Ubuntu Claims 12 Million Users — Before Lucid 360
darthcamaro writes "It's always a challenge to try and figure out how many users a particular Linux distro has — but Canonical is now providing a new figure for Ubuntu that is 50 percent more than what they were claiming just 18 months ago. 'We have no phone home or registration process, so it's always a guesstimate. But based on the same methodology that we came up with for the 2008 number, our present belief is that it's somewhere north of 12 million users at the moment,' Chris Kenyon, vice president for OEM at Canonical, told InternetNews.com. Just in case you were wondering, Fedora still claims more — actually almost double, at 24 million."
NTP-servers... (Score:4, Interesting)
I always thought they used their NTP-servers to count installations...
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Re:NTP-servers... (Score:5, Interesting)
"'We have no phone home or registration process,"
Actually, there is an "opt-in" phone home process. Ubuntu has an option to participate in a software popularity contest thing. Those who opt in not only can be counted as using *buntu, but the poll tracks which software packages are installed.
And, it is really "opt-in" because you are asked if you WANT TO participate or not. I'm almost certain that it defaults to "no", you have to click the "yes" button to participate.
So, if this popularity thing tracks "x" million computers, it's pretty simple to double or triple that number, and claim "x times 3" installations.
Re:NTP-servers... (Score:5, Informative)
It does, at least in Debian.
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I'm almost certain that it defaults to "no", you have to click the "yes" button to participate.
This [ubuntu.com] page says that the package is already installed on the system, but is disabled by default:
This means that all you need to do is enable it.
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I'm almost certain that it defaults to "no", you have to click the "yes" button to participate.
That is correct, for both Ubuntu and for Debian (upon which Ubuntu is based).
In fact, in Ubuntu, the checkbox for this is only available if you click on a button that says "Advanced".
steveha
Can't they just ping the server... (Score:2)
... a few times to at least get some data to work with? If you're doing something like canonical is doing you think they'd want metrics.
Re:Can't they just ping the server... (Score:5, Insightful)
And, if they had installed some phone-home pingy-thing, they'd be pilloried in the town square by people screaming about that when it came to light, and they'd be decried as violating people's privacy. Geeks on Slashdot frothing at the mouth and wielding torches, cats living with dogs, that kinda stuff.
(And, before I get modded flamebait ... that's also half of the amusement of being here. =)
Not until Netcraft confirms it (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not getting my hopes up until Netcraft confirms it.
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Well, they did say it was *before* the new, just as ugly [slushdot.com], look.
They said on their blogs that they had some professional artists. So why didn't they use them?
Nerd next door... (Score:4, Funny)
I bet it's that guy next door with 12 million computers!
Virtualization (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet it's that guy next door with 12 million computers!
It's a lot easier to have 12 million than it used to be.
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It's a lot easier to have 12 million than it used to be.
True, but the power bill!
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Who says they're on?
Botnets (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a lot easier to have 12 million than it used to be.
Some guesstimate? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have many problems with these numbers, how many of those are dual boot systems with Windows? I have three machines like that. I'm not sure of any reliable way to differentiate dedicated stand alone desktops. Ubuntu is the kind of thing I muck around with alot, people such as myself drag up the stats if they are trying to work it out from downloads, respository use stats.
On the upside the total number of machines that have at least one linux distro on them must be rather higher than typical market share stats suggest.
Re:Some guesstimate? (Score:5, Interesting)
how many of those are dual boot systems with Windows?
You're saying a dual boot system shouldn't count as a user?
I own a wii. It's been unplugged for over a year and I play the 360 every day, but I am still a wii owner. Similarly, it seems to me if you have a dual boot system with ubuntu and windows, you're still an ubuntu user. Maybe there are ubuntu purists out there who would look down on you for that and would care to distinguish between the two, I don't know.
I'd wonder more about the second part you hinted at:
I have three machines like that. I'm not sure of any reliable way to differentiate dedicated stand alone desktops.
Would you count as 3 users for this number? This article [internetnews.com] mentions that fedora counts unique IP addresses, if it said how the ubuntu number was found, I missed it.
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"Maybe there are ubuntu purists out there who would look down on you for that and would care to distinguish between the two, I don't know."
Actually, I kind of look down on dual booting. It's rather silly, now that we have several methods of running virtual machines. Especially since running a VM means that you need almost no AV and malware security software running. If I get a drive-by infection, I can shut down the VM and restore it to a snapshot - no need to jump through hoops for half a day to clean t
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Specifically, I run Ubuntu only in a VM - under Win7. The only thing I use it for is SSH tunnelling... and it works beautifully for it.
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Some people like to play games with 3D graphics. Until VMware releases software that allows you to play the latest games under emulation at full screen and similar framerates to what you see natively under windows, needing to dual boot is still a valid argument.
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A CD drive? Huh? Are you serious, or are you just posting FUD? If you are serious, and you have a CD drive which works under windows that does not work with Linux, then I would suspect that the drive is faulty somehow. I mean, this isn't 1995 anymore.
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VM's are not that good at accessing hardware accelerated graphics. I keep windows around mostly for playing the occasional video game, that does not tend to work all that well in a vm.
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I only have a core 2 6320 but trying to do intensive tasks in a VM (like a compiling a large code base) still feels very sluggish.
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No. You don't need to have Linux on your desktop, leave alone multiple distributions of it, to know which hardware is supported -- you need a MASSIVE HARDWARE TESTING LAB to determine that, so if you want to know, you are better off just googling for it.
I don't need to know everything that it supports (why would I care?). I only need to know how well it supports my hardware.
Googling doesn't help much, because, frankly, it's quite a mess - you find a lot of old, outdated data (sometimes "outdated" by a month or two, e.g. by a fresh kernel, X, or other major package release), and this can go both ways - something that was fully supported fine before now has problems. Most often this happens with graphics, but there have been other regressions as well.
You need Ubuntu installation to convincingly argue against using Linux on a desktop, like what you are trying to do (and failing) now.
Well, i
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I run Ubuntu on my netbook, but I only use it maybe 3 hrs a week unless it's a holiday where I'm traveling. Otherwise I am firmly a windows user for games. Should I count as a user? Listing the total number of users doesn't make a whole lot of sense if the total is dramatically larger than the number of actual users.
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I would be willing to buy your wii. Care to sell it?
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If and when they cancel Super Mario Galaxy 2.
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Okay, in retrospect I really should have gone with a car metaphor rather than mentioning a microsoft product or a console of any type. Left myself open to at least three populations of fanboys there.
The graphics and lack of exclusive devlopers... you really went that extra mile to make that the most ridiculous console post I've read on slashdot. I did mention I had a wii, right? Exclusive developers? If I were a shareholder of MS, that might upset me
I bet you just can't wait for Microsoft to crap out another one of those retarded Halo games with that leaping shiny green Power Ranger.
Wait, the next Halo will star the Green Power Ranger..
Re:Some guesstimate? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, I dual boot too but I think I am bringing up the Windows stats.
I log into windows maybe two to five times a year (usually accompanied by a lot of loud cursing).
But of course I paid for my copy of windows so MS counts me as a loyal customer.
Anyways, my point is that that dual booting argument can go both ways.
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On the upside the total number of machines that have at least one linux distro on them must be rather higher than typical market share stats suggest.
Why?
Net Applications, builds its stats from hits to the immensely popular - mainstream - brand-name - sites of its very big corporate and governmental clients.
It isn't easy to make a convincing argument that the average Linux user isn't pointing a browser in their direction.
Shopping Amazon. Poking about the videos on YouTube.
If the Moz Foundation doesn't find
I run Slackware but I masquerade it as Ubuntu (Score:3, Interesting)
I run Slackware but I masquerade my OS string as Ubuntu ;-))
I like to masquerade all ID strings, masquerading apache as IIS, sendmail as JavaMail etc. etc.
Re:I run Slackware but I masquerade it as Ubuntu (Score:5, Funny)
I run Slackware but I masquerade my OS string as Ubuntu ;-))
I like to masquerade all ID strings, masquerading apache as IIS, sendmail as JavaMail etc. etc.
Don't worry - the job market is supposed to turn around any day now.
Total guesstimate (Score:4, Insightful)
So why are we even discussing it?
Lies, damn lies and statistics... (Score:4, Interesting)
Either way, these are not too shabby figures for Linux market penetration. I wonder how many of those installs are on the Desktop though?
These numbers are based on desktop usage mostly (Score:2, Informative)
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It is a debian with a 5 year support contract. I use it for my servers for that reason.
Some fairly realistic figures (Score:2, Informative)
Number of computer users worldwide = 1.2 billion (taken from various estimates)
Linux market share = 1.12% [wikipedia.org] (composite of various sources)
Ubuntu market share = 50% of Linux (source = same Wikipedia article)
This gives us 1.2 billion * 0.0112 * 0.5 = 7 million Ubuntu users worldwide.
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you are better off pulling a number out of your ass, it will be more accurate.
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Re:Some fairly realistic figures (Score:4, Insightful)
Number of computer users is certainly noticeably different from the number of computers in use.
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So you start from 4 numbers, all of them are estimates...
Then you arrive at a number which is somewhat far off the "official" Ubuntu number....
And from that you learn.... what ?
Absolutely nothing.
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50%? No fucking way.
It just is not that popular in the server room.
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Nor on embedded stuff, if you want to get into that.
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You should read some Wikipedia articles on uncertainty and how to take account of uncertainty when doing arithmetic.
To summarize it, you do math with numbers with high uncertainty which means your results will have even higher uncertainty, which means that the Ubuntu estimates are probably much more realistic than your results.
What about OS updates ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Analyzing server logs could determine unique IPs that request data from security.ubuntu.com and if you harvest that data you know how many different Ubuntu systems are live within a period of time.
Update Manager seems to retrieve a list of update servers at least once and that data is a good indicator of the number of installations, that's a good starting number then add some statistics on corporate usage where updates have been centralized, support contracts and you are starting to get a figure.
Downloads a
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And, if you have to reinstall four times in two days, that'd be counted four times. Yes, I've had cases where that's happened. Especially if you're new to Linux. Or working with some particularly dodgy hardware. Or if you just screw up the installation medium in a way where it appears to install fine but then you discover later that some critical package is fucked. I've had all of those happen to me at one point or another.
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I have 4 real and dozens of virtual machines all running one flavor or another of Linux, with Ubuntu being the most common (I also have 3 CentOS boxes of various versions, one current Fedora box, one Mandriva, one SuSE, one Gentoo, one Debian). The real boxes all run or another Ubuntu version, one LTS server, and three desktop alternate installs (2 laptops with whole disk encryption and one "server" with a 5TB software RAID-5 array).
These are all behind one static IP address.
So, am I one user? 4 users? Does
signifigance (Score:2)
I don't use Ubuntu, but i have ~5 Debian boxen, and 3 or 4 OpenBSD boxes... but I'm only one user. so... Yeah, not entirely sure what I'm getting at.
Tell Linuxcounter (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, you better tell linuxcounter.org then! They estimate a total of 29 million Linux users world-wide. If just two distros- Unbuntu and Fedora claim 12 + 24 million, that is already 36 million, and you haven't even started counting Mandriva, SuSE, Debian, Mint, RedHat, or the dozens of smaller distros! If you believe all that, then MY estimate (more like guesstimate) would be close to 60-100 million Linux users.
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Bizzare website. And their estimate hasn't changed since 2005. I switched to Linux since then -- apparently someone else moved back to Windows!
Nothing beats MY OS! (Score:2)
12 million? Bad. That is peanuts compared to the number of people who use my OS! I estimate that 50 millions machines run BestDamnLinuxDistroEver version 2.3!
Fedora is not more popular than Ubuntu (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but there is no way Fedora is more widely installed on PERSONAL COMPUTERS (versus institutional/industrial settings) than Ubuntu.
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who said anything about the count being personal computers only.
As for Fedora, the link in TFA (yes, I had to go read TFA to check you were wrong, thanks for that) counts the number of Fedora installs [fedoraproject.org] by tracking IPs making yum requests, downloads, opt-in phone-home calls, (they recognise requests from behind NAT and proxies as being offset by users with dynamic IPs, though they say they think corporate users behind NAT make up a larger number than personal users)
For example, they get 50,000 direct download
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The map you linked to shows hits for EPEL 5, which is their add on package repository for Red Hat Enterprise 5 (and clones like CentOS). Since Red Hat tends to be more server-oriented, the popularity of 64-bit makes sense.
It looks like nobody's done any back-end changes for the maps in a while, since they only have them for Fedora 7, 8, and 9, in addition to EPEL 4 and 5.
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I suggest you read through the Fedora mailing lists or look deeper at the fedora forums.
I don't think the numbers listed are completely correct but you still see a lot of FC (fedora core) systems running out there unsupported, which was out before canonical was even around. That said many also masquerade stuff for RHEL also . Rawhide etc.
How many are paying users? (Score:2)
That's the real question, isn't it?
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Claims based on Esitmates (Score:5, Funny)
Based on estimates, I have had meaningful relationships with many, many hot ladies.
*Estimates based on downloads.
Fedora *had* 24 million users (Score:2, Interesting)
Until they jacked up some updates. I left RedHat Open Source product after using RedHat since 4.2. Ran into dependency hell with Fedora Core. I went Gentoo for a while (love the speed) but got lazy and tried Ubuntu. It has been my primary desktop and netbook distro ever since. (8.04) Solid as a rock. I even do the distro upgrades after being paranoid and backing everything up, but the upgrades have been flawless.
Still use RedHat Enterprise products with no major issues except the occasional hardware s
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+1 to dependency hell, largely because of the copyright issues over media playback and the completely broken way that Fedora tried to get around it.
And not just dependency hell, but that "SELinux" stuff that secures your OS by the simple act of not allowing anything at all to run, ever.
Ubuntu netbook remix is a winner.
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Actually, Fedora claims 24 million *active* users between Fedora 7 and Fedora 12 -- a timeframe well after you would have run into "dependency hell" issues.
We actually document our methodology, too. Right here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
So your usage of the past tense is incorrect.
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How do you know that Fedora still gives a lackluster performance if you never looked back, and are no longer a user?
Just out of curiosity ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd also wonder: What percent of those linux boxes were bought with MS Windows installed, and are thus also counted a satisfied customers by Microsoft?
(And they must be satisfied, since they aren't calling Customer Support. ;-)
Actually, one of my two linux boxes is running Ubuntu, but it actially came with Ubuntu installed. The other was a castoff Windows machine from my wife ("required for work"), and is running a rather old Debian. It works fine as a gateway/router/server machine, even if it does have less than a GB of memory. Some of us benefit from MS's upgrade process that encourages customers to buy new hardware so often. But it does sorta rankle that MS and their fanboys count our machines as Windows machines.
You want real statistics ... (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the hit count for operating system from Wikimedia:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
Linux has a 1.65% market share and of that share Ubuntu has 0.71%. Ubuntu has approximately 43% market share among Linux users, which by a very large margin makes it the most popular distro.
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Sounds like you don't like the "rough and tumble".
Sure, I have clients in that space. They are served by Redhat Enterprise Linux. With a support contract. If they feel frisky, they may go with CentOS. What are the important new features in RHEL (according to one of those customers)? Not the window manager. Gnome is fine (it's default), but, honestly, they don't care... Kernel crash handling and SystemTap, on the other hand, are to drool over.
Ubuntu? Fedora? Those distributions are for people who like it a l
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Re:Sadly (Score:4, Insightful)
My Portuguese sucks. Hurts the Kerbesa (sp?). Anyway, the article lamented the CHOICE. My point was to simply put a stake in it. Pick something, and go with it. It's the same as the Windows vs. Mac decision. You pick one.
Gnome, KDE, pick one. Development may or may not occur on the other -- but after your choice, it doesn't matter. As long as your choice is good for you. "Future" may matter, but (perhaps surprisingly), not that much.
Current choices ARE stable enough to be used.
Now, I never simply recommend Linux (or Windows, or Mac). Instead, I say "Choose the platform you are comfortable with. If you have a reason to use Linux, then, ok, go with it. If you have a reason to go with another platform, go for that".
If a user CHOOSES something like Linux, and COMMITS to it, they are going to use it. Reasons for the choice? Let me give you a (real) example.
Some family friends were using a computer for email, mailing lists, ballet organization, web browsing. They were using Windows 98, and were reasonably happy. After all, it came with the computer (but was probably bootlegged), and it worked.
Fast forward 4 years. Their daughter started dating a "Web Designer". He thought it wholly offensive and very uncool that they should be using Windows 98. He put Windows XP on the machine. Better, right? Wrong... It now took 40 minutes to boot up to a usable desktop.
They asked me "what should we do"? I gave then some choices (1) a new(er) computer, (2) restore Windows 98, or (3) Linux. They decided to try Linux (a newer computer was not in the budget, and Windows 98 crashed a lot).
We (the family, with my assistance) chose a distribution, and some applications. They have been happy with the choice. After all, they committed to it. When they purchased a new computer (3 years later), they specified Linux, and their application choice.
They never vacillated between Gnome or KDE, Koffice or OpenOffice.org, ARTS or ESD. Because (after they committed), I assisted them in the base (workable) selection. Indeed, one of the reasons for using a (Linux, BSD, other) system is that the user has someone around who can assist this way. It's simply part of the network effect. I think that having a good deal of choice (as a technical person) is a good thing -- but the users don't need to see it.
I don't think it's a problem. But then, I don't really care what platform someone uses. I do care that they have chosen it for (reasonably) rational reasons.
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Oh, the Lubuntu Desktop [lubuntu.net] just looks fine for me.
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Maybe Lubuntu can get an endorsement from Astroglide
That's one hell of a nasty papercut (Score:2)
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Re:Sadly (Score:5, Insightful)
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mod parent up
Re:Sadly (Score:4, Interesting)
Only if it knows the user names.
Just sayin'.
Re:Sadly (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, if your attackers will never try to crack any of your users' passwords...
A username could be anything, but root is always root. Disabling the root password means a cracker needs to take the additional step of identifying a valid user account to target. Not a particularly large step, perhaps, but a step nonetheless.
Re:Sadly (Score:4, Insightful)
A username could be anything, but root is always root.
Pfff. I changed "root" to "admin". No one would ever expect that on my Linux box. Security through obscurity, baby.
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Disabling the root password means a cracker needs to take the additional step of identifying a valid user account to target.
Disabling the root password means now they only need to hijack a normal local user account, not root. You're effectively running as root, with all the security implications.
Re:Sadly (Score:5, Informative)
Don't know if you've noticed, but if you type sudo su - and hit enter, you now have superuser access.
Actually, no. You can escalate your privileges to the superuser only if your account is configured to allow for that. You can easily configure every account on the machine to not be escalatable and just use one account for admin tasks. Secondly, you have to type in your password so, no, you don't just "hit enter".
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Every heard of sudo -i ?
Recent Fedora (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm typing this on my laptop running Fedora Core 12. After recent Fedora builds (from about FC 6) getting successively worse, I was teetering right on the edge of giving up on Fedora and getting a Mac. All my scripts and stuff assume a Fedora environment, (EG: yum) so switching to Ubuntu wouldn't have been significantly easier than jumping to MacOS.
Fedora 12 brought me back to the fold!
Drivers drive. Network managers actually manage networks. And widgets do proper widgetting. It's back to being what a compu
Re:Recent Fedora (Score:5, Interesting)
Network managers actually manage networks.
That's huge. I love Ubuntu on my eee 1005, but the default Gnome network manager is a piece of shit. It's a piece of shit on an older laptop I have too...it works sometimes, if you shake the laptop right and the stars align properly.
I installed wicd on my netbook which is great except it forgets ssid's of hidden networks. Apparently this has been fixed in the latest wicd, but the changes have not propagated to Ubuntu yet. I have a script that logs me on to my home network...but that sucks and means I can't recommend Ubuntu to anyone who wants to put Linux on an old computer.
This is basic stuff; I'm surprised given Ubuntu's track record that it's not perfect by now.
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sudo su works
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Let's see...
Right click and hit "properties".
Then click on the "permissions" tab.
There is a checkbox for "Execute" near the bottom.
You are dabbling with some "niche physics package" yet you can't manage to explore an alien GUI?
That sounds rather sad really.
Re:Sadly (Score:5, Insightful)
I tried Ubuntu, But I just can't.
I wanted to install my favorite niche physics package. I couldn't even figure out how to set the files to 777 through the GUI, I had to 'sudo chmod' them.
Oh and no 'su'? really? I mean 'sudo bash' isn't that hard but jeez I don't know if this is more secure, but it sure is harder to use. I think I'll install centos before going back to fedora.
you can tell ubuntu is getting pretty good when the trolls have to try this hard to criticize it.
or did I miss a whoosh somewhere?
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Ubuntu: Debian unstable + Shuttleworth's "pick of the day" apps and themes My god, Ubuntu has become Windows! ;)
But if you're trolling it makes the effort much easier?
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Eh, it's easy none the less ;)
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I've used several versions of Amiga OS, BBC Micro OS, several versions of Mac OS, OSX, DOS, every version of Windows apart from 2/Me/Server 2008, and a few different Linux distros over the years. I'm quite comfortable using any of them effectively, but I think Ubuntu is better than any of them at providing a usable system right off the bat. I don't see anything particularly childish about it being a well designed and polished distribution. Ubuntu works great for a lot of experienced computer users who appre
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Release an upgrade that crashes the machine. Then count the few dozen people who complain. Multiply by ten. Just as valid as the 12,000,000 number.
What do you mean 'just as valid'? That's the same math we used to work out the XBOX defect rate!
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Troll +/- 0.0
and
Flamebait +/- 0.0
There really is no margin of error there.