market share had been backed up with links -- and not just because it would have made a parody "FreeBSD is Dying" easier to write). The author's underlying thesis is correct: if Linux is going to become a viable alternative for Aunt Tillie, rather than just us Slashdotters, it needs to be as easy for Aunt Tillie to admin
This is a review? (Score:2)
How do they define user base? (Score:2)
I've experienced Ubuntu, the last version was a little slow on my machine, and the software manager broke it once. The current version is mostly faster except with task switching, where it is still noticably slow. The software manager, thus far, has only managed to break itself when it crashed (getting some wireless connection related packages). I'm sure I'll get help from
same true for windows... (Score:2)
The last three computers I bought came with Windows. None of these computers have Windows on them now.
Installing Linux is usually the first thing I do to a computer.
So while I've bought Windows a few times, I have not kept it.
How does Microsoft measure its user base? I see sales numbers fron Forrester and IDC, but couldn't MS publish actual numbers. You have to register Windows don't you? (I guess that doesn't count the cracked pirated versions).
I gues the real answer is that all of these methods ar
Most useless article ever? (Score:3, Interesting)
How much did they pay slashdot for the traffic being generated?
That's a bit cheeky (Score:2)
What?? (Score:2)
Average user? Average user?? That's exactly the sort of thinking and language that screws up these debates to begin with. You start by ceding the point that distro preference is down to user needs & priorities, and then totally contradict that point by taking the "average" user as a point of reference.
That isn't a
ubuntu is great (Score:2)
Dual displays is "strong functionality"? (Score:2)
"Then we have Fedora with strong functionality (dual displays, anyone?),"
Err , dual (and more) displays have been a feature of X windows since at least the early 90s. Not sure when XF86 and Xorg incorporated it but it was long before Fedora came onto the scene. Wtf is this guy on about? You can have dual displays on any linux install so long as your card and drivers support it.
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It isn't Xorg/XF86 that are in question, it is the distro tools that configure them for you.
I have re-written quite a few xorg.conf files to deal with my dual-head display and have not yet come across a distro that handles it well enough to just use a GUI. I haven't tried Ubuntu on this setup but I can tell you that Mandriva, Slax and CentOS5 all do a decent job of setting up a basic config. I have to go in and reconfigure for every one of them but it beats the heck out of rebuilding from scratch for any o
I've Switched (Score:3, Interesting)
Other than those minor things, it has just worked.
I use our main PC as a studio PC. It has a M-Audio 1010LT card which worked, but it took me some time to get the recording issues sorted out. JACK has a slight learning curve as did Ardour, but no more so than Adobe Audition did on XP. I've been rather pleased with the free available software for studio use.
I've even used GIMP a few times to edit some photos. While I had to hunt around a bit looking for the feature I wanted, I haven't run into anything it can't do that I need. Photoshop was always overkill for me anyway.
My experiment at home to run Ubuntu on our laptop has turned into a complete conversion and I'm not looking back. I talk it up to anyone who'll listen.
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I had to tweak our ATI card settings in xorg.conf manually to get a good resolution.
That is the big show stopper in Ubuntu, to me. That is unacceptable in a distro that wants to be user-friendly. I had no problem doing this, and even expected it as I migrated from Slackware. But a non-techie user can't be expected to do this sort of thing. The wink and nod, "here are the codecs" thing Ubuntu does is acceptable, text-file-configuration-editing is not.
Branded as "desktop friendly" (Score:2)
Why mutiple distros? (Score:2, Troll)
This is one of the most confusing things to new users. If they want to buy Windows, they go to the store and buy Windows. It isn't available from 17 different companies; only Microsoft sells Windows. There are a few versions (home, professional, etc) but the installation/upgrade user experience is common across all of them.
Imagine if all of the programmer time and effort that goes towards packaging and installation programs for the vario
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XP Home? XP Professional? Vista Home Basic? Vista Home Premium? Vista Business? Vista Enterprise? Vista Ultimate?
There's lots of Linux distros for the same reason there's lots of Windows versions - because they are aimed at different users with different needs.
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Head over to DistroWatch [distrowatch.com] and read a little about some of the distros, you'll see what the unique purposes of most of them are. Ubuntu is a relatively new distribution, and before that I messed around with R
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And you can catch quite a few subtle bugs by making software work in many different environments.
Why I use Ubuntu (Score:5, Insightful)
#1: No nonsense software manager. Ubuntu's Add/remove programs system just works. No dependency nightmare, rarely the need for command line, no need to compile/mock around with make files (although I'm comfortable with the process) but if there is the need, the option is there. Don't need to signup to get updates, it just works.
- All of my hardware works. ATI card, LCD (minimum tweak needed to get native res), ipod, firewire card, cellphone through USB, digi cams, cd/dvd writers, etc, etc.
- Relative cutting edge and stable software versions, I don't remember the last time I had x/gnome crash on me.
- Great software selection through their reps.
- Sane directory structure/menus setup.
- Excellent community support / forums.
- Ease of installation (although most distros offered this as well)
Never been happier with a Linux desktop.
Why I chose Ubuntu (Score:3, Interesting)
There's no "one size fits all" distro (Score:4, Informative)
Obviously. And Ubuntu is no exception to that. On old PCs that have less than 256M RAM, you can't use the standard Ubuntu live/install CD. Laptops have always been a little behind desktops, making it even harder to find a suitable distro for an old laptop. If one of the brags of Linux is that old hardware isn't left out in the cold, many of the distros make that untrue by building for Pentium IIs at a minimum. Embedded is even harder-- there are few enough options that you can be pretty much stuck heavily modifying and compiling some sort of Gentoo style distro, or even making up a distro yourself. A 386 with 4M of RAM isn't a usable computer anymore, but it's not because it can't do useful work, it's because software has become so much more demanding. I used to surf the Internet on just such a 386, with Netscape 3 running in X.
I've been trying distro after distro, trying to find something lightweight and full featured not just because I have old computers, but also because I like fast response times. Slackware derivatives seem most promising, so have tried Zenwalk, Vector, and Slackware itself. Also tried Xubuntu. Next on my list of distros to try is KateOS.
Someone asked why Mandriva wasn't more popular. In 2 words, nagging and blinders. Mandriva by default points a lot of things to various nag messages, like the default browser homepage. Lot of the help functions launch a browser which, guess what? Loads up another part of the Mandriva web site with both a) nagging, and b) blinders, as in a search function that searches only Mandriva's stuff. Once you get tired of not finding answers there, you forget their help functions, and try your luck with a real search engine, or the Howtos from linux.org, or (gasp) the docs from the homepage of whatever generic app you're trying to use.
tag request (Score:2)
Uh no! god no! Tag request: flamebait
I'll purportedly avoid reading any comment to this news item.
Question (Upgrade from Suse 10 to Ubuntu?) (Score:2)
Plus, I have a shareware game that I'm working on, but, once I flop it out on the MS I'm going to open source it and it would be cool to get it into a hip distro.
windows "skin" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/June/os.ph (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp [w3schools.com]
Re:http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/June/os.ph (Score:5, Funny)
If we just hang in there, we'll overtake them yet!
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The correct way to say it is that the market share has increased to 200%.
See? 200 is way bigger than
Lies, damned-lies, statistics.
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The first is the correct one. The 'oo' in the pronunciation guide is pronounced consistently throughout, as in "soon-soon-soon". The stress is on the middle syllable. oo-BOON-too.
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tags (Score:5, Funny)
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What exactly was "good" about this?
Nothing was actually said, so how can this be "nuff said"?
Markets are measured in dollars. Something that is free has ZERO market share. Zip. Zilch. None. It might be popular with just about anybody, but a market share is a fraction of dollars thay you make out of a total number of dollars that are available to be made. If everybody goes Ubuntu tomorrow and MS and Apple go bankrupt then the market for OS will simply be zero dollars. And Ubuntu will still have zero mark
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...the Canonical distros are nothing special. As a 24-7 sysadmin...
I believe your second sentence there identifies you as someone that is not in Ubuntu's primary target audience. I think most Ubuntu users, including myself, will openly admit that regular Ubuntu releases (long-term releases such as 6.06 are somewhat different) are not really intended for mission-critical servers. If I have to spend half an hour rebooting my Ubuntu system at home and fixing the Xorg config file, I'm probably annoyed, but nobody has lost millions of dollars. The same can't always be said fo
Re:AMD64 support (Score:4, Informative)
but these are NOT installed by default. There are ways to run various x86 binaries on
both Debian and Ubuntu, and you can search the Ubuntu forums for this.
BTW, Gentoo is similar to Debian in being a 'true 64' bit, but in Gentoo the compatibility
libraries are found in a more logical directory tree structure. In all three distro's
a bit of shell script skulldugery is required to launch a 32 bit binary in a 64 bit world.