6 ms·

Plenty of people like Unity, it's just that the naysayers are super-vocal about it. Mir was an attempt to meld mobile and desktop at a time when mobile still ha

by vacri 10y ago

Plenty of people like Unity, it's just that the naysayers are super-vocal about it. Mir was an attempt to meld mobile and desktop at a time when mobile still hadn't really settled down - it was a bold experiment that didn't work. Amazon integration was another experiment that didn't work. They have tried a lot of things, some work, some don't. But if ubuntu listened to the naysayers, there wouldn't be an ubuntu, and desktop linux would have nowhere near the user count it has today. Ubuntu drove a lot of development towards user-friendliness (directly and indirectly). Another of their success stories was Upstart simplifying service management, which was only unseated by Systemd (which started development nearly half a decade later with the benefit of hindsight). It's so tiring hearing the constant bitchfest aimed at Ubuntu when they've done so much for the community, including significantly growing it. Yes, they've made some missteps, but so have all of the big players.

4ad 10y ago
I do not understand how Ubuntu brought users to the Linux desktop. When Ubuntu started, it was just a crappy version of Debian. It was exactly as user friendly (or user unfriendly) as Debian. It ran the exact same software! Everything that made Ubuntu user friendly (or not) was there on Debian. Then they made Unity, but that was after it was established in popular culture that Ubuntu is "user friendly". But now they are abandoning Unity anyway, so it must not have been that important after all. I do not understand why Ubuntu became more popular than Debian. I really don't. Something to do with those free CDs.
- joshumax 10y ago
  I think one of the major driving factors initially was that Ubuntu didn't follow the long package tree freezes that Debian stable/testing was subjected to after a period of time. Debian stable still tends to contain older packages with security patches applied rather than the latest and greatest(tm), which most standard users tend to prefer over stability
- justincormack 10y ago
  More frequent releases. Mattered a lot for hardware compatibility.
- morsch 10y ago
  Does Debian come with a graphical installer yet?
  - 4ad 10y ago
    Debian has had a graphical installer since at least 2007.
  - Jedd 10y ago
    Yes, of course. But ... I've never understood this fixation with graphic installers, let alone why they are considered so important in assessing the quality of a distribution. You install once, and it's fifteen minutes of your life. During installation you need to inform the installer your hostname, domain (maybe), IP address information (maybe), location and timezone, keyboard layout, and disk layout (most people pick the 'sort it out for me' option anyway) ... none of which really benefits from, let alone requires, a mouse. After installation it's all about the maintenance, and that's where Debian shines. Install once, upgrade for the next decade or more. You can use a GUI for management, if you want, though I'm not convinced GUI distro / package management tools are better than the CLI. Perversely colleagues and clients that have chosen to rely on Ubuntu typically end up having to do full re-installs every time a new LTS comes out, as the migration process often simply doesn't work for them.
    - CJefferson 10y ago
      A mouse is useful if you don't know how to tab around boxes. The disk layout option is super-scary for beginners, and full of warnings. I typically don't know what my 'domain' is (I've never known to this day what I should type in that box, and nothing I type ever seems to make any difference).
      - Jedd 10y ago
        > A mouse is useful if you don't know how to tab around boxes. I've heard it said that the only intuitive interface is the nipple - after that, everything is learned. Tab (to move) and space or return (to select) is not that hard to get a handle on - and, really, if that's the limiting factor for a computer user that's got their hands on a Debian installation (from 8+ years ago when GUI install wasn't an option) and managed to convince their computer to boot from CDROM / floppy / ZIP disk etc ... they almost definitely have some bigger problems in their near future. > The disk layout option is super-scary for beginners, and full of warnings. Disk layout options are comparable in GUI and text-based installs. Ditto the warnings. I note that in both (and it's always been in the text-based) there's been a 'pick an automatic layout' option. Again, if you're dual-booting, and don't know what you're doing, then a GUI isn't going to be the thing that saves you from snotting your Windows partition during this process. > I typically don't know what my 'domain' is (I've never known to this day what I should type in that box, and nothing I type ever seems to make any difference). Same question is posed in every GNU/Linux distro installation, text or GUI, and in every instance of either that I've seen, the option exists to ignore it. Again, the problem of a fqdn isn't a function of whether you're using a text based installer, or a GUI one.
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  > Everything that made Ubuntu user friendly (or not) was there on Debian. It was there in Debian (mostly) but it lacked that final bit of polish for the average user. Debian has always been very conservative as well (which is a good thing for some situations, but not necessarily for a desktop) and its documentation and guides on the terse side. Ubuntu just clicked. It was, simply put, Linux for human beings. The user community at that time reflected this as well. It's not just the free CDs that did it. > But now they are abandoning Unity anyway, so it must not have been that important after all. Unity filled a void left by the end-of-life of Gnome 2. Gnome Shell at that time was looking okay, but it had way too many bugs — and this is to be expected in a new product with new UI paradigms and libraries. Unity was Canonical's attempt at providing a stable desktop environment that wasn't quite as revolutionary as Gnome Shell, and that could succeed Gnome 2 in stable releases of the distro. They pretty much succeeded there in my opinion. Today Gnome Shell likely is ready for mass use with all the early bugs ironed out (I hope), so Unity may not be needed as much now, but it did what it needed to do (and very well at that) for years.
  - 4ad 10y ago
    > It was there in Debian (mostly) but it lacked that final bit of polish for the average user. I've heard this before, but I don't buy it. I have been using Linux for 20 years now; back in the day, and back when Ubuntu came out I was using it on my desktop (today, not so much) and I simply not believe this claim to be true. It's often repeated, but never with concrete specific examples on what was more polished and how it was more polished. In fact I believe the opposite to be true. Back then I was using Debian on my desktop. I naturally tried Ubuntu and found out it was less polished because it contained more bugs.
    - vacri 10y ago
      > never with concrete specific examples on what was more polished and how it was more polished. Network drivers for anything other than an intel card. Still, to this day. They're not in Debian for philosophical reasons, but they're a pain-point to non-expert users.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  I think you're 100% wrong there. Ubuntu supplied, and supplies, polish that Debian just doesn't bother with. You're grossly underestimating the It Just Works factor. (I remember trying to move back to Debian. Apart from Xfce compared to Xubuntu looking like it's had a two-day session with the ugly stick, getting my wifi to work felt like I was being lectured by a small RMS on my shoulder.) I do like Debian a whole lot, but for my purposes Ubuntu is functionally an acceptable Debian. (I use Debian on my personal server, Ubuntu on work servers and Xubuntu for my desktops.)
  - 4ad 10y ago
    > Ubuntu supplied, and supplies, polish that Debian just doesn't bother with. This is often repeated but never with any concrete and specific evidence.
    - antod 10y ago
      You want concrete and specific evidence for a subjective judgement call based on peoples own experiences? Where's your concrete and specific evidence that nearly everybody else's subjective personal experience is somehow objectively 'wrong' and needs justifying?
    - davidgerard 10y ago
      The 100 Papercuts projects, for example. Debian has bothered more in the decade or so since Ubuntu started. And, of course, fixes go upstream where applicable - Ubuntu deals with a lot less platforms than Debian has to account for - and Canonical employees work directly on Debian in a few areas. But dude, I remember how much pain Breezy Badger wasn't compared to Debian at the time, in so many ways.
- onli 10y ago
  Multiple factors: Ubuntu had the Linux for human beings slogan, and at the time that was super important. They promised to create a distro that normal users can use, in contrast to the elitist attitude that prevailed in other communities. That was heavily reflected in the mainstream press Ubuntu reached seemingly effortlessly. The slogan was also taken seriously. If you asked in my local Ubuntu community (UbuntuUsers.de) there never was a RTFM or a google link. You got help, even if the question was asked already a hundred times that day. We combined that with writing the best linux documentation that exists to this day, but that's specific to the german Ubuntu community. Also, the installation was easy, it had a good installer. It wasn't even necessary to burn a CD, you could get it shipped. Not everyone had DSL back then nor CD-burners (well, that's true today as well, but now we have USB-boot). That sure helped.
- vacri 10y ago
  Debian has a lot of rough edges. I still wouldn't recommend it for a naif. You have to understand the Debian philosophy to not get angry at how Debian's default install simply doesn't work (still!) with most network cards. Debian has had a lot of user-friendly polish in the last half-decade, but was pretty gnarly before then. I came over to the linux side around 2007[1], and Debian was painful with network drivers and xorg configs, whereas ubuntu just gave you the binary blobs (like most distros) and worked on making X config less painful. Debian at the time was also exceptionally slow to bring in software, and that's improved in recent years. The user-friendly reputation of Ubuntu came well before 2010 when Unity came out - basically in its early days, Ubuntu gave you a distro with APT (= bye-bye, dependency hell) and also had friendly UX as its primary goal. Debian was about user-friendliness in terms of philosophy, not in terms of UX. I now use Debian on my workstation, in the cloud, and on my home laptop. But I would never recommend it to anyone without making them aware of the Debian philosophy first, and it's a philosophy you have to buy into at least a little bit. All the other devs in my workplace are either on macs or ubuntu/unity. [1] My very first linux experience was running ShowEQ, and dependency hell made me swear off linux for almost a decade... :)
  - type0 10y ago
    Well put, in my mind Ubuntu will always be a great gateway drug to Debian. Ubuntu community did a fantastic job to popularize deb ecosystem even though it is often criticized for not contributing enough upstream. I can't imagine anyone using Debian as their first Linux distro, Ubuntu (and it's derivatives) on the other hand is the Linux distro. Debian is arguably more stable and technically might be better implemented but Ubuntu has won over the average user because of ease of use and helpful communities around it.
    - antod 10y ago
      > Ubuntu community did a fantastic job to popularize deb ecosystem This can't be emphasised enough. I was a Debian user before Ubuntu launched, and it really seemed like Debian was going to only ever remain an unsupported (by anyone else) niche in the face of Redhat.
- darpa_escapee 10y ago
  > I do not understand why Ubuntu became more popular than Debian. I really don't. Something to do with those free CDs. Certain things just worked, like hardware. For a time, X worked on Ubuntu with my hardware and I had to jump through hoops to configure X with the hopes it would work on Debian. My touchpad and sound card just worked. Proprietary drivers were easier to install. Desktop packages came with sane defaults. There were helpful forums and IRC channels.
- fooker 10y ago
  The crucial point you missed was it had a really polished installer, easily better than Windows and contemporary Mac OS. My non-tech friends managed to install it from CDs that came with magazines with almost no guidance. Of course after you have everything setup properly, it is hard to distinguish between distros (other than ..say.. package manager), but those choices do not drive the vast majority of people.
gshulegaard 10y ago
Amen. Also, I am not sure the melding of desktop and mobile is such a bad or even a dead idea. It has apparently died at Canonical but I think that may be due to the position Canonical specifically is in. I mean Samsung just entered this space in a big way with Dex...and that is 4 years after the original Ubuntu Edge Indiegogo. I have lamented elsewhere over the death of the Unity mobile direction...so I won't repeat myself but I still think it would have been really cool.
stewbrew 10y ago
Had they listened to the naysayers, they would have used gnome shell all along, the development resources would have been more focused, and desktop Linux would be better off. I recently switched from unity to gnome shell and it's much much better. Unity's bugs were simply embarrassing.

by vacri 10y ago

4ad 10y ago

I do not understand how Ubuntu brought users to the Linux desktop. When Ubuntu started, it was just a crappy version of Debian. It was exactly as user friendly (or user unfriendly) as Debian. It ran the exact same software! Everything that made Ubuntu user friendly (or not) was there on Debian. Then they made Unity, but that was after it was established in popular culture that Ubuntu is "user friendly". But now they are abandoning Unity anyway, so it must not have been that important after all. I do not understand why Ubuntu became more popular than Debian. I really don't. Something to do with those free CDs.

joshumax 10y ago
I think one of the major driving factors initially was that Ubuntu didn't follow the long package tree freezes that Debian stable/testing was subjected to after a period of time. Debian stable still tends to contain older packages with security patches applied rather than the latest and greatest(tm), which most standard users tend to prefer over stability
justincormack 10y ago
More frequent releases. Mattered a lot for hardware compatibility.
morsch 10y ago
Does Debian come with a graphical installer yet?
- 4ad 10y ago
  Debian has had a graphical installer since at least 2007.
- Jedd 10y ago
  Yes, of course. But ... I've never understood this fixation with graphic installers, let alone why they are considered so important in assessing the quality of a distribution. You install once, and it's fifteen minutes of your life. During installation you need to inform the installer your hostname, domain (maybe), IP address information (maybe), location and timezone, keyboard layout, and disk layout (most people pick the 'sort it out for me' option anyway) ... none of which really benefits from, let alone requires, a mouse. After installation it's all about the maintenance, and that's where Debian shines. Install once, upgrade for the next decade or more. You can use a GUI for management, if you want, though I'm not convinced GUI distro / package management tools are better than the CLI. Perversely colleagues and clients that have chosen to rely on Ubuntu typically end up having to do full re-installs every time a new LTS comes out, as the migration process often simply doesn't work for them.
  - CJefferson 10y ago
    A mouse is useful if you don't know how to tab around boxes. The disk layout option is super-scary for beginners, and full of warnings. I typically don't know what my 'domain' is (I've never known to this day what I should type in that box, and nothing I type ever seems to make any difference).
    - Jedd 10y ago
      > A mouse is useful if you don't know how to tab around boxes. I've heard it said that the only intuitive interface is the nipple - after that, everything is learned. Tab (to move) and space or return (to select) is not that hard to get a handle on - and, really, if that's the limiting factor for a computer user that's got their hands on a Debian installation (from 8+ years ago when GUI install wasn't an option) and managed to convince their computer to boot from CDROM / floppy / ZIP disk etc ... they almost definitely have some bigger problems in their near future. > The disk layout option is super-scary for beginners, and full of warnings. Disk layout options are comparable in GUI and text-based installs. Ditto the warnings. I note that in both (and it's always been in the text-based) there's been a 'pick an automatic layout' option. Again, if you're dual-booting, and don't know what you're doing, then a GUI isn't going to be the thing that saves you from snotting your Windows partition during this process. > I typically don't know what my 'domain' is (I've never known to this day what I should type in that box, and nothing I type ever seems to make any difference). Same question is posed in every GNU/Linux distro installation, text or GUI, and in every instance of either that I've seen, the option exists to ignore it. Again, the problem of a fqdn isn't a function of whether you're using a text based installer, or a GUI one.
Freak_NL 10y ago
> Everything that made Ubuntu user friendly (or not) was there on Debian. It was there in Debian (mostly) but it lacked that final bit of polish for the average user. Debian has always been very conservative as well (which is a good thing for some situations, but not necessarily for a desktop) and its documentation and guides on the terse side. Ubuntu just clicked. It was, simply put, Linux for human beings. The user community at that time reflected this as well. It's not just the free CDs that did it. > But now they are abandoning Unity anyway, so it must not have been that important after all. Unity filled a void left by the end-of-life of Gnome 2. Gnome Shell at that time was looking okay, but it had way too many bugs — and this is to be expected in a new product with new UI paradigms and libraries. Unity was Canonical's attempt at providing a stable desktop environment that wasn't quite as revolutionary as Gnome Shell, and that could succeed Gnome 2 in stable releases of the distro. They pretty much succeeded there in my opinion. Today Gnome Shell likely is ready for mass use with all the early bugs ironed out (I hope), so Unity may not be needed as much now, but it did what it needed to do (and very well at that) for years.
- 4ad 10y ago
  > It was there in Debian (mostly) but it lacked that final bit of polish for the average user. I've heard this before, but I don't buy it. I have been using Linux for 20 years now; back in the day, and back when Ubuntu came out I was using it on my desktop (today, not so much) and I simply not believe this claim to be true. It's often repeated, but never with concrete specific examples on what was more polished and how it was more polished. In fact I believe the opposite to be true. Back then I was using Debian on my desktop. I naturally tried Ubuntu and found out it was less polished because it contained more bugs.
  - vacri 10y ago
    > never with concrete specific examples on what was more polished and how it was more polished. Network drivers for anything other than an intel card. Still, to this day. They're not in Debian for philosophical reasons, but they're a pain-point to non-expert users.
davidgerard 10y ago
I think you're 100% wrong there. Ubuntu supplied, and supplies, polish that Debian just doesn't bother with. You're grossly underestimating the It Just Works factor. (I remember trying to move back to Debian. Apart from Xfce compared to Xubuntu looking like it's had a two-day session with the ugly stick, getting my wifi to work felt like I was being lectured by a small RMS on my shoulder.) I do like Debian a whole lot, but for my purposes Ubuntu is functionally an acceptable Debian. (I use Debian on my personal server, Ubuntu on work servers and Xubuntu for my desktops.)
- 4ad 10y ago
  > Ubuntu supplied, and supplies, polish that Debian just doesn't bother with. This is often repeated but never with any concrete and specific evidence.
  - antod 10y ago
    You want concrete and specific evidence for a subjective judgement call based on peoples own experiences? Where's your concrete and specific evidence that nearly everybody else's subjective personal experience is somehow objectively 'wrong' and needs justifying?
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    The 100 Papercuts projects, for example. Debian has bothered more in the decade or so since Ubuntu started. And, of course, fixes go upstream where applicable - Ubuntu deals with a lot less platforms than Debian has to account for - and Canonical employees work directly on Debian in a few areas. But dude, I remember how much pain Breezy Badger wasn't compared to Debian at the time, in so many ways.
onli 10y ago
Multiple factors: Ubuntu had the Linux for human beings slogan, and at the time that was super important. They promised to create a distro that normal users can use, in contrast to the elitist attitude that prevailed in other communities. That was heavily reflected in the mainstream press Ubuntu reached seemingly effortlessly. The slogan was also taken seriously. If you asked in my local Ubuntu community (UbuntuUsers.de) there never was a RTFM or a google link. You got help, even if the question was asked already a hundred times that day. We combined that with writing the best linux documentation that exists to this day, but that's specific to the german Ubuntu community. Also, the installation was easy, it had a good installer. It wasn't even necessary to burn a CD, you could get it shipped. Not everyone had DSL back then nor CD-burners (well, that's true today as well, but now we have USB-boot). That sure helped.
vacri 10y ago
Debian has a lot of rough edges. I still wouldn't recommend it for a naif. You have to understand the Debian philosophy to not get angry at how Debian's default install simply doesn't work (still!) with most network cards. Debian has had a lot of user-friendly polish in the last half-decade, but was pretty gnarly before then. I came over to the linux side around 2007[1], and Debian was painful with network drivers and xorg configs, whereas ubuntu just gave you the binary blobs (like most distros) and worked on making X config less painful. Debian at the time was also exceptionally slow to bring in software, and that's improved in recent years. The user-friendly reputation of Ubuntu came well before 2010 when Unity came out - basically in its early days, Ubuntu gave you a distro with APT (= bye-bye, dependency hell) and also had friendly UX as its primary goal. Debian was about user-friendliness in terms of philosophy, not in terms of UX. I now use Debian on my workstation, in the cloud, and on my home laptop. But I would never recommend it to anyone without making them aware of the Debian philosophy first, and it's a philosophy you have to buy into at least a little bit. All the other devs in my workplace are either on macs or ubuntu/unity. [1] My very first linux experience was running ShowEQ, and dependency hell made me swear off linux for almost a decade... :)
- type0 10y ago
  Well put, in my mind Ubuntu will always be a great gateway drug to Debian. Ubuntu community did a fantastic job to popularize deb ecosystem even though it is often criticized for not contributing enough upstream. I can't imagine anyone using Debian as their first Linux distro, Ubuntu (and it's derivatives) on the other hand is the Linux distro. Debian is arguably more stable and technically might be better implemented but Ubuntu has won over the average user because of ease of use and helpful communities around it.
  - antod 10y ago
    > Ubuntu community did a fantastic job to popularize deb ecosystem This can't be emphasised enough. I was a Debian user before Ubuntu launched, and it really seemed like Debian was going to only ever remain an unsupported (by anyone else) niche in the face of Redhat.
darpa_escapee 10y ago
> I do not understand why Ubuntu became more popular than Debian. I really don't. Something to do with those free CDs. Certain things just worked, like hardware. For a time, X worked on Ubuntu with my hardware and I had to jump through hoops to configure X with the hopes it would work on Debian. My touchpad and sound card just worked. Proprietary drivers were easier to install. Desktop packages came with sane defaults. There were helpful forums and IRC channels.
fooker 10y ago
The crucial point you missed was it had a really polished installer, easily better than Windows and contemporary Mac OS. My non-tech friends managed to install it from CDs that came with magazines with almost no guidance. Of course after you have everything setup properly, it is hard to distinguish between distros (other than ..say.. package manager), but those choices do not drive the vast majority of people.

gshulegaard 10y ago

Amen. Also, I am not sure the melding of desktop and mobile is such a bad or even a dead idea. It has apparently died at Canonical but I think that may be due to the position Canonical specifically is in. I mean Samsung just entered this space in a big way with Dex...and that is 4 years after the original Ubuntu Edge Indiegogo. I have lamented elsewhere over the death of the Unity mobile direction...so I won't repeat myself but I still think it would have been really cool.

stewbrew 10y ago

Had they listened to the naysayers, they would have used gnome shell all along, the development resources would have been more focused, and desktop Linux would be better off. I recently switched from unity to gnome shell and it's much much better. Unity's bugs were simply embarrassing.