[Cialug] RE: UBUNTU

[D. Joe Anderson]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 03:59:17PM -0600, Korver, Aaron wrote:
> What is it's "catch"?  Gentoo's is compile it to optimize it, Knoppix is run
> from CD, anything special about UBUNTU?

It's a commercial distribution.  So, unlike Gentoo, Knoppix, and
Debian, its release engineering isn't entirely up to volunteers. 

It's aimed squarely at the desktop/laptop, newbie,
non-technical, non-server market (though I think they do have a
server version or install set or something, since in the end its
still GNU/Linux underneath).  The disabled root account is just
one example of this--the "right way" to do administrative stuff
is to use sudo rather than to drop into root.  If the install
"just works" no one should *have* to use root, anyway.  I think
the closest comparison here in terms of target market is the
MacOS X desktop market.

It's a Debian derivative.  So, compare in that regard to Knoppix
or Lindows or <insert a bazillion other Debian derivatives
here>.

The billionaire astronaut backing is no joke.  The money behind
the company behind Ubuntu comes from the South African moneybags
who paid for a ride on the Soyuz or something like that.  He
started the Thawte commercial certificate authority back in the
days before Network Solutions bought it up.

That money pays several people who were already participants in
free software development, including some folks from the GNOME
project, I think.  

Release cycle:  Their plan is to follow the same kind of release
schedule as GNOME, which is to have a release every six months
come hell or high water.  This is supposed to help
everybody--developers and users--to plan better, I think.  If
someone wants to make it into the next release, they know what
their timeline is.  If they don't, not such a huge deal, because
the next one is 6 months away.  Contrast this with Debian's
very, uh, deliberate "when its ready" release plan.  Ubuntu's
first 6 month release date isn't until later this spring, so I
guess we'll see how it goes.  Works great for GNOME, or so they
tell me.


-- 
D. Joe Anderson         www.etrumeus.com/~deejoe
"DRM [...] is to copyright law as a machine gun on                                          
a motion detector is to real estate law"  -- Don Marti