Something about Ubuntu

[Nrvnqsr]

well, first of all in my entire life I used Windows from 3.11 to XP, I never understand Linux and its potential, at first I only had experience on Linux is with Unix terminal which they only teach for only one to three days just only teaching the very very very basic (eg: rm mv echo) never atleast some intermediate stuff. And with it, I pretty much stick with the idea the linux as a whole OS is.......junk, inferior, old, dos-ish, jada, jada. A friend of mine show me knoppix, pop it in and I said "oooh games" and still not fasinated.

Fast forward abit, since my old laptop died, I bought a new Compaq M2000 series with Turion64 ML-30 and had it ship it to my job, a friend of mine who used to work with me was a Linux user, he told me if I tried Linux on the laptop, I was open minded, everyone had their taste but I was skeptical and nicely turned him down, but I started to get curious,so I ask and he gave me Ubuntu 5.04 and a old Linux book just to help out.

pop it in and followed the instructions and I saw that it has a built in partitioner and that gave me some relief, reformatting is not my choice ever.....
and with dual-boot installion done, boot it up, Ubuntu crash...wtf....reboot again...crash...."screw it"...reformat entire thing reinstall Windows....back to normal....5.10 got released, and said "aw finally some fixes"....
pop it in install.....reboot....X error crash....."wtf"....format.....Windows

somedays later, seeing ubuntu disc there laying there....pretty much tempted me everyday and I said "lets try again", x crash....ok realized there is a forum...went to forums search for the fix. For now its temporary, now on desktop, test it out, mp3...no go, avi...no go, and saw that all those formats are proprietary I was disappointed, check the forums and got some solutions for the problem, done. Checked the Ubuntu guide, done.

checked the different type of "windows" KDE, Gnome, XFCE, and decided to stick with gnome since to me its more "Windows" than KDE and XFCE, tinkered with gnome and I am satisfied

pretty much many would post here and say "Wow, installed Ubuntu everything worked!!11!! M$ suck it!!!" to me, I REALLY got my hands dirty on the OS, it was a learning expierence, learn to use the terminal properly, but right now its still incomplete right now, just need to test the wifi, install the ATI drivers right, and try to get compile VLC to get MKV video to work. everything else I love it....pretty much I boot more often to Ubuntu except for games and MKVs.

Maybe someday when I come back to school, I hope I would make people turn their heads to see the Ubuntu desktop and say "what is that?"

PS. got to love the Ubuntu bootup and shutdown sounds.

[rykel]

i can understand exactly wat u went thru'... i love linux, linux is great, but it took me much more time in the past 6 mths trying to "set it up" than i ever did with windows XP...

however, the philosophy behind it is right (ie. open source) and thus we can only continue to support & encourage linux's progress. one day, it will become more user-friendly and easy to set up than XP!

of course, XP starts to lag and gets crashes and hanging programs after using it for a while, so please, i am not saying tat XP is "better" than linux in everything, just in the area of getting it all set up and ready to go for productive work!

another area tat XP shines is tat a user like me hardly needs to touch the commandline, altho' tweaking the Registry is worse. hehe

a distro which moves me a lot lately is SUSE 10.0, which seriously allows me to have a great and visually upmarket install-setup-use experience... only thing is tat it is RPM-based, thus conflicts between packages, and the lack thereof, happens frequently. the distro also hangs and i have to hard reboot a few times... so, it's a pity!

if ubuntu and SUSE integrates each other's strengths, and forget abt the RPM vs DEB rivalry - in fact, add Fedora/Mandriva/Gentoo/Slack etc. to the team! (since both ubuntu and SUSE lacks in server/programming/compiling tools, i heard), i think we would soon have the "perfect" distro.

is it THAT bad to have a "Super" Ubuntu which has the fav tweaks from all the top 5 major distros? ubuntu has the greatest potential but since breezy, looking at people's evaluation (yes, many more things DON'T work well compared to Hoary) and distrowatch, this distro is losing its popularity possibly as quickly as it gained it in the earlier half of this year... i love ubuntu, and i hope the distro can bounce back!!

rather than each distro having a lot of great things going for it with a few irritating/nagging and sometimes downright hated bugs (eg. ubuntu breezy xsane almost killed my Canon LIDE 20 scanner when it went spastic trying to scan a doc), i think distros should take wat is good abt each other and then a near-perfect distro will appear.

why should we not have a perfect distro? or at least try to create one?

[aysiu]

why should we not have a perfect distro? or at least try to create one? Because not everyone agrees on what makes a distro "perfect." My thoughts on the matter (http://www.psychocats.net/essays/unifiedlinux.php)--you don't have to agree.

[rykel]

Because not everyone agrees on what makes a distro "perfect." My thoughts on the matter (http://www.psychocats.net/essays/unifiedlinux.php)--you don't have to agree.

i agree... however, there are two issues here - a "near-perfect" (not exactly perfect, but near-perfect, hehe) distro and people agreeing...

on the latter, yes, it is hard to agree on everything all at the same time, because we have different needs and expectations of our distros, but still, we CAN agree to obtain a consensus, right?

ubuntu warty/hoary have gained mass acceptance becoz they worked, and worked well, with bugs tat are either cosmetic or "ignorable" (such as GNOME Desktop not automatically refreshing) but for breezy, there's been some major problems. such as xsane insisting on running as root - this happens if u upgraded from hoary to breezy... and to top it off, i am sure many newbies who have tried SUSE will agree tat it will be helpful if we can incorporate a modified YAST and perhaps Anaconda GUI installer into ubuntu. throw in those high res wallpapers too!

in other words, warty/hoary has obtained a pretty good consensus from linux users... fedora, SUSE, Mandriva etc. would do well to heed the rise of ubuntu and come in to understand the reasons why we love ubuntu after trying out so many diff distros.

btw, notice tat i did NOT ask for a "unified" distro, tat can never, and should NOT, happen... but i did say tat we can create a ubuntu tat takes the best of other distros' user-friendliness and make it our own. eg. why reinvent the installer wheel when anaconda/YAST are already so reliable?

sure, the ubuntu devs should be given a chance to create a better installer, but until it is almost on par with anaconda/YAST, should we not simply leave it in the lab first?

tat was just an example.

my non-linux friends who see SUSE for the first time usually goes, "WOW! Linux looks hot! must have it!" but when they see ubuntu, they go, "is this it? a dullish, brownish desktop tat looks like it came from windows 98?"

of course, it is just first impression, NOT an indication of whichever distro is better, but YAST, Anaconda/SUSE installer, GNOME (which ubuntu has) plus some beautiful hi-res wallpapers do make a difference in people's perception... and sure, first impression counts.

unfortunately, i am not a programmer, but i will see wat else i can do to help improve ubuntu... one way i help is to encourage the use of autopackage (http://www.autopackage.org), which new users love.

[aysiu]

i am sure many newbies who have tried SUSE will agree tat it will be helpful if we can incorporate a modified YAST and perhaps Anaconda GUI installer into ubuntu. throw in those high res wallpapers too! This has been discussed at quite a great length already:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=90487
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=78410
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=66082


in other words, warty/hoary has obtained a pretty good consensus from linux users... fedora, SUSE, Mandriva etc. would do well to heed the rise of ubuntu and come in to understand the reasons why we love ubuntu after trying out so many diff distros. I have to say I personally don't think Ubuntu is a good first distro. I just don't. I think Mepis is a much better first distro (or Linspire even, depending on the new user's needs or preferences). Ubuntu's much better for someone who's in need of a second distro.

[rykel]

This has been discussed at quite a great length already:

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=90487
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=78410
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=66082

I have to say I personally don't think Ubuntu is a good first distro. I just don't. I think Mepis is a much better first distro (or Linspire even, depending on the new user's needs or preferences). Ubuntu's much better for someone who's in need of a second distro.

thanks for those links, reading them now...

actually, siu, u are right... even i myself came over from fedora/mepis etc. to ubuntu, so yeah, perhaps tat is wat we should tell new users... there IS a better choice if u are hungry for more straightforward power in a linux distro - and tat is ubuntu.

and well, when i mentioned SUSE, it was only becoz it was the only major distro with many packages/window managers for newbies to test drive linux... but yes, mepis and linspire are great for them too.

btw, i am reading ur blog, are u singaporean also? would u like to add me to ur skype/msn/yahoo/gizmo/goggletalk? my user ID is rykel98. i would like to invite u to join christian21 (http://www.christian21.org), which i founded.

[aysiu]

It all depends on what new users want, and most new users want something that "works" out-of-the-box. And the type of working they're talking about is proprietary codecs, which means Mepis, Linspire, or Blag.

I recommend Mepis to these "must work" folks for a few reasons:

1. It's cost-free (unlike Linspire)
2. It actually has a community (unlike Blag)
3. It's both a live CD and installer CD in one (something not even Ubuntu can claim). You can pop in the live CD. If you like it, you can install it by clicking "install me," and still use the KDE environment while it's installing.
4. Almost everything is point-and-click
5. It's bloated (when I was a newbie, I was most impressed by a plethora of applications, not by a dearth of applications).

Of course, it took me a few weeks, but after a while I found Mepis restricting, bloated, and lacking in community support and ease of customization. That's when Ubuntu came in.

btw, i am reading ur blog, are u singaporean also? would u like to add me to ur skype/msn/yahoo/gizmo/goggletalk? my user ID is rykel98. i would like to invite u to join christian21, which i founded. I'm not Singaporean. In fact, I've never been to Singapore. Thanks for the invitation--I appreciate it, but I've joined enough things at the moment.

[ssam]

I recommend Mepis to these "must work" folks for a few reasons:

3. It's both a live CD and installer CD in one (something not even Ubuntu can claim). You can pop in the live CD. If you like it, you can install it by clicking "install me," and still use the KDE environment while it's installing.


https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuExpress :-) very high priority for dapper.