Ubuntu is the greatest distribution ever
 

I know this because no other distro takes up five+ news areas on Distrowatch!

Yeah, we're obviously using the wrong distribution, therefore we're probably not human beings. But what really annoys me is that M$ Windoz€ must be the greatest operating system ever, as almost every computer store wants to sell it! :)

Moderator Response
 

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <Ubuntu> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

No, I think Android has the spotlight right now...
"Gartner estimates that Android will reach 1.1 billion users in 2014, a 26 percent increase from 2013."
"In fall 2011 Canonical estimated that Ubuntu had more than 20 million users worldwide."
Pretty sure Ubuntu's numbers dropped because of adware/spyware and whatnot.

Also, just because it takes up a little space on Distrowatch doesn't mean that they're the best thing since sliced bread. There are better distros out there, a prime example is Manjaro.

Don't know where you moved this from but it was a good idea.

Even with the move it has not attracted attention from fanboys other than the OP.

Give it time. It has only been eight hours.

1) Attention does not equal quality and lack of attention does not equal lack of quality.
2) The BBC often has articles about Microsoft, but I have never seen one about Ubuntu. So according to your logic, Windows must be the best OS ever.

That is right. I have never seen one either. Never thought about it. Even from a great company based in GB too.

Probably embarrassed by Canonical.

I know this is tongue in cheek humor when the OP has a Slackware icon and Distribution: Slackware in his posting profile.

Personally. OS are like tools. One is as good as the other depending on the job needed done by the user with the hardware he/she has.

Not a fanboy. Just pragmatic. Run what you brung, I say.

Posts like this are called "trolls". I assume no one ever saw them before, that is why tehy are so eager to asnwer.

jlinkels

+1, it is all about what works for you as an individual.

Knightron wouldn't troll, he is just bring attention to the obvious.

To be fair, Knightron started this thread in General, not in the Ubuntu forum. It was moved here later, and that's why I wouldn't call it trolling. When purely quantitative criteria are so often replacing quality and reliability in its broadest sense, well, some humour IMHO is perfectly acceptable.

I have seen a few articles about Ubuntu on the BBC website. Mind you they were mostly in the context of mobile phones.

There was sarcasm in my remark, in case anyone missed that. I guess it was my personal way of expressing cynicism due to Ubuntu consuming up so much space on Distrowatch's homepage every time a new release roles round, simply because of desktop environments.

That is right, I missed the sarcasm. And I also failed to notice that Knightron is a long-time member.

But anyone in defense of this post must admit that a title like this is a troll-bait.

jlinkels

When dealing with Ubuntu and Canonical Ltd., even indirectly as during a short visit to Distrowatch, one will bump into issues which I believe are quite serious and difficult to skip, at least for one who cares about certain things. I've used Ubuntu in the past (when Debian was my main distribution) so I feel that I have the right to express some thoughts here.

When a free Linux distribution can hire a former Simens Mobile, LG Mobile and Sony Ericsson top-notch marketing manager, John Bernard, now global marketing head at Mozilla, that's curious enough even if the founder of that distribution is a multi-millionaire. But well, why not.

When the same distribution includes in its staff since 2004 (the year of its foundation) a former vice president of General Dynamics C4 Systems, Jane Silber, then I start asking myself a few more questions. You can search the web to see what General Dynamics C4 Systems is. Silber became CEO at Canonical in 2010, replacing Shuttleworth, and is also on the board of a web scraping project (ScraperWiki).

When we add to that the nice spying features which were deliberately turned on by default on Ubuntu, one will understand why, sometimes, some legitimate humour and sarcasm get triggered, and why few people still believe to the "Linux for human beings" story. :)

What's so odd about that? Corporations fund and run Linux and other free software from behind the scenes. Look into who funds X.org, Debian, mozilla and the Linux kernel. Red Hat themselves are a corporation. I assume it's ok that he's now at mozilla - which is supposed to be a "free" browser?

They started with backing from a millionaire - that was no secret - and the project was just Debian unstable with some marketing behind it. So they hired a marketing man.
Red Hat contracts for the US department of defence. Is this situation worse than/any different to that?
I don't think they hired all of those people at such huge expense to rip off banshee projects gnome money and come up with that silly shopping lens thing.

'pal'(thus between quotation marks)

http://kaosx.us/ is better than manjaro ...

Yeah, screw the 32 bit Linux users, huh "pal"?

I don't run Manjero on this P3. But I don't dis it either.
Heck. Even Ubuntu has a 32 bit base iso. I know because I have a Icewm 14.04 LS 32 bit base install I put on a friends laptop that wanted a lean Ubuntu 32 bit install.

Show me where where http://kaosx.us/ offers that?
By the way. I am not disrespecting KOSX either. I just
wonder where your posts come from sometimes?

Moderator Response
 

Moved form <Linux-General> to keep this thread from inciting/provocative/flooding posts that I knew would be submitted. Felt that this thread should be better handled within the <Ubuntu> forum by members who would provide some insight to fellow members. I guess the Ford vs Chevy theory does apply!

I agree, anyone is free to spend any amount of money to market his product, that's why I ended the paragraph with «well, why not». Moreover, corporations are free to fund an run free software: if they wouldn't, a large part of that software would probably not be as good it is today. That being said, the thoughts I expressed were about marketing and business being often considered more important than ethics: when users are not respected anymore but are treated just like a crowd of mere consumers, then I believe that criticisms are justified. Ubuntu has chosen to follow that path, and so has Mozilla, which now is apparently a de facto googleware. For these reasons I will not use nor trust them, unless they clearly switch their policies.

I'm not a business expert at all, but in this particular case the fact that Mrs. Silber has always been a leading member of the staff is somewhat different from Red Hat having contracts with said department. This might be irrelevant, but in my opinion it should raise a few questions, to which I have no answers. It might indeed be interesting to have some clarifications about that from Ubuntu insiders.

I don't think that either. I personally consider those features just another reason for not trusting the distribution.

Philip

Corporate funding or donations is almost always a good thing - they throw some cash or equipment at the project and get to use the result (as with everyone else). If free software projects are to survive, the money needs to come from somewhere to pay the developers. Actual corporate ownership and control, where they put in their own people and inject their own agenda into the mix - not so much. This is not so different to proprietary apart from the actual code being open.

Corporate influenced/controlled software will always serve the corporation doing the influencing. google for example are in the adware/spyware/data mining business - it's up their marketing people to run and foster projects which allow them to package this in a way that it does not come across as adware/spyware/data mining. Marketing is after all deception with a fancy name. google make their spyware/adware palatable by wrapping it up in something useful to sweeten the deal or by funding browsers like opera and mozilla and hiding it there. google also hide their spyware/adware in forum software like this on and on many other sites, especially shopping sites, google have been doing this for many years, it's google's business model, but people just sat back and took it and accepted their "don't be evil" mantra, bought their phones, used their products and just shrugged when the whole streetview wifi hot spot sniffing thing was exposed - and just carried on.

ubuntu installed an amazon shopping thing, the tech press wrote the usual sensationalist revenue pulling articles and a lot of forum users just went ballistic and ran off to mint or whatever... this is unfortunately how a lot of people behave when reading news articles or when reacting to sensationalist, "viral" rumour.

Do you know everyone employed by Red Hat and their backgrounds? I don't. I really don't see the issue with Silber. It's not as if she was sitting their coding spyware and adware herself and also what C4 did, doesn't really seem that related.


Well the distribution has made a few errors - Shuttleworth clearly wants to see if open source can pay, but it's not clear if the OS is the focus anymore.

If you look beyond the distribution(s), there have been a lot of vapourware ideas (phone?) and failed products such as Ubuntu One. It's not really clear where they're heading, but it's clear that he wants to be something like android and clearly has no reservations about adware - as we've seen. The trouble is that he's up against the likes of google, amazon and microsoft who he has to work with bend over for, or ultimately fail.

The shopping lens was poor and overstepped a few boundaries, but they took a gamble, strapped on the flack jackets and knew they'd get away with it. For me none of it comes as a surprise as I've seen ubuntu transform into something unpleasant since 2006 when I first used it. The "purple era", when references to GNU, Linux and Debian slowly but surely disappeared from the site one by one over the space of a few years and were replaced with the terms "free" (as in beer) and the odd reference to "open source". This is a case where the need for marketing and deceiving outweighed the requirement for honesty and transparency.

It becomes clear that the Ubuntu OS is not the focus for Canonical anymore if you make the mistake I did and actually go to;
http://www.ubuntu.com/

While there is a link for downloading 14.10 on that page and not hard to find it is not the featured product.

I believe I went to that site because someone here had a thread wondering where they could get Ubuntu. After checking the site out I now not only do not recommend Ubuntu (that is a 3year old policy) I will never advise going to that site.

I don't advise it now. I give it simply because I think it illustrates the focus of the company at this current time. I think it would be fool hardy to even consider using the desktop OS with this obvious focus. Their support for the OS has been spotty for some time, their bug fixing has been crappy for much longer.

On the note of the site itself, in my FedoraForum days, Dan (the moderator) pointed out that on the download page, they give you an ugly orange skull if you don't donate. I forget the subject of the thread, but if you google around you can probably find the thread. Yet another reason...

Their bug fixing has been pathetic since 2009-2010. I used Ubuntu 8.04 and 9.04 and those were pretty decent but not long after that it got pretty awful. Even the regular ubuntu-based Linux Mint (which is still less buggy then actual ubuntu, because the Mint team works on bug fixing) has way more bugs than the Debian edition (based on Testing). The bugs are my biggest reason for staying away from Ubuntu. I tied Ubuntu Mate out a few weeks ago and I kept getting a notice that things were crashing.

I don't know who is employed by Red Hat either, and in fact I wasn't attempting to compare the boards of those companies. You mentioned Red Hat's contracts, which is something qualitatively different from Canonical board's composition. As far as I know, Canonical might also have defense contracts, as well as Red Hat might have several Silbers on the board, and of course Silber has not been coding herself, but that's not the point. The point is that there are companies which are not behaving ethically, and I'm not sure that saying "so goes the world" is the most positive attitude toward that.

Sure, that's a screwed business model based on obfuscation and deception, which often is difficult to recognize as such. On the other hand, so many people are just accepting it blindly (literally) because they are given those (hardware- and software-) toys and gadgets to play with, and to throw away when a newer toy is put on the store shelves. These people are often the same who say they "don't care about privacy" or they have "nothing to hide", thus completely missing the point. I have heard so many self-justifications from persons owning (or planning to buy) this-or-that gadget (which they perceived as "cool") explaining elaborately their alleged "need" to own it. Of course that need is mostly marketing-induced, and misinformation, as well as disinformation, don't help to counterbalance such a one-sided influence.

That being said, no one is completely immune from marketing, which in turn is not an evil in itself. I guess that one might conceive some kind of Information / Deception index that should not drop too low, for a given company, in order to be still considered ethical while being allowed to do business. I know that the Realpolitik mentality is considered trendy nowadays, but I simply refuse to follow that trend, as it can easily lead to cynicism, and to justification of illegality.