Ubuntu Re: religion?

[Leo Mauler]

--- Arthur Pemberton <pemboa at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 1:38 PM, Phil Thayer
> <phil.thayer at vitalsite.com> wrote:
> >
> >  > Ubuntu sucks balls!!! discuss this instead
> >  > please.
> >
> >  Really?  How about this.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/03/ubuntu-probably-best-linux.html

> >  It was done by LinuxQuestions.org and they
> > surveyed 2500 users.
> 
> Well aside from the fact that they chose Gnome (eww)
> like Redhat/Fedora. I think Ubuntu is actually a
very
> polished distro. 

Well, considering that the other major alternative is
KDE, which looks entirely too much like Windows, I
think that a sigh of relief could easily replace that
"eww".

> My only significant issue with Ubuntu as a whole 
> is that (I am learning about this, and I am 
> subject to correction) they are quite selfish in 
> terms of their development. While most of the 
> fedora streams work on projects upstream, Ubuntu 
> does most of their work downstream so that only 
> Ubuntu people immediately benefit from work they 
> do, leaving it for individual projets to port
> any changes.
> 
> Fedora on the other hand a pretty strict policy 
> of sticking with upstream, applying as few 
> downstream patches as possible. In this way,
> everyone benefits from a fix. I am sure there 
> are exceptions to this of course. So this may be 
> all good and well for Ubuntu users, but again 
> it's pretty selfish.

I agree its selfish, but OTOH it is a policy which
focuses all of Canonical's resources on the end user,
which is quite likely why Ubuntu is so popular among
end users.

Fedora's policy, while still quite a lot better than
Microsoft's policy of "nope, I don't see that BSOD
right in front of my eyes, nope, nope, nope <sticks
fingers in ears> Lalalalalalalalalalala", still means
that the end user might have to wait a bit longer
while Fedora works on some upstream project with
limited benefit to end users.  And if someone trying
Linux for the first time is reminded of Microsoft's
"End Users Are Evil And Should Be Punished" policy,
then they go back to Microsoft because its easier than
waiting for Fedora coders to finish up with some new
project they're doing for a Gentoo-created
application.

Fedora can assume a big chunk of their users are at
least shell script coders.  Ubuntu has focused almost
entirely on non-technical end users, so they have to
have policies which benefit their non-technical end
users in the quickest way possible.  Spending time on
outside projects is laudable, but only when you're
fairly certain that your end users are getting what
they need.

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