Another attack on Ubuntu

Wow, strong words...

http://www.linux.co.nz/journal/2009/7/3/cloned-distros-why-ubuntu-sucks-and-should-be-banned.html

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Comments

Clone wars


ubuntu is not bad
Username: linuxcbon
"Article with 0 interest. Strong words could be used for MSOFT and APPLE. But not Linux, whatever the distro, you dont like it, move on. That guy is a pure idiot. And I am being very polite.

LFS for beginners??
Username: lwill
"In another of his articles he suggests starting with LFS and building your own full desktop! I am no beginner, and I found it challenging just to get a command line system working the first time. While command line is some times still necessary, Puppy keeps trying to hard to eliminate it for all but the real show stopper problems. This is what novices need, and expect now days to get them interested. Then give them the ability to get more advanced at their own pace. If the distro does everything they need it to do from the start and they never open a terminal or change a setting, then I think that should be the best measure of success. To top it off, he highlights one of the biggest problems today by saying "all you really need to do is copy and paste". Just like education in general, just copy it from the book or memorize it till the test, don't bother learning "[i]how to learn[/i]" Pointing out you will probably "hose your machine" doesn't build much confidence in beginners either, recommending you run it in a virtual machine. This can be more difficult and confusing than LFS itself! Last thought, isn't every distro in essence a clone at heart? Don't they all transplant a (genetically engineered / mutated) version of Linus's own heart? (the kernel) (end rant) Lyle

this is funny...
Username: Jota
"As many times in life, the author is right in some things (Ubuntu is not really good) and wrong in others (very wrong, I should say). I also dont't like Ubuntu, but to say that it harm other Linux distro, is a long way!

Pup
Username: Cipolla
"I didn't bother to read the article. I started in fact with Linux about 9 months ago, when ubuntu intrepid was launched (some time earlier I did even install another distro but it didn't go much further than that). Coincidentally, today I was thinking about how ubuntu was so well configured up to the smallest detail, and relating it to the fact of having all the Canonical developers (not talking about the community here). I even thought that maybe Fedora could be like that too but the only time I tried Fedora was this latest 11 release and the PulseAudio Volume Control didn't work (it's a new and promising feature but it was the first distro in about 20 that didn't have audio for me), so I didn't go further than the live-cd (I have a small hd - one more reason to like Puppy). Now I'm trying Upup and I found that I didn't have to put anything besides 'vmlinuz' and 'initrd.gz' at GRUB's menu.lst to boot it from a directory. Idk if I was missing this with the 'former' puppies, but discovering it right now is just the spirit of this OS: make it simple.

Integrating
Username: Raffy
"Integrating (for users/languages) and innovating (in software) are two big undertakings in themselves. MSoft tackled the first and succeeded. Linus tackled the second, slowly and patiently. Now, many other distros are trying a mix of the two. Not an issue, really, unless the user has been taught to be so d u m b that s/he can't command "startx" in console. In *buntu-land, "sudo" is another basic trick to learn.

Re: Mr Yoper
Username: BarryK
"Yeah, I also am critical of Ubuntu in some regards, but Mr Yoper's article did seem to be a bit "over the top". It seems that he has a reputation for strong words. I don't use Ubuntu, and I only know one person personally who does -- and he has not yet upgraded his system, so I don't know if upgrading is really that bad. Well, I have used Intrepid briefly, and had negative experience as posted to this blog. The thing is, much of his criticism is about how Ubuntu does things, especially the aggressive release cycle and using Debian unstable, both of which I also dislike. But, that is just how Ubuntu does it, and I don't think Ubuntu's bad practices should be used to attack clones in general. Well, that was my initial assessment of the article, but I was curious what you guys thought, so I posted the link here.

Sad
Username: rarsa
"By redefining words he is speaking from both sides of his mouth. You cannot complain about 1000s of distros but defend creating one your self. It is extremely sad the ignorance reflected in the following parragraph: "Ubuntu is in my view the paradigm of what makes clones so useless and counter productive to the Linux cause, if there actually is a cause." Freedom. that's it. That a person that contributes to OpenSUSE does not know that may give you a clue why Novell played into MS hands.

Oops
Username: rarsa
"Oops, I just realized that my second parragraph can be misinterpreted. I meant "you" in general. I didn't realize that the previous post was Barry's. I was talking about Yoper. (Maybe an unnecessary clarification but better safe than misunderstood)

Updates
Username: Nathan F
"Interesting enough, I agree with a lot of what the guy had to say. Especially in regards to updates/upgrades. I had a good deal of experience building a distro on top of another distro and encountered quite a number of the problems he described. In fact, after a while Grafpup became almost un-maintainable. I don't know the current state of Ubuntu, but I uninstalled it a couple years ago specifically because I had quite a number of breakages with updates. I'm runnin Debian and FreeBSD now and updates always run smoothly for me. In the case of FreeBSD, yes it does require the command line. But the documentation is extremely good and included right in the install. These days I really value the stability.

Ubuntu
Username: Joe J
"I had wanted to give linux a try for a long time before finally installing it in December 2008. Getting a new laptop allowed me to experiment on the old one. After a good deal of surfing, I settled on Ubuntu. I liked it immediately as it ran much faster, and eventually switched all my computers over to linux, either Ubuntu or Puppy. I want something simple and fast, that just works and doesn't crash. Ubuntu and Puppy fit the bill for me. Out of all the distros I've tried (including Fedora, OpenSuse and Debian), Ubuntu and Puppy work on my particular systems with the least fiddling. I'd rather be messing around on my computer than messing around with my computer. I've never had problems with updates on Ubuntu. I did have a problem upgrading once. It did not work out well, so now I do a clean install for each new version. As far as innovation, it's not high on my list. As I've already said, I want something simple and fast. I think that too often software bloat is foisted on us in the name of innovation. That is why I love Puppy particularly. It is mean and lean and does everything that I want and need it to do.

Another Wanker
Username: Dougal
"The guy works for Novell. Hmm. While I do agree the proliferation of derivatives is a little out of control, Ubuntu is one of the cases where it _is_ worthwhile (and attacking a 6-month release cycle is just stupid. That's how "cutting edge"/desktop distros _should_ work: they're there to help test/stabilize things for the enterprise distros). While I don't care much for Ubuntu, they did a lot to attract new users to Linux (and have nice release names...). And as for the Greg KH quote, here's what a certain Ozzie had to say about it: http://lwn.net/Articles/294681/

What me worry ?
Username: quaismodal
"I think the key words in the article are "When I developed Yope ...". Maybe he had a point to make five years ago in the Wild West days of Linux, but he is fundamentally wrong about Linux in year 2009 There are many millions of people in the world who just want to install a simple Linux OS and run applications on it, without a lot of fuss and bother. They use relatively simple distros like Puppy and Ubuntu to do it. They don't want to do heavy code development or run a high-performance server or any of that stuff - they want to do email and word processing, maybe download and play some MP3s, etc. The author doesn't seem to understand that for every developer are maybe fifty ordinary everyday users who just want to get on with it. But that's OK, everyone has their role and fills a niche of some sort in the Linux food chain, "Mr Linux" too. A world of of developers without end users would be sorry place, in my opinion. Hell, I say 19 million people should create their own Linux distros and distribute them just to drive him nuts ( he he he ). Wooo, I guess I can say some pretty harsh things too.

Bollocks
Username: jamesbond
"A guy who called himself as MrLinux, yet recommends everyday users to use Mac instead? A guy who says "linux for beginners is an oxymoron" yet recommends linux newbies to go to LFS? Yeah sure. Ad hominem aside, all of his reasoning are bogus - everyone of them can easily apply to any distros, original or derivatives otherwise. Or even to proprietary OS. Bollocks.

My view
Username: cthisbear
"I think he's turned out to be a bit of a No Yoper. Chris.

Tags: general