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> In 2001, that wasn't the case at all. You still needed to put in some elbow grease, and there were corner cases for sure, but I was using Linux with no proble
by duaneb 14y ago
> In 2001, that wasn't the case at all. You still needed to put in some elbow grease, and there were corner cases for sure, but I was using Linux with no problems (except a lack of Counter-Strike), had been for years and so had my parents.
Linux (and the ecosystem surrounding it) definitely worked, it was just atrocious at most non-coding tasks. What would you do if someone sent you a .doc (I am glad those days are gone and I can demand PDFs these days), would you just work through the compatibility errors and hope you didn't lose any content? And forget it if you had any non-popular hardware: even if there were drivers for it, they were either incomplete (not blaming the driver writers, just the poor resources for them) or difficult to configure and work correctly.
It's really only in the past five years or so I would be confident someone could probably learn to use it without much help, and I would still recommend OSX for non-devs. I still can't upgrade my ubuntu install without breaking at least one crucial aspect of the system (graphics, sound, the goddamn user interface).
Could you use it well in 2001? Yes, but not without being either very familiar or only using web browsing and email (hope you don't run into active x or flash or any kind of codec that involves you breaking the law).
- sethrin 14y agoUbuntu starts with Debian unstable (usually) and adds their own bugs. I fully expect it to break when updating. I had an enthusiastic period of Ubuntu and Fedora use. It seems stability is a virtue most appreciated in its absence; these days I use Debian stable and have largely forgotten about broken functionality. A few packages are pinned to testing, firefox and chromium were originally compiled from source and have been auto-updating since then. Unless you have a need for every package on your system to be recent to within a few years, you may want to consider using a system intended to be stable. There really is no possible substitute for a years-long testing cycle.
- duaneb 14y agoI do agree about debian, and were I to care about a long term installations I would probably go with that (or freebsd, depending on my needs). But again, I don't think that debian has the user friendliness that ubuntu does, in fact I can't think of any other distribution that works as well (that's not an ubuntu derivative itself). If you are interested, my typical use case is spinning up a vm for about 5-10 hours of total work while I port my code to linux, and ubuntu is simply the fastest way to do that without snapshotting a clean install (which I really should do).
- sethrin 14y agoLinux Mint has a Debian Edition. I think it's based off Testing rather than Unstable. That would probably be my default recommendation for newbies. Personally I'm using Crunchbang, which is minimalist, lightweight, based on Stable, and comes with a nice set of install scripts for web servers and databases and suchlike. Generally speaking though, if I were moving code between platforms, I would make sure that my staging environment matched whatever the production environment was -- I suspect not Ubuntu.
- duaneb 14y agoHmm, good to know. I don't write web stuff so production environment = generic linux distro, most likely to be ubuntu.