Is he refering to the mobile platform as mobile phones or tablet or is it just a rave? I know he isn’t everybody’s favourite so a balanced opinion would be great. ;D
So what will we be up to in the next six months? We have two short cycles before we’re into the LTS, and by then we want to have the phone, tablet and TV all lined up. So I think it’s time to look at the core of Ubuntu and review it through a mobile lens: let’s measure our core platform by mobile metrics, things like battery life, number of running processes, memory footprint, and polish the rough edges that we find when we do that. The tighter we can get the core, the better we will do on laptops and the cloud, too.
So bring along a Nexus 7 if you’re coming to Copenhagen, because it makes a rumpty reference for our rootin’ tootin’ radionic razoring. The raving Rick and his merry (wo)men will lead us to a much leaner, sharper, more mobile world.
{fx: slaps open flipper against forehead} - you mention Shuttleworth and in the same sentence “balanced opinion” ?! Please!
Ok, I don’t think he’s being device centric, it just looks like he might suddenly have realised that Ubuntu is riddled with subtle bugs that make it unsuited to a typical business environment … although not mentioned specifically, it might also mean that he might be “getting” that Ubuntu keeps releasing stuff without testing it properly … which if so, might be a bit of a breakthrough ?!
Just for example, this week’s issue (!), I now need to wait around 3 minutes after bootup before my keyboard and mouse start to work … and after having a couple of other people report the same issue to me, it seems the problem is to do with Webcam’s. If I unplug my (M$ HD) Webcam, bootup is fine. It’s this ‘trivial’ stuff that gets a customer on the phone for an hour claiming the machine is unresponsive after bootup and wanting an engineer to go see …
For anyone out there using Ubuntu who doesn’t fall into the classification of ‘geek’, TURN OFF AUTOMATIC UPDATES, and only run them by hand when you’ve plenty of time … preferably a week after everyone else so you can look up everyone else’s answers to any issues …
This would’ve been a shorter answer but I followed your link and started reading his blog.
The way he writes you’d almost think Linux would’ve failed if it wasn’t for him … Arhrhrhrhrhrhrhrh!
Mmm, interesting thought, what is it you think he has to sell?
Community? - I’m thinking this would evaporate pretty rapidly when brought into contact with M$.
Technical expertise? - no, that’s all part of the Debian ‘sphere’ and wider OS community
Support? - nothing to write home about.
Own code? - bits, not seen much of any great worth (Unity for example!)
Market strategy? - (!)
… did I miss anything ?? If M$ wanted anything of worth from the Ubuntu distribution, I rather doubt they’d be getting from “from” Ubuntu [!]
… bear in mind it takes no time at all to put your own distro together, it certainly wouldn’t take long for an outfit like M$ (!)
… What Ubuntu have done is great, they’ve taken what’s out there and polished it. Just bear in mind, “polishing” is a relatively easy job, as long as you’ve the money to pay for people and elbow grease … so I’m not seeing that what they’ve done actually has any financial value … not least as IMHO they’ve been polishing many of the wrong bits (!)
Update manager → Settings → Updates
“Where there are security updates” , make sure it says “Display Immediately” rather than “Download and install automatically”.
And, then the box pops up in general (as it does) , don’t automatically click on “Install”, unless you know there is something you want. Their pre-release checking is poor at best, when you run updates, bear in mind there is a chance it will break something or render it inoperative. Windows Update carries the same risk, but they do seem to do a little more testing (generally) before they push stuff out.
Because they opted to go with a very new (and very buggy) kernel with 12.04, they’ve been pushing out kernel updates on a regular basis, some of which have been pretty unstable and have had some serious issues. (like load average calculation being completely broken) Now whereas this is an upstream issue and not caused by Ubuntu, they’ve pushed it out broken kernels anyway, then left them in play without back-tracking and reverting to a more sane release. Not good.
Also (!) for users with historical /boot partitions, the update manager program has a nasty habit of filling /boot and aborting … or as I noticed more recently, filling /boot , trying to re-make initrd, failing, rebooting, then finding it was trying to boot into an incomplete kernel config. Not a major problem to stop the boot process and boot into an older kernel, if you know what you’re doing, but somewhat confusing for ‘users’ …
For anyone out there using Ubuntu who doesn't fall into the classification of 'geek', TURN OFF AUTOMATIC UPDATES, and only run them by hand when you've plenty of time .. preferably a week after everyone else so you can look up everyone else's answers to any issues ..
Keith;
I am disturbed to read Mark's comments re Ubuntu automatic updates
All of which very much underlines why I don’t use Ubuntu.
Something like this would never happen with Slackware or Debian Stable. No updates would be released that borked the system.
I don’t get why it is that you have to download Fedora/Ubuntu/etc, install it, then run Update only to find that you have to download almost as much data (sizewise) in updates as you did with the initial install disk. Update the damned install image. Bloody amateurs.
Why do people put up with this sort of nonsense? Oh yes, I forgot, they’ve all been conditioned into it by using Microsoft and Apple stuff.
After a while you begin to realise that Canonical are going to treat you the same way that Microsoft and Apple treat you, at which point, if you have any sense, you go looking for something better. If you’re comfortable with Ubuntu you can cope with Debian Stable (though you’ll find much of the software is older than the versions used in Ubuntu and there’s no groovy “proprietary driver wizard” for graphics cards, requiring a somewhat laborious (by comparison) method for sorting out nvidia or ATI drivers). No Unity in Debian, it’s either KDE or Gnome 3 (or one of the other lesser window managers such as windowmaker (looks like it’s still 1995), enlightenment (can be awesome, but is quirky), xfce (sort of like win98 on steroids) etc). On the other hand Debian Stable is just that - stable.
If anyone wants to try Slackware and needs basic help, just ask. If there’s a desire for a basic written guide, I’ll put one together and post it on this site.
I switched back to Ubuntu because I was having to many problems with Mint. I preferred the Mint interface and found it slick to use, but…it all started to go downhill. Locking grey screens, issues with Firefox, The Gimp, Wine. To name a few. It could have been me, I don’t know. Installed Ubuntu 12.04 and everything works straight out of the box. Unity is total rubbish though, it looks like it has been designed for an eight year old.
Now next time I shall be careful when I mention the M S name (not Microsoft).
What we could really do with is someone to take on the task of polishing Debian releases and pushing them out as a proper distro.
Debian is great, but last time I tried it (maybe 12 months ago) it was full of holes re; the desktop.
someone more concerned with stability and functionality than looks and BS.
Personally if there were such a distro, I’d be happy to pay for it. I certainly think there’s a market for something in the £20-£30 a year range with proper tested updates and proper desktop functionality / stability. (not to mention the concept of paid-apps …) There is money in it for someone, it’d just take some £’s to get it off the ground.
Maybe someone ‘like’ MS but without such a long oar.
With Windows slowly dying, and the rise of everything Linux, that scenario just might come to pass … they have their Xenix roots to fall back on.
And I’d agree, there will certainly be a market for a stable polished *nix when Windows fiinally bites the bullet … and a great opportunity for Microsoft, but will they be smart enough to pick it up and run, or will they just fade out and die trying to “flog a dead horse” ?
mandriva but again rpm and badly translated from french nope cant think of a debian,slackware,arch or gentoo based paid for distro so i guess it’s microsoft suse
