5 ms·

it's hard to read that without feeling the huge weight of criticism (all the kow-towing and talking about experts). and then i come here and 2 out of 4 posts a

it's hard to read that without feeling the huge weight of criticism (all the kow-towing and talking about experts). and then i come here and 2 out of 4 posts are complaining. really, can't you just go somewhere else? ubuntu is fine for my laptop. it might even do for my mother's next time i visit. if you want something else, either use something else or at least have the graciousness to complain without "fuck up" and "muckety muck". you're beyond tiring. go away. please.

mattdeboard 14y ago
"Works on my machine!" I'm more pissed about the fact that there are so many show-stoppers moving from 12.04 to 12.10. I like 12.04. It's solid. 12.10 is not. I'm going to bitch about it. edit: By the way, I did not know "muckety muck" had a negative connotation. I just use it as a synonym for boss. I should probably quit telling my boss he's a muckety muck.
- stingraycharles 14y ago
  The problem is that bitching about past issues adds little value. We all know that they made bad choices in the past, it just isn't really useful to keep reminding everyone about those facts every time something about Ubuntu comes up.
  - mattdeboard 14y ago
    I'm not talking about the past. I'm talking about their latest release which came out two months ago.
- theshadow 14y ago
  This goes without saying but no one is forcing you to upgrade from 12.04 to 12.10. 12.10 is not an LTS release so naturally you should stick to 12.04 if you don't want any of the kinks that are a side-effect of being on the bleeding edge. For me personally, I upgraded from 12.04 -> 12.10 last week and after a 'apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping' I can barely even tell I'm running 12.10!
jiggy2011 14y ago
Ubuntu has the big advantage of being the most widely supported Linux distribution. Of course if you don't like it you could switch to arch or something, but then you have the problem that you want to install program X that only has ubuntu install instructions and you end up having to read forums just to install the thing.
PommeDeTerre 14y ago
Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe there's something to the huge amount of criticism? You know, maybe we should all consider listening to it? The Ubuntu community got so large because Ubuntu was something that people found very useful. Then a few years ago, questionable decisions started being made. They brought a very poor experience to a huge number of people, without offering any benefit. The criticism is valid, and it should be voiced loudly and often. It's not isolated to Ubuntu, either. There are other major open source projects that have started to actively defecate upon their existing user base. Firefox and GNOME are two big ones. We see the same kind of widespread, large-scale anger from their communities, too. The leadership of Ubuntu, GNOME and Firefox have all chosen to essentially ignore the ever-growing disillusionment within their existing communities. I think it will cost them dearly. We've already seen a lot of people moving to alternatives. More importantly, these are the power users who are moving away. These are the very people who are needed by any project that really wants to succeed. They're the ones who help drive others to use the given product. Without them, the project is nothing. It may take a few more years, but I do think that we'll see GNOME, Ubuntu and Firefox go the way of XFree86, if things don't change today.
- rlpb 14y ago
  Remember that Ubuntu flavors such as Xubuntu and Lubuntu exist, and that their existence is supported from the top (just read TFA). Members of the Ubuntu community who don't like Unity just use them instead. No dissenting voices are needed within the community, since all are accommodated. > ignore the ever-growing disillusionment within their existing communities You assume that the voices of dissent come from within their existing communities. I don't think that's true. I think they come from people who wish their own favourite project/fork were as popular, but fail to see why it isn't.
  - PommeDeTerre 14y ago
    Any time I've tried Xubuntu or Kubuntu in the past, I've found the experience to be quite horrible and unpolished. I got the impression that they were second-class citizens within the Ubuntu world, whether they're intentionally held down, or just neglected and without as much attention. I have consistently found that the integration of Xfce and KDE with Debian, for example, is much more robust and sound than what's offered by Ubuntu "flavors" like Xubuntu and Kubuntu. Deny it if you wish, but the anger within the Ubuntu, Firefox and GNOME communities is coming from long-time users who have known better times. It's much more about people who now suffer from a far worse experience when using said software. People who have seen their productivity drop because they've been forced to use Unity, or because Firefox's UI has been screwed up, or because GNOME 3 embodies just about every bad decision that can possibly be made. I think it's an extreme minority of people who complain out of some ideological want for their chosen project or variant to be more popular.
gosu 14y ago
Perhaps the issue is that Mark hasn't been the only one working on Ubuntu. Maybe other people who have contributed their time and effort in some form are unhappy to see it go to waste. (You probably don't want those people to go away, by the way.) Maybe people who haven't contributed anything are unhappy to see a good thing go seemingly bad, as a matter of principle. Or, like someone mentioned, they're sad that Ubuntu's remaining community resources (which might not strictly be Mark's to spend) will now be spent in a way that doesn't benefit them and their friends. Then there are people who might be offended that they were excluded from Ubuntu's audience in the name of "not excluding people from Ubuntu's audience".
pqs 14y ago
It works on your laptop, but not on my father's in law desktop, where it used to work. Ubuntu used to work on this machine and, somehow, after each upgrade it has become less stable. It freezes completely and there is no way to solve the problem. In fact, there are some bugs in Ubuntu's buck tracker that might be related, but they are marked as "won't fix". Anyway, today I'm transitioning my parents in law to Windows 7. It will be a pain for me, but at least it will work for them. It won't freeze. Good luck Mark S. You will end up with a "very interesting" user interface that nobody will use, because of stability problems or because of the pain caused by such an interface.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  "Anyway, today I'm transitioning my parents in law to Windows 7. It will be a pain for me, but at least it will work for them. It won't freeze." Glad you found something that works for you and your father in law. I'll just mention that CentOS 6.3 (and the other RHEL 6 clones, Scientific Linux and Springdale, formerly PUIAS) have a kernel and applications that are similar roughly to Ubuntu 10.04. Ubuntu 10.04 is still supported on the desktop until April 2013 so people have three months to explore alternatives should they have hardware problems or find recent Ubuntus not to their taste.
  - pqs 14y ago
    Thanks for your tip. I was also thinking about trying Debian stable. There is another option, which would be to change the video card of the computer. But I don't have much time. This is my parents' in law computer not mine, and when I go to visit them with my wife, I don't want to stay the whole day in their office doing computer maintenance. So I decided to use W7, which was already installed in their computer.
    - keithpeter 14y ago
      Yes, video cards and hardware drivers generally is the difficult area. I was posting my suggestion for others in the same boat. I detect a 'blind spot' sometimes in some replies to discussions like this about the fact that the operating system is GNU/Linux, and a distribution is just that, a convenient collection of packages and an update system/policy. If someone else finds (say) Ubuntu 10.04 works really well on their hardware, they are likely (but not certain) to find that CentOS 6 will do just as well. I use a recycled Thinkpad with Intel graphics, so any major Linux distro is a half hour install, with most things working out of the box. Debian is strict about proprietary binary blobs, and so needs a wired connection to install and add the firmware appropriate to the wifi card. CentOS I recollect 'just worked'. My reason for using CentOS on the laptop is that there is a definite update life published. Debian release their new version 'when it is ready' and the current stable then drops to old-stable with a year of updates. This approach admirable, but I find it easier to slap CentOS on and forget about it until the laptop dies! Sort of the XP of the Linux world.
wyck 14y ago
Maybe you should practice what you preach. Complaining about complainers is the bottom of the barrel, and asking people to go away from a community just because they disagree and maybe don't use the right wording is a mis-understanding on your part. People are genuinely upset about Canonical's direction, the tech community knows the context and history here, it does not need explaining. A simple "fuck you" reaction is sometimes appropriate. Canonical is clearly taking the wrong direction and the simple solution is to switch to a better community, there are literally tons of them, http://distrowatch.com/ http://distrowatch.com/
chez17 14y ago
So a major distribution being used all around the world should stop being criticized because it's "fine for your laptop"? That seems astonishingly myopic.

mattdeboard 14y ago

"Works on my machine!" I'm more pissed about the fact that there are so many show-stoppers moving from 12.04 to 12.10. I like 12.04. It's solid. 12.10 is not. I'm going to bitch about it. edit: By the way, I did not know "muckety muck" had a negative connotation. I just use it as a synonym for boss. I should probably quit telling my boss he's a muckety muck.

stingraycharles 14y ago
The problem is that bitching about past issues adds little value. We all know that they made bad choices in the past, it just isn't really useful to keep reminding everyone about those facts every time something about Ubuntu comes up.
- mattdeboard 14y ago
  I'm not talking about the past. I'm talking about their latest release which came out two months ago.
theshadow 14y ago
This goes without saying but no one is forcing you to upgrade from 12.04 to 12.10. 12.10 is not an LTS release so naturally you should stick to 12.04 if you don't want any of the kinks that are a side-effect of being on the bleeding edge. For me personally, I upgraded from 12.04 -> 12.10 last week and after a 'apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping' I can barely even tell I'm running 12.10!

jiggy2011 14y ago

Ubuntu has the big advantage of being the most widely supported Linux distribution. Of course if you don't like it you could switch to arch or something, but then you have the problem that you want to install program X that only has ubuntu install instructions and you end up having to read forums just to install the thing.

PommeDeTerre 14y ago

Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe there's something to the huge amount of criticism? You know, maybe we should all consider listening to it? The Ubuntu community got so large because Ubuntu was something that people found very useful. Then a few years ago, questionable decisions started being made. They brought a very poor experience to a huge number of people, without offering any benefit. The criticism is valid, and it should be voiced loudly and often. It's not isolated to Ubuntu, either. There are other major open source projects that have started to actively defecate upon their existing user base. Firefox and GNOME are two big ones. We see the same kind of widespread, large-scale anger from their communities, too. The leadership of Ubuntu, GNOME and Firefox have all chosen to essentially ignore the ever-growing disillusionment within their existing communities. I think it will cost them dearly. We've already seen a lot of people moving to alternatives. More importantly, these are the power users who are moving away. These are the very people who are needed by any project that really wants to succeed. They're the ones who help drive others to use the given product. Without them, the project is nothing. It may take a few more years, but I do think that we'll see GNOME, Ubuntu and Firefox go the way of XFree86, if things don't change today.

rlpb 14y ago
Remember that Ubuntu flavors such as Xubuntu and Lubuntu exist, and that their existence is supported from the top (just read TFA). Members of the Ubuntu community who don't like Unity just use them instead. No dissenting voices are needed within the community, since all are accommodated. > ignore the ever-growing disillusionment within their existing communities You assume that the voices of dissent come from within their existing communities. I don't think that's true. I think they come from people who wish their own favourite project/fork were as popular, but fail to see why it isn't.
- PommeDeTerre 14y ago
  Any time I've tried Xubuntu or Kubuntu in the past, I've found the experience to be quite horrible and unpolished. I got the impression that they were second-class citizens within the Ubuntu world, whether they're intentionally held down, or just neglected and without as much attention. I have consistently found that the integration of Xfce and KDE with Debian, for example, is much more robust and sound than what's offered by Ubuntu "flavors" like Xubuntu and Kubuntu. Deny it if you wish, but the anger within the Ubuntu, Firefox and GNOME communities is coming from long-time users who have known better times. It's much more about people who now suffer from a far worse experience when using said software. People who have seen their productivity drop because they've been forced to use Unity, or because Firefox's UI has been screwed up, or because GNOME 3 embodies just about every bad decision that can possibly be made. I think it's an extreme minority of people who complain out of some ideological want for their chosen project or variant to be more popular.

gosu 14y ago

Perhaps the issue is that Mark hasn't been the only one working on Ubuntu. Maybe other people who have contributed their time and effort in some form are unhappy to see it go to waste. (You probably don't want those people to go away, by the way.) Maybe people who haven't contributed anything are unhappy to see a good thing go seemingly bad, as a matter of principle. Or, like someone mentioned, they're sad that Ubuntu's remaining community resources (which might not strictly be Mark's to spend) will now be spent in a way that doesn't benefit them and their friends. Then there are people who might be offended that they were excluded from Ubuntu's audience in the name of "not excluding people from Ubuntu's audience".

pqs 14y ago

It works on your laptop, but not on my father's in law desktop, where it used to work. Ubuntu used to work on this machine and, somehow, after each upgrade it has become less stable. It freezes completely and there is no way to solve the problem. In fact, there are some bugs in Ubuntu's buck tracker that might be related, but they are marked as "won't fix". Anyway, today I'm transitioning my parents in law to Windows 7. It will be a pain for me, but at least it will work for them. It won't freeze. Good luck Mark S. You will end up with a "very interesting" user interface that nobody will use, because of stability problems or because of the pain caused by such an interface.

keithpeter 14y ago
"Anyway, today I'm transitioning my parents in law to Windows 7. It will be a pain for me, but at least it will work for them. It won't freeze." Glad you found something that works for you and your father in law. I'll just mention that CentOS 6.3 (and the other RHEL 6 clones, Scientific Linux and Springdale, formerly PUIAS) have a kernel and applications that are similar roughly to Ubuntu 10.04. Ubuntu 10.04 is still supported on the desktop until April 2013 so people have three months to explore alternatives should they have hardware problems or find recent Ubuntus not to their taste.
- pqs 14y ago
  Thanks for your tip. I was also thinking about trying Debian stable. There is another option, which would be to change the video card of the computer. But I don't have much time. This is my parents' in law computer not mine, and when I go to visit them with my wife, I don't want to stay the whole day in their office doing computer maintenance. So I decided to use W7, which was already installed in their computer.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    Yes, video cards and hardware drivers generally is the difficult area. I was posting my suggestion for others in the same boat. I detect a 'blind spot' sometimes in some replies to discussions like this about the fact that the operating system is GNU/Linux, and a distribution is just that, a convenient collection of packages and an update system/policy. If someone else finds (say) Ubuntu 10.04 works really well on their hardware, they are likely (but not certain) to find that CentOS 6 will do just as well. I use a recycled Thinkpad with Intel graphics, so any major Linux distro is a half hour install, with most things working out of the box. Debian is strict about proprietary binary blobs, and so needs a wired connection to install and add the firmware appropriate to the wifi card. CentOS I recollect 'just worked'. My reason for using CentOS on the laptop is that there is a definite update life published. Debian release their new version 'when it is ready' and the current stable then drops to old-stable with a year of updates. This approach admirable, but I find it easier to slap CentOS on and forget about it until the laptop dies! Sort of the XP of the Linux world.

wyck 14y ago

Maybe you should practice what you preach. Complaining about complainers is the bottom of the barrel, and asking people to go away from a community just because they disagree and maybe don't use the right wording is a mis-understanding on your part. People are genuinely upset about Canonical's direction, the tech community knows the context and history here, it does not need explaining. A simple "fuck you" reaction is sometimes appropriate. Canonical is clearly taking the wrong direction and the simple solution is to switch to a better community, there are literally tons of them, http://distrowatch.com/ http://distrowatch.com/

chez17 14y ago

So a major distribution being used all around the world should stop being criticized because it's "fine for your laptop"? That seems astonishingly myopic.