hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0707.txt

Episode: 707
Title: HPR0707: Ubuntu on trial
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0707/hpr0707.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:17:53

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Here we go …
Is most science reporting in again for Ken Fallon's request for more shows and he should
be careful what he asks for, you just might get it.
And what I think you're going to get today is a rant for me.
I warn you first, I'm not going to really say things are particularly agreeable and some
of the things I say might or might not even be accurate but they are reflective of how
I feel.
Today I want to deconstruct Ubuntu, what I'm really saying is that I want to, for those
of you, I know a lot of you guys use Ubuntu and you know that's fine and if you really
like it you should use it.
I just want to give you another perspective and perhaps an exit to enter into other options.
First of all, I'll start with a little bit of history about me and my Unixi, Linuxi
background.
I've never really felt very comfortable with Windows from the beginning and the reason
why a lot of people don't feel that comfortable with Windows is that if you went to school
in the United States, if you grew up in the United States and went to elementary school
upwards, there's a good chance that you were using Apple computers.
For a long time, it seemed that Apple computers were the de facto standard of the school
systems throughout the United States.
Starting with the Apple II and going up into the early Macintosh computers, this is what
most of us really had, at least that's what I know, I lived in many parts of the country.
This changes when you get into the commercial world, outside of the school environment,
you really found that the whole world was really becoming more dominated by Windows.
I didn't get to use my first Unix computer till college.
The college I went to had sun, salirous computers and there was something about it that
just gravitated to me.
There was something about it's leanness, it's lack of flowery commercialism that made
me feel that I was actually dealing with something that was real.
I then went off from college to use Windows for many more years and so I heard about this
concept of Linux and this kind of dovetails into my story.
There was this idea that was coming about that there was going to be a free operating
system and I was thinking myself, that just sounds amazing, you know the idea that somebody
is going to create an operating system developed by a community of volunteers and I was certain
that the whole world was going to jump on top of this.
I thought that it was just obvious that everybody, not just talking about businesses and organizations,
but I was thinking everybody was going to be on top of Linux as a desktop, Windows and
Mac were both going to be going away very soon.
This, I was really driven by this and I remember the time, the electronic stores and they
sold commercial Linux, they sold it in a box, you could buy Red Hat in a box, you could
buy Susie in a box and take it home, it was just like you bought anything else for
like $40 or whatever, you can take it home and install it.
I bought Red Hat and I tried to use it, I got pretty close but at the time the high
speed wasn't so common, high speed internet, it was more common with dial up internet and
that's what I was using at the time and all of the manufacturers had gone to using what
they called a wind modem, which I think was effectively just a piece of software, if
I remember correctly, but the long and short of it is that it wasn't really, there wasn't
really a very easy way to get a Linux computer to use this wind modem, you really had to
go through some more hoops.
This set me back for a couple of years, I went back to Windows for a couple of years until
I took a job somewhere and there was a guy at this job and he was something like an Uber
Geek, what I would describe as the super geek, he had a computer and it was running Fedora,
he loved Fedora and he had managed to make his system look very slick, so I was probing
him and asking him about how do you get going with this, and effectively he was somewhat
helpful to me but he had his other things that he needed to get done, so I decided there
was time again to get started and try by a Linux adventure once again and I went with
Debian, that was my first choice and the reason why I was my first choice is because it
was what I had a service with a hosting company, the hosting company used Debian and I thought
that it made sense to you, tried to use Debian, it seemed fairly straightforward, it was
completely free, it was very small and it seemed like a good idea, so I installed Debian
and this was Sarge, it wasn't very easy, I remember getting all the way till I got to the
command line, I got through the partitioning and got through selecting all the various options
it asks you and I got to the command line and that part went fine, but didn't go fine
with X windows and the whole gooey interface, Debian Sarge was just a difficult system to
turn into a Linux desktop, in came Ubuntu, I didn't even get anywhere with Debian at that
point, I just started hearing more about this new Ubuntu system and in came Ubuntu and
it was much easier, it was very pleasant to install the installation process and all of
the X windows, X comp challenges were soft, it came much more minimalist than it comes now,
it had fewer moving parts but you know the sound was working well, the interface was
attractive and it was a nice system for a while, I don't remember what version of Ubuntu
this was that I used, but it was something much older than what we have today, the next
piece though is that by the time that Debian etch came around, I decided to give Debian
another shot, by this release Debian had improved dramatically, if I look over my history with
Debian, I saw that the jump from Sarge to etch is being a huge, huge chasm, I mean a lot of things
were addressed and I went to it, it wasn't anywhere near as hard as it had been in the past and
through package management I could install X windows and KDE, which is what I was using at the time,
and I used that system for a long long long long time, later came Lenny, made things yet again
even better, and today we know there were squeeze and squeezes really quite exquisite at the same time,
but I'm really trying to say is that in my personal case this is all opinion but there's
few things in life that I think are actually perfect, but I do think that Debian is a perfect system,
and it's one that you could consider if you're an Ubuntu user, if you're an Ubuntu user you should
try Debian at some point, if not only for curiosity, the nature of really what Debian is about,
I'm not a member of the Debian project and I do not speak for Debian in any sense of the word,
but Debian is about stability and customisation, I'll get into this a little bit more,
but rather than having a set release cycle the six months period and so on, where effectively
people just push anything out of the door, full of bugs, the concept of Debian is that
it doesn't get released till the bugs are squashed, and when you get Debian you're really getting
some highly scrutinised code and software, so what am I trying to say now, I'll try to accelerate
things if you've listened so far, try to put you to sleep too much, but what I'm saying right now
is that the Linux desktop is dead, and I really do mean that, and I'll take that even further
is that I think actually the desktop in general is dead, and when I say that I'm talking about
from a market share perspective, the amount of people in the population who will continue using
desktops is going to continually decrease, and that's going to change things,
the desktop is not dead for me, and most likely it's not dead for you, the desktop or the laptop,
I'd look at them kind of the same, they'll never be dead for me because I'm a software engineer
by profession, and that's my hobby as well, and if you write code or configure machines,
if you administer machines, then you'll never do this from a phone or a tablet I don't think,
you're going to have a full frame computer in your house, but the population in general,
of which you probably are not characteristic of, if you're listening to this show,
you're probably not representative of the population in general,
they're not going to be using that much desktops in laptops in the future, and I'm becoming
more and more convinced of this, I see it in some of the people I know, I know a friend of mine
in San Diego, she has an iPhone, and she has no other computer system in her apartment,
there's no laptop for anything, the iPhone does 98% of what she needs to be done with a computer
in a month's time, if she wants to check email, she checks it from there, if she wants to
use Facebook or something like that, she uses the app and checks it from there,
if she needs something more complex out of the computer, she will go to a library or use it at work,
she is one example, I also have other examples, if you notice a lot of people are just not upgrading
their computers anymore, even if you have a computer in the house or not buying new ones,
they're maintaining their older XP systems, if they use Windows, and they're just getting what they
need out of XP when they use it occasionally, and I can see how these people are just not really
in their future going to be spending a lot of time in front of desktops, the reason is even for
my phone, which is an Android phone, I sometimes use it rather than using the computer if I just don't
feel like waiting for the computer to turn on, especially with regards to checking email,
I don't do the Facebook or Twitter thing, I really don't like either of those products, but
you did the picture, so the whole desktop concept has a commercial entity is going to be under
increasing pressure, and this is not going to be good news for Microsoft in particular, Apple,
they're different beasts, they have a whole slew of devices, and they look like they have a better
chance, Microsoft is really very centered on the desktop, that's really their bread and butter,
and I don't see a lot of people going out to buy more of the same Windows software for new computers at
home, but if you really want to talk about who's going to be a really big loser, I think it's going
to be Ubuntu, I think they are just too late to the desktop game, they're getting in right as
everybody's losing interest, and you know, let's say something about Ubuntu, when I first started
using it, they used to have a saying that said the Ubuntu Linux for human beings, so their goal was
to try to convert all of these various Windows and Apple macOS users to Linux users now,
with a system that's going to be so easy, and so agreeable. My experience is that I don't know
how much of that has happened, I don't know many people who have really left the Windows world
for Ubuntu, most of the Ubuntu users I know actually happen to be pretty highly technical people
who were probably geared towards a Unix type system regardless, I don't know that I see Ubuntu
having really captured the minds of some of the masses of general users out there, and
really what I think that Ubuntu has done is really more cannonable, just attacked its own
market share, which is the Linux general Linux market share. I'm not really sure how much
you're adding either to Linux, you know, I can make a lot of these same accusations against commercial
Linux in general Red Hat and whoever owns who say these days, but in the very least Red Hat is
kind of an upstream company, they for the most part contribute back to projects that they use,
and they also do a lot of Linux kernel modification, they're actually as far as the commercial
company, they are the biggest contributor to Linux kernel projects, which all Linuxes
benefit from. Ubuntu doesn't do that, Ubuntu does not like to contribute back to projects, and
you can see this in the GNOME version that they use, it's not upstream GNOME, this is a very
different GNOME with a lot of Ubuntu only things on it, and the same can be said with their
relationship with Debbie, and when they make adjustments to the packages that they're using
to various parts of their networking system, they don't necessarily get it back up through
the chain, so when you're using Ubuntu, you know that that's where our goal is, is really not to
be part of this system that we've built, this open source system, they're really trying to
differentiate themselves, and it comes with some trouble. Not only that, but the most recent
versions of Ubuntu are getting increasingly more bizarre, it's coming with so much software on
it that I would never, ever use, from Twitter clients and various other social media stuff,
they've got a cloud computing service in the operating system now, so when you're in a Ubuntu
user, you know, ready to get going to use a Ubuntu one in various other canonical cloud products,
I would never use such a thing, there's a Ubuntu store in there which is very unusual,
especially when you know we have open source,
app repository, GUI's, like SnapTick which have been perfectly fine, and it comes with open JDK
in that system which if you don't know the open source Java version, which I would not need for any reason
anymore, I generally try not to run Java applications on my computer and I feel that Java's more
of a risk than a value these days, and also a bunch of .net things, mono programs,
tomboy notes, I mean this is just not choice, and let me try to break something down.
One thing I always loved about Linux users is their diversity, people put together systems that
they like to fit their use. This is not really so true of Apple users, when you look at one Apple
computer and then you go to another Apple user and you look at their computer, it's very likely
to look the same, Apple users use the same apps, they use the same layout, the screen configuration,
it's a very monolithic culture, they're following what Apple is telling them to do,
and the same can generally be said about Windows, almost every Windows computer generally looks
the same, more or less the same software on it, when you look at a Linux user, your Linux user
generally has a computer, if you take 10 Linux users and you look at their computers, and I'll
preface that with 10 nano Ubuntu Linux users, there's 10 systems that are entirely different,
and that goes back to me, my system, I don't like GNOME in general, so I don't use it, it's just too much,
too many things going on, I use LXDE, and I don't use OpenOffice, if I need something like that,
I'll use GNOME, but I don't need OpenOffice on my computer, I don't actually need
the total music player, all of that is just excess, and in my case what I use is a devian
squeeze system, running LXDE, and it has the software I want on it, which would be things like
key pass, the Gimp G-Sum, FileZilla, Chrome, Chrome is a nice browser, and for sound you know,
I use VLC, and I also like NPlayer, but I usually use VLC, that's all I need on my computer, I don't
really need a company to help me choose what I like, and you know this goes to you know, the next
piece, in the case of devian, devian is very unified, there's only one devian, and it's
core, very simple and very small, if you examine the Ubuntu universe, you see something that looks
very different, Ubuntu is a GNOME distribution, it can't be anything else, other entirely separate
distributions are Kubuntu, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu, none of those others are really supported by
Canonical, Canonical only supports Ubuntu, the Kubuntu team is a very very small number of people,
and when you go down to other Lubuntu, I mean you're talking about a handful of guys who are
supporting this attempted diversity, that just doesn't seem healthy to me, and you know I can
tell you because I actually have an Ubuntu support contract, that's one of the best things I
think about Ubuntu that they actually offer support contracts for people like me for some small
amount of money, and I have an Ubuntu support contract mainly because I use Ubuntu at work,
my workplace, the software developers are standardized on Ubuntu, and I use it at work, and
when you talk to Ubuntu people on the phone, you realize there's a lot of parameters to what they
can help you support, and what they cannot help you support, they officially support Kubuntu,
but they say that they can't really guarantee you that they'll be able to help you,
they will make an effort to help you, but they can't guarantee, you know if they don't know
right off the top of their head they're going to have to close the case.
Considering the other smaller Ubuntu's, they, I don't even think they'll even start the case
for those, if there's a problem with Lubuntu, you're really kind of just on your own, and
this is just strange. Another way in which Ubuntu's fragmented is with the three versions that
they put out, they put out, or they might have been down to two versions now, but at least at one
point they offered a desktop version, a netbook version, and a server version.
The server version is a little more than just basic Debian, with more clutter around it,
and I've used it, I was actually using it at one point for one of my servers, and it was okay
for a while. That server died, and I try to use Ubuntu server again, and the app repositories
were completely off that day. I just gave up when it just gone back to, you know, 100% Debian in
my feed-of-computers. And, you know, the idea of separating OS's by desktop server and netbook,
it just doesn't technically sound. I mean, it's sound from a marketing perspective, but it's not
a technical necessity. And so, you know, this is what I'm saying is that if you are a Ubuntu
user right now, you're probably, you know, a bit more technical than average, or you have a
little bit more adventure in your system than average. What I'm saying is that you can create a
system that is really built for you. I don't know what you like, everybody likes something different,
but I can tell you that Ubuntu is not for everybody, and it's probably not ready for you.
It can't be. It's for everybody, which means it's for nobody. You know, it's one of those things
where you create something so complex that it's supposed to meet everybody's needs, but it actually
meets nobody's needs in the end. And I implore you to, you know, it doesn't have to be Debian,
it can be something else. I would think that Debian would be a natural trajectory because Debian
systems are similar to Ubuntu systems, so it won't be so wildly different. If you did try to
use something like Slackware or Gen2, now you're going to find that you're in a really different
world, and you know, that might be a step further than what you are looking for. But I'm just thinking
of Ubuntu really come about as far as it can go. They made an impressive splash, and I think
their core mission failed. I don't think that the other lunacies are that much more difficult
anymore. You know, their idea was supposed to be so much easier than other lunacies, but that's
not really the case anymore. I think it was the case once upon a time, but I don't think it is
anymore. And I think they're chasing a market that's just too elusive. You see,
where Linux has always thrived is really on very big systems and very small systems.
Linux is fantastically in the server space and on super computers. Linux is spectacularly on
set-top boxes as well. I have a little Roku box that powers my television, and Linux works very
well in there, because those are areas where detail and measurement are more important.
Where Linux has just not done well is in this desktop area, and I don't think it ever will do well.
I don't think it has to do well. We do not need 50% of the world using Linux desktops, or 75% of
the world using Linux desktops. What I'd prefer is just to help exit these people out of the
whole desktop altogether. Just help them get out. They want out, anyways. They want to be in
the tablet world. They want to be in the, you know, smartphone world. That's their natural home.
So we should start a process of trying to help migrate these people out of the whole desktop
arena anyways, because it's probably an overkill for their needs.
Though, I'm not sure I covered everything that was on my mind, but I think you get the general
picture. This is Desmoscience checking out any comments, I'm sure I said a bunch of things that
were crazy in this talk, but anything burning things on your chest, you'd feel free to
email me at dismal.science.hpr at gmail.com
When do I start? What do I begin? When do I start? When do I begin? When do I start? When do I begin?
When do I start? When do I begin? When do I start? No I begin. When do I start? When
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