LWN: Comments on "In defense of Ubuntu"

In defense of Debian only

jengelh — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:10:45 +0000

How about this one...

random user writes me about his ~/.bashrc not getting sourced and blames the PAM stack for it. Not that I know what he was up to, since .bashrc is not sourced by any "raw" invocation of bash. But let's see, SUSE has some magic in /etc/profile* to always source both .bashrc and .bash_profile, just to avoid these cases of users having half of their definitions loaded. Now, is that also "very specific"? For all those distros that do not implement "my way" -- well, it does not even need to be my way only, there are probably more people than just me who need bridges -- you think these distros target clueless users only?

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

mdz@debian.org — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:45:41 +0000

That's naive, at best. Yes, Canonical let's you download, for free, their brand specific bits thus. consolidating the non-paying for services and paying for services customers ... but with CentOS and Fedora etc. it's hard to swallow the argument that Red Hat is getting paid for anything but their services.

Fedora is a different product, with different source code, QA and release methodology. It doesn't compete with RHEL any more than Gentoo does. CentOS is a better analogy: who's complaining about not receiving enough contributions from CentOS?

It makes perfect sense, how else should we measure them? As they get more users they certainly wield more power over the community, and thus. they certainly use more "resources" from the community. So if parts of the community speak out against a "tragedy of the commons", that seems more than fair and sensical.

Hogwash. If a lone developer creates a new distribution which is used by millions, we don't suddenly expect them to contribute on behalf of those millions of users. This would be ridiculous. They aren't "using resources" from that community: on the contrary, that community is using their resources!

The fact that Canonical is employing an order of magnitude less developers (and that's very conservative, IMO) than it's competitors was amusing once, but when it's semi-justified as a long term to just spend less it's discouraging.

That may be your opinion, but opinions don't count for much where hard numbers are concerned. I can't parse the remainder of your sentence; I think there's a word missing somewhere.

In defense of Ubuntu

tracyanne — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:26:31 +0000

I don't have a problem with the way Canonical interacts with the general Linux community, the developers, or other projects, or even with the fact that they include binary only drivers.

The only complaint I have is that they are not as user friendly as they claim, that other distributions, like Mandriva Linux, do it better.

In defense of Ubuntu, additional comments

josander — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 10:19:31 +0000

It has been much talk about giving back to the Linux community on this
subject, but I think that most people forget the most important group:
the users. Contribution back to the different related Open Source
projects is a good thing, but they do contribute more than one should
believe:

*Ubuntu is the distro that "any one" can use and uses - and it has the
habit of just working on most Hardware. The Ubuntu variations have
someting for all with it's different desktop variations and the server
edition.

I'm teaching this days and had 29 new students (only five with some Linux
experience) in the class last Monday. I had 8 Ubuntu CDs and managed to
have all the 29 students to kick out the Windows partion on their (school
owned) Lenovo Lap Tops an install the Ubuntu system within 3 hours --
including my welcome speech and so on!

It wasn't even a plain installation, they did make six new partitions
during the installation: One free for future use, 4 for Linux and one
swap. Everything went OK, and I could start the education after Lunch.
That said: I did prepare the session with an Open Office presentation
that everyone could follow. In order to make this happend successfully,
one need a distro that works well and that is Ubuntu's most important
contribution (besides spreading it out to the world).

Making a distro on one CD that is simple to install and use -- and
powerful enough to make sysadminds, musicians, developers and hackers
happy is no less than a fantastic contribution! And Ubuntu's popularity
gains the other distros as well because more and more people and
organizations are using Linux. I'm sure that other distros borrows good
ideas from Ubuntu too, so Ubuntu do really give back in many ways.

Jostein

In defense of Ubuntu

linuxrocks123 — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:11:36 +0000

https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/desktop/

You have a point in that Red Hat is no longer going after the home desktop market, but it is still fairly easy to get an individual desktop subscription to RHEL if you want.

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

maco — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:11:43 +0000

Patches are often forwarded to Debian. Whether Debian accepts them or not is up to them.

Other times, patches are submitted directly to Ubuntu because it is just before a release and the time to wait for it to get into upstream, request a merge, etc. will overshoot feature freeze or the release date. In these cases, upstream bugs are filed and the patches are handed over. Again, it's up to upstream whether they want to accept them or not.

And then some other times, well, I can't be the only person to think like this. I'm active enough in the Ubuntu community that I think at least a few of the other bugsquad folks would recognize me. Are patches from strangers or recognized names more likely to be accepted anywhere? Ones from recognized names. Who will recognize my name, other Ubuntu members or upstream? Ubuntu. I figure if I get them to approve it, it then gets a "and oh yeah, Ubuntu approved it already" when it goes for upstream review.

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

maco — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:58:32 +0000

"If
Canonical decided to drop support for an arch(sparc or arm just as examples) because it was no
longer deemed potentially profitable to support.. is the Ubuntu development framework flexible
enough to allow the community to take over those sorts of things? "

That has happened. Canonical dropped support for PowerPC a few releases ago.[1] The community now handles the PowerPC port just fine, even releasing the same day.

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2007-Fe...

Ubuntu's contributions

azrael — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:21:54 +0000

Ubuntu (and Canonical) has created lots of tools that can be reused by other distros. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Website/Content/UbuntuContributions
Ubiquity, Upstart, Jockey, Bazaar just to name a few.

In defense of Ubuntu

freggy — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:57:37 +0000

The developers who castigate Ubuntu are uniformly silent about the number of kernel patches coming from the Mandriva camp.

Because there is no reason to complain? Mandiva recently was the third major Linux distributor contributing most patches to the Linux kernel after Red Hat and Novell. Canonical/Ubuntu is nowhere seen on this list...

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

nevyn — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:21:16 +0000

For Red Hat's commercial products such as RHEL, more users = more money = more opportunity to fund development. With Ubuntu, the (full, commercial, updated, supported) product is free, and Canonical only earns revenue from services.

That's naive, at best. Yes, Canonical let's you download, for free, their brand specific bits thus. consolidating the non-paying for services and paying for services customers ... but with CentOS and Fedora etc. it's hard to swallow the argument that Red Hat is getting paid for anything but their services.

it doesn't make much sense to measure "contributions...roughly in line with the number of their users"

It makes perfect sense, how else should we measure them? As they get more users they certainly wield more power over the community, and thus. they certainly use more "resources" from the community. So if parts of the community speak out against a "tragedy of the commons", that seems more than fair and sensical.

The fact that Canonical is compared with competitors with an order of magnitude more developers was flattering once, but when it's used as justification for this type of criticism, it's discouraging.

The fact that Canonical is employing an order of magnitude less developers (and that's very conservative, IMO) than it's competitors was amusing once, but when it's semi-justified as a long term to just spend less it's discouraging.

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

mdz@debian.org — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:47:20 +0000

It's important to understand that Ubuntu depends on a different economic model than, say, Red Hat. For Red Hat's commercial products such as RHEL, more users = more money = more opportunity to fund development. With Ubuntu, the (full, commercial, updated, supported) product is free, and Canonical only earns revenue from services.

The number of Ubuntu users does not translate directly to commercial success, and it doesn't make much sense to measure "contributions...roughly in line with the number of their users". In fact, it's to be expected that the user community will grow much earlier and much faster than the customer base.

The fact that Canonical is compared with competitors with an order of magnitude more developers was flattering once, but when it's used as justification for this type of criticism, it's discouraging.

The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts

jejb — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:46:42 +0000

Thanks for the party political broadcast, can we now return to regularly scheduled programming?

liberty really has very little to do with whether something's upstream or not. A vendor who produces an out of tree but GPL licenced module (and full source) is in full compliance with the GNU four freedoms (and hence with "liberty") but certainly not with upstream first.

Some vendors really get Open Source .. to them, upstream first comes naturally (it even came naturally in 2.4). Some have to be persuaded about the business merits, but get it in the end. Some firmly refuse to see there's any justification but do it anyway because their business model requires that they play in the Linux sandpit. This latter group stay with upstream first because they can't afford to ignore the Linux market although they complain bitterly about the burden it places on them. Finally there's companies who can't ignore the Linux market but decide they can ignore the conventions and address it with things like binary modules.

The only reason the latter two groups stay with us is because of the market size, nothing else. Mark and Canonical's argument is that increasing that market size will pull more companies reluctantly into these groups, plus it will bind their business models more tightly to linux to the point at which it's uneconomical to disengage. As that happens, companies can be moved from group 4 to group 3 because we effectively have them over a barrel.

Note that upstream first only works on the third group because of the market size ... they'd be very happy to dump Linux and what they perceive as it's attendant problems and costs were it not for all those nice, paying, customers using it.

One of the problems that Ubuntu's Adoption first policy is causing is that all the vendors in group 3 want out of upstream first and they use Ubuntu as a club to try to beat other distros into seeing their point of view.

This last is where I'm not sure the future gains promised by adoption first outweigh the current benefits of upstream first ... but it's certainly a valid debate to have.

The reasons behind the emotions Ubuntu/Canonical attracts

cyfaill — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:21:59 +0000

What this means that somehow those who steward Ubuntu have a fundamental flaw in their understanding of how they got to were they are.

Liberty and the concept of freedom itself are tied at the umbilical cord of the mutual concepts of each.

I have been a long time Debian user and occasionally build desktop systems for sale to new Linux user clients... I do not install Ubuntu because I detect that at the core of its organization their is the hinting of a deviation of implementation of many of the core concepts that make a strong Linux build.

Perhaps they see gold in front of their eyes and are thinking of "trying to" sell the sole of Linux to try and reach for it.

And I am most sure that as Ubuntu becomes ever more popular... the ways of using Ubuntu which are deviations of proper Linux administration and use will have the inevitable corruptions of - How To - and - Why, To Do - become even more distorting of their already "different" users basic ways of understanding how to build a Linux.

Ubuntu uses much of Debian as its innards but one thing has always seemed to me to be also obvious...
Debian tries to reach into the spirit of perfection as a goal which it would try to reach for, even though it is not possible. They try hard. This is why Debian is what it is.

Ubuntu sells its soul to the most common denominator, dependent on the work of many others of high caliber thinking to keep it glued together. However, its very human nature of inherent corruption will degrade its core concepts to the base of those goals, based on simple expediency.

That is the difference between those who understand how liberty works and those who do not but are very willing to exploit its existence to further their own goals to the point of the loss of liberty itself.

Ubuntu users are mostly from the migration from Windows and hence they know not what Liberty is or what it demands to keep it.

Sorry if this offends, but I believe it is what is at the core of the problem.

My guess at Canonical's business model

salimma — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 00:01:12 +0000

Since their key profit center is serving ads, not search, they could probably be profitable even without a strong public brand.

Not quite; without the brand, people would not use Google by default (Yahoo and MS Live are arguably as good as Google), and so they would not reap so much ads revenue. Google leveraged its technological lead at the time to create its brand; once the brand is secured, it does not matter if the competition catches up technologically; barring a major mishap, in most people's mind, Internet search == Google

In defense of Ubuntu

salimma — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 23:44:55 +0000

Red Hat started the Fedora project as the replacement for the discontinued Red Hat Linux; if you look at their release history, you'd find that at no time do Red Hat users lack a free-to-use option.

The difference between the RHL and Fedora days is that previously, you could actually get paid support from Red Hat for running RHL on your desktop. With the RHEL/Fedora split, Red Hat is actually making it *harder* for individual users to give them money. Try getting an individual subscription to RHEL if you think Red Hat is chasing after your money. They make it easy for clones like White Box, CentOS etc. as well, by releasing the SRPMs for RHEL and making sure their trademarked artworks are easy to remove.

Re: Hurd typography

giraffedata — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 18:35:35 +0000

Then I guess Hurd isn't an acronym; it's just a proper noun that was invented in an acronymal way.

I don't think acronyms stand for anything, by the way. An abbreviation stands for something, but an acronym is a word in its own right. Unlike with an abbreviation, if you were to "spell out" an acronym, you would change the sentence and probably require the user to translate back to the acronym to figure out what you're referring to. I say "is derived from" instead of "stands for" for an acronym.

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

andrewsomething — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:47:05 +0000

I'm not sure how Smolt works on Fedora, but on Ubuntu you must explicitly opt in to popcorn. So while it's probably a better judge than Google trends, it would be a very conservative estimate. I imagine the same goes for Smolt and Fedora as well.

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

nevyn — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:21:31 +0000

I didn't know Ubuntu published popcon numbers, thanks for that pointer!

Interestingly, unless I'm reading it wrong, the stats. there show Fedora=584,595 Ubuntu=677,927 which is a huge difference from the trends data.

Nothing better to do?

TxtEdMacs — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:07:43 +0000

You are a "Guest", minimal standards should require you to be at least civil.  Your name
calling is too similar to the MS types that posted on the IBM forum to help kill OS/2.  No
repeat performances here.  Be civil or leave.

Thank you,

Txt.

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

TxtEdMacs — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:05:14 +0000

Had I read further into the comments thread I would have foregone my posting, since it was so
obvious facts will not play any role.

My reason to respond now is two fold, a gratuitous attack of name calling by a <i>guest</l>
and noticing you seemed to purposely pretend to quote a question I did not ask.  Moreover, you
cite a known fact that bears no pertinence.

The issue is not if Canonical is making a profit, it is the implied exigencies implicit in
venture capital funding where the modus operandi is a pump and run up of the stock pricing so
the funding group can run off with the excess cash.  That was dishonest, at the very least.
You are oblivious to reasoned argument, hence, you should better converse with yourself and
save of the hearing the noise of your words.

Thank you, your silence is appreciated.

Nothing better to do?

kragil — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:29:30 +0000

OMG!

You are obviously a Ubuntu-hating Fedoratroll/-fanboy. No need to point out in how many ways
you are blinded by your hate.

Anyways .. I take the most user friendly distro with the biggest repository and long support
that is sponsored by a really rich philanthropist any day over the development version of some
enterprise distro :P No matter what.

In defense of Ubuntu

ampers — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:12:18 +0000

I am fairly new to Linux. However I have "dabbled" in "Esperanto" and there is a very big
similarity.

Both are geek products and do NOT want their "love" to reach the mainstream.

However Mark Shuttleworth wants the world to use Linux and is a very successful businessman
and has the ability to achieve his goal. He wants to remove Linux from the domain of the geeks
and make it available for everybody.

I do know that this particular project is costing him "several million pounds sterling" a
year, Fortunately the interest on his capital more than pays for this so he won't suffer too
much.

Ampers (.blogspot.com)

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

andrel — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:24:16 +0000

Actually we do have something better than Google trends for stats. For example Ubuntu popcon, Debian popcon, and Fedora smolt all attempt to measure various interesting things including number of users. (Smolt seems to be down due to the recent Fedora intrusion.)

Mirror admins also have insight into number of downloads, though most don't publish their numbers.

In defense of Ubuntu

miahfost — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:48:35 +0000

Red Hat was vilified in the linux community because it took a very popular product (Red Hat
Linux) and made it proprietary. New updates to Red Hat Linux required paid subscription. They
quickly realized their folly and created Fedora to soothe angry users.

Personally I am suspicious of a distro that starts free and becomes closed. This is why I use
debian which will _always_ be free.

RE:Part of it is about Ubuntu Users too

Miladinoski — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:21:48 +0000

I think everything that you said is right, but it "oh so obvious" and you can't expect for that situation to change.

Imagine a user who has never used Windows who has used Ubuntu for 1 year and it's his first experience with OSs (hey, I said imagine) and then tell introduce him to Windows, ofcourse that he would be confused atleast a bit in the new environment and you can't expect for him not to ask stupid questions like he has never used a computer??
Dumbing down the community is a good thing because that means more newbies are introduced to the OS and that means the OS boosts it's user base which ofcourse is a good thing.

I know of 3 friends to which I recommended Ubuntu and 2 of them switched back to Windows - though they keep Ubuntu on the other partition ('cause in my high-school every student will have a thin client with Edubuntu on it - and they will want to have better experience with it) and the other one keeps Ubuntu and uses it more than Windows. He knows english relatively good and he can ask on IRC or on forums.

In defense of Ubuntu

AlexHudson — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:49:26 +0000

I wouldn't be so sure about investment. RedHat's IPO ten years ago raised them $90M
(thereabouts), which was towards the end of the .com boom. Today's market is much more tech
IPO hostile. RedHat and Novell both have a vast range of products that Canonical doesn't have
as well. 

My comparison with OSAF wasn't really about the finished product (although clearly, with
Debian, they had a bit of a leg up in that department ;). What I mean is that there have been
a number of "open source" companies who have been well funded but failed to become profitable:
OSAF was funded very similarly to Canonical, and have had to contract hugely when the founder
decided it wasn't worth playing the game any more. You also have examples like Eazel.

My point is nothing more that when you grow a company artificially, like Canonical, you need
to invest heavily up-front to create product and services which then sell like hot cakes. If
you fail to get to the "hot cakes" stage (and we're talking sales, remember), it becomes
extremely difficult to turn that into a profitable business and things go downhill quite
quickly.

Canonical's business model?

Cato — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 06:08:55 +0000

I don't have the time or energy to defend my choice of Ubuntu any further - feel free to use
the distro you prefer.  Maybe it would be good to spend more time improving and evangelising
that distro rather than criticising Ubuntu?

Re: Ubuntu developers are also contributing to the Hurd

jbailey — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 05:56:39 +0000

Hi Michael! =)

Part of joining Canonical was largely handing off my Hurd responsibilities, as well as a lot
of my porting ones.  My previous employer had been forgiving about me having 13 architectures
(including very noisy and power hungry Alphas and Itaniums) under my desk.  My home-office
manager, that is to say: my wife, was much less so. =)

I think that given patches, the Toronto Hurd Users Group, Talks, on-line tutorials, and such
that I did with the Hurd, it's fair to say that I worked on it even after I joined Canonical.

It's somewhat ironic - some of why I got the job at Canonical was because of my glibc
co-maintainership, which I only took on because of the Hurd. =)

Tks,
Jeff Bailey

Canonical's business model?

dlang — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:22:58 +0000

it's lots of little things, the fact that the installer doesn't need to ask you a million
questions spread out over an hours time, but asks you a couple questions up front and then
goes and does it's thing is one of them. 

individually they are trivial, but togeather they make it easier for people who don't already
know where to go for everything.

you don't see the difference becouse you are already familiar with the tools and just go to
the right place. but if you were to setup two identical machines with different distros and
give them to people unfamiliar with linux, the _experiance_ (note, experiance, not
speculation) that people have is that Ubuntu generates less frustration and fewer questions
than the other distros.

you don't see it? ok, you don't. nobody is trying to force you to use ubuntu, you are free to
use the distro of your choice.

just do us all a favor and stop bad-mouthing the distro that others choose just becouse it's
not the one you like?

Canonical's business model?

ofeeley — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:10:45 +0000

Again, where's the usability?  The only things you pointed to the last time were the results
of Red Hat hackers' work on Java and then some dodgy Flash stuff and media codecs. The latter
are just as available in Fedora or Gentoo or whatever as they are in Ubuntu for those that
want that stuff.

I've used Ubuntu fairly recently (not out of choice) and am not blown away by any usability
differences between it and any of the other current major distros. I again invite you to point
to some metric so that this is not merely a yes-it-is-no-it-isnt exchange. Otherwise you may
as well merely shorten your post to "I have no problem with proprietary software and patented
codecs and I like the Ubuntu wallpaper."

i too

surfingatwork — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:28:19 +0000

I too feel qualified to widen the screen on this topic. Which is to say, not very qualified,
since you all need for politics is opinions.

In defense of Ubuntu

rahulsundaram — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:11:41 +0000

"Can you point me to the part of Ubuntu that adds medibuntu to your sources.list
automatically?"

There is none which is my point. The legal risk for Canonical in pointing to medubuntu is
similar to the one for Red Hat if it directs users to Livna repository. The difference however
is that Canonical can afford to point people to patent encumbered and proprietary codecs while
Red Hat can't and therefore the solutions offered are completely different.People who argue
that Fedora (and by extension Red Hat) should point to Livna repository are not considering
the legal issues that make it not worth taking the risk. 

The legality of proprietary kernel drivers is certainly a gray area too. So there is both
philosophical as well as legal issues involved in these cases. Keeping that in mind helps.

Canonical's business model?

Cato — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:13:12 +0000

It's great that Red Hat has put so much effort into Ice Tea, and we are all thankful for the
GNU projects.  It's also great that Ubuntu has put so much effort into usability.

As for Flash, I know it doesn't work perfectly, but what does in computers? Being able to use
YouTube and BBC iPlayer is a big benefit compared to the cost.

Setting up a PC is very different to using it - most Windows users simply turn the PC on which
has many apps pre-installed, but I didn't want to buy a Dell box with Ubuntu (didn't have the
spec I wanted), so I installed it myself.  In fact I have always configured extra applications
on the Windows box for this relative, so what I'm doing is really not much different.

I'm sure I could have used another distro, and have used many others in the past - I just
happen to like Ubuntu and I'm confident that it will be particularly easy to use, whereas I
can't say that for the other distros.  

A rising tide really does lift all boats - clearly Ubuntu needs to do more about working with
upstream, but it has done an enormous amount for Linux simply by making Linux easier to use
for the average person.

In defense of Ubuntu

Cato — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:05:27 +0000

Can you point me to the part of Ubuntu that adds medibuntu to your sources.list automatically?
I'm not aware of this, and have always had to find the HOWTO and follow it.  The fact that
various HOWTOs for DVD playback exist, such as
http://www.ubuntu-unleashed.com/2008/04/howto-easily-setu..., indicates
this is still far from automatic.

Ubuntu/Canonical are trying to walk a fine line here - maintain a freely redistributable and
open-source distro, while also making it easy to use patent-encumbered codecs and libdvdcss.
Other distros solve this problem in other ways, of course - e.g. Linux Mint (an Ubuntu
derivative) simply bundles codecs, while Dell's version of Ubuntu includes a commercial and
fully licensed DVD player.

As for proprietary kernel drivers, I think Ubuntu is doing a good job here - it warns the user
they may run into bugs that can't be solved by the Kernel or Ubuntu teams because they are
binary only.  However, it still lets people get the full functionality from their drivers.
This is nothing to do with legal issues as far as I can see - more of a philosophical
difference.

Having said that, 2 out of 3 of my Ubuntu boxes use no proprietary drivers, because I prefer
to avoid them if at all possible - I'm typing this on a new PC built for Ubuntu that uses
Intel graphics and 3Com WiFi stick, which is open source only.

Canonical's business model?

gouyou — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:05:52 +0000

> Fedora has an open infrastructure

Sure but it took a while to get there ...

In defense of Ubuntu

gouyou — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:47:49 +0000

Looking at the current market cap of RedHat (4B+ USD) and Suse/Novel (2B+ USD), a 40M+
investment is pretty good. I guess from the current popularity of Ubuntu, any investor would
be more than willing to put quiet a bit more money in Canonical.

And you can hardly compare OSAF and Canonical: OSAF took over 5 years to deliver their first
stable product.

In defense of Debian only

mjg59 — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:58:53 +0000

it puts the swap partition (when using a blank disk) on sda5 even though there are like 3 primary partition slots left.

Various other OSs have issues booting from non-primary partitions. Why waste them?

installation went through without asking me much but then it decides not to start a DHCP client in the installed system

Default behaviour on a desktop install is to bring the network up when a user logs in.

Trying to boot with vga=0 to get an 80x25 screen and a sane font. Framebuffer is still started. Stupid.

No, it's not. The framebuffer is never started by default except on platforms that require it. The graphical bootsplash does not use the Linux framebuffer layer.

It took them incredibly long to do a 64-bit userland right whereas other distros had it for years.

The 64-bit userland has been basically identical since 4.10, which was released in 2004. What's your actual technical objection here?

No distro way to set up bridges (in /etc/sysconfig/network), you are stuck with the bare brctl commands.

From /usr/share/doc/bridge-utils/README.Debian.gz:

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
    address 192.168.1.2
    network 192.168.1.0
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    broadcast 192.168.1.255
    gateway 192.168.1.1
    bridge_ports all

Which looks pretty much like a distro way to set up bridges. Sure, it's not in /etc/sysconfig/network, but that's because network configuration is done in /etc/network/interfaces.

All your other complaints seem to be "This isn't configured in exactly the same way as other distributions" (which isn't a terribly compelling argument) or just plain inaccurate. There are plenty of things that Ubuntu can be criticised for (and ditto any other distributions), but frankly I don't think any of the ones you've picked fall into that set.

In defense of Ubuntu reproach

liljencrantz — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:59:32 +0000

In what way does providing packaging of other free software components free of charge not
constitute contribution? Packaging is surprisingly hard and huge amounts of work. Ubuntu
provides a valuable service to the community absolutely free of charge.

"Any distro could have done it"

gvy — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:15:07 +0000

You know, some distros do prefer quality releases to crap on exact day.  And I'd argue that
this *is* part of caring for user experience as well.

Promoting wild push (ever been at a daily gazette?) isn't gonna win much friends among
upstreams and peers, as was noted already... if you'd look at quite some Ubuntu patches or
glue code, you'd barely touch the result with a six feet pole.  But you don't care, luckily.
:)

So...

> Be happy with your distro of choice.

In defense of Ubuntu

rahulsundaram — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:17:36 +0000

When you click on patent encumbered codecs in Ubuntu, you are offered to install support for
those codecs from a repository within Ubuntu that doesn't have any patent licenses.

libdvdcss is what is provided by Medubuntu which is considered risky even in Europe (isle of
man legally) where Canonical is located. 

The restricted driver manager also recommends to install proprietary kernel drivers to provide
"full functionality". Those are certainly different approaches from what Red Hat has done and
that is atleast in part due to legal considerations.