Well said. Especially in Desktop OS field, a successful OS should make things work easily. Hardware should be detected and configured properly when the OS is installed. PnP devices should be detected and configured automatically when plugged in. Display, Wireless, PCMCIA, Suspend and Hibernate should work when the OS is installed in a laptop. When comes to a driver installation, it would be better to allow average users to search & install from Synaptic Pkg Mgr rather than building from source. *nix systems have been very successful in server market for many years but have never really entered Desktop market. Why? Lack of hardware support (long story) and more importantly, difficult to use for average users. When we continue to keep the excellence of *nix standards, sometimes, we also need to learn from MS if Linux wants to compete with Windows in Desktop area.

by discouraging having "to know the actual files" and such is infact enforcing/encouraging(in the long run) more drivers and applications that just work for the users when unpacked ... no more no less ...


ubuntu is pretty good with ...


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*nix indeed is a set of tools. One of the best things about this set of tools is that it has extensive documentation. Because almost all *nix operating systems have a pretty standard core way of doing things, a lot of this documentation is appropriate across the board.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu does things in a way which harms the *nix community in general in addition to its own community, by breaking this commonality of documentation.

I might understand and perhaps even forgive Ubuntu's developers for doing this, if it provided any significant benefit. For example, I dislike the fact that they split off their own software repositories from the standard Debian repositories--but I can understand how it may offer some people some benefit.

But not including "make"? The whole default disabled root user/sudo thing? These offer no significant benefit whatsoever. It breaks up the commonality of *nix documentation for no reason. In particular, it breaks Ubuntu documentation apart from Debian documentation, and there was no reason to do so.

Remember, you might only care about the Ubuntu software packages available to you, but someone somewhere had to put it together and maintain it. You may not appreciate how much Ubuntu depends upon common efforts with Debian package maintainers (who may even be one and the same as the Ubuntu package maintaner). Commonality between Ubuntu and Debian reduces the maintenance and testing effort involved.

Sorry, but that's an incomplete view. You're looking at just the "demand" side of the equation. There's another side--the "supply" side of the equation.

The success of Ubuntu and Linux in general depends critically upon shared developer community effort via the open source model. It's helped by having a shared common base to develop software for. It's harmed by splitting things off into non-standard ways of doing things.

Where do you think all this wonderful software comes from? It's not just from the efforts of Ubuntu developers alone.

Choices can be good for the users, but they can mean extra effort and duplicated effort for developers. When these "choices" have no significant benefits for the users but have significant downsides for developers, then what's the good in that?

quite true ...

but from a non-debian perspective ... i see ubuntu as what centos/fedora are to redhat9 ... but i will never install centos/fedora , i feel rather silly if i do that ...

in fact i dont really love ubuntu but i think ubuntu is the right candidate for the replacement of windows os right out of the box ... shouldnt be of much problems ...


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You know what would REALLY encourage more drivers and applications that just work? Including by default the standard components which *nix software developers simply assume exist on all systems.

By not including "make", Ubuntu is actually discouraging hardware vendors from providing open source drivers. Why publish a driver as source code, when it can't be used by all those Ubuntu users out-of-box anyway? Since the driver needs to be packaged as a binary anyway, the vendor may simply decide to publish the binary package themselves to begin with.

Which then means that you better hope you're using one of the more popular Linux distributions for which the vendor decides to make binary packages for, compiled for the processor you're using...

In contrast, if a vendor publishes the driver as source code, any and all linux distributions can compile their own native packages from that source code. That means more choices for users!

The entire "rpm" world shows what can really go wrong when no one agrees to sticking with a standard way of doing things. It's almost the same thing as the Unix wars which crippled *nix and paved the way for Microsoft dominance.

The difference is that the Unix wars were fought between closed source vendors, whereas the "rpm wars" are built on open source software. This means that as fragmented as things have gotten, the multiple vendors can at least all independently build distro specific packages from the same open source software applications. The amount of wasted duplicate effort is reduced to the effort of building rpms, rather than duplicate effort of developing entire software applications.

if ubuntu allows or encourge by simply "just leave those manual tools there" for the ordinary users to build their own staffs from source ... distro like ubuntu might need to includes lots of things or simply just everything without to worry much about the needs of the users ... but that isnt ubuntu ...

think about it in this way ... distro like ubuntu can also helps in enforcing few sets of standard methods for the developers to work on for their future "binary" only releases(i'm no developer i could be wrong with this) ...


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The problem is that standard methods already exist, and it's Ubuntu which is defying those standards, not the rest of the *nix world.

The current standards really only offer the basics and don't go far enough yet, which is why projects like DCC are working toward even more standardization. These efforts obviously aren't helped if major linux distributions like Ubuntu don't even get the basics right.

You may be interested in reading the Ubuntu Forums discussion of this topic.

>> "The problem is that standard methods already exist, and it's Ubuntu which is defying those standards, not the rest of the *nix world.

The current standards really only offer the basics and don't go far enough yet, which is why projects like DCC are working toward even more standardization. These efforts obviously aren't helped if major linux distributions like Ubuntu don't even get the basics right ..."


i donno ... i'm using it as a linux "template" for experimenting ... i believe i'm making the right choice(hope so) ...



edit :: this thread seems getting hotter and hotter ... ^_^


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Thanks, aysiu! An interesting and enlightening discussion. The distinct impression I get is that the Ubuntu community is amazingly Ubuntu-centric. No one seemed to even consider the benefits of doing things in a way consistent with other Linux distributions, much less the *nix world in general.

The documentation issue is one which is near and dear to my heart. Almost all of the amazing things I've figured out how to do in Linux are things I figured out thanks to searching the Internet for appropriate documentation. Only a fraction of this helpful documentation I used was specifically for the Linux distribution I was using at the time, and some of it wasn't even for Linux.

Most recently, I used a diskless workstation how-to written for Ubuntu and muddled through it for use with my Debian systems. I had no problem doing this since I was prepared for the differences between Ubuntu and Debian. But it saddens me that this "translation" between two such similar Linux distributions was necessary at all. (No, I don't have sudo installed and I have no intention to do so.)

At least some of the Ubuntu users in the above discussion thought about the effect on giving newbies instructions, but only considered it in an Ubuntu-centric way--assuming that the newbie was going to ask for advice on an Ubuntu-specific forum and get Ubuntu-specific advice. It saddens me to see someone thinking that way. Why think in terms of just one's own closed off community when the vast world of *nix is so much larger?

Because the world of *nix is so much larger. You must understand that Windows, well all of them, are more or less standardized so it's easy to write a guide that works more or less the same way independent of the version (just a little variation). On the Unix/Linux/BSD/whatever-world, there are endless numbers of different variations, distributions, policies, even standards. There is no way to write a bullet-proof document about anything that would work on every flavour of Linux alone except for some simple "how you copy files using GNU cp", if that even. The power and also the weakness of Unix-like systems is, today, the vast number of flavours that are incompatible in very small ways.

That's why this site has different forums for different distributions - to give specific help for specific problem. If you like standardized operating systems, go for Microsoft or Apple.

EDIT: said that, of course you can write a document that covers nearly every flavour of *nixes - but it would not be too accurate ("configure your ethernet card" instead of "use ifcfg eth0" or "run Ethernet Configuration from your System menu") so it wasn't of any use.

IMHO -- With hundreds of Linux distros generic documentation is OK for background but it isn't as helpful when you have a specific task to accomplish. For one thing the use of directory structure isn't consistent between applications or distros. From my perspective the documentation for Ubuntu is superior. The Ubuntu packaging has also made things more approachable. One example is xmltv which is a component that forms a foundation for many other TV oriented application. I use it to advantage with tvtime and ontv. With SuSE it took many hours to compile and locate the various components. The xmltv package in the Ubuntu repositories was a simple Synaptic install. Of all the distros I've worked with, Ubuntu is the only one I recommend to Linux newbies.

The whole point of having different distros is that you can choose one that fits YOU so saying that Ubuntu breaks standards isn't fair.
The "standard" way of doing many things id dependant on your distro anyway.
What is the standard way of installing applications? It depends on your distro.
Where is the standard place of putting startup scripts? It depends on your distro.

Just 2 examples of things that dont have a *nix standard. This is why when someone asks "How do I ... on my system" the 1st question asked is "What distro are you running?"
Different distros have different ways of doing things which suit different people, if you dont like the way one distro dose something then you always have the choice to change to one that dose it the way you want.

You have to remember the target user of Ubuntu is coming from windows and has no idea what source code is, let alone what to do with it. All they are going to to is open synaptic/adept and download the package they want. There will come a time when they need a program that isn't prepackaged for them but by then they will have a deeper understanding about linux and be able to figure out how to do that, if they get stuck then that's what these forums are for.

And to say that Ubuntu is damaging the open source community is frankly a narrow minded view, consider how many people have joined the community, just from Ubuntu alone, that would have had no clue what open source is and what it's all about. The open source community isn't being damaged by Ubuntu, it's growing stronger, in part, because of Ubuntu.

Saying that the Ubuntu packages depend on the efforts of the Debian package maintainers is true, but you you don't seem to appreciate is that Ubuntu gives a lot back to Debian, from bug reports to patches and even maintaining packages which were abandoned by Debian maintainers.

And something else you have to remember, Ubuntu is not Debian. Ubuntu is based on Debian and shares some of the Debian philosophy, but they are separate.
Isaac said "commonality between Ubuntu and Debian reduces the maintenance and testing effort involved", I have to disagree, the fact that Ubuntu takes a freeze of Debian to develop it into a stable version and then contributes back the changes made to Debian is enough to make that statement unfounded. Yes some of the Debian developers are also working on Ubuntu, but as they work on Ubuntu they are working on Debian because the development is shared between the two projects. So there is more testing, more maintainance and more effort not less.

Just my thoughts on what been said.