Every time you write something negative about a product, you end up making a small group of people from that product's community mad because you don't agree entirely with them. To those people: I said that it was just my personal opinion.
Looking back at my experiences with Ubuntu after knowing about apt-source and the sudo feature, I think the approach of disabling the root account makes more sense today than I did yesterday. But it's not what I expected as a former Linux user and it deserves an explanation in the installer so people like myself would know why they can't log in as root anymore. It should also be mentioned in the installer how important the password for the first user is because of this, since it basically becomes the root account. Finally, this apt-source feature should not be completely hidden. Instead, it should be integraded with Synaptic Package Manager to make it easy to install any software, not just the pre-compiled ones.
Of course, I was wrong when saying Ubuntu was the hardest distro to install. I completely forgot Gentoo. What I ment was the hardest to install mainstream distro. Gentoo is a geek distro. ;) But one thing's for sure: a installer that wants to wipe all your partitions by default really isn't helping the average user. And the truth is, I've never failed to enable the sound card in any other ALSA-based distro. It has always worked from the beginning, only with muted channels. The hardware detection in Ubuntu needs work and I'm sure it will work better in their next release.
I've never said VidaLinux is perfect, but it's the best distro I've installed and used so far. There are lots of things that needs work there too, such as Porthole (which I mentioned in the VidaLinux review). Anyway, I will be sure to test Ubuntu's upcoming Hoary release once it's out. And I look forward to try apt-source, now that I know it exists.
Posted by djst at February 2, 2005 9:21 PMI generally find that informed criticism is less likely to recieve such enraged feedback. 'personal opinion' seems, to me, a bit of a cop out when publicly reviewing a software product (esp. as your 'personal' blog is syndicated via Mozilla).
I thought your Ubuntu review was reminiscent of several other 'leet' linux users' reviews, which were fairly dismissive of Ubuntu because A) they didn't know how to use a system that doesn't let you run amok as root and B) they were incapable of switching from one of the logical defaults that suits 90% of the population. Both of these issues somewhat undermine their self-assumed 'leet'-ness.
Though it has to be said that you were more open to the fact that your needs and the average persons diverge to a great degree.
So perhaps you should, instead of prefacing things with 'personal opinion' as a catch-all, pre-emptive get-out clause, approach new technology experiences with some humility and think:
'I don't know why this is set up like this and am confused/annoyed by it, but I respect the time, effort and intelligence of those working on the project, so rather than dismiss or deride it without in-depth knowledge of the surrounding issues, I will report my experience, explaining my confusion/grievance, and hope that my blog readers can provide the information I need to know why this is done in this way, if it is actually a bug rather than just a different approach, and then decide what my *informed personal opinion* is on this decision/policy/bug etc."
Posted by: dave at February 2, 2005 10:57 AMDavid.
I'm not sure if I aske you already. But did you download the free version of VidaLinux, or would you recommend the full purchase version?
Cheers
-Jed
Jed, I downloaded the free version. I see no reason to pay for it when you can download the same thing for free. Especially not when just evaluating it. The only difference is that you'll have to spend some time in Portage/Porthole after installing if you choose the free version. Linux's supposed to be free, at least that's one of the big reasons why I'm choosing it.
Posted by: David Tenser at February 2, 2005 10:15 PMHave you tried any LiveCDs? I think that if someone wants to just play around, that's a good idea.
Posted by: alanjstr at February 15, 2005 2:32 AMAbout differences between compiled and source-based packages
http://isam.bayazidi.net/archives/2004/07/internal-distro-war/
http://www.zefhemel.com/archives/2004/02/04/gentoo-vs-debian
http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/02/07/27/152253.shtml?tid=23
Once more -- have you tried apt-src in Ubuntu?
http://packages.debian.org/testing/admin/apt-src
Have a nice day,
Matej
Posted by: Matej Cepl at February 16, 2005 8:01 PMpl send me too
qnpcnpp@hotmail.com