Angelo DiNardi » Gentoo < Ubuntu

Gentoo < Ubuntu < Mac

I’ve been a Linux user for years ( on and off since 2000, 100% switch since Jan 2004 ) and I’ve used Gentoo for most of that time. I’ve run Gentoo on my desktop, laptop, servers; everything really. I’d spend days getting a system installed and usable, hours and hours making wireless networking slightly work on my laptop, and more time than I’d like to think updating systems. That all used to make sense.

Back in the day when really to keep on the bleeding edge of Linux software Gentoo was really the only option. If you wanted it in the package manager, that is. Obviously you could install things by hand with others — but Gentoo had it all in portage. But now when even “user friendly” disro’s like Ubuntu include things like Beryl — what does Gentoo really have.

I installed Ubuntu on my laptop finally — replacing Gentoo. When I booted it up for the first time I was able to use NetworkManager in the notifications tray to connect to an access point immediately. It “just worked”. Amazing. I didn’t have to do anything. Same thing with audio and video. It worked right out of the install. I really like that. I also like being able to update 60 packages on a system in all of about a minute.

With such ease of use and simplicity of maintenance where do distributions like Gentoo or Slackware stand? Hard to imagine many people continuing to use them or more, people starting with them. The days of hard to use Operating Systems is over — Linux is finally catching up. Is it too late to stop many of the Linux users from switching to Apple’s Mac? With the power of UNIX and the “it just works” mindset — why not? I’ve got a friend’s G4 Mac Desktop in my room which he lets me use. I’ve started to use it more than all my other systems, even though it is older than them all. Reason? It still performs well, “just works” better, and the user experience is nicer. I’m looking forward to the not too distant future where I can buy myself a brand new Mac.

It’ll be interesting in the next few years to see how much more Apple’s market share will grow. It’ll be especially interesting to see where more of the converts are coming from — Windows or other OSs.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 2:06 am and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Cecilia Stathes

While this topic can be very frustrating for most people, my belief is that there has to be a middle or common ground that we all can find. I do value that you've added pertinent and intelligent thoughts here though. Very much thanks to you!
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Freda

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Ryan A. Hendrickson

"It “just worked”." Where has the world gone to when people want things just to work, instead of wanting to know how and why it works. Half of the linux enterprise could be wipped off the face of the planet by a distro that "just works." Whatever happened to efficiency and customization in an install? I challenge that we do not bow to those who are pushing their Microsofty advertising campaign of a desktop for every user without any setup or configuration. The suggestion of a singular computer without setup. Ugg.. Upon us is the breadth of ubuntoo where there is not configuration process. Where we used to fight to rid ourselves of Microsoft and enjoyed the systems configuration, we find ourselves returning the Microsoft attitude which made bill gates millions. Oh yea, that was the apple attitude too, they just couldn't take the market. Perhaps in the years to come.
Chris Lauretano

+1 to the Mac OS. When I got my Mac mini, I stopped using my desktop and largely stopped using my ThinkPad other than for strictly-mobile things. It was the slowest computer I had, slower than my web server even. The neatness, the integration.. the whole thing was just so polished, and not in the 'ooh shiny aqua interface' way. Linux has definitely made huge leaps and bounds, but most distros are still far behind windows in terms of ease of use. I feel your pain talking about spending hours just getting wireless set up. Whenever I'm on a new linux install on one of my laptops (I cycle through about 6 of my laptops depending on what mood I'm in.. they all run Arch Linux), I usually don't get wireless up and running for about a week. I'd blame whoever set up the wireless network at the house as WPA2-AES, but that would be me :).

I still like to run Linux on everything just because it's a nice hobby. It works well once you get everything set up how you like it, it's just that the 'getting it set up' process can take days (even on Arch Linux where the packages are binary) of staring at sessions of VI editing various config files to get things working, vs. the 30 or so minutes it takes with Windows to get things situated with all your hardware drivers. The other really good reason for running Linux is because you can't just buy OS X and run it on your PC, even though Macs are the same hardware architecture (the Core 2 duo latitude D630 I've been using lately might as well be a MacBook Pro with an nvidia quadro card). Apple has their reasons for locking their software to their hardware, but gosh I wish I could convince them otherwise. I don't want their hardware, I'd like to be able to use my existing hardware or new hardware of my choosing (I'd rather not deal with flimsy, scratch-prone Apple hardware, no matter how beautifully minimalistic it might be).

Networkmanager is friggin awesome though. After using the Arch Linux networking scripts (ncurses interface) for the past year or so, I finally gave it a try a couple weeks ago and haven't looked back.

I think the biggest thing holding back many people using Linux is the lack of a monopoly, honestly. Just yesterday when I decided to try out Kiba dock as an OS X ish dock to replace my XFCE bar (see my new blog post about doing the same on one of my testing machines at work), the pesky problem of too many choices reared it's ugly head again. I have the built-in XFCE compositor turned on, and also have my xorg.conf set up to enable the Nvidia hardware compositor support. That wasn't enough. I needed Compiz and/or Beryl. Ok, simple enough I thought. Well, to use either of those you need AIGLX (seems to only be ATI/Intel compatible) or XGL. Compiz works with AIGLX or XGL, Beryl only works with XGL (I think). So many different combinations of X server + compositor + login manager + dm + wm exist, it's hard to wrap your head around it. Ubuntu works for people because it attempts to eliminate that. Zenwalk does an even better job, having no overlapping packages in their repositories. The company that does the best job of it is Apple. Not only do they tell you which software you are going to use for various tasks (by preinstalling many important apps and having demos for other software they make just in case), they lock you into buying their hardware to run it on. No drivers, no choices.. it just works! Apple tells you the right way, and everyone just submits to them.

Angelo, are you a socialist? :P