Doing deals with OEMs actually seems like a better strategy today than it was even just a few years ago when Canonical did their original deal with Dell.
For one thing, Ubuntu has (for better or worse) made significant progress toward their UI vision. Unity has been polarizing, but many users (especially the "normal" people who are likely to buy an Inspiron or similar) seem to like it.
Even more importantly, a significant number of users today (in any case, more than there were back then) basically only care about having a web browser installed. This means they are less likely to care about having MS Windows (FF and Chrome run on all three "major" platforms).
I only using a web browser and emacs and don't care about polish much. 1) Canonical did a good thing by owning the UI with Unity; they should make it cooler, more beautiful with every release 2) They should focus on providing several high end, many low end models for developers, and experiment better with ARM based models, for example raspberry pi ubuntu 3) 6 months intervals seem to frequent now and maybe it would be better to shift to yearly releases. 4) the software center should be improved better and better.
But when Microsoft change the GUI (as they did between 3.1 and 95, 2000 and XP, XP and Vista and will between Vista and Windows 8) so there is always going to be relearning as technology advances.
Shouldn't people have the choice which new GUI they learn?
And the relearning curve doesn't seem to be hindering the Mac, or the iPad, both of which face the same challenge and yet are taking market share.
Also, I think this is slowly becoming less of an issue. A substantial number (10-15% of global PC market share, depending who you ask) of users have made the jump to Mac, which is quite different from Windows. And on top of that, many now use iPads or Android tablets, with even newer UI paradigms.
When you combine this with much of your data now being available through cloud services, the barrier for trying something like Linux should become lower.
The latest Ubuntu desktop is absolutely stunningly beautiful. The first time I saw it couldn't tell if it was an improved Windows 8 or some new release of Mac OS X. The fact is I think this may have a shot with the masses.
If the latest rumors of EA being in talks with Ubuntu are true, then if massively successful games start appearing for the platform, it may well signify a turning point for desktop Linux.
Here's hoping widespread desktop Linux finally becomes a reality. Well deserved for the amazing work Ubuntu has put into it.
I'm not sure it's a great idea to distribute Ubuntu too widely in its current state. It's not fit for end users. Yesterday I had to fix my third broken Ubuntu installation in a year or so and it's always for the same reason: Failed upgrades. Upgrades leaving the system in an unbootable state has to be an extremely rare event and it's not.
How can this be fixed? I think the entire package management system has to be based on a more robust transactional infrastructure. Unless the user confirms the success of an upgrade, the system has to be rolled back to its original state. If the system doesn't boot, it must boot straight into the old system version on the next reboot.
Upgrades should not be something that anyone hesitates to do, but I know Ubuntu users who'd rather install new software on a separate computer instead of upgrading the fragile Ubuntu installation. The close coupling of application versions to OS versions is the main reason for that. The sources.list concept is just too complicated for most people.
I think we easily forget just how broken the rest of the OS were. If I evaluate Linux as if I am a few years back in time, I don't mind the lack of good QA.
I've also broken an install because I tried an upgrade and there wasn't enough free space.
But that doesn't mean Ubuntu isn't fit for end users. My mother and my sister are running Ubuntu on their laptops and do just fine. And they are in no way technical: they just use the OS for their needs, be it browsing, music, movie playback, photo management, etc. I was actually surprised when I went at a small barbecue for my sister's birthday and she had brought her laptop and was playing CDs some friends brought with music. There was no friction -- the laptop just did its job, just as it would have been with any other OS.
You do have a point though: upgrades should be transactional and I'm surprised there is no way to rollback a failed upgrade. I'm actually postponing upgrading them to 12.04 because I don't want to risk breaking the current setup they have and give myself extra work for nothing. I've decided to only apply the security updates for now and switch to 12.04 when end-of-life is reached for their current version.
My advice is to use "apt-get dist-upgrade" in the text console (Ctrl+Alt+F1, not a gnome-terminal!) and it should go fine. I've upgraded 4 machines from 10.04 to 12.04. Only one failed to auto-upgrade and needed to fall back to the console to complete installation.
The most problematic part IMO is Evolution. This program almost always causes trouble during upgrades, not only on Ubuntu (I had problems upgrading Slackware GSB at home too). Use Thunderbird or Claws or whatever other mailer if you can...
In this particular case the upgrade was interrupted. I have around 250MB on my / partition now. But as I prefer to upgrade from text console, I caught all "out of space" messages and fixed it trivially (made more room, repeat the command). That's the only problem I ever had with a Debian upgrade. I typically use testing.
Now Ubuntu upgrades are hidden behind a GUI, and you are told not to do it manually. It's not uncommon that they fail to cover all difficult cases. Either way, I have Ubuntu on my mother's machine and I've become scared of making upgrades. A few times I had to drop to IRC to ask for specific instructions because I couldn't figure it on my own.
I'm not great with linux (just use it for home fileservers and the like), and for me it's generally a rule that debian distupgrades go catastrophically wrong (libc going out of sync and half the binaries on the system wouldn't run, that kind of thing). It's not foolproof like an OS X or Windows upgrade.
Ubuntu =/= Debian. I have several servers that have been upgraded from Woody up to Squeeze (that's 5 consecutive dist-upgrades in 9 years) and it's less problematic with each release. The only serious difficulties were switching from xf86 to xorg, then apache to apache2. Switching kernels (2.4 -> 2.6) or libc was quite painless.
Since Etch (Etch to Lenny to Squeeze) except for a couple of minor glitches going with the defaults "just works".
From what I've seen Ubuntu often fails upgrades because of the GUI (at some point during upgrade one or other part of the GUI fails/restart and kills the upgrade process itself). Simple advice: dist-upgrade in a text console (not a gnome-terminal!), and it should work fine.
Canonical may not see Ubuntu as having the luxury of waiting until everyone on the internet deems it's "fit for end users", because their competitors haven't. Microsoft never waited until DOS or Windows were perfected, they just released them once they thought they were adequate, and the standard advice there forever has been to do a full reinstall of the system rather than an in-place upgrade.
"Microsoft never waited until DOS or Windows were perfected, they just released them once they thought they were adequate"
NEVER WAITED??? I bet you were too young to remember those days because Micorsoft(Bill Gates) promised Windows(3.11) like 6 years before it was ready. Windows was coming "soon", and "soon" and "soon", for years.
And better we don't talk about DOS. DRDOS was much better than MSDOS, but MS made windows over DRDOS so they had not to compete on technical merits.
Yeah. Maybe btrfs (and it's snapshots) is a good option for system-upgrades which end into non-booting situations, but generally I think it is possible with growth of community and QA infrastructure to minimize situations like these (also, if there is not enough space, the best option is not to allow upgrade in the firstplace).
Thats nonsense, a broken Linux distro is not cost effective to fix because the number of breakpoints is innumerable. Zounds of configuration files, buggy software any an extremely branching entry point and shared dependencies make it quicker to wipe your install and start again. This is what I do with my installs; if it breaks wipe it.
That's funny because Apple has a very pleasing OS upgrade experience. Even better, the machine upgrade experience was amazing to me when I bought a new macbook and was able to migrate installed applications and settings from the old machine seamlessly. Doing something like that on windows or linux is still a pain.
Here's the big question on my mind: why can I not go on Amazon right now and buy an Ubuntu laptop? There is one I have seen (and I have searched for a while), where someone is reselling used laptops with Ubuntu installed.
There are so many device makers out there trying to replicate the feel of a MacBook Pro with Windows. Seems like it would be easier with Ubuntu. The success of Apple sprang mostly from marketing and differentiation, it could happen to Ubuntu with a little motivation.
If you're looking for a Ubuntu preloaded laptop, you can take a look at System76 ( http://www.system76.com ). They only make Linux computers (laptop/desktop/server), though they don't sell through Amazon.
The main point was the "from Amazon" part. It really seems like the largest online retailer would have some company, no matter how big or small, selling Linux laptops.
As far as when Ubuntu will be back at Best Buy here in the United States, or "When at Best Buy down the road?" Kenyon said, "We're working on it and I'm confident we're going to get there."
A better question is whether Best Buy will still be selling computers or anything at all down the road.
I'm happy Ubuntu is starting to gain this type of traction, but it needs two things to really make the leap:
1) Mass market game compatibility.
The mainstream computer user needs office tools, a browser, email, music, video, and games. Games are the only absentee from Ubuntu. Some major upgrades to Wine could solve this.
2) A mobile strategy
There's definitely been attempts to put Ubuntu on mobile devices, but nothing concrete from Canonical. If they had been more forward thinking, they could have been Android instead of Android being Android.
Finally, I'd personally like to see a lite version of the latest Ubuntu releases. The reason I got into Ubuntu in the first place was to bring new life to my old hardware. Unity doesnt work at all on old hardware, and the fallback is not as good as the old Gnome 2 experience. I'm still running 10.10 on a number of machines because it was my favorite release.
I don't think that Ubuntu needs a mobile strategy, and related to this, it probably does not need games either.
Input methods have a huge impact on application design. A app for touch devices is significantly different from a mouse and keyboard device.
Since touch devices are invading the living room and become premier gaming platforms (also in combination with gamepads and large TVs), the classic desktop does only need to focus on applications and use cases that are optimized for Mouse and Keyboard input.
That's why I think Ubuntu should stay with the classic desktop, and Android should keep its focus on devices with less precise/fast inputs like touch/trackball/remote controls
Xubuntu is your "lite" release for old hardware. It's shipped with XFCE instead of Unity so it doesn't require much to run. I believe Xubuntu 12.04 is released same-day as the 12.04 release.
> Canonical will be opening their first Beijing office this year
> At more than 200 Dell stores in China, there is Ubuntu branding present and Dell China employees knowledgeable about Ubuntu Linux.
One of the things I noticed when I went to download Precise Pangolin is that there's a "Chinese Ubuntu" link featured prominently at the bottom of the page[0]. It looks like they've made China a primary target market, since the vast majority of Windows users there are running pirated copies and cannot afford to pay for a legitimate copy.
i'd rather pay an ubuntu tax than a microsoft tax so i really look forward to buying a new machine with the option of ubuntu even if it costs a little more.
but my main concern will be the those who buy an ubuntu machine and then expect to run ms office or other windows only piece of software on it. i will be getting those calls. thankfully most of the home users aren't as dependent on windows only apps anymore.
Even if I have moved away from Ubuntu, if mass users adopt it, I will be happy. And I think they are doing a great job at purposefully" bloating" their platform to accommodate newbies.
The skills I have on Linux only become more valuable as the user base grows.
If these figures are legit, then this is pretty cool news for the open source / Linux community; however, wonder what real user #'s look like since this "...count also obviously doesn't count those that install Ubuntu manually or obtain Ubuntu installations via other means," which seems to be the way that most folks currently get Ubuntu. Either way, hope the trend continues so, at the very least, consumers come to realize there is an alternative to Windows (besides Mac of course).
I don't believe the figures until after they've been sold. The demand for Ubuntu is pretty much non-existent outside the technology enthusiast arena. Ubuntu is just not as polished as Windows either.
OEMs also know there's an easy way out if they don't sell - chuck windows on them and shift them out through clearance sales.
This is all marketoid speil from their marketing VP at the moment.
...when I talk with OEMs and others about Linux pre-loads, I commonly [sic] here a "significant percentage" of these Linux pre-loaded systems usually get wiped by their customers and replaced with pirated copies of Windows -- especially in the Asian markets, where customers are just going after the Linux PCs due to the lower sales cost.
In Romania it's common practice to sell cheaper laptops running FreeDOS or some Linux (say, Acer with Linpus) with the expectation that people are just going to wipe it and install a pirated Windows on it.
If you look at the online review for them, the first remark people have is about how Windows drivers are hard to find. Or they ask about the Windows score.
I once called the Samsung hotline asking about Linux support for a laptop they were selling with FreeDOS and the answer was that they only collaborate with Microsoft.
Otoh, it is actually quite hard to find a laptop that's Linux certified. We bought a HP ProBook just because it was certified although it came with Suse.
Oh, it's not hard to find which model is certified. It's hard to actually find it selling in a store!
Also, I don't want to buy a ThinkPad if I have to buy it with Windows then wipe that.
So my choices are laptops that come with FreeDOS or Linux and that are actually certified for Linux. Because, rumor has it, even some laptops that do come with Linux don't have proper Linux support for all their components -- they are built with the assumption of a Windows install.
At this point you don't have that many choices and if you also want a particular hardware configuration (say, i5) the choice narrows down a lot.
About time. In many countries there are laptops that come with "FreeDos", which is rather pointless. If they aren't going to use Windows, why not just use a great Linux distro like Ubuntu?
Sure Microsoft might not like that, but unless Microsoft is paying them to not allow Linux on their laptops (which I think would be illegal), then who cares?
There was a line of Thinkpads that you could buy with FreeDOS installed for a while. I think there was an understanding that everyone would replace the OS before even booting into FreeDOS once. Perhaps they didn't want to support an official distro?
My honest first thought: hasn't Ubuntu's share of the Linux market been dropping since their introduction of the universally-reviled, highly unintuitive Unity UI? I tried out 12.04 a couple months ago, tried to use it for a few weeks, and very enthusiastically retreated back to CentOS.
Ubuntu has by far the biggest mind share. On HN it's the only distro I'm seeing in the news. On VPS hosting it is most of the time featured alongside Debian.
I hate Unity myself, but I've switched to Xubuntu. There's also Kubuntu, and even if these are supported by the community, they do a better job than most other distros.
I guess I'm in the minority then. Unity is one of the few desktops which gets completely out of your way and uses minimum screen real estate while still remaining usable by non-technical users.
With HUD in 12.04, it's the only widely-used DE I can control almost entirely with keyboard.
i hate unity. it's nothing but distracting eye candy. a non standard waste of resources. but i like ubuntu overall so at the mo i use xubuntu. suits all my needs without unity.
but ubuntu is still an organisation to support especially in terms of them helping produce hardware that will be 100% linux compatible no matter what distro i choose to run.
I don't know what resources you are talking about, but it's definitely not wasting my screen resources as others do.
My vertical spaced is saved my menu-on-panel integration, on fullscreen title goes into panel too. Left-panel is also nice, it doesn't do "minimize on second click" as docky or others, it does nice "overview" on click on multi-window app. And finally, it also saves space by combining launcher and app-switcher.
Could you give me some stats? I wouldn't expect a population to go and spend a lot of money on a CD to install Windows onto a marginally cheaper machine
The obvious difference is that you cannot use FreeDOS for typical desktop activities (like surfing the web, reading mail, Facebook), whereas you can use Ubuntu for almost everything, except Gaming and Photoshop. From my experience with "normal" (non-techy) users, they don't bother switching OSes as long as they can use it for what they want to do, which is in many cases little more than running a browser.
For one thing, Ubuntu has (for better or worse) made significant progress toward their UI vision. Unity has been polarizing, but many users (especially the "normal" people who are likely to buy an Inspiron or similar) seem to like it.
Even more importantly, a significant number of users today (in any case, more than there were back then) basically only care about having a web browser installed. This means they are less likely to care about having MS Windows (FF and Chrome run on all three "major" platforms).