Ubuntu Celebrates Its Ninth Birthday Amid Controversy

[Hamish Wilson]

Powdigsig, can you answer me this honestly; have you ever looked beyond Ubuntu to other mainstream distro's? This has been standard functionality on Linux (not only Ubuntu, but on Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Arch, Mageia, etc) for years.

I seriously get the feeling that Ubuntu users simply (incorrectly) assume that all the niceties in Ubuntu are Ubuntu specific innovations and that all other distro's are like Linux From Scratch and only have a command line and a vi editor.

Broaden your horizon, most of the nice stuff in Ubuntu doesn't originate with Ubuntu.

This. Seriously.

And for the record I have never had a problem with Grub not detecting another system, although I must admit this has not come up for me much since I usually only have dedicated Linux installs on most of my machines.

[dee.]

Open source ethos is more libertarian than liberal,

No it's not. The whole concept of open source depends on a governing body who enforces licenses, that is, there needs to be regulation of what corporations are allowed to do with open source software, to enforce copyleft. Libertarianism is more concerned with minimizing all regulation, which would also make the functioning of open source impossible.

even if it's comprised more by liberals. Libertarianism is the only political idealogy I know of that calls for the abolition of patents and copyright.

Copyright is something of an umbrella term. When talking about "copyright", you need to specify between the various rights that reside within the "copyright" umbrella. There's at least three distinct, very different rights that are often conflated when talking about copyright:

- The copyright proper, ie. the right to make copies of a software (and distribute them)
- The right to sales, ie. the right to use/distribute the software for commercial purposes
- The right of authorship/attribution, ie. the right to be recognized as the author of a software/piece of code

Some parts of the copyright can safely be abolished, but removing it entirely would be detrimental to open source. Of course, most libertarians aren't concerned with nuances like these, they just call for abolition of all regulation...

[DDF420]

Eh? That's the job of GRUB2. And it does it well. For instance, openSUSE always detects Windows in my dual-boot environment.

Yes yes but he/she was talking about detection during installation so isn't that the debian partman packages in ubiquity detecting the other partitions not grub?

[Luke]

Tea Party not very popular now, had more popularity two years ago.

I thoroughly doubt, that the Teabaggers represent one third of the US population - they may *sound* like they do. And I'm not sure how Tea Partiers and "liberal" open source with an African name should go together.

I remember a Washington Post poll in Fall 2011 that had Occupy Wall St(etc) outpolling the Tea Party, with favorables in the high 30's for Occupy and low 30's at that time for the Tea Party. This was before police raids on Occupy designed to drive off support from liberals who don't stand up to cops, and the Tea Party's government shutdown made enemies of people who feared for their Social Security checks.

To tie an operating system (or any other product) by name to ANY political tendency is very bad marketing, as it ties your fate to that political party. Unless you are yourself a member of the party in question or one of its foes, and your product is a secondary matter meant for your organization you should not do this. Let's put it this way: Suppose Microsoft's new CEO was a noisy Republican Party activist. Enough of that noise and he would drive some Democrats and more people left of the DP to either Apple or Linux. Were he an equally noisy Democrat he would drive some of the GOP and more of the Tea Party to Apple, possibly to Linux as well. In either case he would lose sales.

This "open-source Tea Party" remark has the potential to offend both the Tea Party and progressives like myself at the same time, an even worse mistake in branding.

[johnc]

10.10 was my first Ubuntu. 11.04 was decent (w/ gnome-panel). It all went downhill (precipitously) from there.

It's a shame, really. I feel like they were on a good trajectory. And then Shuttleworth completely lost his mind. Ehh, it happens to everybody eventually.

It opens up an opportunity for someone else to step in and carry the torch.

[BSDude]

Powdigsig, can you answer me this honestly; have you ever looked beyond Ubuntu to other mainstream distro's? This has been standard functionality on Linux (not only Ubuntu, but on Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Arch, Mageia, etc) for years.

I seriously get the feeling that Ubuntu users simply (incorrectly) assume that all the niceties in Ubuntu are Ubuntu specific innovations and that all other distro's are like Linux From Scratch and only have a command line and a vi editor.

Broaden your horizon, most of the nice stuff in Ubuntu doesn't originate with Ubuntu.

Lol, even PCBSD has most of that stuff

[Hamish Wilson]

Lol, even PCBSD has most of that stuff

Actually... yes.

[GreatEmerald]

Yes yes but he/she was talking about detection during installation so isn't that the debian partman packages in ubiquity detecting the other partitions not grub?

If you're talking about auto mounting, then yes, that's the partition manager doing the detection, and yes, openSUSE does that perfectly fine as well.

[RoboJ1M]

Well, I've almost completely fried my 12.04 installation at home and it's in desperate need of a rebuild.

So I've decided to have a bash with the other major distros, see how they've come along since I last tried them.
That was about 10 years ago, I went back to XP and then ditched it for Ubuntu circa 6.06.

I've got the following to try:

Archlinux 2013.10.01 (not sure about this, probably too techie)
openSUSE 12.3 GNOME
Fedora (19-1?)
Ubuntu 13.10
Debian 7.2
Linux MINT 15 Cinnamon

I've decided not to try:

PCLinuxOS (I don't like KDE)
CentOS
Mageia (KDE)
Slackware Linux (only interested in everyday-linuxes, not techie ones)
FreeBSD (not Linux)

However: A quick check of the Plex site shows that the Plex Media Server is only (officially) available for Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS.
So maybe I'll add CentOS to the list.
All my knowledge is, however, of Debian-type distros, so RHEL derivatives are going to be a bit of a hump.

[Hamish Wilson]

All my knowledge is, however, of Debian-type distros, so RHEL derivatives are going to be a bit of a hump.

That difference is often overstated, methinks. But you seem to have a good list.