2c about the development of ubuntu

[Daniel Stone]

On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 02:22:16AM +0100, Udo 'Robos' Puetz wrote:
> Huh? As in "apt-get dist-upgrade"? Then debian has had support for debian
> for a 10 year frame already... You could always do this with debian and,
> without any blunt mis-step by ubuntu, you would be able to do this
> naturally. If you call this "support", okay.

Actually, Debian only supports upgrades between subsequent stable
releases.  slink to potato to woody is supported, but slink to woody is
not.

> If you would invest in wine (rms side of "should move to linux software
> aside) THAT would be userfriendly because nobody would run a server app on
> wine (who is in their right mind) but users could use a desktop program on a
> linux desktop. The failure rate of that program would then be similar to
> being run on windows so the transition would even be simpler for the user :)

Using Windows programs on a Linux desktop is fraught with problems, and
is not very user-friendly at all.  It's a neat hack, but the
Frankenstinian result is far from usable.

> Killer apps for the desktop? All a machine nowadays needs is internet and
> you are ready to go on the desktop. You *could* even use those hype-ajax
> office thingies on the internet and forget OOo. You need a good browser and,
> above all! Internet! See my comments about modem/isdn (<- take a look at
> support of isdn) "it should "Just Work", TM".

Sorry, hate to break it to you, but people want to use Flash, they want
to read their Word documents, they want to tool around in Photoshop,
they want to play games, they want to manage their photos, they want to
burn CDs, they want to manage their music and keep it synced with their
MP3 player (read: iPod), etc, etc ...

(This was the very top of the rather long list I compiled from the
rather representative sample of my extended family, of whom only one is
strongly computer-literate, and I didn't ask him anyway.)

> > There is no such thing as Enterprise Ubuntu. There is only Ubuntu (and their 
> > flavours like Kubuntu/Edubuntu/XFCE Ubuntu (TBD)) and a company who is giving 
> > support to other companies.
> 
> See the other comments, there will be. 

I don't know what you mean by this, but the only enterprise-ish Ubuntu
effort is the server project.  There will never -- never -- be a pay-for
version of Ubuntu.