Yeah I totally agree. In two years, Ubuntu has gone from one of my favorite distros to one of my least favorite. I'm on 11.04 and I'll probably stay here until it's EOL'ed then move to Mint.
I'm on 11.04 as well. I'm still trying to find a good desktop alternative. So far there is not much and KDE certainly isn't an option. I'm keeping an eye on Mint as well but I'm not sure if that's going to be it..
If you didn't get it from my previous comment, the reason I;m still on 11.04 is because it's the last version of Ubuntu shipped with GNOME 2, i.e. the last decent desktop environment...
I was on Ubuntu from 6.10 to 11.04. Then switched to Mint Cinnamon Maya (based off Ubuntu 12.04) recently. Cinnamon looks a lot more like Gnome 2, and loving it. I'm back to installing whatever applets I want! Maya being an LTS, all the better! I recommend you try it
You mean taking care of driver issues, taking slightly better care of newbies, making it easier to install useful nonfree stuff and releasing reasonably fresh packages in a Debian-based distro?
As a long time Ubuntu user the new "Software Center" is a huge disappointment. Just browsing it is enough to freeze and sometimes crash my computer; Installing packages is difficult and the UI is slow and unresponsive. Unity also frequently crashed on me for seemingly no reason.
Also, drivers are just as bad as they were back in 8.04. I still can't watch a fullscreen YouTube video without terrible stuttering, screen tearing or audio lagging. And before you say so, no, it's not my computer hardware that's causing these problems.
My point is that Ubuntu's main job is and always has been as a package curator on top of Debian.
If you are a long-time Linux user then you should not have a problem using apt-get or synaptic, or installing xubuntu-desktop or whatever you want. You should also be familiar with the concept that some hardware does not come with good Linux drivers. Ho hum.
Any popular linux distro lets you choose your desktop and almost everything else, the main reason to choose one distro over another is your faith in their package curation
I don't think that's necessarily fair to say. I've been using Ubuntu since it first came out for probably the same reasons as most other people - aptitude was dead simple and generally seemed to "just work". It probably also won me over initially because out of the box my audio and NIC drivers all worked. Most other features of your average linux system could be found on other distros, so these were the main drivers of me sticking with Ubuntu. Prior to Ubuntu I generally went with Slackware or FreeBSD.
I don't think that they're making any sort of direct choice to stop doing those things. I just think that their current desktop manager choices have been bad. I tried installing the latest Ubuntu on my main desktop PC this past weekend and it was a failure. I did get all my drivers working, but they didn't work out of the box anymore. Even once I had them all working, Unity seemed very unstable and in general the experience was very disappointing. It appeared to me that they were positioning themselves so that they could start throwing money making ad software and garbage onto my desktop. Now with the recent blog announcements that they might be enabling direct-from-desktop 1 click purchases and stuff, I doubt I'll ever consider installing it as a desktop, again. At least without xwindows, all of the original reasons for why Ubuntu was awesome still shine.
Unnecessary (and intrusive) features being piled onto an already bloated OS is the reason I, a former Ubuntu fanboy, installed Arch Linux a few months ago: Now I know exactly what's installed on my system and exactly how my system runs and works.
I get that they have to make money somehow, but I can't help but feel that they should be focusing on polish, bug fixes, and regression management instead of piling on more features like this. I'd be a lot happier if they were adding these features after fixing things like broken Compiz quirks or Unity commandeering the super key and breaking your personalized keyboard shortcuts.
Hell, I'd even pay cash money for Ubuntu if they could guarantee regression-free updates and a truly solid desktop (i.e., no "oh yeah it works just fine, except for this long list of annoying problems"). But their priorities seem to be elsewhere. Blame can certainly be assigned outside Canonical but the buck has to stop somewhere.
Personally I think this cheapens the desktop quite a bit. I'm already advertised at for 90% of my day, now I get to be advertised at in my one sanctuary, my desktop.
Agreed that it cheapens it. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in server service/support now that Ubuntu is becoming a major player in the server market.
I would be willing to shell out top dollar for a UNIX OS that's as stable as OSX and "just works" the way OSX does but is also as customizable and hacker-friendly as Linux, even if it's closed source. I've been wondering if there's any room for a company in this space—its obviously a very niche market, so you'd have to charge a lot, but I (and maybe other nerds?) would certainly be willing to pay.
There is definitely room for such a company, and the market is not as niche as you'd imagine. If you could provide an environment as user friendly as OS X with top-notch security and all of the customization features of Linux, most software development companies would pursue this option for their teams. I know I'd use it every day, and I'd happily pay for a non-commercial license in the $50 range.
It's niche enough to not justify the hundreds of millions of dollars such a project would require and the high risks.
OSX "just works" because it has a full suite of software that comes loaded on it and "just works" very well and makes a lot of Windows programs jealous (except for some Office products). If people want customization and general freedom, they already have Linux for free.
I think it is safe to say that the market for people unhappy enough with both OSX and Linux, and willing to pay for that, enough to justify years and years of expensive and risky development, is _relatively_ small.
Maybe there would have been 5 years ago prior to the tablet+mobile (iOS/Android) revolution. I agree though; personally I love Debian + Solaris but neither them nor any other *NIX variant has the slick feel of OS X. Not to mention a nice development environment like ObjC+Cocoa.
I do not think you can have a "hacker friendly" OS that is closed source.
I suspect that if a hacker friendly OS that "just works" does come out, it will be from a computer company trying to offer a non Windows option (either for price and/or because people start not liking Windows). Given the volume of computers such large companies make, the unit cost associated with a polished OS will be very low. Although this OS would be designed for the average user, the company would likely choice to use open source programs for cost.
Dell might be edging in to that space with Project Sputnik. It's too bad that the specs on their machine are underwhelming for their target market. If it fails because of that, Dell will be hesitant to enter the market again--but for precisely the wrong reasons.
I'd pay $2k+ for a 14 inch laptop, 1600x1200 IPS screen, SSD, i7, dedicated graphics, and a good keyboard (with home, end, pgup, pgdown) that could run Linux. Hell, I'd be happy with the dedicated graphics just working in Windows, and I'd dual-boot to game. But no such machine exists right now.
Slackware is simple, easy to use, and "it just works". It's free software so of course it's hackable. It's not as GUI-y as an OSX fan might like, but otherwise, it fits your requirements.
It even has the "top dollar" price tag ($30-$50 depending on if you want the 6 CD set or a single DVD, and whether you sign up for the subscription or not), although you can download it for free if you want.
I completely agree. I know this whole story is tired, and it has been said before but I'd really like to be able to update to a x.04 version without fear that it will break everything.
There are other distros than Ubuntu you know... There's a whole world of modern, active, distros open to explore, that don't include shopping options in them!
I personally think they are missing a great opportunity to reinvent the workstation. If we imagine there are a number of different user patterns in computing: entertainment users (consuming), business users (data processing), power users (creation and research), application developers, system/server developers and infrastructure (servers). (A bit simplified of course).
To me it seems like they are targeting entertainment users, when they really should be targeting power users and application developers. The first two (entertainment & business users) already being dominated by the competition and the last two (system/server development and infrastructure) already having a good track record. The nice thing about researchers and creators are that they mostly want the same things like low-latency processing of multimedia, stability, flexibility, power and value. Features that will trickle down to entertainment users that do care about it, but are unable to evaluate it exclusively.
Paradoxically enough this used to be Apples territory before they switched to Unix. With the exception of value and therefor also power, leaving the an opening for hobbyists (creators) and large scale deployments (research) to Microsoft and Linux respectively.
To do this you'll need application developers to bridge the gap between system & server developers and power users, which there seem to be a surprisingly small overlap between, at least seen to activity. These are unfortunately the people you piss off when you value sponsored searches and flashy menus over consistency.
Just in time to ruin the OS, now that (a certain, but reasonably large subset of) PC-users are looking for something not Windows too migrate to in response to Windows 8. Fantastic.
I know Ubuntu 12.10 made it certain I wont recommend them. This is only making things worse.
This reminds me of the evolutions of Mac OS X from Snow Leopard to Lion, and I think it's absolutely ridiculous.
Social networks, shopping, etc. are all features that should NEVER be part of the core of the computer operating system. These are things that should be opt-in experiences to the user and are unwanted bloat for many.
The only reason Canonical, in my book, can get away with this and Apple can't is that Ubuntu is provided free of charge so there must be some sort of revenue stream, whereas OS X already costs me money and therefore I shouldn't have to put up with anything I don't want.
Would like a vote on how many ran the command: `sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping`
Within my circle, it was the first thing we googled for. I like Ubuntu. Canonical's best best is to go the way of Wikipedia and plead for pledges or seek out crowdfunding. They also have an opportunity to take some share of the desktop market away from Windows 8 but adding in features like this hurts them more than it helps.
Ubuntu will eventually become Windows where first thing you do after installation is to remove these bunch of services and applications. Canonical knows their online search would be a failure if it came as a separate software. Hence, Canonical is using its loyal customers as guinea pigs.
I wonder if there is a market for something like a CentOS/RHEL base system (think slow moving core system) with a faster pace of release for the desktop applications for a small fee.
I kinda get this on my laptop using CentOS plus some carefully chosen additional repos..
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 77.7 ms ] threadAlso, drivers are just as bad as they were back in 8.04. I still can't watch a fullscreen YouTube video without terrible stuttering, screen tearing or audio lagging. And before you say so, no, it's not my computer hardware that's causing these problems.
If you are a long-time Linux user then you should not have a problem using apt-get or synaptic, or installing xubuntu-desktop or whatever you want. You should also be familiar with the concept that some hardware does not come with good Linux drivers. Ho hum.
Any popular linux distro lets you choose your desktop and almost everything else, the main reason to choose one distro over another is your faith in their package curation
I don't think that they're making any sort of direct choice to stop doing those things. I just think that their current desktop manager choices have been bad. I tried installing the latest Ubuntu on my main desktop PC this past weekend and it was a failure. I did get all my drivers working, but they didn't work out of the box anymore. Even once I had them all working, Unity seemed very unstable and in general the experience was very disappointing. It appeared to me that they were positioning themselves so that they could start throwing money making ad software and garbage onto my desktop. Now with the recent blog announcements that they might be enabling direct-from-desktop 1 click purchases and stuff, I doubt I'll ever consider installing it as a desktop, again. At least without xwindows, all of the original reasons for why Ubuntu was awesome still shine.
Hell, I'd even pay cash money for Ubuntu if they could guarantee regression-free updates and a truly solid desktop (i.e., no "oh yeah it works just fine, except for this long list of annoying problems"). But their priorities seem to be elsewhere. Blame can certainly be assigned outside Canonical but the buck has to stop somewhere.
Personally I think this cheapens the desktop quite a bit. I'm already advertised at for 90% of my day, now I get to be advertised at in my one sanctuary, my desktop.
OSX "just works" because it has a full suite of software that comes loaded on it and "just works" very well and makes a lot of Windows programs jealous (except for some Office products). If people want customization and general freedom, they already have Linux for free.
I think it is safe to say that the market for people unhappy enough with both OSX and Linux, and willing to pay for that, enough to justify years and years of expensive and risky development, is _relatively_ small.
I suspect that if a hacker friendly OS that "just works" does come out, it will be from a computer company trying to offer a non Windows option (either for price and/or because people start not liking Windows). Given the volume of computers such large companies make, the unit cost associated with a polished OS will be very low. Although this OS would be designed for the average user, the company would likely choice to use open source programs for cost.
I'd pay $2k+ for a 14 inch laptop, 1600x1200 IPS screen, SSD, i7, dedicated graphics, and a good keyboard (with home, end, pgup, pgdown) that could run Linux. Hell, I'd be happy with the dedicated graphics just working in Windows, and I'd dual-boot to game. But no such machine exists right now.
It's not Linux though.
Slackware is simple, easy to use, and "it just works". It's free software so of course it's hackable. It's not as GUI-y as an OSX fan might like, but otherwise, it fits your requirements.
It even has the "top dollar" price tag ($30-$50 depending on if you want the 6 CD set or a single DVD, and whether you sign up for the subscription or not), although you can download it for free if you want.
To me it seems like they are targeting entertainment users, when they really should be targeting power users and application developers. The first two (entertainment & business users) already being dominated by the competition and the last two (system/server development and infrastructure) already having a good track record. The nice thing about researchers and creators are that they mostly want the same things like low-latency processing of multimedia, stability, flexibility, power and value. Features that will trickle down to entertainment users that do care about it, but are unable to evaluate it exclusively.
Paradoxically enough this used to be Apples territory before they switched to Unix. With the exception of value and therefor also power, leaving the an opening for hobbyists (creators) and large scale deployments (research) to Microsoft and Linux respectively.
To do this you'll need application developers to bridge the gap between system & server developers and power users, which there seem to be a surprisingly small overlap between, at least seen to activity. These are unfortunately the people you piss off when you value sponsored searches and flashy menus over consistency.
I know Ubuntu 12.10 made it certain I wont recommend them. This is only making things worse.
Social networks, shopping, etc. are all features that should NEVER be part of the core of the computer operating system. These are things that should be opt-in experiences to the user and are unwanted bloat for many.
The only reason Canonical, in my book, can get away with this and Apple can't is that Ubuntu is provided free of charge so there must be some sort of revenue stream, whereas OS X already costs me money and therefore I shouldn't have to put up with anything I don't want.
Within my circle, it was the first thing we googled for. I like Ubuntu. Canonical's best best is to go the way of Wikipedia and plead for pledges or seek out crowdfunding. They also have an opportunity to take some share of the desktop market away from Windows 8 but adding in features like this hurts them more than it helps.
I wonder if there is a market for something like a CentOS/RHEL base system (think slow moving core system) with a faster pace of release for the desktop applications for a small fee.
I kinda get this on my laptop using CentOS plus some carefully chosen additional repos..