Ubuntu might soon be dropping off my forum list.

[Void Main]

Never mind, I forgot I don't have a dedicated Ubuntu forum. Well if I did have a dedicated Ubunutu forum it might have soon dropped off the list:

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7103672739.html

[worker201]

Somebody should have seen this coming. The next evolution of Linux in the consumer market was bound to be a non-open system that a developer/marketer could control at the sales counter. GNU/GPL stuff is just too risky and unsellable for most salesmen.

I wonder how the millions(?) of new Ubuntu users will take this. The shift towards proprietary support and the shift away from the Debian base might have serious consequences for the look and feel and licensing of further Ubuntu use. Hopefully most of them will do what they've been avoiding - installing Debian.

[worker201]

A Slashdotter had this to say:

To be honest it is probably a good thing in the long run. A long term criticism of Linux has been the number of different distros leading to numerous ways of performing the same tasks.

We've all heard this before, especially in regards to packaging: tgz, rpm, deb, yast, etc. I think having different solutions makes for a more interesting and free environment. I can use vim and tcsh, or elvis and bash, or emacs and ash, or jove and csh or vi and ksh, etc ad infinitum. I even think it would be pretty cool if there were native Linux competitors to the Gimp, grub/lilo, and maybe even competitors for low-level things, like gcc and autoconf. The more options you have, the more choices you get to make.

Personally, I don't think that replacing 95% Windows share with 95% Fedora share is the way to go. Regardless of personal tastes, different OSes serve different purposes for different people. 10,000 different OSes with different apps in every one would be okay, as long as we have a handful of open document formats that everyone agrees to support, and free drivers.

Anyway, back to the point at hand. I guess it's okay if Ubuntu wants to disenfranchise a bunch of users and go even more commercial. As long as they don't take anyone else down with them. A Linux that supports all these proprietary drivers and software might convince people like nVidia to never ever make a decent open driver. And that might help Linbuntu, but it hurts everyone else. Selling out like this doesn't do much to help the Linux movement as a whole, and can even hurt it. So that's my major complaint.

[Ice9]

worker201 wrote:

Hopefully most of them will do what they've been avoiding - installing Debian.

I highly doubt most of these "new ubuntu users" have even heard of debian, considering the effort the *buntus put into spreading the word about debian - NOT

[worker201]

To even further complicate things, I just read ESR's "World Domination 201" paper:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world ... n-201.html

He seems to be saying that Linspire may just be the key to the future of Linux. One of the main arguments of the paper is that access to proprietary codecs is the main thing preventing mass acceptance of Linux. Linspire, due to a lawsuit, actually has rights to distribute those codecs. After presenting this paper, ESR was offered and accepted a place on the board of the Freespire project.

So it seems that the bottling of Linux with proprietary stuff might indeed be the future.

[Void Main]

ESR used to have some good input but he has really gotten fruity in the last few years. He's WAY off base on this and is selling out. Lindows is a Windows wannabe and Michael Robers is a Bill Gates wannabe. Linux, GNU and Free Software can live very well without them and would be far better off without them in my opinion. They do not exist in my world just like Microsoft doesn't exist. Ubuntu is getting too cozy with them and they are also quickly becoming non-existent in my world. So lets see, it would appear that so far it's Lindows, SUSE and now Ubuntu on that list (there are a few more but they are insignificant players).

[Linux Frank]

Hmmmm.... Well well well.

I had heard rumblings that something was happening in Ubuntu world. I have been running it for sometime. Fedora's bloody persistence in YUM and some issues with repositories caused me to look elsewhere.

I played with a few things but when I got Ubuntu up it fitted well. However I hated the graphical easy environment. Then I noticed the massive amount of quality errors inherent in any predominantly GUI OS. Then the Xserver fiasco which hosed me because I am no uber user and I don't know about rolling back packages, and never had the old ones saved anyway.

I started hunting around and now they are getting in bed with those I care least about in the Linux community.

So I have annoyances with Fedora, Mandrake and Ubuntu that have been enough to drive me away. Debian and Slack are just a little to unrefined for others who use the computer, otherwise they would be up.

Where the hell does one go? I grabbed the FC6 live, and it looks like Fedora. Have they gotten over their rewriting of APT? Are there good repositories available? Does SmartPM actually work now.

Has Mandriva discovered a quality control procedure yet?

Anyone any good advice for my next distro, it seems Ubuntu has to go.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[Ice9]

I heard good things about Mepis recently and it's also debian-based.
I tried it a while ago and it was not for me but then again, as I stated in another thread, the *buntus offer nothing that I can't do with a fresh debian install and a half hour of "customizing" so for me there's really no need for anything else.
You could also try something like Sidux which is a fork of Kanotix.
This one is based on debian Sid and focuses on usability, never used it but read some very good feedback about it.

Edit: This is a statement taken from their website
[quote]On 24th of November 2006 sidux was formed by a group of people who strive to do the impossible: making Debian Sid (aka “Unstableâ€

[worker201]

ESR used to have some good input but he has really gotten fruity in the last few years. He's WAY off base on this and is selling out.

The way he kept saying "our enemies" when referring to OSX and Windows was kinda spooky. It didn't sound like a voice of reason anymore.

Where the hell does one go? I grabbed the FC6 live, and it looks like Fedora. Have they gotten over their rewriting of APT? Are there good repositories available? Does SmartPM actually work now.

Back in the old days (last summer), I used FC5 and SmartPM with very little trouble, and had great times and did great work. Supposedly, Smart can deal with yum and apt repositories, but I honestly couldn't tell you which ones I was using - it was that transparent to me. All I had to do was select packages. I had a huge number of repos configured, pretty much anything I wanted was available. Overall, I don't feel there is anything at all wrong with Fedora. The only reason I'm not using it now is because I wanted Slackware.

[Calum]

i'm not sure i understand what's going on here, but i don't want the OS i use (of late ubuntu) to become some sort of lindows clone. can i fix this by changing my apt repositories so i don't get swept along with this crap? or will i have to damn well install some OS from scratch? i really like ubuntu from what i have seen, and would prefer to continue to use it as it is. but i am not up for buying into any closed crap and would rather upgrade to debian packages than ubuntu ones, if indeed ubuntu are showing that their true colours are not the same as those of FSF/GNU/Linux.

Hope i am making sense, as i said, i am not sure i understand what is going on properly.

[Ice9]

Calum wrote:

i really like ubuntu from what i have seen, and would prefer to continue to use it as it is. but i am not up for buying into any closed crap and would rather upgrade to debian packages than ubuntu ones, if indeed ubuntu are showing that their true colours are not the same as those of FSF/GNU/Linux.

The *buntu people sync their repositories with the official debian ones like every 6 months so I guess at such a time you should be able to first dist-upgrade ubuntu and then point your sources.list to the official debian repositories and dist-upgrade from there without too much trouble.

[worker201]

Calum, my understanding of what's going on:

Ubuntu and Linspire are combining forces. Thanks to a lawsuit settlement in their favor, Linspire carries distributional rights to a bunch of proprietary things, like codecs, and are able to distribute them. Doing so goes against pretty much everything GNU/Linux stands for, and probably will require the resulting OS to have a standard Microsofty EULA that you must agree to. They may figure out a way to keep it free, as in beer, but it will no longer be free, as in speech.

Some people are apparently digging this, though - you will no longer have to download codecs yourself, and things like mplayer and other quasi-legal items can be included in the distro. Many people think this will be the bonus that pushes Linux over the top, making it much more attractive to the masses, since the new distro will provide out-of-the-box multimedia. Eric S. Raymond, former champion of the GNU, is all for this - however, he wants some kind of assurance that whoever champions multimedia Linux will step down when Windows is dethroned.

It's not clear what the project will look like at this point. Probably everything will be rebranded, with the best and worst of Lindows, Linspire, Ubuntu, and Freespire (maybe some Windows 95, who knows?). Personally, I would suggest getting out now, while the getting is good. Then again, I know how hard you have been looking to find a distro that suits you.

[JoeDude]

For now, I'm going oto hang on for the ride. Not only have I absolutely loved Ubuntu...But, my wife actually uses it without rebooting to winxp. In FC, SuSE, Mandrake...well, many others, she would just reboot into windows XP. Now, though, She just cruises through it (Ubuntu) doing her thing, and even had me showing her how to get packages. This is a massive success for me!

[Master of Reality]

While i sit in this cafe browsing this forum, Kubuntu is installing itself on my desktop machine...

[Calum]

well, that's fine, i will stick with debian, which is what i consider my current system to be. i'll fix up my repositories to point to real debian sources and sort out any issues as they come up.

Because even if they got ESR to sign up, i still think that arrangement stinks, and i hope it is shown that any GNU software released under the aegis of this merger (or whatever it is) is illegal under the terms of the GPL.