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  • Originally posted by Akka View Post
    And they are in a worse position relative Apple with osx. Osx is also one of this semi open system. Even Google with chrom, android whatever is probably in a better position relative Canonical (on the desktop, on tablet and phones the comparison is silly.
    Osx already is a very good working modern desktop unix system. Without the community part I don't see the point with Canonical over Apple.
    I thought the thread was about Mir then degenerated to vs Wayland etc...Why bring up Apple and OS X. As far as I know, neither Google's android nor Apple's OS X will be using Wayland or Mir. If you know otherwise then please inform me.

    You cannot legally obtain OS X without purchasing an apple computer as far as I know and last time I checked, they cost a hefty sum which is not a justifiable purchase in many economies.

    If Canonical is able to produce an OS on par with the popular proprietary offerings free of cost then good on them and good on the community. If they fail to produce it, then bad on them but there are still many alternatives available no?

    I don't understand why so many people are faulting Canonical for the vision they have. If you do not agree with their vision, that's fine. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. However, there is no need to vilify them like they are responsible for clubbing baby seals or stealing first born children. People keep screaming that Ubuntu is taking their freedom when no one is forcing them to use Ubuntu.

    It takes leadership to deliver that vision and that is what Canonical is offering to Ubuntu. Leadership.

    There are many community developed distributions and a few more pop up every week while some die. This has been going on for many years, yet it has amounted to little with regards to making the Linux desktop mainstream. Why fault Canonical for diverging from the norm (Which obviously hasn't been working out)?

    If Ubuntu's direction isn't your cup of tea then use another Distro. Many are doing just that. There is no need for slander.

    With regards to the Wayland/Mir fiasco. For what Ubuntu wants to offer, Wayland may not fit well. Not that it is technically inferior to Mir. In fact it may be technically superior to Mir. It is certainly more complete at the moment. But let's say for example, Ubuntu adapts Wayland. 8-10 months down the road, they need to change the way Wayland works to accommodate some changes in their product offerings. How do they accomplish that? Do they force changes on Wayland that disrupts every other distro using Wayland. I doubt that would happen as such disruptive changes would be rejected upstream. What are their other options? Forking Wayland and maintaining the patches? Doable yes! But it may be better for them to have their own display server that they can integrate with their offerings and change when they see fit to do so without needing the blessing of the established oligarchy of Wayland devs.

    Wayland may be ideal for a desktop distributions that do not change much over the years. However, the mobile consumer space that is fast to evolve might require a more flexible solution (Flexible meaning disruptive changes can be made as the market dictates).

    Some people are behaving as if Wayland is the golden torch of Linux, as if everything will magically get better as soon as Wayland is adopted. Nothing much will change when Wayland is adapted. Linux wont magically see a higher adoption rate on the consumer desktop. X is not the reason linux isn't more popular in the consumer desktop space and Wayland will not solve that problem (Is that even a problem?). The only thing that will happen is that Distros will have a better graphic stack available alongside X.

    You may never hear anyone say "Oh, I'm going to buy an computer with OpenSUSE preinstalled because it is using Wayland". Of course you may never hear someone say "I'm going to buy this ubuntu Computer because it us using Mir". However, you may hear someone say "I'm going to buy that Ubuntu phone because I can also use it as my desktop computer when docked".

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    • Originally posted by lapis View Post
      C is an old language.Is not capable to produce Big software like a graphics stack.I dont like C++ (complex language),but is better than C.
      This is what Linus Torvalds has to say about C++ in git:
      C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot
      of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much
      easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if
      the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out,
      that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

      In other words: the choice of C is the only sane choice.
      gmane.org is your first and best source for all of the information you’re looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, gmane.org has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!

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      • Originally posted by chithanh View Post
        This is what Linus Torvalds has to say about C++ in git:

        http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.v...43/focus=57918
        GCC is switching from C to C++.

        Migrating GCC to C++ as implementation language:
        C++ is a standardized, well known, popular language.
        C++ is nearly a superset of C90 used in GCC.
        The C subset of C++ is just as efficient as C.
        C++ supports cleaner code in several significant cases.
        C++ makes it easier to write and enforce cleaner interfaces.
        C++ never requires uglier code.
        C++ is not a panacea but it is an improvement.
        clang and llvm are also using C++.

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        • Originally posted by jayrulez View Post
          If Canonical is able to produce an OS on par with the popular proprietary offerings free of cost
          Jeez. What the hell is going on. Canonical produces what? How many times it has to be repeated. Canonical just re-packages debian packages and before unity they used their custom gay brown color, few icons and gay brown wallpapers. You call it ABLE TO PRODUCE and call it a VISION? They are not creating their own stuff, they just repackage packages. What the fuck is this retarded nonsense all over again. Canonical's only vision is make money from using other people hard work. I'm not a tech. guy, but read what wayland devs have to say about mir. MIR is just shiny stuff written on paper that's all. Canonical want more control to make more money, you call it vision. Mobile space? There is android and huge company google behind it. Now all that buntu phone hype shit, lol that crap offers nothing fancy compared to android. What's the big deal? Oh wait it's teh hype, retards don't care because they are stupid sheeps.

          Comment


          • Originally posted by phoen1x View Post
            Jeez. What the hell is going on. Canonical produces what? How many times it has to be repeated. Canonical just re-packages debian packages and before unity they used their custom gay brown color, few icons and gay brown wallpapers. You call it ABLE TO PRODUCE and call it a VISION? They are not creating their own stuff, they just repackage packages. What the fuck is this retarded nonsense all over again. Canonical's only vision is make money from using other people hard work. I'm not a tech. guy, but read what wayland devs have to say about mir. MIR is just shiny stuff written on paper that's all. Canonical want more control to make more money, you call it vision. Mobile space? There is android and huge company google behind it. Now all that buntu phone hype shit, lol that crap offers nothing fancy compared to android. What's the big deal? Oh wait it's teh hype, retards don't care because they are stupid sheeps.
            He used the word "if" there. I don't think "if" means what you think it means.

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            • Originally posted by johnc View Post
              Though Sam also paints a somewhat depressing view of what can be realistically accomplished by the open source "community" and talks about the struggles of spreading FOSS. Frankly, I just don't get it... and it seems like he's come to accept some of the realistic limitations as well. But what is the deal with FOSS that makes it such an ethos or almost religion for many? And don't get me wrong, I love religion... but I go to a church for my religious experiences. FOSS is an extremely poor substitute for a holistic belief system. I, personally, only really believe in "open source" in the sense that I think code should be visible to verify no invasions of privacy and the like. I don't have any particular fondness to one open source license over another.
              Now there is an interesting can of worms you just opened. Speaking as an atheist, I do not see free software as a religion, but I do see it as a political and ethical stance, which to me is more important than any religious belief or experience could be. It is a position I have grown to support due to evidence and persuasion, and I have been convinced enough that I feel I should defend it from blind attacks and assertions. Now, I would like to think if someone brought me real concrete evidence that free software was a somehow wrong or evil I would like to think I would drop it (what such an argument would be seems extremely unclear), but of course being a human being I would be a little more emotional and feel a little more invested than I would otherwise may be, so I may get a little belligerent about it. But I do not see anything religious about this.

              Originally posted by johnc View Post
              Ohh stop if you think a non-tech user could manage any Linux distro, let alone a non-Ubuntu one.
              The arrogance here is verging on the insulting. But I will let my own experiences guide me here, thanks. Ubuntu does not have some magical usability advantage just because it is brown.
              Last edited by Hamish Wilson; 08 March 2013, 02:32 PM.

              Comment


              • Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                3) Ubuntu. Ecosystem is defined by the packages.
                Unless you mean upstart/Unity which are a dubious contributions at best, Ubuntu has always been a Debian derivative. There's nothing in it you couldn't get with any other distro.

                Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                Banks are distributing their homebanking software precompiled and dynamically linked against libraries that are currently in Ubuntu, causing grief to users and developers of other distros.
                And other banks use ActiveX and require IE. And they all know about as much about software development as users know about ecosystems.
                Last edited by prodigy_; 08 March 2013, 02:49 PM.

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                • Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                  I don't think that statement is true. Users may not know the term "ecosystem", but they definitely know about the things that make up an ecosystem.

                  Examples:
                  1) Firefox. Ecosystem is mainly defined by the myriad of extensions. Users who wanted to switch to another browser (like Chrome) found it difficult at first because the extensions which they were used to didn't exist yet
                  2) Android. Ecosystem is mostly defined by apps. People like to buy Samsung Android phones, but almost nobody buys Samsung Windows phones, despite price and hardware being very similar. Most of the important popular apps are on both platforms, but few of the important non-popular ones are on WP. Like the app from your local public transport company or sports team.
                  3) Ubuntu. Ecosystem is defined by the packages. Want the latest release of some software? Find it readily availabe in an Ubuntu PPA. Banks are distributing their homebanking software precompiled and dynamically linked against libraries that are currently in Ubuntu, causing grief to users and developers of other distros.
                  As an ecologist, I find the use of the word a poor choice overall. What eats what here? Where is the energy flow? What about nutrient cycles, consumption levels, energy input and output? Who is the top predator, who are the producers? What about intake, assimilation, respiration, biomass of each unit? No, to me something like "software sphere" would make more sense.

                  Originally posted by Hamish Wilson View Post
                  Now there is an interesting can of worms you just opened. Speaking as an atheist, I do not see free software as a religion, but I do see it as a political and ethical stance, which to me is more important than any religious belief or experience could be. It is a position I have grown to support due to evidence and persuasion, and I have been convinced enough that I feel I should defend it from blind attacks and assertions. Now, I would like to think if someone brought me real concrete evidence that free software was a somehow wrong or evil I would like to think I would drop it (what such an argument would be seems extremely unclear), but of course being a human being I would be a little more emotional and feel a little more invested than I would otherwise may be, so I may get a little belligerent about it. But I do not see anything religious about this.
                  Yeap, that's exactly how I feel about the subject as well.

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                  • Originally posted by jayrulez View Post
                    You cannot legally obtain OS X without purchasing an apple computer as far as I know and last time I checked, they cost a hefty sum which is not a justifiable purchase in many economies.
                    You have NO clue what you are talking about. Have you ever even set foot in an Apple Store? (i guess not) You can buy MacOSX by itself and that has ALWAYS been the case. it's like $100. I know several people with Hackintoshes that have done just that.

                    if you are going to make factual claims, at least take 2 seconds to verify that are indeed facts. (going on Apple's website / online store would have been appropriate, in this case b4 making such moronic claims).

                    Originally posted by jayrulez View Post
                    Some people are behaving as if Wayland is the golden torch of Linux, as if everything will magically get better as soon as Wayland is adopted. Nothing much will change when Wayland is adapted. Linux wont magically see a higher adoption rate on the consumer desktop. X is not the reason linux isn't more popular in the consumer desktop space and Wayland will not solve that problem (Is that even a problem?). The only thing that will happen is that Distros will have a better graphic stack available alongside X.
                    No. I don't think people think it's 'the golden torch of linux'. I think many long time linux users want standardization, not more fragmentation - which just hinders development. I also don't think people assume that once Wayland is adopted that automagically will see a much higher adoption rate (where the fsck do you even come up with this stuff? it's pretty laughable).

                    having a better graphical stack, more standardization with less fragmentation is the point.

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                    • Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                      If you look a bit around their numbers, you will find dates where the Linux numbers dropped markedly, e.g. between January and February 2012. Same for iOS between October and November. My guess is that NMS was changing their counting method there. So a growth pattern which includes such anomalies is probably not a very useful indicator for anything.
                      Well, you posted the graph . I agree that their numbers are probably somewhat subject to anomalies because the Linux base is so tiny - I don't think their sample size is huge. But the trend is more or less the same as w3schools: slow growth, short faster growth, flat. It's flat for two and a half years; hard to write off as an anomaly, especially when w3schools shows the same thing.

                      Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                      That was not the point of the post which you were replying to. Whether Ubuntu's dominance is a good achievement or bad thing is independent from whether "the devs will follow" Ubuntu in what they are doing.
                      Well, you have to go all the way back in the context: look at what gamer2k was replying to as well, which was a 'what has Ubuntu done for us lately?' kind of comment. To me, my response flowed reasonably in the thread.

                      Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                      You should not think for a second that users are dumb sheep that simply follow marketing or are stuck with Ubuntu/Windows/... because they don't know any better. Users choose Ubuntu because the software and ecosystem fit their needs most.
                      That's not what I meant at all. It's not about being a dumb sheep. It's about this:

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                      What do you see there? Piles of Ubuntu. That's not 'marketing'. At least, not in the derogatory sense you intended. It's the result of a concerted effort on Ubuntu's part to get a bunch of solid, working AMI images right up on Amazon's download page. Which was a really smart thing to do, I say again.

                      What I mean is this: I think that most people who use EC2 don't really care what distro they get, as long as it's good enough. If you're deploying on EC2 it's because you kinda just want to get to a working shell without all the hassle so you can poke something, right? So it often doesn't matter much to you what it is that provides that shell, so long as it's competent. Ubuntu would do fine. So would Fedora, or Arch, or RHEL, or anything else at all. Maybe you like one more than the other in some other context, but in the EC2 context, it probably just doesn't matter. So the fact that Ubuntu goes to the trouble to make tested images that work right out of the box available right from Amazon's AMI download page counts for a lot. You're not going to bother going out and trying to find Fedora's or Arch's AMI images, which probably don't work as well anyway. Because Ubuntu's done the work to be the big prominent Linux choice on the AMI download pages, you'll just grab Ubuntu. It's there, and it'll get you to a Linux environment with a shell, and you're happy. You probably don't care about expert paid tech support for your EC2 instance, or whether it'll still have updates in five years' time, or any of that crap; you just want a working Linux environment.

                      Again, this is a smart thing that Ubuntu has done, but it's not necessarily directly something you can generalize. Though I do think the cloud environment gives other distros something more of a 'level playing field' against the entrenched entities like us, which frankly, is probably good for both sides.

                      Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                      The OpenShift numbers are like that because 1) customers who have already decided for RHEL go there and 2) they don't have a choice to install anything else.
                      Well you can ditch 1), 2) is quite enough =) Which is why I put a wink next to it. It wasn't a serious point in itself; just a silly way of pointing out that all cloud environments have differing attributes. It's much more obvious in the case of OpenShift, but EC2 is not exactly a level playing field for comparing the merits of different distributions, since Ubuntu has advantages on EC2 that are specific to EC2. I'm not saying that's unfair or wrong or anything like that, on the contrary, as I keep saying, it's a great job by Ubuntu. All I'm saying is it means you can't look at the EC2 numbers and assume 50% of people would pick Ubuntu for any Linux deployment if all other factors were equal, or anything like that.

                      Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                      One more data point how relevant OpenShift (or any of the other cloud operators) is in comparison to EC2 is the Freelance.co.uk Fast 50 report for Q4, Amazon AWS is now #6 top trending item. OpenShift is not even an also-ran.
                      That's a pretty indirect sampling method. I'm not a huge fan of surveys of 'trends' in 'terms'. EC2 and OpenShift don't compete directly, either, and I didn't intend to give the impression I thought they did; it was just a jokey way of making a point, as I mentioned above.

                      Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                      Certainly your employer pays a considerable part of the $1.3bn/year income directly to one of the analyst houses which will answer questions about market share and trends. Especially the pace at which stuff is moving into the cloud and how long it takes for the slow-moving enterprise market to reflect the operating system trends.
                      Personally I vastly prefer engineers to analysts. RH engineers have been building the basic pieces of the cloud since before the cloud was a thing. We're perfectly on top of the trends, thanks.

                      Originally posted by chithanh View Post
                      Sometimes you see surveys among members of Linux User Groups like the one right before LCA 2010 (sorry that the link contains only a tarball with CSV data, as nobody bothered to make pretty graphs out of them apparently). These surveys are usually not very large (a few hundred respondents) and opt-in or even self-identified among a very narrow target demographic, so the numbers cannot be directly transferred to the general population. But the general picture that is painted here is the same in all surveys.
                      Ubuntu is used by 69.3% of respondents, almost twice as many as the next biggest distro, Debian which has 35.5% (multiple distros can be named). And this is among visitors of a Linux conference, who are enthusiasts or professionals with 30% participating moderately or heavily and 75% at least occasionally in the Linux community. It seems plausible that among general users, the share of Ubuntu is even higher.
                      It seems plausible, I'll give you that; I'm just not sure I'd be confident stating it as an unalloyed fact.

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