Why Ubuntu

[Moose Tracks]

Neither my roommate nor I are Windows people. I use Mac and he uses Ubuntu Linux. So here is the problem:

 

He gets very frustrated with Ubuntu and then downloads and tries out 50,000,000 Linux variants. He doesn't like those and goes right back to Ubuntu. Then in about six months, the process repeats itself and then it's back to Ubuntu.

 

So why is Ubuntu the Linux he keeps going back to? Is this normal for Ubuntu users?

[kernalzero]

this is a pretty random question. First I would suggest just asking your roommate. He'll probably just tell you. From personal experience the learning curve for linux is fairly steep. It takes a good amount of time using linux to get it to do everything you want. I tried many distro's when I was in college including redhat, suse (which I really enjoyed), ubuntu, MEPIS, DSL, etc. I found going through all of these that ubuntu had alot to offer with only installing the OS. The nice thing about linux though is you can go through however many distro's you want and testdrive them all until you find one for you - their free. www.linuxiso.org just my opinion though, he could be doing if for some other reason...maybe he just gets bored

[b2bwild]

He gets very frustrated with Ubuntu and then downloads and tries out 50,000,000 Linux variants. He doesn't like those and goes right back to Ubuntu. Then in about six months, the process repeats itself and then it's back to Ubuntu.

 

So why is Ubuntu the Linux he keeps going back to? Is this normal for Ubuntu users?

To be very honest, Its called being a Distro sl*t. He will keep doing that until he doesn't create a "Fix" for problems hes having instead of "Searching" for ready made solution...

 

This is the Linux way.

[leafhound]

He probably keeps going back to Ubuntu because it has a massive online forum user base.

[Alessandro17]

Many people keep going back to the first distro(s) they tried, they can't accept that their first "love" betrays them or that they were wrong in the first place.

Eventually they either move on to something else (most cases) or they stick with their first distro for an indefinite time.

I am no different. I started with Mandriva (then called Mandrake), followed by (open)SUSE and Debian.

These days I still believe that Mandriva is the best, together with its derivative PCLinuxOS.

But the reality is that now I use Windows 7, and I am just beginning to seriously appreciate Snow Leopard. Not much Linux in my daily life.

[ekimseekem]

I've always found that Ubuntu does a good job of giving you something mostly complete, but the last 10% of it is tooth and nail to get it working. This is true of all Linux distros out there, you get them working to the way you want them too... then eventually you want to change/add something and its (most of the time) a large task.

 

For me, my goto Linux distro is now Linux Mint, its basically Ubuntu, but just that much more is done for you out of the box (audio codecs, thunderbird, terminal addon, better apps, etc).

 

I have my complaints about all OS, to me there is no perfect OS... just some are better then others and you need to decide what works best for you...

[beermacht]

ubuntu is nice - my first distro was open suse, was also nice, but on my os-lut would suse be a little bit to heavy

i don't need 3 os's on my eee, but it was fun to try it, so i installed sl, 7 and ubunto on it - ubuntu makes some funny stuff - i tried to format a sdhc card unter ubuntu - didn't work - unmounted it and since that day, ubuntu brings up an error un startup - it won't boot without a sd card as a swap drive (it has a swap partition - but also wants this stupid card)

[leafhound]

Just a shame about the Ubuntu community, over at the forums all they ever talk about is Windows.

[Nirbo]

Ubuntu was one of the first to not have a completely awful package management system. Apt-get was (and is in some cases still) better than {censored} like RPM and the RPM spinoffs like Yast.

 

In fact the only thing I've seen that I liked better was Portage in Gentoo, but that's only because I'm a FreeBSD user and portage was inspired by the ports tree.

 

Granted it's always been buggy in most of it's releases but then most Linuxes are.

 

I don't use Linux at all these days but when I did for me it was mostly a case of "better the devil you know." If you know exactly what problems you'll have to fix in a clean install, you've got your fallback distro

[Alessandro17]

Ubuntu was one of the first to not have a completely awful package management system. Apt-get was (and is in some cases still) better than {censored} like RPM and the RPM spinoffs like Yast.

 

Provided people do not forget that APT (The Advanced Packaging Tool) was invented by Debian several years before anybody had ever heard of Ubuntu.

As to RPM, dependency hell is a thing of the past. There have been all sort of package managers for RPM, beginning with Mandrake (now Mandriva) URPMI (10 years old), apt4rpm, Yum, Smart, Zypper...

Nowadays if you were to use a RPM based distro you wouldn't probably have any problem whatsoever, as certainly is the case with PCLinuxOS which has always used apt4rpm.

 

Taken from the Ubuntu forum:

 

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=26950

 

Does RPM hell exist anymore? April 14th, 2005

RPM Hell is really a myth. Nowadays, most distros (ok, practically ALL) have a packaging frontend like APT or YUM or SMART or YAST, etc that takes care of finding dependencies intelligently.

 

The problems usually happen when you install a Debian deb on Ubuntu, a Redhat RPM onto Mandrake, etc. Just because they have the same extension DOES NOT mean they are compatible!

 

By jdong, ubuntu forums admin

[Nirbo]

And several years before Ubuntu existed. Mostly my own distaste for RPM (and apt-get) is bias. I prefer the way ports and portage does it where compiling from a distfile is the prefered method but binary packages are also made available.

 

Most linuxes do the reverse, with packages being rolled per distro and binary being offered by the repositories.

 

And I've not used PCLinuxOS at all. My last Linux that I used more than a few hours was probably OpenSuSE 11. Since becoming a FreeBSD user around the 4/5 releases I've never really looked back (or felt the need to look back.)

 

In terms of a point, I'd have to say mine is Ubuntu had a package manager and repositories that (at that particular time) got people excited enough that a lot of people made it their "go-to" distribution. Most of the people I know who were already running Debian prior eventually went back to Debian too.

 

In the end, "better the devil you know" is the reason most people go back to their original distros. Doing things "better" is largely bias based, since any OS that does it flat out wrong usually becomes defunct.

[fedexnman]

pretty funny thread, bout ubuntu, ive used winxp , macbook etc.. i got started using ubuntu little over a year ago,( downloaded ardour on a mapbook and googled linux and ubuntu came up the rest is history) anyways.. a newer ubuntu version comes out every 6 months, its fun to tinker with things. so thats why you see him trying different linux distros every 6 months, its fun, im guessing almost virus free, its also free and the apps for it are free, and also is a pain in the rear too. ubuntu rules !!!

[tprankd]

Honestly, I prefer Gentoo over Ubuntu. I will admit, the Software Center on 9.10 is a nice concept for quickly finding fun content.

[nmarques]

"Ubuntu isn't Linux"!

 

Not that I care much, but why do you compare apt-get with RPM? They are very different things.

You could maybe compare RPM with DEB. In this case that would make sense... And you could compare apt-get with yum, which would still make sense

You might be a FreeBSD use, but your knowledge on Linux is very poor, and you actually shouldn't speak of things you don't know, because comparing RPM (RedHat Package Manager) to apt-get is just something people wouldn't do.

 

And for BSD flavours, NetBSD is the best!

 

Ubuntu was one of the first to not have a completely awful package management system. Apt-get was (and is in some cases still) better than {censored} like RPM and the RPM spinoffs like Yast.

 

In fact the only thing I've seen that I liked better was Portage in Gentoo, but that's only because I'm a FreeBSD user and portage was inspired by the ports tree.

 

Granted it's always been buggy in most of it's releases but then most Linuxes are.

 

I don't use Linux at all these days but when I did for me it was mostly a case of "better the devil you know." If you know exactly what problems you'll have to fix in a clean install, you've got your fallback distro

[wargod18]

No I love Ubuntu I have stuck with it for almost a year now can't wait for 10.04

[beermacht]

well. as nice as ubuntu looks and feels - as "bad" could it be

 

it would actually nice if anyone could do me 2 favours

 

1, tell me why ubuntu thinks that the sd card must be inserted as a swap drive (had once a card inserted when i booted ubuntu)

 

and 2, how can i get i get rid of this stupid setting (there is a swap partition on the hdd, nobody told ubuntu to use the sd card)

[srs5694]

well. as nice as ubuntu looks and feels - as "bad" could it be

 

it would actually nice if anyone could do me 2 favours

 

1, tell me why ubuntu thinks that the sd card must be inserted as a swap drive (had once a card inserted when i booted ubuntu)

 

and 2, how can i get i get rid of this stupid setting (there is a swap partition on the hdd, nobody told ubuntu to use the sd card)

 

I'm not sure of the exact cause of your problem, but I have two suggestions:

 

1. Use Linux fdisk to look at the SD card -- for instance, type "sudo fdisk /dev/sdb" at a command prompt, if the SD card is /dev/sdb. Check the partition type code (in the "Id" column). If there's a line with "82" (really hexadecimal 82, or 0x82) in that column, then that means the SD card's partition (or one of them, if it's got multiple partitions) has somehow gotten set to the code for Linux swap space. Change it by using the 't' command in fdisk. Changing it to '0c' is appropriate if you want to use it as a FAT disk. At the fdisk main prompt, type 'w' to save your changes. If there are no files on the disk, you may need to create a new filesystem on it by typing "mkdosfs /dev/sdb1" (or something similar with a changed device code).
   
2. Check your /etc/fstab file for all the lines that include the word "swap." If you've got swap space on your hard disk, you'll see a line for it. If you see another entry that refers to the SD card by device filename, delete that line. Entries may also use UUIDs to refer to filesystems and swap space, which can make it harder to identify them. If necessary, you can delete all the swap entries and then create a new one by device ID -- use fdisk on your main disk to identify which partition holds your swap space.
   

 

Chances are one of these procedures will fix your problem, although it's conceivable there's something more obscure going on.

[beermacht]

thanks for your suggestions - first of all - i was not able to fix it!

 

but i was able to see a little bit more of the problem

 

i used a live "cd" (usb stick) and tried a few repair hints i've gotten.

the sd card didn't work - i have no idea whats wrong with this installation - it was never really in use (it's on my spare computer for customers to let them see and try different os's)

 

the uuid in the fstab is wrong - it points to sda4 but with a different uuid (right sda - wrong uuid)

since i was not able to fix the problem (read only - and the chroot stuff didn't change anything) - i will kick ubuntu and use the space under 7 (well 22gig for p0rn and trojans )

[fogster]

More to the original thread -- My day job sees me administering racks of CentOS/RHEL machines, so I like to think I know my way around Linux well enough. I ran Gentoo for years on my desktop.

 

But my (non-Mac) laptop runs Ubuntu, not any of the more "hardcore" distros I've worked with. The reason is really pretty simple -- I want my own computer to be easy to use. I don't mind having to tweak config files or rebuild binaries at work, because it's my job. But when I come home, I want to use my computer, not work on it. I suspect modern distros are much better, but I've just had so many headaches in the past trying to get dependencies right or trying to recompile Apache and its myriad dependencies that I fled and found something that usually just worked. (Incidentally, this is the same reason I left Windows back in the 95/98 days.)

[perk137]

I've never really understood why people say this: "Ubuntu isn't Linux"!

 

I've been using Ubuntu for ~1.5 years, and it works pretty well for me. I like the fact that they are trying to get a user-friendly distro that appeals to the masses.

[srs5694]

I've never really understood why people say this: "Ubuntu isn't Linux"!

 

I doubt if many people mean that in quite the way you imply. I can think of two ways in which a similar comment, or even those exact words, could be meant in proper context:

 

• Technically Linux is just the kernel. Thus, no Linux distribution is Linux, although they all by definition include Linux. Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, etc., are all collections of Linux and other stuff. This is the point of view of certain people, and it's the official position of the Debian developers. Such people generally prefer "GNU/Linux" when referring to a whole distribution, since so much of the core functionality of most Linux distributions comes from the FSF's GNU utilities.
  
• Because of Ubuntu's popularity in the last few years, some people have taken to using "Linux" and "Ubuntu" as if they were synonymous, but in fact Ubuntu is far from being the only Linux. I just named a few others, and in fact there are dozens (maybe hundreds) of Linux distributions around, especially if you count small or specialized tools. Linux is used on everything from cellphones to supercomputers, and even on Ubuntu's target systems, there are plenty of alternatives that are just as much Linux as Ubuntu is. Thus, the comment "Ubuntu isn't Linux" might not be meant to diminish Ubuntu's status as a Linux distribution, but rather to emphasize that Ubuntu is just one of many "flavors" of Linux distribution. This might be important if somebody is drawing incorrect generalizations about Linux based only on Ubuntu -- say, assuming that they all use APT for package management or start up X automatically when they boot.
  

[Alessandro17]

in fact there are dozens (maybe hundreds) of Linux distributions around, especially if you count small or specialized tools.

 

According to Distrowatch, 313, not counting dormant or discontinued distributions (else it would be 651).

 

New distributions in the Distrowatch waiting list are also several hundreds. New distributions are moved to the official list when they meet certain criteria:

 

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=links#new

[privateabstract]

Just a shame about the Ubuntu community, over at the forums all they ever talk about is Windows.

 

Surely you're taking the p|ss?

 

If not, try joining their IRC. Hardly a mention of Windows at all.

[TopGear]

Neither my roommate nor I are Windows people. I use Mac and he uses Ubuntu Linux. So here is the problem:

 

He gets very frustrated with Ubuntu and then downloads and tries out 50,000,000 Linux variants. He doesn't like those and goes right back to Ubuntu. Then in about six months, the process repeats itself and then it's back to Ubuntu.

 

So why is Ubuntu the Linux he keeps going back to? Is this normal for Ubuntu users?

 

Well, I used to do the same thing But now I'm stuck at Ubuntu, love it.

[mckooter]

threads a couple days old now, but the OP is describing exactly what I always do

 

my reason:

 

Ubuntu makes linux very easy, the forums have the solution for nearly every problem i get, and for me linux is all about making it work, once its working I have very little to do there.

 

This is my process:

 

1) Install Ubuntu as a dual boot

2) Get Everything working perfectly.

3) Boot back to windows and forget about ubuntu for 6 months

4) Decide to make a challenge and actually learn more linux and install a harder distro

5) Give up

6) GOTO STEP 1

 

right now im at step 3 (about 4 months in, ... ALMOST TIME )