MATE Desktop and a little thought...

[Johnny Rosenberg]

2012/7/21 Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
> 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

There could be the answer to the numbers above. People, especially
Ubuntu users who are not satisfied with Unity, hear about Mint and go
to their web page. Maybe they even install it. Then they see that it
looks a bit like Windows and think ”Oh no!”, uninstall it and go back
to Ubuntu…

I remember back in 2007, when I switched from Windows to Ubuntu. I had
many reasons to do so. I had complained loudly about Windows in maybe
a decade and some people told me that if I'm not satisfied, why don't
you try something else? I have been thinking of Linux of some sort for
a couple of years, since I worked a bit with Unix at school (like a
university) in the early 1990's, and I really missed it when working
with Windows. Everything seemed to complicated stupid in Windows, I
thought. However, the step between thinking and doing can sometimes be
very huge, so it took me a couple of years before I heard of Ubuntu
6.06, a distribution that should be a good start for a Linux beginner.
Still I didn't do anything (except burned an Ubuntu 6.06 CD, which I
never used), until summer 2007, when I first installed Ubuntu 7.04. I
consulted a lot of pages online before I decided for the Gnome
version. I wanted a full feature desktop and one of the reasons that I
picked Gnome was that KDE looked too much like Windows, and I really
didn't want that. And I still don't. Maybe there are more people like
me out there, somewhere…


Kind regards

Johnny Rosenberg
ジョニー・ローゼンバーグ

> & 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.
>
>
>
> --
> Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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>
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