On Mon, 14 Mar 2011, wes smith wrote: >> On Sat, 12 Mar 2011, Robert Nesius wrote: >> >>> I think Canonical gets a bit of a bad rap. They are pushing a >>> debian-based distro with a six-month release cycle - which is exactly >>> what a lot of people wanted. They also have done a lot of work on >>> integration. I don't know the whole story, but there has been friction >>> between the Gnome community and Canonical for awhile - as from reading >>> the posts above it seems Gnome leadership has been somewhat dickish >>> about some of the issues at play. >>> >>> I'm interested in objective criticisms of Ubuntu. Not so much in people >>> bagging on it to look 1337. >> >> >> When I see people calling it "noob"untu, I think they are trying to >> tell me they are more experienced users who don't need an easy-to-use >> distro. I've been using Unix and Linux systems for more than 20 years >> and I greatly prefer something easy that requires almost nothing from >> me as a user. If it's easy to install and just works, that's great. I >> would prefer to have no sysadmin skills at all and have a system with >> good, secure default settings that never fails. Having readily >> available, up-to-date packages is important. For me Ubuntu is working >> fine. If there is something better, I'd like to know, but I wouldn't >> want it if it's going to take a lot of time to figure it out. >> > > How can you learn anything if everything just works. Where's the fun > in that. If you want to learn how to use R, Octave, Python, Ruby, Perl or C, then with a quick Ubuntu install, a couple of minutes on synaptic, and you will have everything working. You can start the fun of learning those worthwhile programming systems right away. Of course, if your goal is to learn how to install a really badly maintained distro, then you'll want something that doesn't just work. That's the upside of having choices. The thing I don't understand is why you'd want to make fun of someone for using Ubuntu instead of something that doesn't just work. I'm not sure that you understand that by deciding to spend your time on some tricky Linux distro, you have less time to study things like programming, or chemistry or statistics or history or law or medicine or a million other things. Ask yourself this: How many CEOs or world leaders can compile a Linux kernel? Is it because they are stupid that they can't do it? > Canonical does it for the sake to be different. Are you a native English speaker? I don't get your point. > It doesn't work for us lets switch to something in house, hence unity. > Making drastic changes hurts the user. People are going to have to > relearn how to navigate through the OS. Adobe flash has done this too, > vdpau doesn't work for us lets make our own api. I've never like the > debian way of pkg management. openssl-devel makes a lot more sense the > libssl-dev I still don't understand you. > When I choose an OS I prefer to pick the ones that come with a forced > lifestyle. I prefer to spend extra money to have comfort that my user > experience will be above average and that my laptop doubles as a cake > cutter. I can't make decision for myself so I let the OS / developers > do it for me. I then like to hang out in coffee shops and show everyone > my new toy. OK, but it's still hard to really get what you are trying to tell me. You might find that if you try to explain your position forthrightly that you can see that there are some major flaws in your argument. Mike