Why Linux Vendors Need To Sell More Than Linux

jfruh writes "Mandriva, a venerable Linux distro, is on the verge of shutting down. One of its main problems is that it never grew into more than just an OS vendor. The big players in the commercial Linux space — Red Hat, SuSE, Canonical — all built Linux into their larger computing visions. Is there any room in the marketplace for just a straight-up Linux distro anymore?"

Re:If you want the short answer

[stevenfuzz]

I am sitting at work using Ubuntu with Unity as we speak. Honestly, I like that I can do everything in 1 or 2 clicks or with the keyboard. I think it's ironic that there is this rally cry to evolve Linux into some more usable and advertise-able OS, yet when someone like Canonical decides to go for full-out evolution, those same people immediately reject it. So it goes...

Re:OS's are...

[Dr_Barnowl]

Well, yes, you can configure it. But I would have thought the default settings would be something less annoying than "update automatically then show a popup-dialogue and spontaneously reboot in 5 minutes. Do not offer an option to not reboot - make the user keep deferring it in chunks of between 5 minutes and 4 hours". If the updates happen at lunchtime and you left a bunch of windows open while you stepped out for lunch, say goodbye to any work you haven't saved.

Whereas the default on my other OS is "open the update manager, present the available updates list, and wait for user input". And when it's finished updating, it colours one UI element red to let you know that a reboot would be good, but it's not going to force you. You can configure this behaviour too.

My gripe is that the default settings on Windows cause you pain - at the very least, they force you to save your work and reboot, or constantly poke at a nag-box to prevent it rebooting, whereas the default settings on my chosen working OS don't even force you to update, and when you do, you can carry on working as long as you like before you reboot - I typically just shut down at the end of the day and consider that the first half of my reboot cycle.