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Provocative at best. "We FOSS supporters get all on our high horses about proprietary software while we keep offering up "Linux for humans" that, in reality, i

by hendler 17y ago

Provocative at best. "We FOSS supporters get all on our high horses about proprietary software while we keep offering up "Linux for humans" that, in reality, is an oft broken mess, at least in the case of Ubuntu. I am back to believing Andrew Wyatt was right when he called the distro "garbage salad." This is a perfect example of what he was describing. No wonder CrunchBang Linux is moving to a Debian as a base instead of Ubuntu. Linux Mint may be moving in the same direction." A specific complaint I could find from the author is about a printer driver. While I haven't used another distro for quite some years now besides Ubuntu and RHEL, third-party drivers often fail to work on every platform - Mac and Windows included. While the user does represent a common user, and usability and reliability could be improved in Ubuntu - I find the article a bit too "garbage-salad" (to quote the author).

nailer 17y ago
Really? Mac and Windows have pretty good third party driver support the last time I checked. I've never had to upgrade my entire OS to get a new piece of hardware working either RHEL backports a lot of driver updates to its stable releases. Ubuntu LTS doesn't seem to do this.
- hendler 17y ago
  I do know of many upgrading and downgrading from Vista to get ethernet drivers working as expected. I agree, they do have "pretty good" third party driver support. But a non-intel mac from 4 years ago will not likely run a new printer, nor would an intel mac likely have a driver for printer 5 years old. A huge effort has been made for backwards compatibility, and driver support from commercial products, and that doesn't make driver support or bug-fix responsiveness inherently better. The author could have not upgraded the OS and her printer would still work fine. I don't like that solution - but the Ubuntu bashing in the article seems contrived. Maybe Ubuntu LTS can be improved. But I don't see the article expressing this concern adequately .
- blasdel 17y ago
  Mac OS X has good driver support only because Apple implements their own drivers for every device, and bundles them with the OS. Leopard had ~5gb of printer drivers alone in the default install! In 10.6 they moved to a system that installs drivers for stuff on-demand, automatically downloaded from Apple.
  - Someone 17y ago
    "because Apple implements their own drivers"? AFAIK, Mac OS X and Linux share a lot here. Both use (Apple-owned, and GPL/LGPL) CUPS.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
- vetinari 17y ago
  Really? Try HP Deskjet 6500 series with duplex module installed, connected to non-HP jetdirect. The only way to make it work on OSX is to install ghostscript and hpijs and then dive into cups internals. On Ubuntu, it works out of the box.
- FooBarWidget 17y ago
  Well I'm on my Mac right now and I can't get my Epson printer to work. Last time I wasted 30 minutes on it, so ever since that time I boot up Linux every time I want to print something. Ditto for scanning. I can't find good scanning software for OS X that doesn't suck or costs a lot of money. (Image Capture is too primitive, I want something like XSane) So I boot Linux every time I want to scan something.

by hendler 17y ago

nailer 17y ago

Really? Mac and Windows have pretty good third party driver support the last time I checked. I've never had to upgrade my entire OS to get a new piece of hardware working either RHEL backports a lot of driver updates to its stable releases. Ubuntu LTS doesn't seem to do this.

hendler 17y ago
I do know of many upgrading and downgrading from Vista to get ethernet drivers working as expected. I agree, they do have "pretty good" third party driver support. But a non-intel mac from 4 years ago will not likely run a new printer, nor would an intel mac likely have a driver for printer 5 years old. A huge effort has been made for backwards compatibility, and driver support from commercial products, and that doesn't make driver support or bug-fix responsiveness inherently better. The author could have not upgraded the OS and her printer would still work fine. I don't like that solution - but the Ubuntu bashing in the article seems contrived. Maybe Ubuntu LTS can be improved. But I don't see the article expressing this concern adequately .
blasdel 17y ago
Mac OS X has good driver support only because Apple implements their own drivers for every device, and bundles them with the OS. Leopard had ~5gb of printer drivers alone in the default install! In 10.6 they moved to a system that installs drivers for stuff on-demand, automatically downloaded from Apple.
- Someone 17y ago
  "because Apple implements their own drivers"? AFAIK, Mac OS X and Linux share a lot here. Both use (Apple-owned, and GPL/LGPL) CUPS.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
vetinari 17y ago
Really? Try HP Deskjet 6500 series with duplex module installed, connected to non-HP jetdirect. The only way to make it work on OSX is to install ghostscript and hpijs and then dive into cups internals. On Ubuntu, it works out of the box.
FooBarWidget 17y ago
Well I'm on my Mac right now and I can't get my Epson printer to work. Last time I wasted 30 minutes on it, so ever since that time I boot up Linux every time I want to print something. Ditto for scanning. I can't find good scanning software for OS X that doesn't suck or costs a lot of money. (Image Capture is too primitive, I want something like XSane) So I boot Linux every time I want to scan something.