MATE Desktop and a little thought...

[Liam Proven]

On 20 July 2012 20:36, Daevid Vincent <daevid at daevid.com> wrote:
>
> It could be argued that Canonical already DID shoot its own foot with this
> Unity debacle. ;-)

Yes it could, but long term, I suspect Unity will prove to be a win.

> That has been a thorn since it's introduction and what I attribute to the
> mass exodus away from Ubuntu -- which WAS the dominant distro (even
> trouncing on RedHat/Fedora long ago to take the crown).

Do we *know* this or merely suspect it?

I suspect that the people complaining about Unity are outnumbered by a
larger group who are getting on fine & don't say anything.

>
> http://distrowatch.com/
>
> Rank    Distribution    H.P.D*
> 1       Mint            3859<
> 2       Ubuntu  2201=
> 3       Mageia  1774>
> 4       Fedora  1697<
> 5       Debian  1361<
> 6       openSUSE        1349=
> 7       Arch            1154>
> 8       CentOS  988>
> 9       Puppy           853=
> 10      PCLinuxOS       784>
>
> Mint seems to have a significant lead over Ubuntu and includes MATE
> http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

That is just page views, not user numbers. It's interesting &
suggestive but proves nothing.

> I've not used Mint, but hear great things.

It's pretty good.

It is more Windows-like in appearance & has bundled media codecs.

Snags:
* no supported release-to-release upgrades
* update program too conservative & only flags some updates
* some 3rd party apps & drivers do not install smoothly because they
don't directly support Mint

#3 can be 'fixed' by stopping distro detection, where available, &
telling the installer it's the corresponding version of Ubuntu.

> Also isn't it based upon Ubuntu,

Yes

> so wouldn't it follow that the MATE packages should work on an Ubuntu system
> too?

(?) How does that follow?

Anyway, there /are/ Maté packages for Ubuntu already.


> OT: I find these types of phenomena very interesting. I mean, how some
> company/product/service/even distro can be so massive and seem that they
> will never falter and yet somehow manage to royally fsck something up so
> badly that they collapse.

Ubuntu has not collapsed, though.


> Gentoo, SUSE, and Solaris, come to mind on a
> distro scale.

All still alive. & Solaris is not a distro & not a FOSS product.

> On larger scales, Altavista was huge at one time, now where
> are they?

Google PageRank was & is a killer advatange.

> Yahoo was the king of search

Only when the Web was very small. Human-curated indices could never
keep up after '96 or so.

> and absolutely crushed by Google
> search. Digg was THE news site and sold for millions and now it was just
> sold off for a pathetic $500k.

Reddit is better.

Also, if you think $500K is "pathetic", can I borrow half a million
bucks, please?

> Friendster was the hot new social network
> that stole the title from Six Degrees (yeah, remember that?) and then
> Myspace came along and drank their milkshake. Now they too are just a sad
> sad shell of what it was, and Facebook owns that domain by a landslide.

FB did it better.

It will die too in time.

> Google+ will ultimately fail. I'm not saying G+ is good or bad, I'm just
> stating a fact.

Not a fact; a supposition. You don't *know* the future & nor do I.

It is very likely, yes, but we don't know. It's not a fact.



-- 
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