Move to Ubuntu
A recent post in Planet Gnome about moving away from Arch into Ubuntu got me thinking, because I just did the same thing a few weeks ago, when Ubuntu 10.10 was released. But I didn’t really liked the reasons I did so.
First, I love Arch Linux. It’s simplicity and speed are amazing. It’s clearly focused on power users, which is great for me. It’s package manager (Pacman) is very fast and powerful, while still easy to use. I love how I can search and query packages both installed and from the cache with concise commands that usually do what you want at the first time. Compared to Ubuntu’s apt-cache and apt-get, which I usually have to read the man page to remember a few commands and to Fedora’s yum, which I’m never comfortable with, Pacman is always the winner. If that was not enough, you can create useful packages in under 10 minutes. Better yet if you can find a pre-made PKGBUILD in AUR, which contains thousands of recipes to build packages. The binary packages are usually enough for a desktop, but sometimes you do need to dig into Yaourt, which automatically downloads and compiles recipes. It is time-consuming sometimes, but comparing to finding a PPA with a decent enough version of a package that you can’t find in Ubuntu, it’s not much different.
That leads to the first reason I switched away from Arch, is that Ubuntu usually has recent enough versions when it’s released. But six months afterwards, I really want to try new versions of packages. If I can find a good and well-maintained PPA, then it’s ok. If I can’t, there are a thousand other things I would like to do then to create my own packages for new upstream releases. So, this time of the year, a few weeks after Ubuntu was released, I can actually enjoy it for a while (actually, Rhythmbox is just out with a new version, which I will probably never get on this version of Ubuntu).
The second reason and one that is a hot topic right now, but this is mostly a user perspective, I got locked into the Gnome modifications that Ubuntu did. Honestly, I like the modifications, I like the Indicator applet, I’m using the Indicator Applet Menu (despite a few bugs) and I love the Notify OSD. And I miss those on Arch. I tried building some components of Ayatana Project in Arch, but didn’t had much luck (understandable actually). The Arch way is to use as much as upstream as possible without modifications, which is usually very good. You can find a few bugs which are corrected already on other distros, but you get releases faster and you get to see how upstream really is. And that is a big issue for Ubuntu, because no matter how much they talk about not forking Gnome, it’s just not upstream anymore. If I would move to Fedora or OpenSuse from Arch, I would get a very close experience. Not because they don’t improve Gnome or add their own modifications, but because all their modifications are upstream. So even on Arch, I can enjoy all the great investment these guys made to Gnome. But now I can’t use Ubuntu’s investment outside Ubuntu (I could actually if I spend enough time porting it, but it’s just not worth).
And now, I’m locked in to Ubuntu, I’m locked to the Ubuntu OS to use Ubuntu Software, which are both actually very high quality, but I’d prefer a different OS. Some other OS vendors work the same tactics to get more users and I definitely don’t want to use their software, no matter how great they are. Of course Ubuntu is miles away from these vendors, but it’s going through a similar and very dangerous path. Again, this is only a user perspective and a user that Ubuntu is not focused in (and I’m glad they have a very strong focus on other users). I just wished Ubuntu would give a bit more back to a community it takes so much from.
So every time we talked and you gave me a hard time about my crazy talk you’re actually on Arch?
I’ll get you when you come back…
I’ve tried Arch in the past and quite loved it but couldn’t stand it because the Arch team didn’t think they should package debug/devel builds in pacman. :S. I went to Gentoo afterwards.
The only reason I don’t use Ubuntu is because of the slowness of the distro and the outdated packages. Please Ubuntu has been slowly becoming a commericalised distro.
I don’t understand, what do you mean by Ubuntu software?
I think he means the versions of applications that are available in Ubuntu repositories.
Just use aptitude instead of the deprecated apt-get/apt-cache, and you will get everything in a single command
(and extra bonus, aptitude search has much more relevant result than apt-cache search).
It is also worth to note that pacman is so fast because it almost makes no check on version dependencies, so basically it is ok if your system is always up to date, so for instance, I often had the problem that I needed to install a package without upgrading the whole system (because of lack of time to deal with possible consequences), but installing the package would pull in an upgrade to a library and that would break other applications. So in the end, it all depends how you use your linux distributions, but being fast has drawbacks
Ubuntu actually dropped aptitude in 10.10. But you can try aptdcon – the console frontend to what is the debian version of packagekit. It is quite usable also.
“by default”. You can install it, though.
The claim that apt-get/apt-cache is deprecated is inaccurate. Maybe point to some official stance from any of Debian/Ubuntu projects?
If you want packagename-only search hits (what ‘aptitude search’ gives), use ‘apt-cache –names-only search’.
http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-pkgtools.en.html#s-aptitude
“Note that aptitude is the preferred program for daily package management from console.”
@CT, ‘not preferred’ != ‘deprecated’; anyways I’m aware there’s a bunch of people loving aptitude, and maybe that’s what’s meant there. It’s not an official stance. There was once a stance where a aptitude was promoted over apt-get for a dist-upgrade, but even that didn’t mean apt-get was deprecated. It was simply a (strong) recommendation.
You do know that people are working to make the Ubuntu user experience available on Arch?
See https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=100200 and https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=99746
Sure, not the same, but though you might be interested.
I didn’t know about that, actually the last comments I saw on the Arch Forum was why would anyone want to use Ubuntu’s modifications on Arch if you can just use Ubuntu instead.
In a few months when I get tired of Ubuntu’s old software, that will great
ubuntu’s modifications are not upstream because upstream doesn’t want them. here’s the tiny difference.
They’re not upstream because Ubuntu develop’s in-house and enforces its own copyright on important stuff like Unity and ayatana.
You are making noise. Please stop! Nearly all software Ubuntu ships is ‘owned’ by someone else, and that means they can’t enforce any copyright on it.
Actually, all their Ayatana project code (the Indicator Menu, Unity, Notify OSD, etc) are owned by Canonical, because they do enforce copyright assignment to them. It doesn’t mean they are evil, because it’s still open source, so you have the same freedom as you do with any other open source software. But there are downsides to copyright assignment (for instance, the only real contributors to the Ayatana project are Canonical employees, being it a coincidence or not, it’s not healthy).
Ubuntu often doesn’t work with GNOME as other developers do. Meaning: the way of suggesting changes is like a hit or run. You hear nothing for 6 months, some tarball is dropped, then you hear nothing when feedback is given.
Meaning: upstream doesn’t want them is just not true.
@n3rd : maybe because some of the Ubuntu’s modifications may not be well suited enough ?
On top of that going from Gnome to Unity is even worst concerning the user lock’in possibility.
But this is Ubuntu goal : have its own brand, desktop experience
I don’t think your examples of vendor-lock-in examples are that good. E.g. NotifyOSD is an upstream in itself. It’s an implementation of a spec and can act as a drop-in replacement for GNOME’s implementation. There’s no reason why other distributions couldn’t package it, in much the same fashion that they can package Firefox, Thunderbird or Pidgin and offer those to their users as alternatives to the respective GNOME pendants. It should be similar with indicator applets.
My list wasn’t exhaustive at all, it’s just the items I miss most. Notify OSD can be easily installed, but applications are not meant for it, so it’s a mess when it’s used as a drop-in replacement. The problem is that because it’s only used in Ubuntu, applications have no motivation to support it (even with Ubuntu patches existing for almost every software that uses notifications, just one more example of software written for Ubuntu which is never going upstream).
Those patches really should be upstream (and, as far as I can tell, have all at least been filed there). The notifications specification specifically intends that applications check the server capabilities and tune their notifications to suit. When they don’t, they’re broken and need to be fixed.
>The problem is that because it’s only used in Ubuntu,
That’s weird. I was under the impression they just implemented the same protocol for these notifications as the one that KDE4 uses.
That was the whole point. One notification protocol to rule them all.
Same for the indicator stuff. It’s just a gnome implementation of stuff available for KDE, where canonical thought KDE had the better api’s.
And both protocols are part of the freedesk-spec. Which is the upstream Canonical was actually collaborating with, rather than Gnome.
I’m on the: they can be their own upstream cart. All their stuff is GPL. They have a bug tracker, you can get support.
The gnome foundation itself isn’t as ‘independent’ as it would appear either. And hundreds of gnome projects (meamo, one-laptop-per-child-interface, etc. all exist outside of gnome).
This whole ‘but it doesn’t use our infrastructure’ argument is false. It assumes a centralized control of code. The whole point of launchpad is that you can fork on your own infrastructure and hook up the infrastructure with launchpad.
I’m not saying Canonical is making the best of efforts to please a community. But that’s because, unlike other distrobutions, their focus isn’t on the constant in-fighting in the community, but on their product. Trying to convert as many people to a free desktop as they could possible convert.
I’m completely confident that if somebody from Arch would send them a mail and said we want this stuff in Arch, could you help, they would go and help out.
They aren’t trying to sell YOU linux. You are already converted. It’s not linux for nerds or the elite. It’s linux for my (and your) Mom.
It’s the easy granny distrobution that can compete with Windows and OS-X. Can’t we all just agree that that’s great thing, and that the other types of linux users are already well served?
I would suggest to try out openSUSE. I recently moved there (duh) from arch. I expected many annoyances but zypper is actually about as fast (faster with searching) and while it doesn’t technically have a rolling release schedule, it has OBS. OBS allows you to set certain packages (like all of GNOME or the multimedia stuff) to be from another repository. This would on other distributions break stuff – but OBS, acting like some kind of auto-backporting tool, rebuilds all packages for your specific version (using the openSUSE serverpark) so it’s rock stable yet up to date.
And with openSUSE you can be sure that every improvement is contributed back upstream – openSUSE has this as policy.
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I have faced the same problem in the past. I am hooked on Ubuntu’s large repositories, ease of use and the great community, but unhappy with some decisions Canonical has made and is making. These include the inclusion of Mono and Mono-based apps, controversy after controversy about upstream contributions, design decisions and mostly about their inability to communicate their vision.
My temporary decision has been to switch to Kubuntu which gives me all of the advantages of Ubuntu with fewer of the problems. It is pretty much OTB KDE, but with access to the large repositories and PPAs. Besides KDE 4.5 is much better than GNOME 2 or 3.
If they start being autocratic with Kubuntu as they have been with Ubuntu, then I may switch to another distribution such as Fedora or even Arch, both of which I have used.
I use none of Mono software, but I don’t know what’s your problem with it. It’s FLOSS isn’t it? Which distro excludes it from its repos, and why?
You can find more linux software here:
http://tips-linux.net/en/software
I hope it is useful