On Tue, 2007-09-04 at 09:27 -0400, David R. Meyer wrote: > I can't stand it.
Originally I couldn't stand it either. I like it now. what i couldn't stand was the inflexible install procedure (no developer edition, no profiles to choose from, no ability to choose what to install and what not to). I didn't like the fact that if I didn't want OpenOffice in there, i'd have to remove it after the install instead of choosing not to have it install at all at the beginning. I had problems with some packaging bugs when upgrading to the next distro version. By and large though, it works and is smooth enough. I like apt-get more than rpm (when I switched I don't think yum was available yet). Really though, I switched because of the Debian Universe and multiverse. At the time, I was using svk and svn a lot and Mandriva (which was what I was using) didn't have any packages for svk and I think svn was slow to be upgraded. I'm sure there were other reasons. I was an icewm freak at the time, but lately either my laptops have gotten faster or gnome has gotten faster or both, so gnome has been usable (I still can't stand the KDE on my wife's laptop, but it's not my laptop anymore ;-). > With so many distros already out there, why Ubuntu? Fedora, > OpenSUSE, Mandriva and Debian all have excellent desktop > and server apps. Why Ubuntu? I think it comes down to simplicity. When I switched, ubuntu had better hardware support (well, for the laptops I was using at the time) than did Mandriva. the inflexibility of the install also makes it more approachable to non-techies. As much as I don't like the inflexibility, in fact when the install is done I know how to get postgresql and php and apache and gcc ang g++ and everything else I need installed. So non-techies can install it pretty easily, and techies can figure things out. > I don't understand this cult-like following, but am > willing to listen. There are more non-techies than techs in the world. The ratio is probably on the order of 1:10. that's where some of that PR is coming from. Non-techs, or barely-techs can use it and be pretty comfortable with it. I'm not into the cult myself. I don't much care what distro other people use and if I recommend ubuntu it's because i can help them with it. if they want to use slackware, well, i haven't used slackware since it came in floppies so i can't help much there. I'd love to learn opensolaris, actually. but i don't have the time or the spare PC/laptop to install it on. how is the hardware support? Does it install in vmware? if yes, I'll install it there just to learn it. i see people raving about ZFS. I can see where that would be useful for servers. What's the realtime IO situation there? I've been investigating git lately because subversion is slowing my laptop down incredibly when I have to work with very large working copies of source code (and some interspersed data) from work. ionice helps a lot with that though. tiger _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
