Ubuntu blues

[Martin Alderson]

On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 09:01:19 +0100, Tollef Fog Heen
<tfheen at canonical.com> wrote:
> * Martin Alderson
> 
> | Sorry guys, but this is turned into a flamewar.
> 
> Then we should either end the thread or turn it into a non-flamewar.
> I think there are interesting issues raised in the thread which we
> should discuss a bit further.

Absolutely. Thank-you for this response. It makes me feel as if they
are intelligent people still in the Linux community.
 
> | I don't have the effort to continue it, but needless to say I feel
> | that aslong as Linux continues to have this attitude of 'WIND0WZ
> | SUX0RZZ111LOL', it's not going to address the real issues.
> 
> Linux, like Windows, has a community around it.  The Linux community
> is diverse and you'll both have moderate people saying something like
> 'I prefer Linux because of A, B and C (which are all valid reasons'
> and those people saying 'Windows sucks (with some random spelling of
> both words)' without any reasonable explanation.
> 
> Ubuntu is trying to be more of the first than the last,  We have the
> code of conduct, we have an open development process and try to have a
> friendly tone when talking to each other.

Agreed. 

> | I thought it was very funny that someone commented that Bash was more
> | familiar than Windows for them. Gee, that's got to be 1% of the
> | computer-using population.
> |
> | Also, installation is stil a huge issue on Linux. This needs fixed, and fast.
> |
> | apt-get is not good enough for the reason it's centralized and _STILL_
> | requires per-distro packages. This is not good enough - I can run
> | Win3.1 apps on XP absolutely fine.
> 
> apt-get is a debugging tool and should not be used unless you know
> what you are doing.  Use a proper frontend like Synaptic or aptitude.
> I don't see why centralisation is a problem -- can you elaborate a bit
> on that?  Per-distro packages, well, naturally.  Or you can go with
> LSB and what that provides.

Centralization is a problem because:

a) It requires someone to manually check every package from the
distro, which usually means that updates become slow due to the sheer
number of them. Ubuntu is much better than others in this regard, but
Debian is terrible. 3 weeks to get updates is not good enough.

b) I don't think you would be willing to carry propitiatory software
on your repositories. I still feel that propitiatory software is
always going to be needed on Linux. There is a lot of 'behind the
scenes' software which I think it would be unreasonable for you to
carry. Infact I think it's unreasonable for you to carry even 25% of
Linux OSS when there is so much of it.

> Most people I've talked to absolutely love how apt and one repository
> of all the useful stuff works.  Compared to Windows, you don't have to
> go one place to fetch your Office package, one place to get your IM
> tool, another place to get a good programmer's editor and so on.  To
> me, that usually takes a couple of days when I install a Windows
> machine, while on Ubuntu, I just install the packages and don't have
> to hunt them down.  Since you get the packages from different places,
> you have no way to be sure you get security updates without spending a
> lot of time checking web sites for updates.

Oh absolutely, I agree entirely. It's very useful until packages
aren't in your repositories and you have to start installing loads
from source, *.deb and other repositories.

> The last point is important.  Most vulnerabilities with worms that
> have affected Windows boxes have been patched by MS before, but the
> user has never installed the patch.  I would be surprised if there
> wasn't a lot of other applications out there in the same state.
>
>
> | Also, as for this 'Linux is more difficult to exploit' stuff, I don't
> | really believe it to be honest. It doesn't really matter anyway since
> | the main problem is USER CONSNETED SPYWARE INSTALLS. Please tell me
> | how Linux is going to stop this? How can you stop someone installing
> | spyware.deb or whatever when they type their password and press OK -
> | answer? You can't.
> 
> It's a lot easier to track down and remove for somebody who knows how
> UNIX works.  Yes, I agree that's not an answer to a beginner.  So, let
> me rather ask the question: why would you download a .deb from
> somewhere and install that rather than rely on your central
> repository?  You have loads and loads of free software which does not
> include spyware (since spyware, if it came with the software, would be
> removed by whoever packaged it).

I wouldn't. Just like I don't install Kazaa on my Windows PC. But I
know a hell of a lot of people that would. Someone would bring out a
non-OSS version of Kazaa and bundle it with a load of spyware. They
offer it as *.rpm, *.deb etc. The user double clicks on the package,
and boom, spyware infestation.

> | [...] and I think GTK2 is still less stable (or harder to write
> | stable apps for) than Win32 apps.
> 
> I find most GTK2 apps nice and stable on my system, but I guess this
> is an example of 'Your Mileage May Vary'.  Do please file bugs in
> bugzilla if you find reproducible bugs.

They are not usually reproducible, but sometimes apps will just crash
randomly or just 'go'. Just exit, no warning, no bug report... just
disappear.