thelinuxlink.net

Just ran into this blog post, about Ubuntu not being for "new Linux users", a couple of valid points are made, check it out: http://linux-blog.org/index.php?/archiv ... Users.html

For example this one I think is very valid:
"For example, say that a webpage requires JRE to display correctly. Windows and IE offers an auto download or manual with double click install. Many distributions of Linux come with Java already installed. For Ubuntu...you have to drop to a command line and sudo to install it. What new Linux user is even going to know to do that? What new Linux user is going to feel comfortable doing that? Of course, let's say that the new Linux user is sporting a nice Ubuntu 5.10. That'll fix that sudo stuff right? Wrong. Automatix be damned...you still have much command line stuff to do."

Also, something that annoys me about Ubuntu is the massive amount of Apple-style fanboys out there, who're like: "Ohhh Ubuntu rocks, everything else sucks, sudo dude, my mum runs Ubuntu, Ubuntu Ubuntu Ubuntu...."
UBUNTU IS JUST ABOUT TWO YEARS OLD FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!!!!!
Red Hat and SUSE has been here for over 10 freaking years! And Mandriva is just about eight years old! They've had time to really think about to the bottom how their distros should work, make out licensing agreements with people like Sun and Macromedia to make life eaisier for the new Linux users who want Flash and Java support, they've been polishing their distros off for years and have had time to think the user experience through, and I'm not just "advocating that SUSE is a good distro" here (It is btw ), Fedora provides a damn good GNOME experience (I've been looking at their upcoming 5 release, and even as a die-hard KDE user I have to say it looks pretty good), Mandriva does a great job as well, and SUSE too provides a wonderful KDE and GNOME experience.

The whole thing about licensing agreements is, I suspect, a red herring. _All_ of the distributions you mention have spent 10 years _selling_ their distributions, and, most likely, are able to get per-sale agreements for things like that.

The whole issue over things like Java, Flash, etc, is a big one. Although, to be honest, I don't have Java installed on my home desktop (Debian) nor my laptop (Ubuntu), and have never felt the need to have it.

I think there are two important reasons that Linux is exciting:

1. Canonical have done in 2 years what the other distributions have spent 10 years doing. (OK - maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but they're progress is staggering, and if they keep it up they really will make a difference.)

2. Ubuntu is a distribution that is liked by both new-to-Linux people _and_ hardened Linux gurus, thus bridging the gap and allowing for a helpful transfer of knowledge. (Again - this is a bit of a sweeping statement, but I think it basically holds true.)

/me dons flameproof suit.

The fact that Ubuntu doesn't come with Java installed is no excuse to condemn a new user to Windows or Linspire.

When I was new I tried several different distros until I found what I liked. Starting a newbie on a specific distro because it comes with proprietary pieces installed is more of a handicap than a help, but ultimately most people will migrate to a more free distro anyway.

As far as Ubuntu being no good because it's only 2 years old, it's not like they started from scratch. Ever heard of Debian? I think they've been around a few years.

mrben wrote:The whole thing about licensing agreements is, I suspect, a red herring. _All_ of the distributions you mention have spent 10 years _selling_ their distributions, and, most likely, are able to get per-sale agreements for things like that.

Yes, and in "most" cases, you've been able to get it for free, even before Novell bought SUSE, whenever a new version came out you could either buy it, or wait six weeks and get it for free. Mandriva has always had a free version, so has Red Hat (To my knowledge).

mrben wrote:The whole issue over things like Java, Flash, etc, is a big one. Although, to be honest, I don't have Java installed on my home desktop (Debian) nor my laptop (Ubuntu), and have never felt the need to have it.

You just nailed it on the head with "I don't have Java installed on my home desktop (Debian) nor my laptop (Ubuntu), and have never felt the need to have it.". YOU don't have it installed nor need it, but what about the Windows users that are used to using Azureus or other Java stuff, I'm sure they apreciate being thrown right into the command prompt when wanting to use that stuff, which I think is a flaw in the way a distro handles newbies.

mrben wrote:1. Canonical have done in 2 years what the other distributions have spent 10 years doing. (OK - maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but they're progress is staggering, and if they keep it up they really will make a difference.)

Yeah right, dude, today it doesn't take a whole lot of a time to put a distro together. Look at all the Debian offshoots, they popping up like mushrooms, there's also this new weird-ass Fedora derived distro called FoX Linux, which had a bunch of hype for a minute.

mrben wrote:2. Ubuntu is a distribution that is liked by both new-to-Linux people _and_ hardened Linux gurus, thus bridging the gap and allowing for a helpful transfer of knowledge. (Again - this is a bit of a sweeping statement, but I think it basically holds true.)

Well, go check out fedoraforum.org, right now it has about 61,915 members (Yes I am aware that ubuntuforums.org has 75,130 members), I doubt that there aren't a lot of experienced users in both camps.

Gomer_X wrote:The fact that Ubuntu doesn't come with Java installed is no excuse to condemn a new user to Windows or Linspire.

Dude, did I even refer to Linspire in my original post? I like the stuff Linspire do by sponsoring Kopete, a lot of KDE stuff etc. etc., but I don't like their Linux distribution. People who make a distro that sets people up with a root account by default don't understand the fundemental basics of UNIX security, hardcore UNIX admins has said for over twenty years: "NEVER RUN AS ROOT". I think those guys are a little more experienced when it comes to security than Linspire (And I'm talking about people that've used stuff like AIX, Solaris, IRIX....).

Gomer_X wrote:When I was new I tried several different distros until I found what I liked. Starting a newbie on a specific distro because it comes with proprietary pieces installed is more of a handicap than a help, but ultimately most people will migrate to a more free distro anyway.

Well, if you're used to Windows or OS X, you don't give a crap about Java, Flash... not being free (See RMS' definition), you just want things to work, let's face it, if you introduce a Windows user to Linux you know for a fact he don't give a shit about the GNU philosophy because he already uses proprietary software, or just want his damn machine to work (Windows doesn't exactly fulfill that demand in my mind). Also don't we want our moms and paps to use Linux? I doubt a lot of people in that genre cares about Java not being free, I doubt they care about multimedia codecs not being free, they just want things to work. The thing we have to ensure when we introduce Windows people, and especially hardcore Windows user that sit in the registry all day long, to Linux is that they don't get a bad experience at first sight, that makes them go right back to Windows and believe Microsoft's crappy "Get The Facts" (Get The FUD?) propaganda. Of course we can just ignore such users, but in the end that bites us in the butt more than it helps us, of course you and I can give a crap about not more people using Linux, because we get the fact (I can't believe I just said that) that it's a superior OS and all that happy stuff, but as we go into the future of multimedia and stuff, what will be the most common thing you will see regarding that? DRM
And that will eventually make our experience with Linux more misserable, if we like to buy DVDs or something. Linux will never get the so-called HDCP support, and thank god for that, but at the same time that completely takes away our ability to legally watch next-gen DVDs (HD-DVD and BluRay), HDCP support has to be a part of the kernel, and since our kernel is GPLed, what can people do? Go right in and look at how the HDCP stuff is working and hack it so you can disable the copy protection on other platforms probably as well. The point I'm trying to make is that if we don't act now, and get more people over to Linux, we will never get the chance again, because once people are upgraded to Vista, and locked into the next-gen multimedia era, we will be out in the cold. Why is it that we have such a hard time with the legality of codecs and the ability to purchase music, and TV shows legally online? Because we're only about 5,2% of the market, and even though we are bigger in numbers than those Apple users, most people don't know it, and we can't prove it do anybody and convince them to make all that stuff available to us.

Gomer_X wrote:As far as Ubuntu being no good because it's only 2 years old, it's not like they started from scratch. Ever heard of Debian? I think they've been around a few years.

I didn't say, nor did the article as far as I am aware (The writer mentions that he uses Ubuntu), "Ubuntu was no good" on a general plan, I said it was a bad choice for new Linux users, because it makes a lot of things that Windows users are used to being easy to do, pretty damn hard (Maybe not from our perspective) right off the bat. Of course I know Ubuntu is based on Debian, I'm not completely stupid, but let's face a fact, Debian has never aimed to be easy to use nor do they primarily aim to be a desktop distribution, you can certainly use it for that, but it's for the faint of heart among the Windows users out there.

On the flip side, I think newbies do need support and support is not free. If you monetize the time on the free support forums you will see that people spend thousands in support hours.

Even if the support on this is free, it cost them time. Linux commercial support is made exactly, to save money/time learning linux.

I think if we know you are a total linux newbie, the best advice is to get this service to them unless you are going to be his personal support assitance for free.

Gomer_X wrote:The fact that Ubuntu doesn't come with Java installed is no excuse to condemn a new user to Windows or Linspire.

Linspire is far from being a condemnation, Linspire is saving them more money than if you make them try Ubuntu. Simply because they dont have to worry about drivers, installation, they have dedicated support and they get discounts on commercial software.

Not everybody wants to move to Linux because is free (as in freedom) they want to move because security concerns. Linspire is far more secure than windows, and they are able to run their software, and have help I think is well worth the price.

If you think support is free, you should get sued and see how expensive can (legal)support is. This come to the point that Linc make some months ago where operating a computers is like operating car. You do have a responsability for learning the tool. Why would people pay money for driving school (yeah we dont want to know u learn on your own for free), since this is not about you but about the general population.

I want to know why flash doesn't make a plugin for amd64 and ppc linux.

I wouldn't think it would be that hard to make

it pisses me off. if they want to be so dominant on the web then they could at least support more than one platform.

jsusanka wrote:I want to know why flash doesn't make a plugin for amd64 and ppc linux.

AMD64 I don't understand either, but PPC I could understand a little more (That isn't saying that I understand it). How many people actually use Linux on a PPC machine? Not many, and those who do are in most cases geeks like us, if you're a non-experienced user you probably run Mac OS X on a PPC machine, why wouldn't you? I havn't seen a single Mac user that think Linux is superior, besides Dann and Linc of course.

jsusanka wrote:I wouldn't think it would be that hard to make

An AMD64 version is very easy to do, you just run make!

jsusanka wrote:it pisses me off. if they want to be so dominant on the web then they could at least support more than one platform.

Or do what that WinRAR folks did, keep the encoding mechanism proprietary, but just give away everything related to decoding. That makes you truly dominant. It's not that I like this kind of thing, but it makes it eaisier for us who want to just display Flash animations on the web.

I've been looking at the GNU project's Gnash project, it seems to be progressing pretty well sofar, I think that maybe around christmas or maybe in the first quarter of 2007, we will have something that's very very close to being useable, and by the end of 2007 we will have a very good Flash 7 player, then the tough task comes to making a free player for Flash 8, but what the heck, if DVD Jon could crack DeCSS, the GNU project can certainly do a player for Flash 8.

Tsuroerusu wrote:

mrben wrote:The whole thing about licensing agreements is, I suspect, a red herring. _All_ of the distributions you mention have spent 10 years _selling_ their distributions, and, most likely, are able to get per-sale agreements for things like that.

Yes, and in "most" cases, you've been able to get it for free, even before Novell bought SUSE, whenever a new version came out you could either buy it, or wait six weeks and get it for free. Mandriva has always had a free version, so has Red Hat (To my knowledge).

SuSE always put proprietary stuff on the box set that was never available in the download edition (which was always notorious).

RedHat always made their source packages available, but not ISOs for their main products (hence the existence of CentOS, etc). And, like most commercial distros, continue to not provided anything for playing back MP3s or DVDs, due to commerical/legal concerns. Mandriva, I believe, likewise.

Yeah right, dude, today it doesn't take a whole lot of a time to put a distro together. Look at all the Debian offshoots, they popping up like mushrooms, there's also this new weird-ass Fedora derived distro called FoX Linux, which had a bunch of hype for a minute.

You can't condemn Ubuntu for being only 2 years old, and then say that it takes no time to put a distro together. You have to pick one stance or the other.


I don't have any problems with SuSE, Fedora, or Mandriva. Personally, I believe that they all have issues that are difficult for 'new' users, just as much as Ubuntu.

I recommend Ubuntu to my new user friends. But the number one reason _why_ I do that is simple - it's what I use, it's what I know. The best distribution for any new user is the one that their nearest Linux techie knows the best. For me, that's Debian or Ubuntu, and, of the two, Ubuntu is easier to use.

mrben wrote:SuSE always put proprietary stuff on the box set that was never available in the download edition (which was always notorious).

Hmmm, that's weird, I have some old SUSE laying around, and they have a little bit of proprietary stuff here and there. I bet it's because of licensing they have to do with folks like Macromedia, Adobe.....

mrben wrote:RedHat always made their source packages available, but not ISOs for their main products (hence the existence of CentOS, etc). And, like most commercial distros, continue to not provided anything for playing back MP3s or DVDs, due to commerical/legal concerns. Mandriva, I believe, likewise.

Red Hat made ISOs available until they decided to go to Fedora Core, then their enterprise products were only available as sources. Well, if you wanna provide a DVD player, you gotta pay a "per unit" licensing fine for both the MPEG2 format and CSS decryption stuff.... even Windows doesn't give you this, I don't blame anyone for this, not even Ubuntu. Mandriva has always had a free edition, and you could add all the proprietary stuff if you wanted to from community reps, of course, you can do that with Ubuntu too.

mrben wrote:You can't condemn Ubuntu for being only 2 years old, and then say that it takes no time to put a distro together. You have to pick one stance or the other.

Well, look at all the weird-ass Linux distros out there, if it took A LOT of hard work, I doubt there would be aś many. Of course it does take some effort, I couldn't do one, at least at the present time, but still, it's very easy to remaster LiveCDs, I have done that with SLAX. And today with Xen, you don't really have to pick one distro, next month when FreeBSD releases 6.1 which should have support for Xen, I might actually give it a whirl, and then run SUSE in Xen so I can run all the apps which are a pain to run under BSD, such as Azureus which is a Java-based app, and Java is a nightmare in BSD.

mrben wrote:I don't have any problems with SuSE, Fedora, or Mandriva. Personally, I believe that they all have issues that are difficult for 'new' users, just as much as Ubuntu.

Well, I agree with you that they all have at least one issue, but I disagree that it's "just as bad" as Ubuntu. Look, if you're a Windows user and you get Ubuntu and/or SUSE installed, the first thing you probably wanna do is surf the web, fine that works pretty well in all distros, then you might wanna listen to music, I doubt any Windows user uses OGG as his prefered audio format, so he tries to play an mp3, already there he has a problem, and how does he get Ubuntu to play it? Well if goes to the classic ubuntuguide.org, or the new wikified version of it, it shows him how to do it WITH COMMANDS for crying out loud! The worst thing you can do to new Linux users these days, is throw them right into the command prompt. SUSE at least has some limited mp3 support, and you can install all the packages you need, all through a GUI, which I found easy to guide people through on the phone, of course you can use Synaptic in Ubuntu, but none of the guides, focuses on doing that, they just say "ohh go execute this command", what if the user don't even know what a command is? What if he just fundementally don't wanna use the command prompt? The thing you have to keep in mind is that Windows people trying Linux can always go right back to Windows, of course you and I can give a shit about that, but then we will never get a bigger amount of people migrated to Linux if we don't try and address the problems they're having, and it doesn't help a bit by throwing new people right into the command prompt, Mandriva and Fedora also guilty of this to an extent, when you go to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org and pick reps. you get commands to execute, because to us more savy users, it seems eaisier, but what if the user doesn't feel that way, I say guide him through a GUI even though it might take a little more time, he will at least feel some familiarity (I never spell that word right ).

mrben wrote:I recommend Ubuntu to my new user friends. But the number one reason _why_ I do that is simple - it's what I use, it's what I know. The best distribution for any new user is the one that their nearest Linux techie knows the best. For me, that's Debian or Ubuntu, and, of the two, Ubuntu is easier to use.

Well I have no problem with that, what I do have a problem with is all the hype about Ubuntu being the eaisiest to use distro, and everything else is damn hard and sucks ass, ohhh, and "Mark's hoary butt is nice........" I can't stand the fanboys and zealots I sometimes run into, I'm not accusing you of being a such one, because you gave some constructive answers above, but there are just so many Apple-style fanboys of Ubuntu out there.
And heck, Ubuntu doesn't even have a centralized GUI for configuring the system which is what Windows users are used to, I acknowledge that it does have some basic tools, but I find them very very limited, it doesn't even have a GUI for configuring Xorg which is a really big lack in my opinion, both SUSE, Mandriva and Fedora to an extent, have tools for configuring X.

Tsuroerusu wrote:Well I have no problem with that, what I do have a problem with is all the hype about Ubuntu being the eaisiest to use distro, and everything else is damn hard and sucks ass, ohhh, and "Mark's hoary butt is nice........" I can't stand the fanboys and zealots I sometimes run into, I'm not accusing you of being a such one, because you gave some constructive answers above, but there are just so many Apple-style fanboys of Ubuntu out there.

I can't stand fan boys either! Look, no distro is perfect but it's getting better everyday. I remember when I had to hack the crap out of XFree86.conf just to get X working on my desktop. Ubuntu/Kubuntu at the very least has some what raised linux into the mainstream consciousness. For that alone I think we should be grateful.

FYI, I just added Mark Shuttleworth to our guest calendar for 5/31.

Patrick wrote:I can't stand fan boys either! Look, no distro is perfect but it's getting better everyday. I remember when I had to hack the crap out of XFree86.conf just to get X working on my desktop.

Of course, I'm not stupid, everything has it's flaws, nothing ever gets perfect. Yeah that XFree86.conf era was a pain, thank goodness we're past that now.

Patrick wrote:Ubuntu/Kubuntu at the very least has some what raised linux into the mainstream consciousness. For that alone I think we should be grateful.

Again, what does Ubuntu do that hasn't been done before? In my eyes, it's just some rich guy that dropped a lot of money into a creating a Linux distro, I personally think Novell does a better job of this, even though they're aiming for the corporate side of the market. Of course Ubuntu does get better, I've been looking at some screenshots of the latest alpha and it looks like it does have a tool for adjusting screen resolution, which is good.

Patrick wrote:FYI, I just added Mark Shuttleworth to our guest calendar for 5/31.

Hehe, remember go grill him about those brown default desktops!

Personally, I feel the best way to get a Windows user to try Linux is to take their PC, do the install and set-up of Linux yourself, then give them back a complete system... ready to go.

I've done this now with a hand-ful of people and it seems to be the best method of Linux adoption. They're still using their Linux system and are quite content.

Got another co-working coming by the house some evening this week to do the same thing.

I do the install, do the upgrades and get all of the extra packages they'll need to do what they want to do. I hand them back a working system and they just use it. They don't care if they're using Kanotix, Slackware, Arch... whatever. They just know that they're using Linux and KDE (I set them up with KDE ever time).

If they want to install a new package, I'll talk them through it or log into their desktop remotely and show them.

Tsuroerusu wrote:

Patrick wrote:FYI, I just added Mark Shuttleworth to our guest calendar for 5/31.

Hehe, remember go grill him about those brown default desktops!

SH|T BE GONE!


New splash screen:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/attachment. ... 1130425734

And login screen:

Judland wrote:Got another co-working coming by the house some evening this week to do the same thing.

I had another co-worker ask me this morning to help him setup a linux box. We're making progress people!