Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04
by Ryan Smith on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
First Thoughts
Since this is Part 1 of a 2 part series, rather than ending on a conclusion, we’ll end on some first thoughts.
In searching for an answer to our question of whether Ubuntu is good enough to convince me to switch, I ultimately have failed to find enough compelling reasons to entice me as a user to switch to Ubuntu for my day-to-day operations. I should make it clear that this is not taking price into consideration – this is only taking into account my current situation as a Windows Vista user. Ubuntu does plenty of things well and I could certainly use it for my day-to-day operations, but there are few things it does better and more things it does worse as compared to Vista, such that using Ubuntu likely hurt my productivity even after I adapted to the differences. It’s hard to fully compete with commercially developed software when you’re giving yours away for free, so I don’t consider this a surprise.
From a performance standpoint, there’s little reason to switch in either direction. As I stated early in this article performance was never a serious condition for evaluation anyhow, and the results don’t change that. Ubuntu outperforms Vista at times, but at other times it looks to be held back by compiler differences and the disadvantage of needing to play nicely with proprietary products that don’t return the favor (e.g. SMB performance). As far as I am concerned, Ubuntu performed no worse than Windows for my day-to-day needs.
Now there are some situations where performance is important enough that it can’t be ignored, and the gap wide enough to make a significant difference. In Part 2 we will be looking for these situations.
I do think there are some niches in which Ubuntu works well, where the operating system itself is the killer app. One such situation is (or rather was) the Netbook market. It’s a market that used to be dominated by Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix. On such devices where you don’t have the resources to do anything fancy, Ubuntu’s weaknesses become less important. Meanwhile price becomes more important. However cheap copies of Windows XP specifically for the Netbook market appear to have killed this idea for now.
For what it’s worth I do have an older laptop (for guest use) that currently runs XP. For the same reason as the Netbooks, I’m considering replacing XP with Ubuntu 9.04 for the security benefits of it not being Windows. I’ve already had to wipe the machine once due to a guest getting it infected with malware.
As I haven’t gone too much in depth yet, let’s talk about user-to-user support. In spite of its user-friendly label, I have not been particularly impressed with the Ubuntu support structure. A lot of this comes down to the difficulty in finding help for existing issues, in spite of colorful names like Hardy Heron to help weed out results. Ubuntu’s Wiki, package archives, and forums all have a great deal of old information that turns up with searching. Results for 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon for example are now a historical curiosity – support ended for Gutsy back in April. Those pages and threads are largely unhelpful, and yet they clutter the search results of Google and the Ubuntu site’s search engine, pushing down more relevant information. Meanwhile the opposite is also true: results for newer versions of Ubuntu are also unhelpful.
The source of the problem comes down to 3 things. 1) Old information still exists and apparently doesn’t go away very easily. 2) Particularly for Ubuntu’s forums, they are divided up by topic but not version. 3) New versions of Ubuntu are published too often.
Now #3 is probably going to be a bit of a touchy subject, but it goes back to why we started with 8.04 in the first place. Either you’re on the upgrade treadmill or you’re not. Ubuntu moves so fast that it’s hard to jump on board. This is good from a development perspective since it allows Ubuntu to improve itself and get feedback sooner, but I don’t believe it’s good for users. A working user-to-user support system needs a lot of knowledgeable users, and the Ubuntu community is clearly full of them, but they seem to be spread out all over the place with respect to what versions they have experience with.
It’s to the advantage of less-knowledgeable users that they stick with a well-tested LTS release rather than be on the bleeding edge, but that’s not where the most knowledgeable users are. Compared to the Mac community where everyone is in sync on Leopard, or the Windows community where everyone is hating Vista and lusting over Windows 7, there’s a lack of cohesion. User-to-user support would be better served by having the community less spread out.
I have mentioned this previously, but the driver and packaging situation needs to be reiterated. While I don’t think the Linux kernel developers’ positions are unreasonable, I do think they’re hurting Ubuntu as a user-friendly operating system. The driver hell I had to go through shouldn’t have occurred, and if there was a stable API for “binary blob” drivers perhaps it wouldn’t have. The pragmatic position is that users don’t care if their drivers are open source or not, they would rather things just work. Ideals can only take you so far.
Along these lines, the packaging/repository system and the focus on it needs some kind of similar overhaul. I like how it allows updating software so easily and how easy it is to install software that is in Ubuntu’s repositories. But software that is not in a repository suffers for it. Installing software shouldn’t be so hard.
Finally, there’s the value of free as in gratis. Ubuntu may not be perfect, but I am still amazed by what it does for the price of $0.00. It’s a complete operating system, entirely for free. This is something that needs to be recognized as a credit to the developers, even if it doesn’t encourage anyone to switch.
Looking forward, coming up in the next couple of months will be the launches of Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Ubuntu 9.10. Compared to where Ubuntu stands with 8.04, there’s a year and a half of time for improvements, along with another LTS release due inside of a year. I think the new releases of Windows and Mac OS X are going to tip the scales away from Ubuntu in the immediate future, but given the lifetimes of those operating systems it’s going to give Ubuntu plenty of time to improve. This is something we’ll take a look at first-hand with Part 2 of this series when we look at 9.04 and more.
As a parting thought, we’d like to hear back from you, our readers, on the subject of Ubuntu and Linux in general. We’d like to know what you would like to see in future articles, both on the hardware and software side. Including some form of Linux in some of our hardware tests is something we’re certainly looking at, but we would like specifics. Would you like Linux-focused hardware roundups? What benchmarks would you like to see in Part 2 of this series (and beyond)? We can’t make any promises, but good feedback from you is going to help us determine what is going to be worth the time to try.
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viciki123 - Monday, February 22, 2010 - link
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YOu are spamer .For this, you could pick up some popular open source and proprietary (or their free equivalents) application that can run both Linux and W7. and compare the price, time and power consumption for retrieving, saving, processing, compiling, encrypting,decrypting compacting, extracting, encoding, decoding, backup, restore, nº of frames,etc, with machines in a range of different CPU and memory capacities. http://www.idresses.co.ukzerobug - Monday, February 1, 2010 - link
Regarding benchmarks and Linux-focused hardware roundups, one thing worth of consideration is that while Microsoft places strong resources on O/S development to create features that will require the end users the need to get the latest and greatest powerful hardware, Linux places their efforts in order that the end user will still be able to use their old hardware and get the best user experience while running the latest and greatest software.So,the benchmarks could compare the user experience when running popular software on Microsoft and Linux O/S's, with different powerful machines.
For this, you could pick up some popular open source and proprietary (or their free equivalents) application that can run both Linux and W7. and compare the price, time and power consumption for retrieving, saving, processing, compiling, encrypting,decrypting compacting, extracting, encoding, decoding, backup, restore, nº of frames,etc, with machines in a range of different CPU and memory capacities.
MarcusAsleep - Thursday, December 17, 2009 - link
Quick Startup: OK, Windows is fast - at first, well let's say that is if you install it yourself without all the bloatware that come standard on Windows store-bought PS's (we bought a Toshiba laptop for work with Vista that took 12 minutes after boot-up for it to respond to a click on the start menu - even on the third time booting.)Windows startup is often burdened by auto-updates from Microsoft, anti-virus, Sun-Java, Acrobat Reader, etc. etc. that slow down the computer on boot-up to where your original idea of "hey I just want to start my computer and check my email for a minute before work" can take at least 5. I can do this reliably on Linux in 1. Yes, if you know a lot about Windows, you can stop all the auto-updates and maintain them yourself but 99% of Windows users don't have time/or know how to do this.
Trouble-free: E.G. I installed Linux on a computer for my wife's parents (Mepis Linux) 7 years ago for email, pictures, games, web, letter use and haven't had to touch it since then. This is typical.
For Windows, often I have done fresh installs on trojan/virus infected computers - installed working antivirus and all Windows Updates (not to mention this process takes about 2-4 hours of updates upon updates + downloads of the proper drives from the manufacturers websites vs about 1 hour for an Ubuntu install with all updates done including any extra work for codecs and graphic drivers) - only to have to come back a couple months later to a slow again computer from users installing adware, infected games, etc.
Free: Nearly every Windows reinstall I've had to do starts with a computer loaded with MS Office, games, etc. but upon reinstall nobody has the disks for these. There is a lot of "sharing" of computer programs in the Windows world that is not very honest
With Linux, you can have the operating system plus pretty much anything else you would need, without having to cheat.
Adaptable Performance: You can get a well-performing Linux installation (LXDE Desktop) on a PIII computer with 256MB of ram. The only thing that will seem slow to an average mom/pop user would be surfing on flash loaded web pages, but with adblock on Firefox, it's not too bad. With Vista loaded on this computer, it would be annoyingly slow. You can often continue to use/re-use computer hardware with Linux for years after it would be unsuitable for Windows.
I think these features are of high value to the average user -- maybe not the average Anandtech computer user -- but the average surf/email/do homework/look at photos/play solitaire/balance my checkbook user.
Cheers!
Mark.
SwedishPenguin - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
Using SMB for network performance is extremely biased. It's a proprietary Microsoft protocol, of course Microsoft is going to win that one. Use NFS, HTTP, FTP, SSH or some other open protocol for network performance benchmarking. Alot of NASes do support these, as they are Linux-based.Furthermore, using a Windows server with SMB with the argument that most consumer NAS use SMB is pretty ridiculous, these NASes are most likely going to use Samba, not native SMB, the Samba which is implemented in GNU/Linux distributions and Mac OS X, not to mention that most of the NASes that I've seen offer at least one of these protocols as an alternative.
SwedishPenguin - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - link
The ISO thing is pretty ridiculous, creating a simple GUI in both GTK and Qt and integrating them into Gnome and KDE should be pretty damn easy, though I suppose integration with the respective virtual file systems would be in order, in which case it might get slightly more complex for those (like me) not familiar with the code. There's even a FUSE (userspace filesystem) module now, so you wouldn't even need to be root to mount it.About the command-line support, IMO that's a good thing. It's a lot easier both for the person helping and the guy needing help to write/copy-paste a few commands than it is to tell the person to click that button, then that one then another one, etc. It's also alot easier for the guy needing help to simply paste the result if it didn't help, and it makes it much easier to diagnose the problem than if the user would attempt to describe the output. And you usually get much more useful information from the command-line utilities than you do from GUIs, the GUI simplifies the information so anyone can understand it, but at the price of making debugging a hell of a lot more difficult.
nillbug - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
It must be said that Ubuntu and the major Linux distributors all have 64bit O/S versions since a long time. The reason behind is to allow users to benefit from memory (+4MB) and 64bit CPUs (almost all today) gaining a better computing experience.If this article was a private work of the author to provide him an answer on whether he may or may not move to Linux, people should advise him the above mentioned. As for an article intended to be read by thousands it must be pointed out that it's conclusion is a miss lead.
In face of today's reality (and not the author reality) why did he never mentioned the 64bit Ubuntu systems? I guess he's final thoughts then would've been much more in favor of Linux.
nillbug - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
It must be said that Ubuntu and the major Linux distributors all have 64bit O/S versions since a long time. The reason behind is to allow users to benefit from memory (+4MB) and 64bit CPUs (almost all today) gaining a better computing experience.If this article was a private work of the author to provide him an answer on whether he may or may not move to Linux, people should advise him the above mentioned. As for an article intended to be read by thousands it must be pointed out that it's conclusion is a miss lead.
In face of today's reality (and not the author reality) why did he never mentioned the 64bit Ubuntu systems? I guess he's final thoughts then would've been much more in favor of Linux.
seanlee - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - link
I have read all 17 pages of comments…a lot of Linux lovers out there… and they all purposely ignore few important things that make Windows successful, which in term, makes most Linux distribution marking failures, I have used Linux on my net book and my ps3, and I absolutely hate it.1. User friendly. No, CLI is not user friendly no matter what you say; no matter what excuse you use; no matter how blind you are. NOT ONE COMPANY dare to provide their mainstream products to be CLI only, from things as simply as ATM, ipod, to things as complicate as cellphone, cars, airplane. That ought to tell you something--- CLI is not intuitive, not intuitive=sucks, so CLI = sucks. You command line fan boys are more than welcome to program punched cards, expect no one use punched cards and machine language anymore because they are counter-intuitive. Having to do CLI is a pain for average user, and having to do CLI every time to install a new program/driver is a nightmare. GUI is a big selling point, and a gapless computer-human user experience is what every software company looking to achieve.
2. There is NOTHING a Linux can do that windows cannot. On the contrary, there are a lot of things windows can do that Linux cannot. I’d like to challenge any Linux user to find engineering software alternatives on Linux, like matlab, simulink, xilinx, orcad, labview, CAD… you cannot. For people who actually user their computer for productive means (not saying typing documents are not productive, but you can type document using type writer with no CPU required whatsoever), there is nothing, again, I repeat, NOTHING that Linux can offer me.
3. Security issues. I disagree with the security issues that windows has. I can set up a vista machines, turn it on, luck it into a cage, and it will be as security as any Linux machine out there. Hell. If I bought a piece of rock, pretend it was a computer and stare it all day, it would be the most secure system known to the man-kind. Linux’s security is largely due to one of the two reasons: 1. Not popular, not enough software to support and to play with. 2. Not popular, un user-friendly. Either of them is not a good title to have. It is like you are free from the increase of the tax not because you have your business set up to write off all your expense, but because you don’t make any money thus you don’t have to pay tax.
4. There is nothing revolutionary about Linux for an average user, other than it is free. If free is your biggest selling point, you are in serious trouble. Most people, if not all, would pay for quality product than a free stuff, unless it is just as good. Obviously Ubuntu is never going to be as good as windows because they don’t have the money that MS has. So what does Ubuntu have that really makes me want to switch and take few weeks of class to understand those commands?
Be honest, people. If you only have ONE O/S to use, most of you guys will chose windows.
kensolar - Monday, October 26, 2009 - link
I hope you realize that your hated is showing so strongly that absolutely no one cares what you say.
That said, I don't know how to use a cli and have been successfully using Linux for 3 years. I found the article to be a fairly fair one even though the author is so unfamiliar with Linux/Ubuntu. As he does not use the default app's in windows, linux users don't use the defaults only in linux. K3B is far superior to Brassaro and so on. In addition, I don't think he let on very well as to the extent of the software available in the repositories (with addition repositories easy to add). Several hundred app's, 20,000 programs, even security app's and programs ranging from easy as pie to complicated. (for those of us how have a computer that is more than a rock) I personally do audio mixing, video transcoding, advanced printing....all with graphic interfaces.
BTW, I learned how to turn on a computer for the 1st time 3 1/2 years ago, I stopped using windows a little over 3 years ago and have no reason to go back. I find it too hard, limiting and frustrating to use. Plus, I can't live w/o multiple desktops, the author didn't get it yet, but once you get used to them you can't go back.
Well, I've said enough for now, can't wait for your next article.