[PLUG] 'buntus

drew wymore drew.wymore at gmail.com
Sun Apr 25 21:18:22 UTC 2010


On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Bruce <kd7vvk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 04/25/2010 12:57 PM, drew wymore wrote:
>> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 12:44 PM, Michael Moore
>> <moore.michael.m at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Bruce<kd7vvk at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>>> I landed in the Kubuntu environment.  Kubuntu 9.10, in my experience,
>>>> fell flat on it's ISO.  I assumed it was growing pains of the latest
>>>> KDE.  I installed Ubuntu on my "it has to work" machine and then used
>>>> the other laptop to tinker with 10.04 (starting with Alpha 2) of both
>>>> Ubuntu and Kubuntu.  Neither seems to be very spectacular in what it
>>>> does.  I haven't had any major problems, though I am far from a power user.
>>>>
>>> My thought:  Ubuntu might not be the best choice for an "it has to
>>> work" machine.  That's not to insult or disparage Ubuntu, it's just a
>>> reflection of Ubuntu being a reasonably bleeding-edge distro, akin to
>>> Fedora.  Any bleeding-edge anything is likely to have some bugs&
>>> burps that creep into the shiny and new.  Often, the problems that
>>> distros get blamed for are the result of bugs (or, design decisions or
>>> implementation changes that might be controversial) upstream, as Drew
>>> already mentioned with regard to the missing xorg.conf.  To some
>>> extent, it is the responsibility of distros to put together a fully
>>> functioning whole, but in practice there are so many moving parts that
>>> it simply isn't possibly to be up-to-the-minute and completely free of
>>> sometimes show-stopping bugs or usability issues.  And when upstream
>>> devs do something that annoys a lot of users, it's always the
>>> bleeding-edge distro's users that get exposed to the annoyance first.
>>>
>>> Personally, I'd stay with something that doesn't prioritize the latest
>>> and greatest over stability or usability for an "it has to work"
>>> machine -- especially in light of your unsatisfying experience with
>>> KDE/Kubuntu.  In the Debian universe, there is nothing more stable
>>> than Debian stable itself.  In the Red Hat universe, many here have
>>> talked about Scientific Linux or CentOS.
>>>
>>> Michael M.
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> PLUG mailing list
>>> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
>>> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
>>>
>>>
>> Good points Michael. I think one thing that I took away from that
>> article as well was that it appears from the perspective of the writer
>> that corporate interests, in this case Canonical, take away from the
>> interests of the user base and that there seems to be a communication
>> problem between the developers and the community and maybe that's
>> where most of his problem is and not with the changes themselves. What
>> seems to get lost in the discussion in my opinion is that Ubuntu for
>> better or worse has become the face of desktop linux in many ways and
>> with its notoriety and large install base it gets blamed for some
>> things that have nothing to do with the distro itself (see the xorg
>> complaint which is silly to me).
>> _______________________________________________
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>> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
>> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
>>
> I think this is where my questions started.  If Canonical is going the
> way of the commercial interest, then perhaps it is time to change.  The
> flip side of that...the buck has to stop somewhere and someone always
> makes decisions that are not popular with everyone.
>
> Bruce
> _______________________________________________
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> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
>

Well said Bruce, the buck does indeed not to stop somewhere. My take
is that Canonical isn't so much bowing to corporate interests and
ignoring the community but that the community is now so large, there
isn't going to be the consensus and ability to make every user happy
anymore.

 It happens with most successful start ups at some point. That early
excitement and enthusiasm and hard work to make users happy changes
when the user base grows to a point you have to decide that meeting
the middle is better and more worse the risk even if it means
alienating those who supported you in your early days.

I think the other part of this, being accused of bowing to corporate
interests especially in the linux world is seen as evil and will be
something that distro providers who, like Canonical and Red Hat will
have to find a way to balance in order to be financially successful
and not violate the spirit from which they were born.

Drew-



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