I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Nico0020 »

yea its not the default theme, but they are including it now which is a start. The dock is Avant Window Navigator.
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by jaredfogle »

I just talked to an old friend from school who was installing Ubuntu but has never used SSH.

More evidence for my theory!
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by BlackAura »

Just got round to upgrading to 9.04 on my main machine. Works fine now - with 8.10 I had a hell of a time getting working drivers for my video card (GeForce 9600GT, which I got in December), and had all kinds of problems with the driver crashing the entire X server. Basically, any applications using older toolkits (GTK1, TK, or basically anything except GTK2) would crash the X server, I had all kinds of performance problems in Gnome (and still the occasional crash, always in the video driver), Firefox was so slow it was damned near unusable, and KDE 4 was entirely unusable - right-clicking anything crashed the entire X server 75% of the time, opening a new window crashed the X server 50% of the time, and it was horribly slow.

All fixed now. Everything's working perfectly again, and it seems far snappier than before.

One minor wrinkle - most of the main menus (the Applications and user-switch menus in particular) stopped working on my main user account, but not the others. I had to delete all of Gnome's configuration files to get it working again.

Slightly more on-topic... I used to have a few manual configuration changes on a couple of my Ubuntu systems. My main machine now only requires one - to swap the 3rd and 4th mouse button. That's a very unusual thing to do, and actually requires extra software to accomplish on Windows, so that doesn't bother me too much. My MythTV machine downstairs now only requires one manual configuration change as well, to disable the built-in wireless driver, so I can use ndiswrapper instead. Apparently, the Windows drivers for this card work far better than the Linux ones written by the same company...
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Ender »

Dead thread bump! Don't mind me, I've been away. ;)

I think we're at the point where the average user can use linux. By average, I mean someone who uses the web, email, and Openoffice now and again.

That said, as someone who's used (and done tech support for) all 3 major OSes (Mac, Linux/Unix/BSD, WIndows) I can't imagine using the *nixes again until there's a lot of work done. I work in freelance arts, and Gimp is not Photoshop. I've yet to find decent audio or video editing tools that don't take a week and a prayer to get going and keep going. Writing programs (text editors, word processors, or apps to write novels) are either unnecessarily complicated or unuseably simplistic. And don't get me started on dependency hell and ALSA/OSS.

People occasionally give me a hard time about using a Mac, saying that it's just because "art people use macs." Fact of the matter is I like that mac apps are self-contained and don't copy random files everywhere on my computer. I like that uninstalling is as easy as deleting (for the most part). I like that most things work without a fight, and I like that installation is mostly standardized and I don't need 8 versions of the same library installed on my system so that I can get a few older apps running. I could function with Windows, though I'd need to do a lot more system maintenance, but I just can't function in linux.

I dunno. Linux is great in theory. In practice, it's a mess, and ubuntu hasn't really changed that. It's become less of a mess for a certain class of users (which may or may not be the majority), but it has a long way to go before I can even consider using it daily. And this is me, who uses the terminal daily in MacOS for SSH and a bunch of other things (but mostly SSH).
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Specially Cork »

OpenOffice...*sigh* It used to be quite a nice MS alternative, but Office 2007 feels lightyears ahead. Also, now I've got Windows 7 RC up and running I know where my loyalty lies. I'll be buying my license in October.
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Ex-Cyber »

BoneyCork wrote:OpenOffice...*sigh* It used to be quite a nice MS alternative, but Office 2007 feels lightyears ahead.
That's kind of strange, considering that every Office user I've talked to about it hates the way they changed the interface. OpenOffice definitely has its warts, though, particularly when it comes to interoperability with Office for complex documents.
Also, now I've got Windows 7 RC up and running I know where my loyalty lies. I'll be buying my license in October.
I was running it for a while, and it's not bad, but I'm back on XP now and don't really miss anything. The fact that 32-bit XP is still the main platform for Xilinx ISE doesn't hurt either.
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Specially Cork »

That's kind of strange, considering that every Office user I've talked to about it hates the way they changed the interface.
I loved the way they changed the interface. It took a bit of getting used to, but it's so much better than the ridiculously-long drop-down menus they had before. As for XP...I could live with it, because I've always liked it. 7 just seems to make everything I do so much easier and enjoyable because of so many small little changes.
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Stormwatch »

Why use an office suite at all? I'm fond of the idea of LaTeX... structure and content, rather than arbitrary presentation. :geek:
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Ex-Cyber »

Stormwatch wrote:Why use an office suite at all? I'm fond of the idea of LaTeX... structure and content, rather than arbitrary presentation. :geek:
I like LaTeX too, and the idea is definitely sound. but the implementation is far from perfect. Different "environments" sometimes interact in surprising ways, embedding images is more complicated than it should be, and it's not a format you can generally expect others to use if you need to collaborate. Still, if you're producing a PostScript/PDF file or a printed document the output of LaTeX looks much more professional and consistent than any mainstream word processor I've seen. From what I've heard it seems like the only serious competition is Adobe FrameMaker, which is decidedly not mainstream (an $800 price tag will do that, I suppose).
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Ender »

I mostly use a program called Scrivener, which is basically a fancy text editor. But I write - if I care about the layout it goes into InDesign.
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Specially Cork »

Stormwatch wrote:Why use an office suite at all? I'm fond of the idea of LaTeX... structure and content, rather than arbitrary presentation. :geek:
How does this replace all the apps available in an office suite?
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Ender »

It doesn't, but ask yourself: how many people need Word, Powerpoint AND Excel?

As a general rule, one of the three is all people really need, but they sign on for the long haul. I don't use windows regularly, but I think Office 07 is pretty good. They implemented a lot of the things they had in Mac Office 04 (which was way better than windows office at the time).

Office is great if you need to use those particular pieces of software - but you can't tell me the average home or leisure user needs to - they use them out of ignorance of a piece of software that does what they want better (and generally free).

I could use LaTeX, but I don't do a lot of math typesetting, so I just use Indesign instead. If I didn't have indesign, and didn't know about LaTeX, I'd fight through using Word. But OOo will do the same thing as Word with the same struggles.

Frankly, I think all "office" suites are crap, and rarely do what the user wants them to do in the simplest way.

But if we're talking about averages, Writer/Word/iWork/Wordpad/Textedit/Notepad + Web Browser X = a fully functional computer.
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Specially Cork »

It doesn't, but ask yourself: how many people need Word, Powerpoint AND Excel?
Me. I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, I just have my own needs and can only really be open to alternatives if everything is adressed by them.
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Ender »

BoneyCork wrote:
It doesn't, but ask yourself: how many people need Word, Powerpoint AND Excel?
Me. I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, I just have my own needs and can only really be open to alternatives if everything is adressed by them.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that nobody needs Office. I wouldn't use OOo given the choice. I'm more saying that the average home user doesn't. Like I said, I like Office 2007, but for me everything between Office 97 and 2007 was crap. Openoffice has settled into the space between those two versions, which sucks, it's true.

That said, I think it's less about having a competitor to Office and more "How many people use spreadsheets and make presentations that don't already have Office, and is there any money to be made from them?" There are a ton of better alternatives to Word, depending on what you're trying to do. Keynote (mac only) leaves Powerpoint in the dust. Somehow, excel is the only real spreadsheet game in town though.

It's actually funny - I think Apple could make a killing with Keynote for Windows.
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Code-Red »

I've been using Ubuntu for a week now. I hate it, but it's the only thing my dying laptop can run anymore.

I'm going out of my way to build a new computer so that I don't have to use Linux anymore. I mean, it's great for a couple things (servers, programming, fucking about with the terminal for 4hrs before anything gets done..., free programs), but it is still no where near close to being user friendly, or anywhere in the same league as OS X or Windows... maybe that's not the point, but then Linux users should stop claiming it's ease of use and adoption.

Face it, we (computer users) grew of out terminals for a reason. If you hand an office worker/house wife/whatever a copy of MS-DOS and ask them which they'd rather use, that or Windows, it's Windows. Because they either:

a) can't remember the commands
b) never used DOS as an OS
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Zealous zerotype »

how many of you have payed sco their licensing fee for running linux?
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by BlackAura »

Code-Red wrote:Face it, we (computer users) grew of out terminals for a reason. If you hand an office worker/house wife/whatever a copy of MS-DOS and ask them which they'd rather use, that or Windows, it's Windows. Because they either:

a) can't remember the commands
b) never used DOS as an OS
Which means you're doing it wrong. Last time I had to use a terminal for something (disregarding servers that I have to connect to using SSH, or some file management tasks that are far easier from a command line than any GUI) was probably two or three months ago - I had a dead hard drive, and I was recovering files off of a sector-by-sector image. Hardly a typical task your average computer user will be able to do - this particular average computer user was paying me to do it.
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Specially Cork »

Microsoft and Apple managed to convince whatever demographic by parents are in that computers are good and easy to use. Linux is miles away from doing this, and miles away from being a mainstream OS as a result. The thing is, I don't think it matters, because I keep getting the same message from these arguments: all the things stopping Linux from becoming a mainstream OS are many of the things the Linux fanbase enjoys.

I'm an average Joe user, and everything I dislike about the OS is disputed by Linux users with reasoning that I just don't agree with. What they want and what I want are often completely different things. Maybe Linux is destined to remain where it is, and maybe that's a good thing.
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by losinggeneration »

Resurrecting a dead thread :twisted:
BoneyCork wrote:Lots of choices with few clear differences and crazy names and brands that have nothing in common with the "Linux" name.
Actually, Linux is a trademarked name. The US Trademark office actually forced the Linux Mark Institute was required to enforce the trademark. wikipedia That's a reason why there isn't a single common "Linux." The bigger reason obviously being: differing views on how packages should be dealt with, what should be included by default, what the target audience is, and the list goes on.

Sure these reasons may not help Linux gain mainstream support, but what's to say that Linux can't have three or four big players in the desktop market? (Ubuntu, *SUSE, Mint, and/or Fedora/RedHat, which are just the current top four on distrowatch.) And who's to say Hera, Kodiak, and Cheetah don't sound just as ambiguous? (Early OS X versions if you couldn't tell.) Or NT, ME, &CE? It's just as reasonably to say that Ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora all fall under the Linux umbrella as it does, CEMENT (sorry, I do like that joke) falls under the Windows umbrella of OS's.
adventure_of_link wrote:one of the ways I can see Linux going mainstream is convince ATi to either:

1) fix their drivers
or 2) stop making video cards, period.
That's why AMD released the specs for their ATI graphics cards so the open source developers could write their own drivers (which may not be blazing fast, but tend to be pretty solid/stable.)
Ender wrote:And don't get me started on dependency hell and ALSA/OSS.
Personally, I haven't really had that problem in nearly 10 years now.
Ender wrote:People occasionally give me a hard time about using a Mac, saying that it's just because "art people use macs." Fact of the matter is I like that mac apps are self-contained and don't copy random files everywhere on my computer. I like that uninstalling is as easy as deleting (for the most part). I like that most things work without a fight, and I like that installation is mostly standardized and I don't need 8 versions of the same library installed on my system so that I can get a few older apps running. I could function with Windows, though I'd need to do a lot more system maintenance, but I just can't function in linux.
Well, most all distros have a pretty standard path hierarchy to which programs and libraries are installed. That said, PC-BSD (sure it's not Linux, but I couldn't think of a distro besides Gobo Linux that does anything similar) does basically what you're talking about with keeping packages self contained with all dependencies included.
BoneyCork wrote:Also, now I've got Windows 7 RC up and running I know where my loyalty lies. I'll be buying my license in October.
Heh, I really enjoyed this video Is it Windows 7 or KDE 4?. Seriously though, KDE 4.2.2 and up (4.3 currently) are really starting to shape up to be a decent desktop environment. It's at the very least worth a try from say a livecd or VM.
BoneyCork wrote:all the things stopping Linux from becoming a mainstream OS are many of the things the Linux fanbase enjoys.
I'd still argue that a computer with Linux compatible hardware that is setup correctly can be just as easy to use as Windows/OS X. The difference being (which tends to be true with OS X too) the user has to understand how to get compatible hardware/software in the future. That's a hurdle that a lot of people won't be able to over come for quite some time because it can be difficult to find hardware that's compatible with Linux (I've never really had that problem because pretty much any hardware I've thrown at it "just works.")
BoneyCork wrote:I'm an average Joe user, and everything I dislike about the OS is disputed by Linux users with reasoning that I just don't agree with. What they want and what I want are often completely different things. Maybe Linux is destined to remain where it is, and maybe that's a good thing.
If you're perfectly happy with your current OS that's fine. For me though, Linux has done 95% of what I've needed it to for the last 10+ years. That 5% really only being commercial games which don't have any support for Linux. So, I tend to fall into the category of Linux users who will advocate using Linux as an alternative, but won't twist your arm or threaten your life if you don't feel the same way I do.

On topic, maybe not Ubuntu, but on my current machine at work (Arch) a former Linux and now Mac guy I work with was so impressed by some of the desktop effects that you can enable (wobbly windows and desktop cube) that he was tempted to install Linux again (and he did with Parallels.) A friend of mine, whom I've installed (k)Ubuntu for has told me about her coworkers being impressed by the desktop effects she had enabled on her laptop. Basically, I think Linux (and Ubuntu) have really came a long ways in regards of usability and polish. Is it going to be for everyone yet? Probably not since like others have said, there just aren't Linux alternatives to some programs that some people need (like Photoshop, which IIRC runs in Wine, but that's really a different discussion.) But then again, graphics designers, video editors, etc can be considered niche markets when 90% of people aren't going to be needing the advanced features of Photoshop (and GIMP ends up being good enough for their needs for instance.)
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Re: I think linux might have "broken through" with ubuntu

Post by Nico0020 »

I use Open Office, but I also have Office2007 Installed via Crossover. The interface of 2007 is nice, but it still confuses me and I always revert back to OpenOffice. I am an English major, so all I use is the word application, and sometimes powerpoint. My only problem with openoffice is that I can not read comments that my professors tag to my papers, thus i open them in 2007.
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