Ubuntu in Trouble?

[edoc]

In an article generally favorable to the future of Linux and negative toward the future of MS: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/65996.html

There is a thought-provoking conclusion re. Canonical/Ubuntu that may be worth a closer look by Puppy/Woof developers ...

Trouble Ahead for Canonical?

And what of Canonical, we couldn't help but ask?

"It's worth mentioning that the nerdcore is starting to leave Ubuntu," drinkypoo warned. "I noticed because I had done it, and then started commenting about it, and finding that many others were finding the overall quality to have gone downhill.

"If Ubuntu doesn't start trimming the sails and stop breaking drivers in every release," he concluded, "they're going to have real problems."

[nitehawk]

@edoc...
I've seen some of those same comments off and on over the internet, myself (can't think exactly all where to write down here)....
but even on the Ubuntu forums,...there has been similiar comments. Some say that's why they switched to LinuxMint.....that even though it's really "Ubuntu under the hood" that Mint has a bit more time before a release to "fine-hone" things a little bit. "Woof" may fare as good as well,....with disgruntled Ubuntu leavers jumping ship for something "Ubuntu-like" but that just actually works.

[sunburnt]

Makes one wonder if the broken drivers thing will trickle down to the offshoots.

Debian may be a better base for a offshoot Linux distro though more work's needed.
The real benifit for basing a distro. this way is that apps. & drivers are done for you.
So rather than handling them yourself, the distro. just downloads them directly.
For Woof there'd be no drivers/modules SFS file, & no apps. repository to have to maintain.

[nitehawk]

For one thing,...Ubuntu (according to Distrowatch) is the leading favorite distro,.and is therefore more well known. So having "Woof" based off of it would be a plus in that repect (and as you say, having the "repos" already there) only equals a great thing IMO.
It's the HUGE Debian/Ubuntu repositories that will be the drawing factor,..(if Woof will be using the repos directly)....plus the ease and friendliness of a Puppy! Double goodness! I agree that having a direct Debian base (instead of Ubuntu base) might be a better way to go.....but it still will be good.
Can't wait to get my copy!
EDIT: I did get off of edoc's topic a bit,.......the idea is that Ubuntu is having problems with it's "too soon" release cycles to be stable as it needs to be. Woof may be more like Linux Mint (if based off of Ubuntu) and Barry may do more of the "fine-tuning" needed. I found Linux Mint 6 (that I am also using right now) to be directly based off of Ubuntu 8.10,....and has a lot of the same problems. Took me FOREVER to figure out how to set up dialup in it!!!! Arrrrrrr.

[ecomoney]

For a short time, Ecomoney Systems offered commercial support for ubuntu, but weve just dropped it for several reasons.

Many of the drivers are broken, and need many hours of hacking to get common equipment to work. Puppy has much better hardware detection.

It takes hours to install, update and add programs. It seems impervious to being copied between disks, partitions and different computer systems, causing many delays. this means we cant recycle computers into saleable items at anywhere near the rate we can with puppy.

It needs a lot faster hardware to run, and runs a lot slower than puppy when installed.

Changing simple things like graphics card drivers breaks compiz and the effects. The compiz effects are pretty good, but they cant be made to run reliably. In business you cant promise someone something and not deliver, best not to have them at all.

It breaks....our ubuntu systems have a much higher failure rate than our puppy systems. It is simply less reliable.

Without editing complex text files, it is impossible to read a hard disk in the same computer as the one ubuntu is installed on. I would assume if it is a hard disk physically installed inside the computer that the user is working on, they wouldnt need "permission" to run it.

The layout of gnome (the default window manager) is unfamiliar to anyone with previous windows computing experience (i.e. most people).

Having a commercial company behind it (canonical) means it must be constantly careful about lawsuits and has to tread extremly carefully with things like the flashplayer and .wmv codecs. Basically it is vulnerable to the machinations of certain closed source software vendors.

The repositories are ill-maintained. When the msn protocols were changed, the AMSN team updated their packages within a few days, but ubuntu took THREE WEEKS to update their repositories and issue an update so msn would work again. They have for about two years included a buggy beta version of audacity which doesnt work, on top of an untried and untested audio system (pulseaudio) on a Long Term Support edition.

The things they have got going for them is a simple and useable user file system (which puppy would do well to emulate somehow) and good printer autodetection.

[Colonel Panic]

Interesting.

I think I've mentioned Freegeek before on here, they're an outfit in Portland, Oregon which refurbishes old computers and sells them on or gives them to volunteers who have built a few systems with them;

http://www.freegeek.org/

Anyway, they started off by putting Debian on their machines but later switched to Ubuntu. I wonder if a similar outfit could be made to work using Puppy, especially your version (Transition Linux)?

[edoc]

What is nd where is Transition Linux, please?

[jamesbond]

I have heard this "Ubuntu is going down" mantra since as early as 2007.
In the last 3 releases since, I have seen great improvements between those releases (and this is from end-user perspective). Sure, some applications / drivers fail, crash and burn. Some releases even has regression bugs. And not all decisions are perfect. But what are?

And definitely, while Ubuntu is targeted as general purpose usage, there are specific use cases which doesn't fit. Which is fine, and that's beauty of free software that we are spoilt by many choices (or create one if none of them are suitable).

The world is always changing. Priorities change. In free software projects, people come and go for many reasons. You can't always satisfy everyone. But be careful with comments like this --- too many you-know-who want Ubuntu (=currently the poster child of Linux) to fail.

Everyone can create a funny-looking nickname and claim he/she has contributed for this or that software project for the last 100 years, and now is leaving because that software project is failing his/her expectations etc etc. In reality who knows whether that person is just paid shim from you-know-who.

When you repeat a mantra like this (xxx is failing, xxx is failing) instead of doing something to fix it (=even a suggestion would be better than doomsaying), it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Less-informed people will read the news, and says "oh xxx is failing, then I shouldn't invest my time/effort/$$$ to install/develop/test xxx" and look and behold ! XXX will definitely fail once a majority hold this view.

Remember, whether you like Ubuntu or not, whether you agree with Ubuntu or not, it is currently the poster child of Linux and there are many who like to see it fail. If it is ever to fail, I would rather that it fail because of fair competition (in bigger terms - beyond usability and stability reasons) rather than because of a baseless social-engineering.

The stake is simply too great.

[edoc]

The defense of Ubuntu sounds a lot like that of our current USA President, Barak Obama "No matter how badly he is making a mess of everything he touches we have to defend and support him because as the first black President he is too big to fail."

I don't agree that this is a sound argument for Ubuntu or Obama - product quality and leadership competence are self-evaluating - Linux was doing fine before Ubuntu and will do fine if Ubuntu fails, the USA was doing better before Obama and may well do better once he is not reelected - if there is anything left not destroyed by the Left.

There was not a word in my post that implied that I agreed or disagreed with the Ubuntu news item, I was merely asking questions, which for a little longer is still permitted by the current regime here in the USA.

[twilliams]

Moderator censored non-troll, and non-rant post restored-Self censored!!!
Sorry it took so long restoring as John's forum was non responsive for a time.

Trying to interject some common sense in such commentary being quoted below.
As IT was being made political in a senseless troll like manner.

The defense of Ubuntu sounds a lot like that of our current USA President, Barak Obama "No matter how badly he is making a mess of everything he touches we have to defend and support him because as the first black President he is too big to fail."

I don't agree that this is a sound argument for Ubuntu or Obama - product quality and leadership competence are self-evaluating - Linux was doing fine before Ubuntu and will do fine if Ubuntu fails, the USA was doing better before Obama and may well do better once he is not reelected - if there is anything left not destroyed by the Left.

There was not a word in my post that implied that I agreed or disagreed with the Ubuntu news item, I was merely asking questions, which for a little longer is still permitted by the current regime here in the USA.

F$%#ing christ!, been sipping the Limbaugh koolaid have we?

[jamesbond]

I don't live in the US so I really have no idea that's what people say about Obama - and I'm really surprised if people start to think like that, because, hey, there are more important performance criteria to lead a country than being black or white or rich or poor ...

I am not trying to defend Ubuntu. If Ubuntu doesn't meet its users expectation, its user base will slowly melt away - and it will die. This will be true not only of Ubuntu but also all free software. And yes, I agree there were Linux before Ubuntu, and there will still be Linux after Ubuntu (though, I would say, Ubuntu did help the acceptance of desktop Linux beyond any other company did).

I also can't vouch whether the article is correct (in fact, I don't read it) - so most definitely I can't comment on it except the summary on the first post.

I am just warning against paid shims who would spam boards and write FUD articles about the death of Ubuntu (and Redhat, and Suse, and Puppy, and any free software in general), and poison the public mind that free software is uncertain, unstable, and therefore not worth it.

This is a very common problem in review boards right now - since convincing people that my product is superior is sooo difficult, then why not I write bad reviews about my competitors'? Low life I know, but it's not below some of people to do this. Especially if they are paid to do this.

Again, no implying that certain questions are taboos

[LaneLester]

Interesting.

I think I've mentioned Freegeek before on here, they're an outfit in Portland, Oregon which refurbishes old computers and sells them on or gives them to volunteers who have built a few systems with them;

There is a similar organization here in Athens, GA, Free-IT Athens, which sells the refurbs to schools for $25 and individuals for $50. I bought 8 for a new network in my science classroom, all with Ubuntu Intrepid.

Lane

[bugman]

The defense of Ubuntu sounds a lot like that of our current USA President, Barak Obama "No matter how badly he is making a mess of everything he touches we have to defend and support him because as the first black President he is too big to fail."

never heard that one, what i have heard is

'they gave the last guy 8 YEARS to fuck everything up, why doesn't the new guy even get 8 WEEKS to fix it all?'

now, get back on topic . . .

[puppyluvr]

Hello,
Could`nt help but notice the mention of Transitions Linux..
Transitions is my 3.01 based Pup that I use on recycled equipment, and for Windoze refugee`s..Its slackware compatability, and stable base, make it an Ideal "Transition" to Linux..Hence the name..
Transitions is fully equipped, and rather large, needing >256mb Ram to load, due to OpenOffice and the Gimp being built in..
On lower Ram machines, ie <256mb, Transitions will run best as a full install..
The boot code contains the "noram" option, to get it booted on low ram machines, to allow for a full install..Installed, 128mb ram runs well..On a 512mb machine, it flies...

Transitions was designed for Doze refugees, and their machines, in mind, so its a little, ummm, bloated..LOL
Ive made a version, Transitions Lite, for older recycled machines, without OO , FF, or the Gimp, but have never released it..
Basically, FatFree 3.01 makes a great base to build a system on older hardware.
TransitionsSE will be 4.20 based, and still somewhat "bloated" by Puppy standards, as refugees tend to need everything pre-installed where possible...
Anyhow, Transitions is available at the link in my signature below, and the forum thread is here:http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 49&t=28450
Thanks...

[edoc]

The defense of Ubuntu sounds a lot like that of our current USA President, Barak Obama "No matter how badly he is making a mess of everything he touches we have to defend and support him because as the first black President he is too big to fail."

never heard that one, what i have heard is

'they gave the last guy 8 YEARS to fuck everything up, why doesn't the new guy even get 8 WEEKS to fix it all?'

now, get back on topic . . .

You are lecturing me using language that is forbidden on the Forum? "Physician heal thyself."

BTW: Change means nothing, there is positive change and negative change.

MS releases new version after new version claiming that changing to the new version will be an improvement when often the only thing that improves is their bottom line.

In the Linux world we are recruited to change from distro to distro, again with the claim that the change will be good for us.

The political illustration was to show that change is not necessarily good - Obama has taken the worse decisions of Bush and amplified them manyfold - making him already the worse President in modern USA history. He's already spent more money that all of the prior Presidents combined - in the middle of a recession! Duh.

Try not to allow your raging hatred for President Bush to blind to to an even less competent or trustworthy politician - it can only lead to a bad result.

The parallel is that MS releases Vista claiming superior security and stability - it gobbles up lots of precious resources and then fails on both accounts.

The claim - which I neither endorsed nor contested - was that Ubuntu is becoming unnecessarily bloated and unnecessarily unstable (broken drivers and dependencies) and thus was creating a bad image for Linux rather than the original good image.

Address the facts and don't attack the messenger.

[bugman]

Try not to allow your raging hatred for President Bush

what's not to hate about the worst war criminal in chief we've had since johnson/nixon?

and what's not to love about a guy who can tell me how bad a president is after a few weeks on the job? a few weeks spent trying to clean up another guy's mess?



btw, note that i did not vote for obama [my vote as always goes out to the late gus hall] and do not even like him all that much, but if we can't be rational, let's at least try to be fair, eh?

[hillside]

Gus Hall??? There's a blast from the past. Now, I gotta go find my old campaign button!

Edit: I should say something about Ubuntu since that's what this thread is actually about. I tried it. Ubuntu made my little computer whimper and cry. Then, it's legs got all wobbly and it fell to it's knees. Poor little computer.

Puppy is better.

[raffy]

Every newly developing software is in trouble, don't you think? There are people who say that Puppy is very unstable, but there are others (like me) who still use the 6th version back (2.13) and could not say the same.

Take another case, that of Firefox3. It is "in trouble", as it keeps crashing in Puppy 4. I take a barebone 4.1.2 and add Firefox2 and enjoy crash-free browsing.

There's wisdom to the suggestion that in open source projects, we don't simply say that someone or something is in trouble. We should say that "there is a problem" and then help solve it.

And speaking of leaders, you are the holy savior of the land until you actually get to the hot seat. Now everyone else is the savior.

[edoc]

Get over your blind hatred for President Bush and look at what these socialists are doing to FREEDOM!

The parallel between political and software policymaking is that throwing more and more money or code at a problem is rarely the best answer and often exacerbates it.

Obama and the Democrat Congress (remember - the economy was fine until the Democrats started tinkering with it a few years back - they FORCED the banks to make bad loans) - imagine that contrary to all history and competent economics that spending into massive deficits will be good - it never has been and is not now.

In software development dumping thousands of lines of patch-code onto already poorly functioning code is dumb and further complicates the mess - Apple learned that and MS is apparently unteachable - a number of Linux distros are repeating the error.

The tiny distros like Puppy make sense because they constantly return to minimalist code - so they know what is going on - which is what competent leaders should do but rarely (with the exception of President Reagan) have done.

[DMcCunney]

Get over your blind hatred for President Bush and look at what these socialists are doing to FREEDOM!

"Freedom" is a loaded word. What do you mean when you say it?

Obama and the Democrat Congress (remember - the economy was fine until the Democrats started tinkering with it a few years back - they FORCED the banks to make bad loans) - imagine that contrary to all history and competent economics that spending into massive deficits will be good - it never has been and is not now.

Banks were not forced to make bad loans. The sub-prime mortgage meltdown did not occur because the government pressured banks into making bad loans - it came about because mortgage lenders thought they saw a way to increase revenues and profits.

Once upon a time, I worked for a bank. I was in a consumer credit area. My shop used sophisticated credit scoring techniques to determine whether to make a loan to a particular customer, how much it should lend, and what it should charge for doing so.

We watched in grim amusement as the credit card operations (another part of the bank unconnected with us) decided that they could increase market share and boost revenues and profits by lowering the standards they used in determining who to offer cards to. It worked for a while. Then the bad debt chickens came home to roost, hundreds of millions of dollars of charge-offs for noncollectable loans occurred, and everybody got a sharp reminder of why the bank hadn't offered credit cards to a lot of those folks under the old rules. The standards got tightened again. Our Region Credit Officer was eloquent about the stupidity and misjudgment of the credit card operation, as what happened to them was predictable and had happened before, but greed trumped good judgment, and that happened before too..

When the sub-prime market imploded, I recalled my former banking days. The folks in the sub-prime lending space came up with what they thought were novel ways to place more loans, boost revenues, and increase profits. But the novel ways were based on underlying assumptions about the economy, and no one seemed to ask "What's Plan B? What do we do if the economy doesn't behave the way we are assuming?"

The bank I used to work for made an assumption back then that people might not have a lot of money now, but would would make more money in the future, and the future income could be used in determining how much to lend. (It assumed borrowers were "upwardly mobile", and their situations would improve.) The sub-prime lenders made similar assumptions about the folks they lent to.

C'est tres joli pas, but it assumed a healthy economy where the folks lent to would be doing better down the road, and could afford to make the higher future payments the loan agreements would impose. That assumption proved to be false, and large numbers of folks who had gotten sub-prime loans were unable to make the higher payments.

That was bad enough, but mortgage lending depends on the secondary market, and it was the secondary market that collapsed. Banks make mortgage loans, then package batches of loans they've made and re-sell them on the secondary market. They use the money they get from the resale to make more loans. Banks were packaging and reselling batches of sub-prime loans along with other loan portfolios. When the economy took a downturn, and recipients of sub-prime loans couldn't make the payments, the value of the packages sold to the secondary market plummeted, and lots of financial institutions found themselves with billions of dollars worth of assets that suddenly weren't worth billions of dollars. The blow to their balance sheets proved fatal for a number of them.

This happened during a Republican Administration, and the Republicans are getting the blame for it. The rapid growth of sub-prine lenders like Countrywide happened entirely during a Republican administration, and Democratic policies had little to do with it. There was simply a class of lenders that saw an opportunity to make money by loaning to people who were considered poor risks by other lenders. Loans got booked, revenue rolled in, profits soared, and all concerned wore dollar sign shaped blinders. Risk management officers who tried to say "Wait a minute!" were muzzled and even fired, because senior management only saw the money rolling in, and ignored the potential downside.

The Obama administration has to try to clean up the mess. You can argue about whether what they are doing is the right way to do it, but casting the problem as the fault of misguided Democratic policies betrays a failure to understand the problem and the economy in general. As a rule, the government has limited success in guiding the direction of the economy, regardless of which administration is in power. Different administrations will try to push different agendas stemming from what they believe to be desirable for the country, but the economy ultimately goes its own way. Like water attempting to flow downhill, money attempts to flow to where it can make more money. Governments can attempt to dam or guide the flow, but the efforts generally have only limited success, as money is endlessly creative and finding other paths to take. Regulation is equally problematic, as the regulators often don't understand what they are attempting to regulate.

It helps a lot if you take Democrat and Republican out of the equation when discussing this stuff, as it just muddies the waters.

In software development dumping thousands of lines of patch-code onto already poorly functioning code is dumb and further complicates the mess - Apple learned that and MS is apparently unteachable - a number of Linux distros are repeating the error.

Such as?

As a general rule, refactoring existing code is preferable to rewrites.

What would you have Microsoft do? Rewrite from scratch? That doesn't happen to be possible.

Windows is improving. Win2K/XP are an order of magnitude more stable that the Win9X branch. Security patches are a fact of life in any non-trivial OS. I installed Xubuntu 8.10 alongside Puppy as a test, and it promptly found 150+ patches and updates intended to address security and stability concerns. The underlying problems in code that create security concerns can be summarized as "Never trust your data", and occur across all OSes.

I get Windows Critical Updates automatically and apply them. I don't mind getting them - quite the opposite, really. I just think Microsoft's current focus on security is one they should have had in place about 5 years earlier than they did.
______
Dennis