I have tried almost every distro that is out there. Yes, I know that there are hundreds of them, yet you have to believe me. Yes, I did try BSD, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, or Suse but YET IM USING UBUNTU !

This Ubuntu HATred can go on and on forever and there is no point to argue on priorities. Id rather compare OS to food. Some preffer big chunk o meat on fire and are happy with it, the others enjoy classical cuisine, while some of us end up vegetarian.

PS: Debian has a great community. Dare to argue ! And it does matter a lot !

Hawk

But one bad aspect about Ubuntu is that it changes some aspects of Debian, and doesn’t document those changes very well. One example is this UpStart thing. Very poorly documented. You can easily find info on how to modify Debian’s startup process in just about any way, and that info is still pertinent to the latest version. Not so with Ubuntu.

The other bad thing is that there are way too many “Ubuntu fanbois” in (and moderating) the forums, so it’s almost impossible to find accurate info without wading through tons of useless advocacy, and unhelpful “noise”. And the moderators are next to useless. They never update the info on the forums. So as one example, if you do a search to find out how to modify Ubuntu’s startup process, you’ll find lots of outdated and unworkable “solutions” that mention editing an inittab file, which fail under the latest Ubuntu, due to the changes incurred by UpStart.

Ubuntu is heading in the wrong direction. Its developers don’t seem to read its forums. They don’t seem to be writing docs. The forums are inundated with fanbois, and run by such, and filled with outdated info and/or useless noise. Ubuntu has gotten “too big”, and would have already collasped under its own weight if it weren’t for the fact that it relies upon Debian for the bulk of its existence. If Ubuntu were a more independent distro, it probably would already be in significant decline.

Ubuntu is not just for noobs I’m a hardcore C++ guy

It has the best forums and the best repos…. you can customise it any way you want.

The other is for the organization market, where machines are obtained and have pre-installed OS and software by the organization.

Of the two, the organization market is the most cost effective to distro support service sellers, as they can enjoy multiple desktop deployments across one organization, dealing with one point of contact and a periodic known payment.
Such an organization needs a worldwide support channel, employing on the ground technicians and engineers.

On the other hand, the personal desktop market offers a distro company a large user base and the free word of mouth advertising that comes with it. With many individual users, support can be centralised, free and offered over electronic media, negating the costs associated with on the ground staff. As the user base grows, support services can be offered by 3rd party businesses, much like the many MS oriented PC shops do today, without any cost penalty for the distro supplier.

Both of these exist in my area. Novell and RedHat have offices with support and sales staff. Many MS PC shops now support user installed Linux machines, and a few will install Linux on request.

As prices of Linux effective hardware falls and Vista effective hardware grows, some are even pre-installing Ubuntu.

Looking at the number of machines in both markets, gives some indication of the size of each, and the organization market is definitely an order of magnitude larger. This is where the big PC makers like DELL, HP, Lenovo et al, make their money often by leasing hardware, whereas the PC shops more than likely build, badge and sell their own clones.

At the moment, RedHat and Novell are firmly entrenched in the organization desktop market as they make their money from selling support on a business user oriented product.

Ubuntu is firmly entrenched in the personal user market as they are creating a user base market from an ease of use general purpose product.

RedHat and Novell users may use that product at work, but what they use at home is the market that Ubuntu is exploiting so that they will take it to work to do all those things that Novell and RedHat doesn’t.

By the time there is demand from organizations for paid support on a Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu can easily sell 3rd parties an approved support agency agreement instead of having to pay for their own on the ground staff.

First of all, it’s Linux, not Unix. There is a huge difference and apparently you can’t see it.

Second, if people are not “command experts” they need to stay far away from Ubuntu or any other *buntu for that matter. Everything you need to setup requires some sort of ‘sudo …’ command in a terminal or a file hacked. If they want a more-or-less command-less experience, they need PCLinuxOS, Suse, or Mandriva. Compared to those 3, Ubuntu is rather arcane when it comes to user setup and maintenance.

@Ian MacGregor: You can thank Debian, then, and not Ubuntu. Ubuntu is nothing more than Debian rehashed and presented in an easy to install format with a full working GUI. If you install Debian, which is a much more involved installation process, you’ll get the same thing minus the heavy handed system scripts. The Debian community is largely responsible for the size of the repository, though.

As far as the command line, the Mac community has embraced it, even though the original idea of the Mac was to do away with such nonsense. I think Windows users, once accustomed to command line computing, will also love it. It certainly has its advantages.

The CLEAR winner in ENTERPRISE desktops is none other than SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

Ian MacGregor

Linux needs a killer app and I think the command line is that… and can be that for a good deal of people. We just need better training materials… on how it can be useful for more people.

There was a product, that I can’t remember the name of at the moment, that was tool for a hybrid environment… that provides command line interaction with a number of desktop apps and functions. It seems pretty amazing but I don’t think it has quite caught on yet. Vague enough for you?

think about the Answer to this Q, and you will get the Idea about “Red hat” Vs “Ubuntu”.

*** GNU/Linux is not about how to criticize Windows best, its much thicker. Check your Attitude ****