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Ubuntu is NOT a part of community

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  • #21
    Well I agree with BlackStar.

    Ubuntu constribute with a lot of users. Really.. Before Ubuntu not many knew about gnu/linux. But that has changed dramatically the last 5 years (because of Ubuntu).
    Almost everyone today knows what linux or Ubuntu is, because Ubuntu get a lot of press coverage where I live.

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    • #22
      Ubuntu is hype and nothing else. Userfriendly debian based? Had been done before, many times. Ubuntu had just better PR. That is all. And the article is not rubbish. Ubuntu is more broken with every release and several of the known bugs are idiotic showstoppers.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by energyman View Post
        And the article is not rubbish.
        No, but I'd say it's overhyping the problems. In particular, the list of bugs leaves out the 'may' and 'on specific platforms' provisos on a some, making them seem much worse than they are.

        Ubuntu is more broken with every release
        I'm not convinced. Some things get broken every release and some other things get fixed and a lot of features get added. While I'd rather they not break anything, it's hard to make significant OS changes with thousands of applications and not break a few.

        Fixing my system took a few hours over the weekend, but the only remaining major reproducible issues are the lack of autologin support (presumably a GDM issue) and the unreliable wireless on my netbook (presumably a kernel driver issue).

        and several of the known bugs are idiotic showstoppers.
        I don't see any 'showstoppers' there myself.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by BlackStar View Post

          and promote the patches upstream as does Fedora and openSUSE.
          Funny I never heard about just one upstream developer satisfied with ubuntu feedback. Where have all the feedback gone...? :-D

          I thought Gentoo followed the "don't patch" philosophy, like Arch?
          Maybe you should see the statistics.

          Who doesn't actually make any money out of this endeavor, unlike Red Hat or Novel.
          Who claim himself the best community distro so loudly? You can not be the community leader with strategy based on parasitism. Bigger market share brings bigger responsibility. That's how it works.

          OpenSUSE? That's a badly-designed, bloated Ubuntu wannabee.
          That Opensuse you hate so much, has much stonger functional community, not that funny Ubuntu circus based on drove of Shuttleworth sheep. Many important decisions in Opensuse are made by community. important decisions in ubuntu are made by Shuttleworth.

          That Opensuse you hate so much brought Build-service for everyone. This is a killer feature, and huge step toward global community, not the opensuse one.

          That Opensuse you hate so much have many upstream developers.

          Hogwash about bloated distro is just your personal opinion. Nothing more.

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          • #25
            Originally posted by movieman View Post
            I'm not convinced. Some things get broken every release and some other things get fixed and a lot of features get added. While I'd rather they not break anything, it's hard to make significant OS changes with thousands of applications and not break a few.

            Fixing my system took a few hours over the weekend, but the only remaining major reproducible issues are the lack of autologin support (presumably a GDM issue) and the unreliable wireless on my netbook (presumably a kernel driver issue).

            I don't see any 'showstoppers' there myself.
            Pretty similar experience, myself. I've updated 3 PCs and 2 laptops since the release of 9.10 and the worst thing that happened was a non-working touchpad on one laptop (fixed by doing the default dist-upgrade). Everything else went smoothly - in fact, one of my PCs has been upgraded continuously from 7.04 to 9.10 without issues.

            Just to put things into perspective, one recent Vista -> Win7 upgrade process managed to actually brick one of the two aforementioned laptops. I had to open the chasis and remove the CMOS battery before it would boot again. Confidence inspiring, ain't it? My OpenSUSE and Fedora VMs have never *ever* managed upgrade themselves without going FUBAR in the process.

            So much for your list of "showstopping bugs" in Ubuntu.

            Then again, many users are bitter in light of Ubuntu's success, so they tend to blow out of proportion whatever problems they read about (because obviously they don't have any first-hand experience with the distro - the first mark of a good troll).

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            • #26
              Here's my 2 cents.

              Ubuntu doesn't stay close to upstream because it's not possible when they apply so many ****ing patches that actually *break* the software.

              Eg. http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/pa-in-ubuntu.html

              Vanilla Distros like Arch and Gentoo do report bugs and send fixes to upstream. They don't just patch them away.

              Novell employs people just to work on KDE, gnome, the kernel, X.org, openoffice/go-oo (btw many fixes from go-oo make their way to sun's openoffice eventually), and various other projects.
              Redhat does the same.

              Smaller (community) distro's can't hire anyone, which is why they can't contribute as much.

              Ubuntu just hires people to work on launchpad, ubuntu, unr, and ubuntu one (which is proprietary).

              Why does having more users matter exactly? What will it bring? It won't bring more devs, they would find out about linux anyway.

              I have found archlinux to be more stable than any other linux distro because they don't have fancy tools or patches that break things. Everything is setup the way it's supposed to be, the way that's easier for the software, not the user. Users should be willing to learn something. For me, updating is just 'pacman -Syu' daily. No releases, no delay of waiting for a new release.

              /rant

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              • #27
                Good that you mention Arch, cause Arch Linux has the biggest and best community of all Linux distribution. Arch Linux is actually driven by comunity (AUR project), Ubuntu has big number of "users" but those users come and go, but it isn't constant userbase.

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                • #28
                  Linux distributions are not football teams although there seems to be a lot of "football supporters" around them. They have different reasons to exist and have been started with different goals, and they function in different ways.

                  One thing is that one distro's success does not mean it hurts another distro. They are not fighting between themselves for a limited set of resources. They will all gain on increased acceptance of Linux in general and together take "market share" from MS and Apple. Of course some distros will die because they have no advantages over others.

                  Some people here talk about the great "market share" of Ubuntu. Remember that the distro is given away for free, so it's not like they are earning money directly by this "market share". I would guess RedHat and Suse have more paying customers. I don't think Canonical has earned a lot of money so far. And it was funded out of the pockets of one man. Should we deny him spending his money the way he chose to? Should he had donated his money to kernel hackers, or given it to the poor, instead of building a new distro that worked the way he wanted? I also think as soon as Canonical starts to get off the ground economically more resources will be spent on upstream development.

                  Now let's come back to goals. I think many people behind Ubuntu (community and corporate owners) are genuinely interested in making as much people as possible able to use free software, and to avoid the monopolies of proprietary software. This could mean cutting some corners on the way, like allowing proprietary hardware drivers until free ones have caught up, or focusing resources on making it a polished product instead of making new upstream features.

                  "Why does having more users matter exactly?" - this guy does not really share the vision of having more people using free software

                  Personally I don't think it is important that everybody uses free software, or that they use one distribution or another. But to preserve/create the freedom to choose your own tools in the modern information society, a certain "market share" for free software is necessary. And to gain that share, don't come running with gentoo or slackware, or GNU/Hurd for that matter. I wonder if I could have used for instance my internet banking with a free browser today if it wasn't for a couple of Mozilla developers putting the foot down and focusing on a polished end-user product like Firefox. And I have had to use not-so-free java licenses on the way but not any more, and I hope the flashplayer issue will go the same way.

                  Finally, just some points for those who did not know:

                  Fedora is an experimental community distro, not meant for "normal" end-users. So it does not "compete" with Ubuntu. Fedora serves as a test bed for the commercial distro RHEL from Redhat. RHEL is a business competitor to Ubuntu's LTS releases (with its support offers from Canonical).

                  Greg HK which some people refer to, is from SUSE, also a commercial competitor to RedHat's and Canonical's support service, and part of the big corporation Novell. It is part of his company loyalty to make SUSE sound better than other companies, and probably in his company culture to add a little poison to his expressions.

                  /me sorry for getting troll-baited and writing such a long article that no one will read in the most useless thread ever.
                  Last edited by tormod; 30 November 2009, 06:50 PM.

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by tormod View Post
                    "Why does having more users matter exactly?" - this guy does not really share the vision of having more people using free software
                    Yeah, I don't.
                    If people want to use it let them use it, but this whole 'we need more users' is basically turning free software into a religion.

                    I'm not talking about different roles, I understand that Ubuntu is aimed at a different audience, but they don't give back much to anything except themselves.

                    It's difficult to argue with trolls without exaggerating a bit

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by some-guy View Post
                      Yeah, I don't.
                      If people want to use it let them use it, but this whole 'we need more users' is basically turning free software into a religion.
                      It's not a religion, it is a war strategy It's more "we want to let more users be able to choose Linux", and what I also hoped the Firefox parallel would illustrate is that if only a small group of users use Linux, the rest of the world will not care about interoperability and Joe the user will need a Windows machine to do "normal" user activities, like internet banking or watching Youtube.

                      Of course there are many "classic" Linux users who do not care about this and what other users do, as long as they can read slashdot in lynx and listen to their self-recorded .ogg files.

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