Questions about Ubuntu 18.04 live/install ISO

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2019 at 14:23, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
>
> Ah, OK. I didn't know that. That would explain it.

It's how most modern distros work now. The only exception I know is
openSUSE which still bundles all the main ones on the install DVD and
makes you pick one.

> Draw your own conclusions, people :-)

Well quite.

> All makes sense, and at lease Ubuntu has lighter-weight variants.

The thing that particularly annoys me, and I am very surprised this
hasn't come up more, is that OpenGL does not work well inside VMs. I
had to learn this the hard way.

Software rendering mostly works, but as you say, slowly. It kills
performance, especially in a single-threaded VM (as most are by
default). And yet these days most people would test out a new OS or
distro in a VM before they try it.

Do this with any of the big ones -- Ubuntu/Fedora/SLED's GNOME 3,
Mint's Cinnamon, openSUSE's KDE -- and it will work, yes,  but only
poorly.

I've talked to quite a number of people who didn't know this.

Not Invented Here Syndrome is rampant in FOSS and getting worse. Fans
of all the desktops don't know much about other desktops. Most people,
like "Little Girl" in this group, only want something like the default
Windows 9x experience: even moving the panel to a different screen
edge confuses them and they won't consider it.

People like me, whose GUI and desktop experience started in the
mid-to-late 1980s with stuff like classic MacOS, Windows 2, AmigaOS,
Atari ST GEM, Acorn RISC OS and OS/2 2, are used to diversity and all
GUIs looking and working quite differently from one another. That was
normal.

Now, take the standard Windows desktop, right-click the panel and
untick "locked" and drag it to the left, and people panic. They no
longer know how to work it.

This is why Windows 8 flopped. No start button? Aaaaaaargh! I can't use it!

It's absurd and ridiculous, but it's where we have got to.

I rather wish Microsoft *had* sued in 2007 and put all the
Windows-like desktops off the market. We'd have some real diversity
again.

> :-) He missed the term 'buffer' in that one.

Baby steps!

> Moot as far as I'm
> concerned — I've worked all my life in technical fields which have their
> own terminology, some of which is at odds with that from other fields,
> and you just learn to cope. There is no mileage in telling historians
> that their "footnotes" aren't actually footnotes but citations
> masquerading as footnotes, and that if they want actual footnotes they
> should learn to write without them. You have to let them submit their
> book to a publisher and have it returned with all their footnotes
> removed first. It's a learning curve.

A good point!

-- 
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