Feels awfully defensive. And I'm tired of people saying things like "why the negativity?" Just because you don't like what someone says doesn't mean it's negative, but besides that it should be okay to say negative things.
Right, Ubuntu running autonomous stuff feels kind of like the opposite of "a user".
And if watching Netflix on their smart TV makes people Ubuntu users, then having a bank account makes them users of any number of exotic IBM letters-slash-digits operating systems. (though ironically, Netflix is just about the only thing I run on my old Ubuntu laptop, and superior compatibility with that Ubuntu laptop was the primary reason why I switched from the silverlight-only Netflix clone I used before to Netflix, so for me personally, they are very much related)
Despite the focus on cloud in the article, there are a lot of ubuntu desktop users. I mean it has become rare to see a dev running Windows in my experience. Could be a regional thing but it seems popular here.
Windows isn't so bad. I had a legit prejudice against it for the longest time, and did literally everything in my power to avoid it even as my team began working almost exclusively on .NET projects.
Now I've bootcamped my mac and swapped out my desktop Arch installation in favor of Windows 10. There are undoubtedly things that I miss - and I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't primarily writing C# - but it's not quite the purgatory I'd imagined / remembered it being.
IIRC, nearly all of that behavior can be disabled during installation (so before any user activity exists). And if you're talking about backdoors/hidden privacy behavior, there's been a risk of that since Windows 95. I think that the defaults of Win10 are bad, but it's not all as bad as the FUD that's floating around.
The worst features can only be disabled on Enterprise editions of Windows. That is not the attitude I want in the most important piece of software on my computer.
> There are undoubtedly things that I miss - and I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't primarily writing C# - but it's not quite the purgatory I'd imagined / remembered it being.
Yes, I keep telling myself that I'm going to dual-boot my Surface Pro 3 with Arch, but I never get around to it, in large part because Windows 10 just isn't that bad.
VS also has nice Python tools. Powershell competence is going to improve your Windows experience. I figured out I have been looking the world in the wrong way. We all complain about the annoyances, but I think to use both Windows and Linux competently makes you a better over all developer.
I've really embraced Powershell in a big way recently. A fairly expressive language, full backing of .NET, gives you total control of Windows.
I always hated that Windows didn't have a [useful] terminal, cmd doesn't really cut it, but once I realized how deep you can actually go with Powershell, I've integrated it into our companies build process.
Well, some things don't, but it mostly works. Sleep is always dodgy for me (won't wake up properly), the camera doesn't work, and the brightness adjuster is spotty, but it's nothing I can't live with.
I'd rather see the money go towards a company that's actually working to support Linux, will deal with the machine under warranty, and so on. Also, the keys are in the right place, there are two mouse buttons, and so on.
I just tried install in Ubuntu 15.04 on my new XPS 15 and it turned into a brick--can't even get into BIOS. Nor can I boot from USB because the interwebs told me I needed to disable them to get them working again--somehow they were disabled during the install process.
Hopefully, I can return and get an inspiron or HP.
I go to a fair number of conferences and it really depends on the conference and its represented tech. AWS Re:Invent was about 50% Windows, 30% Mac 20% Linux, Mobcon (mobile dev) was 30% Windows, 65% Mac, 5% Linux, but PhpTek I would say was 10% Windows, 60% Mac, 30% Linux. I was actually taken back by how many Linux laptops I saw.
I get the point, people are using Ubuntu without knowing much about. I will have to shout out to Linux Mint Rebecca. One awesome Desktop environment, I do much of my learning of C#/F#(thanks MonoDevelop) on it. Its one of the few Linux desktops that did make me feel welcome and focus on what I am trying to get done, instead of getting in the way.
There's quite a few people at CloudFlare who run Ubuntu on Macbooks.
I run it on my home systems and my work laptop (a Lenovo, I'm one of the few who prefers it over Mac hardware it seems). My wife runs it on her work computer, she's a film academic and finds it just works well enough given most of her time is in web apps or watching films (though she does keep a Windows machine for creating Powerpoint slides).
Thanks for that suggestion of Softmaker. I've been trapped using Windows just because of MS Office. I just tried using their "freeoffice" and I was able to stay in Ubuntu while editing Word and Powerpoint. Libre Office had always messed up both my Word and PPT files - but freeoffice seems to work (well, so far at least.)
I am super happy with Softmaker since many years. But recently I had to work on an investment pitch presentation with a buddy who uses word. The ppt file, made by Softmaker, that I sent him did not look very good when opened with Powerpoint.
(I send the file to their very good support service, they are always improving)
I guess if you are interested you start with the previous version, which is free:
You could also just use LibreOffice, which comes preinstalled on Ubuntu. GP merely mentioned _creating_ slides, which should pose no issue. Current versions of MS Office even support OpenDocument (*.odp files) for both reading and writing, so cross-compatibility should be good too.
I guess Ubuntu's popularity may result in Mir winning out over Wayland? Or upstreams supporting Wayland primarily but most users actually using Canonical-patched Mir adaptations of upstreams? Things could get weird.
It would be so much better if Canonical focused their efforts on Wayland. Mir is just such an awful thing for Linux in general.
I use Linux and OSX desktops every day and catching up to OSX or Windows in terms of everyday usability via reasonable graphics performance is basically impossible without the ecosystem working together.
That being said, Ubuntu can do whatever they want, it's their money and resources and they can sink it into Mir if they choose but wow, what a waste.
The examples are not about Ubuntu users. Almost all are about Ubuntu being used as a server or an instance. As such, the display server won't even be installed. Some (low quality) Dutch website said that using the same method a pressrelease could be written that there are more Windows users than people on the planet :-P IMO, Ubuntu is based upon Debian, so Debian is the biggest one :-P
Note that there's some debate on the accuracy of some of the examples. That they used it in the past or used it partly doesn't mean an entire company uses it now.
The big loss in mir is ubuntu itself. They had some of the finest people working on it, and now many of them are leaving to go to google. Ubuntu lost focus with the phone.
> Docker users have launched Ubuntu images over 35.5 million times.
Doesn't he know that it's mostly CI systems and deployment scripts launching containers in automated fashion? Moreover you can't count how many containers are launched, you can just count pulls.
Came here to essentially say the same thing you mentioned in your second sentence. In terms of how many Ubuntu containers have been launched, it could easily be in the billions. Docker makes OSes so ephemeral that any statistic on launched Ubuntu instances is meaningless.
The down side of containerization for Canonical though, is that as engineers get more sophisticated with microservices and Docker in general, container images are built from much smaller distros such as Alpine, Busybox and even from Scratch.
It's going to be a problem for all of the current commercial distributions. For a long while now, their focus has been on ease of use and administration. Docker (and containerization in general) is changing that dynamic by shifting the ease of use and administration up to the hypervisor level. From Scratch and other micro-implementations were a pain in the ass to manage not only because of the difficulty in using them, but also because it's very difficult to replicate across a large number of servers. Now Docker can exactly replicate those results across a large number of servers, with not much more work than it would take using something like Puppet.
It's going to be interesting to see whether Red Hat and Canonical try to make the shift to being the OS inside containers, or if they'll be content with being the container host.
I like Ubuntu and have gotten most of my family to switch. LTS for some who are far away.
It is also interesting to watch people like my mom, who never used another desktop before, learn Ubuntu. Then I showed her a Mac desktop and a Windows one and she said "they are not user friendly" -- I thought was pretty funny.
But I also hear a lot of hate from developers about Ubuntu lately -- "It is not really free", "They changed my Gnome desktop, I'll never use this piece of crap again". "They hate systemd and invented their own thing!. --No, they adopted systemd now. --Oh... ok, well they still have a stupid user interface!". Kind of stuff.
What a bunch of whiners and complainers. Before that it was complaints for a decade -- Linux on desktop. "Year of the Linux Desktop -- such a joke". We had Mandriva, Redhat, Gentoo, others for years and they couldn't create desktop usable for average people -- hardware support was bad, interface sucked, design was bad, still had to use command lines to configure things etc. Then Ubuntu came, tried to do something about it, and while not perfect, made a huge improvement. Now it is possible for normal users to use a Linux desktop and many are using it as such. And because developers use it for development, the server version also ends up in production often.
I appreciate Canonical, but disagree with being called a whiner/complainer. I'll give praise/complain in moderation. Your post sounds too much like "with us or against us" US president comment. On any topic I might like some bits, dislike others. Canonical invited me to (real life) UDS twice btw.
The release of RedHat 8.0 in 2002 brought Linux UI up to reasonable standards of general-public friendliness. Anybody shouting this ridiculous canard after that point is likely just shilling for the proprietary industry.
The year of the Linux desktop never happened because by the time Linux became user friendly enough to install on desktops, the market for desktops had been eclipsed by laptops (and their proprietary chipsets, especially for wifi). By the time Linux caught up on laptops, people had moved on to tablets and phones.
The year of the Linux desktop, arguably, was 2011, when Android 4.0 was released, and brought Android up to the performance standards of iOS.
I've never really had much trouble running linux on notebooks. It makes no difference, a notebook is just a slow desktop with a built-in UPS. So the year of the linux desktop was probably sometime around 2004, when driver support got good enough for most hardware. Earlier if you didn't care about working video drivers.
But have desktops really been eclipsed by notebooks outside of my little bubble? I don't know very many people who even own a notebook, and I personally only have one for work.
Almost everybody I know has and uses a desktop computer at home, but I don't think I know anybody who has bought a new one in the last five years or so.
A notebook is just a slow desktop with a built-in UPS, more arcane chipset, proprietary power management systems, and proprietary wifi chipsets.
Yes, it's been possible for quite some time to install Linux on laptops. But to actually use a laptop with Linux on it, things like power management need to work out of the box without lots of configuration by the end user. Linux support for ACPI has only very recently become solid to the point that I don't need to worry about it.
And as far as notebook ownership eclipsing desktop ownership, notebook sales eclipsed desktops long ago, around 2004. For most people, unless they're PC gamers, notebooks have offered sufficient computing power for more than a decade.
There are two things I never liked about Unity, the Amazon thing, and the super shallowness when pressing the "windows" button to launch apps. It only works reasonable well on super fast machines with a really good graphics card. I don't understand why it takes up to a second before I can start typing on almost any machine I use. And it is only a overlay which could almost be static.
Gnome on the other hand does the whole live animation thing for every window on every desktop and it is still mega fast even on my oldest machines. I press the button and basically instantly I am able to start typing and launching the app I need.
If that is like you describe it, it isn't very intuitive to do so. It seemed easier to me to change the distribution instead trying to find out how to make it faster.
You can disable all online features of the dash on System Settings-->Security and Privacy.
As for Unity2d it was just
sudo apt-get install unity-2d
but it was removed after 12.04 if I'm not mistaken. That is why I still use 12.04 on a couple laptops. I think the time is running out for 12.04 updates, so I will need to change to something else. There is always gnome-session-flashback, I guess. Not sure if the kids will like it/want it, as they're used to Unity and it's their laptops...
Unfortunately it has kind of gone backwards for a few years.
But, I recently installed the new Ubuntu Mate and it is awesome! Gnome2 with a modern menu, which is probably the pinnacle of free desktops until the newer ones mature, fix their usability issues, and reverse decisions to cripple their interface(s). I mean its a fucking workstation, and they are still chasing the grandma market who moved on to iPads five years ago.
Also, for the first time in years my laptop suspends/resumes perfectly. I've had about a 1/5 chance of crashing during either as long as I can remember. No longer under Wily.
Mate just reinforces why I am bitter toward Ubuntu. Compiz used to be a pretty rad window manager 5-6 years ago. But Ubuntu basically hijacked Compiz as the foundation for Unity, so any Compiz version newer than I think 0.8.x is missing key features and suffering many bugs, if used for any purpose other than to support Unity. If Ubuntu hadn't messed up Compiz so much, then Mate+Compiz would indeed be a viable and happy desktop environment. Fortunately Gnome3 is itself viable now. But I will never get back the many days of really trying to make mainline Ubuntu (and Mint with Cinnamon and Mate) work for me post-Unity (after all it comes with Compiz out-of-the-box! ;) ) and suffering all the stereotypical brokenness for which people deride desktop Linux.
Would you say you use Compiz as a tiling window manager? In the old days it was a totally snazzy tiling window manager. After Unity, many of the tiling features were removed or broken (I waited until 2013 to try this stuff, so I gave the dust a chance to settle).
I do remember the hotkeys to send windows to the side or corners, which I liked. But, so far I am doing fine without them, and appreciating some hard won stability.
See I don't even know or remember what Compiz is anymore. My mom doesn't know what Compiz is. I guess that's when Ubuntu switched (12-14 or so release?) to the new start launcher and "search apps by typing their name", and everyone hated that? Yeah I remember being annoyed at that for a while, but then got used to it and now like it more. I don't even remember what old desktop looked like.
But I also noticed at the same time, my hardware on the laptop worked and the UI was smoother and more consistent. So saw enough improvements with each release to keep me happy with it.
Maybe at some point I stopped being a Linux distro hobbyist who was interested in what individual packages were called, and what kernel version each ran. I used to love that stuff. I started with Mandrake Linux, used Redhat, Gentoo for a while. But then stopped being interested in that became sort of an ignorant user that just wants his dev environment, (compilers), language packages, wifi, trackpad to work etc.
Agreed! I was delighted by Gnome2 (Ubuntu) and now I am delighted by Gnome3 (Debian Stable). I don't do anything too custom, just need basic tiling. I recommend Ubuntu to friends and family, it's just not for me anymore. And I have forgotten about Compiz too until somebody brings up Mate: I wasted a lot of time with Mate because Ubuntu screwed up Compiz and now I am a bit spiteful toward Ubuntu.
Agreed - I also used to be "linux hobbyist" until the day I realised I was spending far more time monkeying about with packages and kernels than actually doing anything useful. Thanks to Ubuntu I don't have to care about that anymore.
> But then stopped being interested in that became sort of an ignorant user that just wants his dev environment, (compilers), language packages, wifi, trackpad to work etc.
This is exactly why I have been using Ubuntu for years. If I cared about customizing every little thing and using the lastest packages then I might use Arch. I just don't have the time for that crap any more.
> I mean its a fucking workstation, and they are still chasing the grandma market
Ubuntu's original mission was to make a desktop for the general user, as every other desktop distro out there was already available for the technical user.
Don't confuse low-quality, buggy, and incomplete with technical users. Yes, they are able to work around issues but crap is not what makes a technical workstation. See CADT, https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Ubuntu has arguably not succeeded at either, except by accident with Ubuntu Mate. It still isn't as cohesive and complete as Windows 2000 was, which was good for technical and general users alike. SGIs were pretty good too.
I'll give you some examples. Since the early 90's NT has supported custom gui themes, you can change colors in a theme in a few clicks. It has had a gui service manager to administer service daemons, very easy to use. (Windows has actually gotten worse also!)
This is the correct level of abstraction for a workstation. The two choices given today between broken/absent and crippled/too-difficult are no choice at all.
These things still don't exist under free desktops decades later! Or they may have existed for a few years until the next CADT wave broke them.
I can't speak for OSX, but Ubuntu beats Windows these days in terms of usability, mainly because the software ecosystem is not polluted with crapware like it is with windows. If I want to find a tool to do x, it is an 'apt-get install' away where as with windows I have trawl through pages of google search results, trudging through trial versions before I find something that does what I want. If you are a developer, even just the basic unix tools are a god send in saving hours every week, on windows you have to deal with cygwin just to get something approximating those great tools.
That's what got me to make the switch. I just wanted a command line without all the crud that comes with Windows. I don't see going back to Windows as long as I'm writing code.
This is not entirely true. As someone that recently switched to Ubuntu from being a long time windows user.
Your apt-get scenario only works if what you're looking for is in the official repositories. If not, you have to add those repositories first. That's a lucky menu find in the Ubuntu installer or some random add repo command with some possibly untrusted domain in it.
Then... You get random install errors. Missing so files or package dependencies etc.
Trust me, I've done more googling trying to install stuff on Ubuntu than I ever did on Windows. At least with windows if you had the exe or msi file you were dons 99% of the time. And you almost always found that file on the site for that program.
Even if you can find your package in the repos, you can always build from source if you like. In that case it a ./configure && make && make install away
And IMO Unity is the better DE.
But I wouldn't say Ubuntu is the better overall UX.
OS X has my least favorite DE. But I think it has the better overall experience. I've been using OS X for about 2 years now and I can't remember a time it came out with stuff for me to solve.
On Ubuntu recently I had to change the default kernel it was using and recompile my graphic drivers after an update, not that hard a task but not something an end user should have to go through. I've used Ubuntu 12 and am now using the 14 and it really has improved a lot both on reliability and UX, but it may take a lot of work to get it to be reliable depending on your hardware.
My dream DE would be something like DWM but without the tiling stuff, more features included out of the box and written in a higher level language.
Happy lubuntu user here. It's small and fast, hardware support is nothing short of amazing. I'm running it on a high-res laptop and there isn't much that I would change.
I whined a bit to myself when they switched me away from Gnome but I got used to the new interface. Just takes some time. Now that I'm constantly switching back and forth between Ubuntu, OS X, and Windows, my biggest problem isn't any of their interfaces. Just the fact that they're all different. Switch back from the Mac to anything else and now my mouse wheel works oppositely (and other minor issues along those lines).
And in Ubuntu. Although I don't know if Ubuntu lets you specify the behavior based on the type of the device, e.g. trackpad vs. mouse. Certainly you can configure X per-device but that's not just a checkbox in settings.
Really? I gave Ubuntu a go as a daily driver a few years back. Getting WiFi working was a struggle, the constant offers to install apps in normal browsing flow was irritating, sound died a few times, and over time my boot partition got filled up with old linux images and had to be cleaned with magical command-line incantations.
That being said, it had less trouble with my network printer than Windows does.
I get the appeal of Linux, but I did not have a grandma-friendly experience.
I haven't had wifi problems with Ubuntu for literally a decade. When there is a problem, it isn't Ubuntu's fault as a distribution but rather has to do with hardware that has no Linux driver or needs a very recent kernel version. But using very recent kernels will also have its own problems.
The only criticism I can relate to in this is the boot partition filling with old linux images, it really doesn't make sense that cleaning those out isn't done automatically by default.
Reliable WiFi is hard stuff - but nowadays Linux has gotten to the point where it mostly just works. OTOH I still have WiFi issues on OS X to this day - just recently tried backing up some files over SMB and WiFi choked.
I remember worse days, compiling drivers from source, audio never worked. Wifi support was only for an exclusive set of devices, video drivers were terrible. Because of that benchmark, what I have now works.
I've had dual boot on my laptop for a while (Win7 and Ubuntu), but a few months ago I wiped the Ubuntu and reinstalled the latest Ubuntu desktop and forced myself to use it for several weeks. So much better for development purposes, even though I still get frustrated with some things (a Win7 alt-tab switcher would be nice for example).
I don't know exactly what you're looking for, but Ubuntu has a ton of window management hot keys. Moving windows to virtual desktops, resizing, alt-tab, etc.
I think Dustin makes an excellent point that Ubuntu doesn't really have a way of expressing 'users' unlike other OS targets.
I also think Ubuntu has successfully hit the 'fat spot' of Linux users, which is to say appeals to the widest possible set of users given the choices it has available to make. That is something which is pretty amazing given the fluidity of Linux users.
I also think Ubuntu has a shot at becoming the "last" operating system. I think that because I see Windows 10 and MacIOS :-) moving toward more opaque systems, things you package and app for through a specific toolset and with a company controlled process. This suits the Microsoft and Apple markets which are primarily users of the systems as opposed to developers. And that leaves an opening for Linux to be the primary 'tinkerers' operating system. And of all the Linux distributions I see Ubuntu as the easiest to just slap on and get started with.
Definitely an interesting development from my perspective.
What I am missing is the "I begrudgingly use Ubuntu for my servers because of $reason".
Of course I am a user, but maybe it wasn't my decision or it was a very close call with another distro where it's plus or minus a few hundred instances...
That is an excellent point, and precisely why I think Ubuntu is where it is. There are are enough "reasons" to use it for a larger group that even though some members would prefer a different distro they begrudgingly go along.
The impressive thing is that they can pull that off. Because back in the day you got SunOS or Ultrix or IRIX and by golly you had to use it, there really wasn't a remixed flavor that you might even consider liking better. So with Ubuntu there are lots of remixed flavors and yet they have pulled together enough of the puzzle, whether its package management, system configuration, or hardware support that makes it the least bad choice of all the flavors.
Wikipedia, the 7th most popular site in the world according to Alexa, reports ( http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOpera... ) that Ubuntu clients were 0.48% of Wikipedia's web traffic in June 2015 (0.49% in May 2015, 0.49% in April 2015).
Webserver statistics might give some estimation on OS usage.
Not sure how reliable Ubuntu identifies itself in the user agent of web browsers. But just for fun, I counted requests on my webserver via a simple grep:
grep Ubuntu access.log | wc
grep Windows access.log | wc
Looks like I get 1 request from Ubuntu for about 100 hits from Windows.
At our (Linux focussed) most people use Linux on their machines, but almost nobody uses Ubuntu. Instead there is a mix of Debian (stable, testing) and Arch Linux users. Two years ago we had more Ubuntu users but most of them either left or moved to Debian because of Canonicals politics.
This seems like a pretty weak argument. If the whole argument is to say "No one knows" rather than to actually dig and get more data, that seems like an expectation of defeat.
I'd argue that as much as we think Linux is getting more popular, we (as perusers of HN) are naturally part of the tech bubble, the small segment of people that are likely to use Ubuntu. Outside this group, I've yet to see Ubuntu recognized by many people.
I understood the author gave some examples where the number of ubuntu users would be higher than expected, but didn't really try to get a level of accuracy in conclusion. The difference, say, between 10,000 and 1,000,000 users is pretty high. A comparison relative to other OS users would be helpful.
Most people don't know what Ubuntu is, I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The argument this article is trying to make is that millions of people use it without knowing it, either directly or indirectly. For example, Uber has millions of users, this is a fact and so millions of people use Ubuntu indirectly so it's definitely more than 10,000 people. That's the point of the article and it makes a good case.
Not saying this is a great metric, if we're talking Ubuntu on the desktop which is what you're thinking of it seems, then the numbers must be very much lower than that but total of real people using it on both the desktop and the server directly is probably above the million mark though.
I always say that BSDs are the most popular operating systems... everyone uses them thousands times per day... Even you windows users, your updates are served from FBSD server.
All of our infrastructure is CentOS (or derivative) in every single place I've ever worked. I used a mix of Mac and Windows at home and work. I don't want a linux distro with UI overhead.
I don't think that's a good reason to choose CentOS over Ubuntu really, since Ubuntu can be installed sans UI overhead and Centos can be installed with UI overhead.
The key difference IMO is that CentOS is derived from RHEL, a distro built mainly with server applications in mind (you can tell a lot of things like directory structures and packaging were designed for easier/repeatable/automated configuration), while Ubuntu was (and is still?) primarily targeting UI-based use cases, or more 'end/single-user friendly' use cases.
Case in point, why does MySQL automatically get started (in an insecure state, mind you) when installing from the official repos on Ubuntu? And standard Apache and Nginx configuration patterns (and the changes from 10-12-14.04) sometimes make me want to give up supporting Deb/Ubuntu!
RHEL/CentOS and Debian/Ubuntu are all viable server OS. RHEL/CentOS are more common in US. Debian/Ubuntu are very common in Europe, etc. and with cloud instances.
I find the RHEL tooling to be more baroque and arcane than the Debian tooling, and the latter is generally nicer to read output from. Debian isn't primarily targeting UI-based use cases, and Ubuntu inherits its system tooling from them. The arguments of 'it starts automatically' are a RHEL vs Debian debate, not Ubuntu specifically, and I think they're a canard, to be honest. If you're installing a system where a brief window of localhost-only mysql server could be compromised, you're already in an usual position - you're installing a database system on a sever that other, untrusted entities are already using. If you're concerned, you could simply install your pre-seed config file before installing mysql instead of after it, as Debian doesn't overwrite altered config files.
Re: apache: at least apache on deb-based systems keeps the same name everywhere, and you don't have to remember which part of the system calls it httpd and which part calls it apache :)
I installed Ubuntu for two non-technical people I know.
There's a bug in Ubuntu where old kernel packages are kept on the boot partition and not uninstalled. These accumulate, and quickly (<6months) fill up the boot partition.
This is such an easy fix, and it's frustrating that it is still a problem. Both users have come to me saying "I don't know how to make Ubuntu work" because of this.
I have made a lot of user switch to Linux. My first recommendation will be either Ubuntu or Mint.
I have tried many distros over the time and I liked Arch Linux for quite some time. But the problem was reliability. I spend my productive time fixing an issue or trying to isolate the issue or fixing PKGBUID to install a package.
Ubuntu on the other hand was my backup in case Arch crashed.
My Linux experience can be titled 'From Ubuntu to Ubuntu'.
Now I believe using a stable distro is really productive unless you have lots of time in your hand.
I like Ubuntu except the Unity part. No problem. Install Xfce and live happily.
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[ 93.1 ms ] story [ 1288 ms ] threadAnd if watching Netflix on their smart TV makes people Ubuntu users, then having a bank account makes them users of any number of exotic IBM letters-slash-digits operating systems. (though ironically, Netflix is just about the only thing I run on my old Ubuntu laptop, and superior compatibility with that Ubuntu laptop was the primary reason why I switched from the silverlight-only Netflix clone I used before to Netflix, so for me personally, they are very much related)
Now I've bootcamped my mac and swapped out my desktop Arch installation in favor of Windows 10. There are undoubtedly things that I miss - and I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't primarily writing C# - but it's not quite the purgatory I'd imagined / remembered it being.
Thanks, but I have better things to do with my time than chasing settings in the system, whose vendor does not respect my choices.
Yes, I keep telling myself that I'm going to dual-boot my Surface Pro 3 with Arch, but I never get around to it, in large part because Windows 10 just isn't that bad.
I always hated that Windows didn't have a [useful] terminal, cmd doesn't really cut it, but once I realized how deep you can actually go with Powershell, I've integrated it into our companies build process.
Hopefully, I can return and get an inspiron or HP.
I run it on my home systems and my work laptop (a Lenovo, I'm one of the few who prefers it over Mac hardware it seems). My wife runs it on her work computer, she's a film academic and finds it just works well enough given most of her time is in web apps or watching films (though she does keep a Windows machine for creating Powerpoint slides).
It just works, and has done for a long time.
I am super happy with Softmaker since many years. But recently I had to work on an investment pitch presentation with a buddy who uses word. The ppt file, made by Softmaker, that I sent him did not look very good when opened with Powerpoint. (I send the file to their very good support service, they are always improving)
I guess if you are interested you start with the previous version, which is free:
http://www.freeoffice.com/en/
I use Linux and OSX desktops every day and catching up to OSX or Windows in terms of everyday usability via reasonable graphics performance is basically impossible without the ecosystem working together.
That being said, Ubuntu can do whatever they want, it's their money and resources and they can sink it into Mir if they choose but wow, what a waste.
Note that there's some debate on the accuracy of some of the examples. That they used it in the past or used it partly doesn't mean an entire company uses it now.
Doesn't he know that it's mostly CI systems and deployment scripts launching containers in automated fashion? Moreover you can't count how many containers are launched, you can just count pulls.
The down side of containerization for Canonical though, is that as engineers get more sophisticated with microservices and Docker in general, container images are built from much smaller distros such as Alpine, Busybox and even from Scratch.
(disclosure: I work for Docker)
It's going to be interesting to see whether Red Hat and Canonical try to make the shift to being the OS inside containers, or if they'll be content with being the container host.
It is also interesting to watch people like my mom, who never used another desktop before, learn Ubuntu. Then I showed her a Mac desktop and a Windows one and she said "they are not user friendly" -- I thought was pretty funny.
But I also hear a lot of hate from developers about Ubuntu lately -- "It is not really free", "They changed my Gnome desktop, I'll never use this piece of crap again". "They hate systemd and invented their own thing!. --No, they adopted systemd now. --Oh... ok, well they still have a stupid user interface!". Kind of stuff.
What a bunch of whiners and complainers. Before that it was complaints for a decade -- Linux on desktop. "Year of the Linux Desktop -- such a joke". We had Mandriva, Redhat, Gentoo, others for years and they couldn't create desktop usable for average people -- hardware support was bad, interface sucked, design was bad, still had to use command lines to configure things etc. Then Ubuntu came, tried to do something about it, and while not perfect, made a huge improvement. Now it is possible for normal users to use a Linux desktop and many are using it as such. And because developers use it for development, the server version also ends up in production often.
If you switch distributions forever because you refuse to install a single package to get a different desktop, you might be a complainer.
Year of the Linux Desktop -- such a joke
This has not made sense for over a decade.
The release of RedHat 8.0 in 2002 brought Linux UI up to reasonable standards of general-public friendliness. Anybody shouting this ridiculous canard after that point is likely just shilling for the proprietary industry.
The year of the Linux desktop, arguably, was 2011, when Android 4.0 was released, and brought Android up to the performance standards of iOS.
But have desktops really been eclipsed by notebooks outside of my little bubble? I don't know very many people who even own a notebook, and I personally only have one for work.
Yes, it's been possible for quite some time to install Linux on laptops. But to actually use a laptop with Linux on it, things like power management need to work out of the box without lots of configuration by the end user. Linux support for ACPI has only very recently become solid to the point that I don't need to worry about it.
And as far as notebook ownership eclipsing desktop ownership, notebook sales eclipsed desktops long ago, around 2004. For most people, unless they're PC gamers, notebooks have offered sufficient computing power for more than a decade.
Gnome on the other hand does the whole live animation thing for every window on every desktop and it is still mega fast even on my oldest machines. I press the button and basically instantly I am able to start typing and launching the app I need.
but it was removed after 12.04 if I'm not mistaken. That is why I still use 12.04 on a couple laptops. I think the time is running out for 12.04 updates, so I will need to change to something else. There is always gnome-session-flashback, I guess. Not sure if the kids will like it/want it, as they're used to Unity and it's their laptops...
But, I recently installed the new Ubuntu Mate and it is awesome! Gnome2 with a modern menu, which is probably the pinnacle of free desktops until the newer ones mature, fix their usability issues, and reverse decisions to cripple their interface(s). I mean its a fucking workstation, and they are still chasing the grandma market who moved on to iPads five years ago.
Also, for the first time in years my laptop suspends/resumes perfectly. I've had about a 1/5 chance of crashing during either as long as I can remember. No longer under Wily.
But I also noticed at the same time, my hardware on the laptop worked and the UI was smoother and more consistent. So saw enough improvements with each release to keep me happy with it.
Maybe at some point I stopped being a Linux distro hobbyist who was interested in what individual packages were called, and what kernel version each ran. I used to love that stuff. I started with Mandrake Linux, used Redhat, Gentoo for a while. But then stopped being interested in that became sort of an ignorant user that just wants his dev environment, (compilers), language packages, wifi, trackpad to work etc.
This is exactly why I have been using Ubuntu for years. If I cared about customizing every little thing and using the lastest packages then I might use Arch. I just don't have the time for that crap any more.
Ubuntu's original mission was to make a desktop for the general user, as every other desktop distro out there was already available for the technical user.
Ubuntu has arguably not succeeded at either, except by accident with Ubuntu Mate. It still isn't as cohesive and complete as Windows 2000 was, which was good for technical and general users alike. SGIs were pretty good too.
I'll give you some examples. Since the early 90's NT has supported custom gui themes, you can change colors in a theme in a few clicks. It has had a gui service manager to administer service daemons, very easy to use. (Windows has actually gotten worse also!)
This is the correct level of abstraction for a workstation. The two choices given today between broken/absent and crippled/too-difficult are no choice at all.
These things still don't exist under free desktops decades later! Or they may have existed for a few years until the next CADT wave broke them.
http://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/winnt351
That said, as someone who used Windows 98 through 7 on my development platforms, my WTFs/minutes is very elevated on a Windows 10 machine.
you spend a couple hours (not even really) setting up a few pieces of software.
Your reward is not to be saddled with unity trash until you realize it's a piece of crap and go back to windows (or OS X).
Your apt-get scenario only works if what you're looking for is in the official repositories. If not, you have to add those repositories first. That's a lucky menu find in the Ubuntu installer or some random add repo command with some possibly untrusted domain in it.
Then... You get random install errors. Missing so files or package dependencies etc.
Trust me, I've done more googling trying to install stuff on Ubuntu than I ever did on Windows. At least with windows if you had the exe or msi file you were dons 99% of the time. And you almost always found that file on the site for that program.
And IMO Unity is the better DE. But I wouldn't say Ubuntu is the better overall UX. OS X has my least favorite DE. But I think it has the better overall experience. I've been using OS X for about 2 years now and I can't remember a time it came out with stuff for me to solve.
On Ubuntu recently I had to change the default kernel it was using and recompile my graphic drivers after an update, not that hard a task but not something an end user should have to go through. I've used Ubuntu 12 and am now using the 14 and it really has improved a lot both on reliability and UX, but it may take a lot of work to get it to be reliable depending on your hardware.
My dream DE would be something like DWM but without the tiling stuff, more features included out of the box and written in a higher level language.
That being said, it had less trouble with my network printer than Windows does.
I get the appeal of Linux, but I did not have a grandma-friendly experience.
The only criticism I can relate to in this is the boot partition filling with old linux images, it really doesn't make sense that cleaning those out isn't done automatically by default.
Edit: http://askubuntu.com/questions/206710/how-do-i-disable-unity...
???
I have been running mostly OSX on the desktop for a while, but IIRC Compiz has a couple different alt-tab switchers that you can configure.
Then again, marketing rarely makes much sense when looked at rationally, and this is definitely marketing.
The entire world runs on FreeBSD, Debian, and Windows :).
I also think Ubuntu has successfully hit the 'fat spot' of Linux users, which is to say appeals to the widest possible set of users given the choices it has available to make. That is something which is pretty amazing given the fluidity of Linux users.
I also think Ubuntu has a shot at becoming the "last" operating system. I think that because I see Windows 10 and MacIOS :-) moving toward more opaque systems, things you package and app for through a specific toolset and with a company controlled process. This suits the Microsoft and Apple markets which are primarily users of the systems as opposed to developers. And that leaves an opening for Linux to be the primary 'tinkerers' operating system. And of all the Linux distributions I see Ubuntu as the easiest to just slap on and get started with.
Definitely an interesting development from my perspective.
Of course I am a user, but maybe it wasn't my decision or it was a very close call with another distro where it's plus or minus a few hundred instances...
The impressive thing is that they can pull that off. Because back in the day you got SunOS or Ultrix or IRIX and by golly you had to use it, there really wasn't a remixed flavor that you might even consider liking better. So with Ubuntu there are lots of remixed flavors and yet they have pulled together enough of the puzzle, whether its package management, system configuration, or hardware support that makes it the least bad choice of all the flavors.
Wikipedia, the 7th most popular site in the world according to Alexa, reports ( http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOpera... ) that Ubuntu clients were 0.48% of Wikipedia's web traffic in June 2015 (0.49% in May 2015, 0.49% in April 2015).
Recent upgrade to 15.10, learning systemd. To my surprise, I really like systemd.
Also have had great experience with Ubuntu on RPi. Now I'd like to try Ubuntu on a phone...
Not sure how reliable Ubuntu identifies itself in the user agent of web browsers. But just for fun, I counted requests on my webserver via a simple grep:
grep Ubuntu access.log | wc
grep Windows access.log | wc
Looks like I get 1 request from Ubuntu for about 100 hits from Windows.
I'd argue that as much as we think Linux is getting more popular, we (as perusers of HN) are naturally part of the tech bubble, the small segment of people that are likely to use Ubuntu. Outside this group, I've yet to see Ubuntu recognized by many people.
Not saying this is a great metric, if we're talking Ubuntu on the desktop which is what you're thinking of it seems, then the numbers must be very much lower than that but total of real people using it on both the desktop and the server directly is probably above the million mark though.
Case in point, why does MySQL automatically get started (in an insecure state, mind you) when installing from the official repos on Ubuntu? And standard Apache and Nginx configuration patterns (and the changes from 10-12-14.04) sometimes make me want to give up supporting Deb/Ubuntu!
Re: apache: at least apache on deb-based systems keeps the same name everywhere, and you don't have to remember which part of the system calls it httpd and which part calls it apache :)
Ubuntu server's default UI is a bash shell.
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server
Not saying you should be switching over now because of this, but come on.
There's a bug in Ubuntu where old kernel packages are kept on the boot partition and not uninstalled. These accumulate, and quickly (<6months) fill up the boot partition.
This is such an easy fix, and it's frustrating that it is still a problem. Both users have come to me saying "I don't know how to make Ubuntu work" because of this.
I have tried many distros over the time and I liked Arch Linux for quite some time. But the problem was reliability. I spend my productive time fixing an issue or trying to isolate the issue or fixing PKGBUID to install a package.
Ubuntu on the other hand was my backup in case Arch crashed.
My Linux experience can be titled 'From Ubuntu to Ubuntu'.
Now I believe using a stable distro is really productive unless you have lots of time in your hand.
I like Ubuntu except the Unity part. No problem. Install Xfce and live happily.