Ubuntu Developing Its Own Calculator, Calendar, Etc

[Luke_Wolf]

Its a very good analogy for a lot of slow code and it looks like it hit a nerve. To spell it out for you in this situation it means if the tools are shit a good programmer can make the best out of a bad situation.

To be fair to BO$$ there are some instances where the craftsman can do nothing because his tools are so crappy. For instance say you've got a bunch of flathead screws that for whatever reason need screwing in, but all you've got is a phillips screwdriver (not to say that the phillips screwdriver is bad for what it's meant to do but it's crappy for using with flatheads), It doesn't matter how good of a craftsman your phillips screwdriver won't work with flat head screws.

Another more relevant example is the entrenchment tool. Any person stuck digging holes with that thing would be right in blaming their tool, you're not going to get very far at all with one in any reasonable amount of time and expended effort no matter how much of a clever bastard you might be.

Simply put to use another saying related to craftsmen "You have to use the right tool for the job" or the more general "Work smarter not harder".

[TheBlackCat]

But sometimes the best out of a bad situation is still a bad situation...

But you have provided no evidence that using python properly results in a "bad situation", you just assert it does based on nothing but a wild guess.

[bwat47]

It's not my problem. I was just trying to find some possible reasons why Software Center starts so slow. You're arguing that it isn't python that it takes a lot of time to retrieve data from Canonical. I am saying that it takes a lot of time to load the window as in the main window. After it loads the window it takes another couple of seconds to load the data and display it. But the first 10 seconds I just sit and wait for the window to appear.

Good tradesman never blames his tools? What a moronic saying. I know both C++ and Java and Python and when it comes to performance close to metal SIMD code optimizations with custom allocators, C++ rapes Python. So saying that likely Python has absolutely no implications in the performance of Software Center seems like a cop out for lazy programming. You're basically saying that it's normal to wait 10 seconds for an application to start and the VM has no part in it.

On another thread I was arguing why the hell on Windows I get smooth mouse movements while in Linux I get choppy mouse movement under heavy CPU or disk I/O. I was told that since the mouse is not in kernel like in Windows and the mouse is in X which is just another process in userland combined with the completely fair scheduler that the kernel uses, this kind of behavior is expected. Can you people please stop arguing how it's impossible to do something in Linux while that used to work just fine since Windows 1.0? Why is it always that taking 15 seconds to start an application and choppy mouse movement nobody's fault and should be accepted unquestioned? And don't get me started on listening to music while copying a file.....

I've never seen my mouse cursor lag in linux, on any computer I've used linux on

[TheOne]

Mouse lag and audio hangs are true.

What BO$$ is saying is actually true, I ran out of ram while compiling huge source files with make -j 5 and the mouse cursor stopped responding until there was available ram.

I have a quad-core cpu and 4 gigs of ram if it matters.

Also I have experienced audio that stopped playing when starting to copy huge amount of files from one place to another. This usually happens when using a file manager, haven't tested from shell using cp.

People tend to say that Ubuntu hasn't contributed back to community but in my humble opinion making an environment that works is enough. I remember when I first tried linux and trying to listen audio in mp3 format was a pain in the ass, or installing proprietary drivers to get some decent gameplay. Stupid things like that aren't stupid at all they matter from the standpoint of new users. Canonical has made the linux experience more pleasant for new comers, now even my grandma can use a linux

[nightmarex]

What BO$$ is saying is actually true, I ran out of ram while compiling huge source files with make -j 5 and the mouse cursor stopped responding until there was available ram.

I have a quad-core cpu and 4 gigs of ram if it matters.

Also I have experienced audio that stopped playing when starting to copy huge amount of files from one place to another. This usually happens when using a file manager, haven't tested from shell using cp.

People tend to say that Ubuntu hasn't contributed back to community but in my humble opinion making an environment that works is enough. I remember when I first tried linux and trying to listen audio in mp3 format was a pain in the ass, or installing proprietary drivers to get some decent gameplay. Stupid things like that aren't stupid at all they matter from the standpoint of new users. Canonical has made the linux experience more pleasant for new comers, now even my grandma can use a linux

Okay first, that audio problem sounds like you're taxing your disk (trying to read and write too much data) for the buffer you have (usually adjustable). I'm sure people will blame Linux because their shoutcast radio is skippy while downloading torrents 0-0. If this isn't the case and your internet radio is hanging while moving files that's bizarre.

Second mouse hangs... Well I can tax my CPU 98% (video conversion) on 4 cores and still have a responsive desktop, I am sure there are cases where this may not hold up but I never have that issue. I remember taxing single core systems (even on Windows) and having the computer laugh at you when you tell it to do anything but those days are gone.... I hope. My phone has a dual core ffs.
If it is a ram issue, that maybe plausible. It's well known you don't want to use swap if you can avoid it though (on any operating system). I suppose if you have a SSD this maybe a non issue. Via your description sounds like it's a combination of swap usage and CPU taxing.

[eliac]

...

People tend to say that Ubuntu hasn't contributed back to community but in my humble opinion making an environment that works is enough. I remember when I first tried linux and trying to listen audio in mp3 format was a pain in the ass, or installing proprietary drivers to get some decent gameplay. Stupid things like that aren't stupid at all they matter from the standpoint of new users. Canonical has made the linux experience more pleasant for new comers, now even my grandma can use a linux

Ubuntu has been a positive force for Linux in many ways, but let's not make it more than it ever was. Installing mp3 codecs or proprietary drivers is not even something that your grandma should be exposed to, and for the kind of user that had to tackle it was a solved problem in most distributions when it was a solved problem in Ubuntu.

Once installed and configured, the Ubuntu Gnome experience for a final mainstream user (your grandma) was pretty much indistinguishable from a Fedora+Gnome one or a SuSE+Gnome one.
Yes, installation might have been easier or smoother. But installing is for tinkerers, not your grandma. Yes, finding CLI incantations to solve particular problems might have been easier thanks to a better organization of the community. But apt-getting stuff or using a terminal is for tinkerers, not your grandma.

What Ubuntu has been best at was not providing a better user experience, but providing a lower entrance barrier to power users. That's an important market, because they are in turn evangelists among their less computer-literate colleagues or grand-parents. And overall I'm glad Ubuntu was there to exploit this "market" and raise the profile of Linux. Same with their commercial partnerships for netbooks and laptops... their business model never made much sense but I'm glad someone spent their money to give Linux better visibility.

On the other hand, Canonical started very early to downplay the role of the Linux community at large in the accomplishments under the Ubuntu brand. Even worse, we nowadays have a very obnoxious new category of rabid distro fanboys, which I suspect are mostly those self-professed power users that found in Ubuntu a tool for a little ego boosting. They got to solve some problems with their friends' and parents' computers, they probably also created some entirely new ones, and more importantly they got to show off with "an alternative OS that is totally not windows nor mac. No virus and it's faster".

[TheOne]

Via your description sounds like it's a combination of swap usage and CPU taxing.

I disabled swap on my system

[Vim_User]

I disabled swap on my system

So what do you expect to happen when your computer runs out of RAM? That it magically functions properly without having the RAM for the tasks you run?
This is a misconfiguration, nothing else.

[TheBlackCat]

How exactly is Canonical downplaying the importance of linux community? They never say anything about it as a marketing strategy just like google. The never say that Android is based on linux since linux frightens people since everybody knows linux as that shitty operating system for geniuses that can't play an mp3.

"How are they downplaying it? They just never talk about it"

downplay (ˈdaʊnˌpleɪ) [Click for IPA pronunciation guide]

? vb
( tr ) to play down; make little of

How can you make less of something than by ignoring its very existence?

[TheOne]

Yes, finding CLI incantations to solve particular problems might have been easier thanks to a better organization of the community. But apt-getting stuff or using a terminal is for tinkerers, not your grandma.

If I recall correctly when the audio player was opened Ubuntu was configured to automatically ask the user to download necessary codecs if playing some unsupported format.

Same with flash player, video drivers, etc. I don't remember my grandma telling me she needed to apt-get anything But of-course, later other distros applied the same techniques