Question: Has Ubuntu brought some structure...

[Snowhog]

Yes. "In the 1990s, Shuttleworth participated as one of the developers of the Debian operating system."

[bsniadajewski]

Yes. "In the 1990s, Shuttleworth participated as one of the developers of the Debian operating system."

I thought so. hence, I believe, the use of APT instead of RPM or TGZ.

[tek_heretik]

The Red Hat thing was just a guess guys, I love to speculate. But yeah, rpm is a nasty package management system, way more flawed that Debian's, I've had very little trouble with apt. I did not know that about Mark, ya learn something new everyday.

As for the Red Hat legal thing, Red Hat is the commercial version, why wouldn't they protect it? Fedora is the 'free' testing ground of Red Hat, so Red Hat can take those improvements and incorporate them in to their commercial OS, nice deal they have going there.

[james147]

i would think its because debian is a really good base to start with and the debian packaging system is way better then that of those rpm style distros.

Shame the debian packaging system is still not a very good system just better then most of others.

Personally I have had far less problems with pacman then I have with apt-get and less with apt-get then with yum...I also find it in that order for easy of use

[bsniadajewski]

Shame the debian packaging system is still not a very good system just better then most of others.

Personally I have had far less problems with pacman then I have with apt-get and less with apt-get then with yum...I also find it in that order for easy of use

Have you tried opensuse and its Zypper for software management? The Qt/KDE UI is quite similar to Synaptic or Muon and its CLI has syntax quite similar to APT. I have it going on one of my HDD's (though not right now) and I haven't run into any problems yet. I even have it pointed to the Tumbleweed (its rolling-release style) repos without issues yet.

[james147]

Have you tried opensuse and its Zypper for software management? The Qt/KDE UI is quite similar to Synaptic or Muon and its CLI has syntax quite similar to APT. I have it going on one of my HDD's (though not right now) and I haven't run into any problems yet. I even have it pointed to the Tumbleweed (its rolling-release style) repos without issues yet.

I tried opensuse along time ago, hated its YAST config utility... but for yum most of my experience is with redhat to probably slightly tainted *grumbles about red hat*. I don't care much for gui package manager and tend to use the command line utils.

[tek_heretik]

I tried opensuse along time ago, hated its YAST config utility... but for yum most of my experience is with redhat to probably slightly tainted *grumbles about red hat*. I don't care much for gui package manager and tend to use the command line utils.

I found YAST extremely annoying too, hated the package manager too, nothing but dependency nightmares, SuSE never stayed long on my HDD. It takes forever to install and it's slooooooooooow overall performance wise.

[dmeyer]

I use openSUSE 12.2 for my primary disto and personally I have never had any dependency problems even with multiple repos added. I think its usually best to use 1-click installs then not stay subscribed to the repo. I absolutely love zypper, its so fast once you disable the refreshing of repos every time you install something or do nearly anything else. Yast as a whole is unnecessary for a desktop user but I have found it nifty a few times when setting up networks. The package manager module in Yast I feel is actually excellent once you fix the weird styling.

[tek_heretik]

I use openSUSE 12.2 for my primary disto and personally I have never had any dependency problems even with multiple repos added. I think its usually best to use 1-click installs then not stay subscribed to the repo. I absolutely love zypper, its so fast once you disable the refreshing of repos every time you install something or do nearly anything else. Yast as a whole is unnecessary for a desktop user but I have found it nifty a few times when setting up networks. The package manager module in Yast I feel is actually excellent once you fix the weird styling.

I haven't tried it in a few years, maybe more, maybe it's better now, but I know one thing for sure, they are always releasing 'release candidates', arrrrrrrrrrg.

[dmeyer]

I haven't tried it in a few years, maybe more, maybe it's better now, but I know one thing for sure, they are always releasing 'release candidates', arrrrrrrrrrg.

When they release - they release incredibly stable and polished builds. Honestly, no distro comes close for stability while still being fairly up to date and the community contributes upstream a lot. When I think of the ideal distro for schools or universities then openSUSE comes to mind.

(K)ubuntu is much better for home users although the LTS releases and some of the other releases definitely inspire confidence for the future. Kubuntu is the distro of choice in the Brazilian and Canary Island school system right? (K)ubuntu is better of late with finding balance but there isn't consistency. One release is fantastic, one is awful, two good, one so bad you wish you'd never touched it. To be fair though, the bad releases are usually not the fault of the Kubuntu devs, its usually something from upstream and because of the rapid release cycle Kubuntu gets burdened with it.

Which distro do I recommend for any Linux newbie? Kubuntu. Which distro do I use on all my live usbs with persistence? Kubuntu. Which distro has the single best community? Kubuntu. Newest KDE (and other) software with a reliable base? Kubuntu.

Kubuntu is perfect for nearly all use cases except mass deployments, and mass administration where I think openSUSE does it right. They just don't have any LTS releases even if Evergreen is really good.

[james147]

To be fair though, the bad releases are usually not the fault of the Kubuntu devs, its usually something from upstream and because of the rapid release cycle Kubuntu gets burdened with it.

It is a problem with lack of alpha/beta testers. It probably works for the few devs that work on it constantly but when brought to a larger audience its cracks begin to show. The only way to fix this is to encourage more people to try the alpha/beta release AND report the bugs back to the developers. The more people that do this the smoother the release will be.

Which distro do I recommend for any Linux newbie? Kubuntu. Which distro do I use on all my live usbs with persistence? Kubuntu. Which distro has the single best community? Kubuntu. Newest KDE (and other) software with a reliable base? Kubuntu.

Kubuntu is perfect for nearly all use cases except mass deployments, and mass administration where I think openSUSE does it right. They just don't have any LTS releases even if Evergreen is really good.

Personally I love ArchLinux more then kubuntu now on my systems, but still recommend Kubuntu to anyone that wants to get into Linux or really, anyone who doesn't like to know exactly what their computer is doing and how it works . Kubuntu does have a great community that's the main reason I still troll about on these forums

[dmeyer]

It is a problem with lack of alpha/beta testers. It probably works for the few devs that work on it constantly but when brought to a larger audience its cracks begin to show. The only way to fix this is to encourage more people to try the alpha/beta release AND report the bugs back to the developers. The more people that do this the smoother the release will be.

More testers would definitely be good but I still feel the poor devs are very under resourced. They do such an amazing job for how small a team they are and with only limited commercial support. I think Blue Systems is the company we need to thank for hiring a few devs but its still not the same as say what the backing Fedora has.

I must admit, I'm one of the guilty parties that doesn't beta test. The big problem for me with beta testing is that I really have no clue what to look for. I'm sure the best way to beta test is to just use it like you normally would but the problem is I'm scared of losing anything and I don't really have the time to set-up Akonadi/Kontact and let Nepomuk/Strigi index every two weeks. I don't have a play machine so when I do test it, it would probably be under virtual box and that's never a fair test environment either.

Personally I love ArchLinux more then kubuntu now on my systems, but still recommend Kubuntu to anyone that wants to get into Linux or really, anyone who doesn't like to know exactly what their computer is doing and how it works . Kubuntu does have a great community that's the main reason I still troll about on these forums

I was and still am a huge Arch fan. I ran with it for quite a while but I had a few issues with it. Bumblebee kept breaking which was an absolute showstopper for me. As I study math and economics I work a lot with some proprietary software, namely Mathematica and Matlab. Arch is almost never a supported distro and even though you can install it, and it usually runs fine, when you do run into a problem you just can't get support. The community was usually good at trying to resolve issues but with proprietary software more often than not the only solution lies with the vendor. Even the best wiki in the world can't help sometimes. Heck I've even has issues with Kubuntu. Luckily you just play it off as having Ubuntu and they will support you just fine.

My biggest hang up though is that I could never install Arch on somebody's computer knowing that they won't run into an issue sooner rather than later. Arch was reasonably stable for quite a while but in the last 6 months they've made a few big changes that have borked quite a few systems. I'm sure they will stabilize in the near future but for now I'm giving it a wide berth .

[james147]

I don't have a play machine so when I do test it, it would probably be under virtual box and that's never a fair test environment either.

A Virtualbox test is still better then no test The best place to get involved with testing is on the freenode irc channel #kubuntu-devel where all the developers tend to hang out.

Luckily you just play it off as having Ubuntu and they will support you just fine.

Can always lie and say your running ubuntu, as long as you know who to and are willing to translate their instructions but yes, it is lacking in cermicial support a bit... one thing I love is that steam seem to be aware of it and might be willing to support it, at least that's the jist I get when reading their announcements.

My biggest hang up though is that I could never install Arch on somebody's computer knowing that they won't run into an issue sooner rather than later.

I would never do this, if they want to try Arch you hand them the link to the beginner guide and see how they do... if they cannot install it from that (even with your help) then they are not going to be able to maintain it and are better off with something like kubuntu which is always my first suggestion.

Arch was reasonably stable for quite a while but in the last 6 months they've made a few big changes that have borked quite a few systems. I'm sure they will stabilize in the near future but for now I'm giving it a wide berth .

They should be back to being stable again now, or at least soon. Switching to systemd was a huge change but if you followed their new reports (which every arch user should do) and did what they said then you should have been fine and to be fair, I have seen more kubuntu computers die during a major upgrade like this then I have seen Arch boxes and ArchLinux is not for people who don't like to read up on current events.

[dmeyer]

A Virtualbox test is still better then no test The best place to get involved with testing is on the freenode irc channel #kubuntu-devel where all the developers tend to hang out.

Thanks, I'll definitely try set a Saturday aside every now and then to tackle an alpha/beta build. The big issue is my absolute lack of experience with bug reporting, doing stack traces, general debugging or even something as simple as package programs. If there was a nice simple video series by a dev on say YouTube that covers all these things (even only in brief) would be perfect and give prospectus testers a much easier time giving meaningful, quality feedback.

They should be back to being stable again now, or at least soon. Switching to systemd was a huge change but if you followed their new reports (which every arch user should do) and did what they said then you should have been fine and to be fair, I have seen more kubuntu computers die during a major upgrade like this then I have seen Arch boxes and ArchLinux is not for people who don't like to read up on current events.

I never had a borked system with Arch so all is good for me. Maybe I'll give it another try in Vbox in a month or two. Its pity they moved away from their old install system. I quite liked it but it was horrible unmaintained.

[james147]

Thanks, I'll definitely try set a Saturday aside every now and then to tackle an alpha/beta build. The big issue is my absolute lack of experience with bug reporting, doing stack traces, general debugging or even something as simple as package programs. If there was a nice simple video series by a dev on say YouTube that covers all these things (even only in brief) would be perfect and give prospectus testers a much easier time giving meaningful, quality feedback.

I highly recommend the #kubuntu-devel irc channel if you want to help test, they will help you get started and tell you want to do.