No, I prefer something where specific distros targeted towards newcomers are on equal foot popularity-wise, instead of one distro outshining them all even if the ease-of-use is highly subjective
Linux needs take-up by more “users”, otherwise powerful sponsors will disappear if they cannot grow their revenue take. Those users will have much less operating system or development skills. They just want stuff to work with an easy installation process. They won’t care about the development process.
I don’t know why you comment on that, considering my reply was towards the claimed “fast development” cycle of Ubuntu which can’t compete with a rolling release. Nothing more, nothing less.
That’s what happens in a free market. Winners and losers. The more distros there are, the more losers there will eventually be, in the competition for user take-up.
Free market does not equal quality and superiority. Look at MS and its crap, yet it holds the majority of the market. My problem with Ubuntu is the claimed superiority over other similar distros, which IMNSHO doesn’t exist. You seem to have missed that I do agree that Spaceman has done an excellent marketing job
That’s just good tactics in response to the insurgance of MS into the linux community. What did the others do? They complained from the touchline or signed powerless boycotts against Novell. At least Shuttleworth’s tactics would have helped in the case of demotivated developers, and help to retain resources needed by the community.
The openSUSE devs don’t agree with you and many other SUSE users who responded to this, me including, don’t agree either. His response was a covert almost arrogant one
In the end, it’s simple. MS want to destroy linux (whatever their PR agency claims). To prevent that, Linux needs experienced and powerful players like Shuttleworth. They play hardball, or the money runs out.
I agree with this, but not at expense of other distros. If all other distros fall, it will be easier for MS to focus on just one and much easier to kill it
I also prefer that. That’s not where we are right now, and I would prefer to see other distros raise their game, including this one. Disparaging the competition won’t get you to your preferred result, and ease-of-use will always be subject to user opinion.
I don’t know why you comment on that, considering my reply was towards the claimed “fast development” cycle of Ubuntu which can’t compete with a rolling release. Nothing more, nothing less.
The claim of “fast development” cycle is ok. You are splitting hairs, unless he claimed it was the only fast development i.e. faster than all others. In any case, the newcomers will probably not be interested one way or the other, providing it works.
Free market does not equal quality and superiority. Look at MS and its crap, yet it holds the majority of the market.
I don’t recall saying it did equal that. Well, if Ms stuff is crap then their success must have come from successful marketing. Obviously the free market didn’t agree with you.
If all other distros fall, it will be easier for MS to focus on just one and much easier to kill it
FUD. That extreme position is not a given. It’s just as likely that other leading distros will raise their game, and the competition will continue.
Good points and I agree with them, but I’m not splitting any hairs. He said fast development and I pointed out to an even faster one like the rolling release. I don’t see anything wrong with that and I don’t know why you assume that I somehow imply that rolling releases will interest newcomers or must be part of a distro for newcomers
I don’t recall saying it did equal that. Well, if Ms stuff is crap then their success must have come from successful marketing. Obviously the free market didn’t agree with you.
How did the free market didn’t agree with me? Their success didn’t come from quality code but from successful marketing. And what did I say? I said free market does not equal quality or superiority, eg quality code or superior technical implementation. MS is a marketing and manipulation machine. They didn’t get their position because they write better code or have a superior implementation. They mostly did it by cheating, lying, killing and destroying competition using their famous tactics. Free market does no guarantee that the best implementation will be the one that will have the stronghold. If this was so, we’d all be using Mac OS X or some other UNIX-like system such as Linux or Solaris/BSD/whatever (maybe even BeOS or Amiga or what have you)
FUD. That extreme position is not a given. It’s just as likely that other leading distros will raise their game, and the competition will continue.
How is it FUD? Imagine that tomorrow ALL Linux distros disappear and only Ubuntu survives and no one makes another Linux distro anymore. As Ubuntu has a parent company (Canonical) this is exactly what MS wants. MS can’t really compete against a free worldwide community since it’s not the traditional thing MS competes against and they have lots of difficulties doing so currently. MS is best at competing against companies and Ubuntu has one, as well as Fedora, SUSE, etc. So, if all are gone but one, this will be much easier for MS to compete against them and eventually kill them off. Now it’s much tougher for them due to the amount of distros present which combined have a very strong momentum, more so than if only Ubuntu existed. Of course, this will probably never happen due to the OSS license and there’s a high chance that someone will start his own distro but I am allowed to imagine virtual scenarios
Also, I sense a bit of hypocrisy here. Generally, most people agree that it’s good to have different distros for various reasons and defend this statement. However, when one of them outshines all others and becomes the most popular, in this thread people seem to defend it at the expense of others. Further, my question still remains unanswered. What makes Ubuntu that good (technically wise) that it deserves to be the famous poster child? In my opinion, absolutely nothing. It became popular because of excellent marketing and the loopback effect I mentioned, not because it stands out technically/or is more user friendly above other similar distros made for newcomers.
I have neighbors here who one day came knocking on my door begging me once again to fix their Windows computers (they have three and a Mac laptop). I got tired of this and told them that they really should switch to Linux. They asked which will be right for them and I mentioned three: openSUSE, Ubuntu and Mandriva. I installed on their PCs, SUSE, Ubuntu and Mandriva and told them to use all for a while and see which they like the most. After two weeks, they came knocking again saying that so far SUSE has impressed them the most and wanted me to install it on all PCs which I did. At the end they asked which Linux distro was the most popular and when I mentioned Ubuntu, they pulled their eyes wide open, since they said that Ubuntu was the one that made the least impression to them.
It didn’t agree with your claim that MS is crap. Their sales results have provided all the evidence. But by all means don’t wait for the answer, and continue with your imagined “virtual scenarios”. No doubt you will eventually become a legend in your own mindrotfl!. I prefer reality and hard evidence. BTW, I am no fan of MS and haven’t run Windows since I switched to linux a few years back.
How is it FUD? Imagine that tomorrow…
There you go again. The answer is: Because you are using an imaginary worst-case situation that hasn’t happened. A classic FUD ploy.
Their sales results have provided all the evidence because the world is locked in into MS software and it’s very hard to ditch it, even more so when MS is manipulating stuff all the time and playing tricks - even hardware is specifically designed around Windows. And yes, I’m more than happy to continue with my “virtual scenarios” and imaginations since it broadens my perspective and extends my borders, unlike you where you stick only to “reality”. It’s imaginative and originally thinking people that come with some of the most profound ideas that change/improve things. Btw, I take your comment as an insult due to the way you’ve written it (including the ROFL smiley) thus internally I lower the way I see you.
There you go again. The answer is: Because you are using an imaginary worst-case situation that hasn’t happened. A classic FUD ploy.
And you know the drill… just because … doesn’t mean …
if more than one distro was equally famous as Ubuntu, that’ll be much better than is now the case. Better not only for Linux’ popularity, but also better in the way that’ll give more heath to MS
Well if you think your rant about Mark Shuttleworth and ubuntu was original…you know the drill…
Btw, I take your comment as an insult due to the way you’ve written it (including the ROFL smiley) thus internally I lower the way I see you.
I was being “imaginative” about a possible end result of your assertion. Well it made me laugh, hence the smiley. I didn’t realize you would be so sensitive given your disparaging remarks about Shuttleworth, who may not even be a member of this forum i.e. not here to defend himself;).
there are lots of people who fiercely don’t agree with Spaceman. So according to your thinking, they all should be guilty, not original or something else. Fact is, if you read his blogs and them some of the comments on specific blogs, you will see lots of people not agreeing with him, not only with his writings, but also sometimes with his tactics.
As for being sensitive, not really. But the way you wrote your reply was strongly suggestive of a mockery due to failing to realize that others may have different views and opinions. Instead you chose to fall back on such comments. Did you get a similar response from me? No. Each time I was able to make a comment in a decent way instead of writing something that can easily be interpreted as an insult. Lots of people act in such ways, they either get hostile when they can’t win an argument or become insulting
Outside of work, I bet that > 80% of people only use their computers for email, web, and perhaps word processing. If I am correct, then why all this fuss over which OS is “best?” Even Suse, which I prefer over others has issues (consider Metacity…what the heck is this? Get rid of it please!). Given time, I predict that Linux will grow in usage, but it will take time. From a user perspective, I think the best way to grow Linux is to actually BUY it. Sometimes I think user loyalty to Linux is completely dependent on paying < $5 for a new release and all packaged software extras.
And what do you find so unusual about my disagreement? Others are allowed to disagree with how current things are, but I am not? You really are making yourself ridiculous, you know. Tell me, what is wrong with favoring the many over the one instead of the one over the many like you do now? Nothing. This is similar to how society currently works (favoring the ones selected few over the many (and lots of those selected few do not really deserve it)) and look at where we are currently. 2% holds all wealth of the whole world and the rest 98% is suffering in misery. Don’t you think that if specific distros which position themselves as desktop ones and target newcomers had equal popularity as Ubuntu, this will be much better for Linux, not only for popularity stuff but also for making it much tougher for the competition? A combined force is much harder to defeat instead of a force that’s mostly traveling alone.
Also, the current state of how the community in general operates is not even near efficiency (and I’m talking about community as a whole, not specific distro communities). There’s not enough collaboration between the various distro communities and even distro developers. Instead of competing with your own kind and dividing yourself, distros/communities should join together much closer and combined go against the real competition. As it currently is, I don’t think Ubuntu alone has enough power to change the mind of most people in switching over to Linux. Of course, there are also technical aspects that need to be addressed, mostly in usability areas, which I won’t go too much into this right now. Linux has been stuck in the single digit percentage for many years now
If only you had just made a comment. I strongly disagree with the word “decent”, you are definitely a legend in your own mind.
I am a legend in my own mind because I express my opinion which does not really match yours except on a few points we agreed earlier? Nice… and again your resort to personal attacks/calling names that will get you nowhere. And how was my comment not decent? Do you have your own meaning of decency or do you follow the general definition of it? If the general one, please point out where my comments were not decent (no, calling Shuttleworth a Spaceman is not an insult if you know why I do it and how I see the word “spaceman”. When I say to someone “spaceman” it’s a huge compliment from my side. I’m keep myself constantly busy with quantum field theories and mechanics in general and Cosmology/Baryogenesis and am founder of various BOINC space teams. Because of these things, the word “spaceman” is the biggest compliment I can give to someone who’s actually been out there in space. This I admire very much in Shuttleworth and he’s a great guy and a smart one, but this does not mean that I am not allowed to disagree with him on various subjects)
Really, do you often find that people react to you in that way? Lots of people? Surely not. Do you need to win? Always? La La La…
No, believe it or not. Only you seem to do it as it bugs you because we agree on some points and disagree on others and you can’t seem to accept my disagreement but I can accept yours. So instead, you fall back to mockery and trying to make me “scared” or provoke me even more for your own amusement. Because each time I make a constructive comment, you can’t seem to reply to it without resorting to calling names and saying I’m my own legend in my mind and things like that, while at the same time you can’t see that you are too a “legend” of your own mind since you constantly need to reply in a mockery/insulting way due to being sure that you are write and I am wrong, while at the same time, not really constructively addressing the points where I might have been wrong or not.
Now, what was it you were saying about Mandriva vs openSUSE and how did that relate to Ubuntu and/or Mark Shuttleworth?
It was the comment from 69_rs_ss and then a few other people jumped in, after my comment.
Hey all, … its counter productive to debate the merits of each others personality. No personal comments nor statements that can be misconstrued as insults. PLEASE !
Please, lets stick to conversing in general … not insulting. I note this is the scope of the “Chit-Chat” area:
**General Chit-Chat **A friendly place to converse about your adventures with openSUSE, your weekend, your boss, your new car, and generally stuff that doesn’t fit somewhere else (and we must ask: PLEASE do not post help questions here)
Mandriva or openSUSE
That’s a hard one. I like them both. Mandriva looks more polished - the main theme, the bootsplash and Mandriva control center. IMO YaST is really ugly. Both gtk and qt versions (qt version isn’t even qt4 and on kde4 it’s pain in the *** to look at it). But oS fells much more stable and basically everything works. Mandriva has some problems but i can live with them lol! In the end they are equal to me. Maybe that’s why i have them both on my PC
I don’t really look too much to these details. But it’s my understanding that with KDE4 everything are “Oxygen” icons… and well, the package is called “yast2-theme-openSUSE-Oxygen”.
OpenSuse Pro’s in comparison to Mandriva:
It’s easier to keep things up to date, with community repos OpenSuse seems more user friendly.
Great Community support
Good amount of packages in the repos
Cons:
KDE4 isnt as stable here as on Mandriva, also I think that Yast isnt as good as the Mandriva control center.
I also prefer Mandrivas package manager over Yast’s package installer.
Mandriva Pro’s:
As mentioned above KDE4 seems more stable, people keep saying how great KDE4 is on OpenSuse but from personal experience its no better or worse then what I seen on Kubuntu but Mandriva seems to have the best KDE4 with Kubuntu in a close second… but again this is personal experience.
I much prefer Mandrake control center over Yast, Yast seems awkward while the layout and design of MCC seems well organized…
Cons:
Community support is terrible at best, for most linux communities I visit if I have an issue I get a solution in a reasonable amount of time…
But because Mandriva has a small community and a good amount of that said community being french being a English user makes you feel like you are from outer space when asking for support.
Oh yes, my bad:shame:. Guess not everything you find in google is true rotfl!. But still it doesn’t explain why it looks like something made with qt3 (talking about the main window).
And the oxygen theme makes it better but compared to MCC, YaST just looks old. And if you’re using crystal icons, like I was, YaST looks just kde3 app.
So maybe it’s time to change a bit yast’s design:\
Even if I don’t use the YaST Package Manager too much (I use zypper 99% of time), after searching through it, I saw that if I filter by “Package Groups” (retranslation from spanish) it uses hicolor icons instead of oxygen. Is this what your are complaining about or there is anything else?
And if we are all talking about the icons of package groups in the QT YaST sw_single module… someone reported the bug!!!
