New article in the Economist criticizing Linux usability

Christopher Browne cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Tue Apr 3 03:38:49 UTC 2012


On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 10:43 PM,  <sciguy-Ja3L+HSX0kI at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> But after a
> while, and on this point I agree with the writer, creators of OS'es
> like Ubuntu became over-zealous and broke a lot of things. But his
> problem is that he is using this idea to whitewash all other Linux
> distros, which is a bit unfair.

Well, he's putting together a story, optimizing its presentation so as
to ensure maximum publication-worthiness, in the "maximizing
controversy" sense, so it's pretty predictable that there will be a
maximum of luridity.

Historically, it hasn't just been Ubuntu that has gotten thus
"over-zealous."  Fedora has had its moments, and going back as far as
when Red Hat 7.3 was aggressive about drawing in things I can barely
remember anymore, but broke a lot of things on people.

There's eminently good reason to *want* a distribution to be
aggressive about drawing stuff in.  Ubuntu has been using this with
regards to supporting new devices ASAP, and that's rather important if
people are trying to install it on a recent laptop.

In contrast, Debian's relative conservatism can lead to people having
to go searching for "bleeding edge" bits in order to support whatever
new stuff is on their motherboard that isn't in a stable kernel.  I
ran into that very problem when I installed Debian on my present
desktop machine at the office - I *needed* to pull a wildly newer
kernel than was in Stable to support the NIC that was Dell's flavour
of the week.  I was able to work it out, but not everyone can, and
some might use such challenges to justify arguing that Debian's old
and broken.

I'm suspicious that Ubuntu may have gotten so aggressive with stuff
like Unity that it may well hurt them.

There's a lot of stuff "up", between Unity, Wayland, new init
alternatives, and it's debatable whether:
- Being an old stick-in-the-mud risks being left behind.  And a LOT of
people left Slackware over such.
- Adopters of new things are lemmings leaping towards the edges of cliffs.

Precedent exists, in both directions.
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