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Re: Ubuntu Not Ready for Prime Time

Mon Oct 18, 2010 10:28 pm

Shining Arcanine wrote:
As far as the spectrum of Linux distributions goes, Redhat Enterprise Linux and its clone CentOS are probably the best in terms of a "bug free" experience as far as Linux while Gentoo Linux's testing tree is probably the best in terms of get it done. No release of Ubuntu Linux is better than these distributions at either of these extremes. FreeBSD is a better option in my option than RHEL, but it is not a Linux distribution.

I think I'd put Debian (the stable release of course, not the testing/unstable branches) up there with RHEL/CentOS in terms of stability.

FWIW I don't think Ubuntu is *meant* to fill the niche at either extreme. It is clearly a compromise between stability and having the latest bleeding edge versions of stuff, with the non-LTS releases slanted farther towards the latter. It happens to be a compromise that works well for many people (myself included).
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Re: Ubuntu Not Ready for Prime Time

Tue Nov 02, 2010 1:00 am

I suspect they are afraid to take a step back feature-wise on an LTS release vs. the previous non-LTS release; this may drive some of the questionable package version decisions on the LTS releases. While the assumption that "features which were bleeding edge 6 months ago should be relatively stable now" may be true much of the time, it certainly isn't always true. The drawn-out, painful maturation of subsystems like Pulseaudio and Compiz are cases in point.
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Re: Ubuntu Not Ready for Prime Time

Tue Nov 02, 2010 7:58 am

A more prosaic example of needless change in the LTS release was the new theme and window-button placement that everyone was griping about this past spring.

IMO they should've waited until 10.10 for that and then made adjustments during the cycle to the next LTS.
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Re: Ubuntu Not Ready for Prime Time

Thu Apr 14, 2011 6:11 pm

Interesting first comment. Ubuntu not ready for prime time. I have been using Ubuntu for about three years now and there is not much it won't do. I have used Windows (reluctantly) since about 1993 and found it way too buggy and hackable so I decided to try multiple Linus distros, I tried Ubuntu last...actually, I wasn't going to try Ubuntu because I wasn't sure I liked the name, but I am very happy I did because I won't use Windows now. I have a laptop...well 2 now that won't run Windows properly, one...I cannot find the wireless driver from anywhere and it won't detect it and Windows renders it slow. Under Ubuntu there is no guess work, waiting for anything...it is very fast, does anything I desire it to do and the wifi adapter works as soon as I turn the laptop on...never needed to install anything. My second laptop will run Windows...very poorly I might add. It runs ever so slow and freezes. When I run Ubuntu this Dual Core 64bit Dell Laptop runs pretty much as fast as my quad core with zero problems. It also will do anything I try, anything I wish to accomplish as a programmer, hardware engineer and business owner becomes easy and secure. Not to mention, appearance wise it is years ahead of Windows. I wouldn't go near Windows and all I sacrificed was one Windows game, the rest work fine using Wine.
 
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Re: Ubuntu Not Ready for Prime Time

Thu Apr 14, 2011 7:18 pm

Paragraphs are your friends. Without them, your post is unreadable.
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Re: Ubuntu Not Ready for Prime Time

Thu Apr 14, 2011 7:19 pm

Jolt wrote:
I have a laptop...well 2 now that won't run Windows properly, one...I cannot find the wireless driver from anywhere and it won't detect it and Windows renders it slow. Under Ubuntu there is no guess work, waiting for anything...it is very fast, does anything I desire it to do and the wifi adapter works as soon as I turn the laptop on...never needed to install anything. My second laptop will run Windows...very poorly I might add. It runs ever so slow and freezes. When I run Ubuntu this Dual Core 64bit Dell Laptop runs pretty much as fast as my quad core with zero problems.

Yeah, with the release of Vista/Win7, I think we've seen an interesting "turning of the tables" where driver support is actually *better* overall on Linux than on Windows now. The bleeding edge devices that lack Linux drivers are more than made up for by the huge number of older devices where the manufacturer decided not to bother doing a Vista/Win7 and/or 64-bit port. Planned obsolescence really pisses me off, and Linux doesn't force me to ditch my older hardware just because the manufacturer decided it wasn't worth supporting any more.

Not to mention, appearance wise it is years ahead of Windows.

Years ahead of XP, at least. But that's not really a fair comparison, given that XP is nearly a decade old!

Still, I'm with you -- I'm definitely a Linux convert. The only reasons I still use Windows at all (in a VM) are A) to edit complex Word documents created by other people that don't import properly into OpenOffice; and B) to run embedded development tools for PIC microcontrollers. The vast majority of my computing is Linux-based these days, and has been for a couple of years now.
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Re: Ubuntu Not Ready for Prime Time

Thu Apr 14, 2011 8:19 pm

My HTPC runs Windows XP only because my scanner still works and there's no drivers for it under Win 7 (old Canon scanner, probably about 7 years old now).

For daily computing needs like email, basic multimedia, document editing etc, I can get a Linux distro to do most of these things out of the box without having to install much else for older machines. I prefer installing Linux distros to Windows, as they are simpler and faster.

Jolt wrote:
I have a laptop...well 2 now that won't run Windows properly, one...I cannot find the wireless driver from anywhere and it won't detect it and Windows renders it slow. Under Ubuntu there is no guess work, waiting for anything...it is very fast, does anything I desire it to do and the wifi adapter works as soon as I turn the laptop on...never needed to install anything. My second laptop will run Windows...very poorly I might add. It runs ever so slow and freezes. When I run Ubuntu this Dual Core 64bit Dell Laptop runs pretty much as fast as my quad core with zero problems.


Did your laptop come installed with bloatware? How much memory does it have? Windows XP will pretty much run quickly on any PC from the last 6 to 7 years. I have a Vista laptop and that is really slow. Win 7 works well even on my Eee PC, but that's probably because of the SSD. Linux seems to do fine with older hardware and if you got something really old, anything using LXDE as a frontend pretty much keeps it snappy.

I'd say Linux and Windows both have their merits. It all boils down to how much effort you want to put into learning how to use and maintain the operating system, and you can get pretty efficient machines out of either OS.
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Re: Ubuntu Not Ready for Prime Time

Thu Apr 14, 2011 8:46 pm

I've converted to Ubuntu for the majority of my computing time. Going forward though I don't know how I feel about it yet. The problem is that Canoncial is pushing Unity onto Ubuntu WAY too early. In it's current state I wouldn't consider it even close to being ready for prime time. The last few updates have increased Unity's stability greatly but there's just too much features and design decisions that I think are poorly thought out. Not being able to right click is driving me nuts. It leaves out way too much functionality that's exposed in the menu when right clicking.

Actually, Unity and Gnome 3 both have me questioning the UI design talent in the Linux community. Just stuff that seems to being pushed based on people's ego rather than good design principles.
 
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Re: Ubuntu Not Ready for Prime Time

Thu Apr 14, 2011 9:07 pm

etilena wrote:
My HTPC runs Windows XP only because my scanner still works and there's no drivers for it under Win 7 (old Canon scanner, probably about 7 years old now).

Have you checked whether it is supported under Linux? I was quite pleasantly surprised to discover that my Epson Perfection 1650 (about the same age as your Canon) "just worked". Plugged it in to my Ubuntu desktop, and wasn't sure what to expect... 5 minutes later I was scanning documents with xsane. It was probably the most hassle-free scanner setup I've ever done, under *any* OS. (Yeah, admittedly xsane's UI is a little... *ahem*... shall we say, counter-intuitive. But once you've learned it you're set since it works with any scanner that has Linux drivers.)

Skrying wrote:
Actually, Unity and Gnome 3 both have me questioning the UI design talent in the Linux community. Just stuff that seems to being pushed based on people's ego rather than good design principles.

On the bright side, KDE 4 finally seems to have stabilized... so there's a viable alternative!
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Re: Ubuntu Not Ready for Prime Time

Thu Apr 14, 2011 10:34 pm

Kurotetsu wrote:
I don't use Ubuntu, but from what I understand Linux doesn't need defragging due to how the file system works:

http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index. ... ragmenting

So 5. isn't really an issue.

BS. Every time I head the "doesn't need a defragmenter" argument, it's because that FS doesn't have one available.

The example is vastly over-simplified. The "Linux" filesystem (actually there are several) can fragment files just as easily as any other FS. Note the simple example doesn't mention NTFS. NTFS is just as sophisticated as most Linux filesystems, yet has more defragmentation programs available for it than any other OS -- because of how pervasive it is, not because it fragments worse or more easily.

On the other hand, fragmentation isn't generally a big problem. It's a corner case that's easily optimized on Windows because there are a plethora of tools to handle it. But most of those systems would continue to run just fine even if they weren't defragmented.
 
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Re: Ubuntu Not Ready for Prime Time

Thu Apr 14, 2011 10:39 pm

axeman wrote:
A brand new install of Windows ends up with 10% of the files fragmented or some nonsense when there is 100s of GB of free space... wtf?

There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. Pushing most of the files together, true, can cause fragmentation more quickly. But spacing them out with large gaps between them causes a lot more head movement, and moving the drive head is the slowest thing a hard drive can do. So six of one, half dozen of the other...

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