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Debian Open Source Operating Systems Ubuntu

Ubuntu Turns 10 110

Scott James Remnant, now Technical Lead on ChromeOS, was a Debian developer before that. That's how he became involved from the beginning (becoming Developer Manager, and then serving on the Technical Board) on the little derivative distribution that Mark Shuttleworth decided to make of Debian Unstable, and for which the name Ubuntu was eventually chosen. On this date in 2004, Ubuntu 4.10 -- aka Warty Warthog, or just Warty -- was released, and Remnant has shared a detailed, nostalgic look back at the early days of the project that has (whatever else you think of it ) become one of the most influential in the world of open source and Free software. I was excited that Canonical sent out disks that I could pass around to friends and family that looked acceptably polished to them in a way that Sharpie-marked Knoppix CD-ROMs didn't, and that the polish extended to the installer, the desktop, and the included constellation of software, too.
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Ubuntu Turns 10

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  • before unbuntu (Score:4, Interesting)

    by asv108 ( 141455 ) <asv@@@ivoss...com> on Monday October 20, 2014 @10:20AM (#48186145) Homepage Journal
    I was running Gentoo on my desktop and laptop to get the latest performance optimizations since most distros at the time were optimized for older processors. Ubuntu was really the first distro that was optimized out of the box for performance desktops. I don't miss debugging compilation issues with "emerge world".
    • I hardly would call Unity "optimized". The animations are laggy as hell and it takes ages for Dash to pop up. And this comes from a guy who otherwise actually likes the user experience and graphics of Unity.
      • Unity was super fast and smooth, for the two minutes I ran it under Ubuntu 11.04 before switching to Gnome 2. But I don't remember the dash (why would I want to search my programs instead of just running them?)
        The OpenGL performance or that for the main OS GUI is totally random, depending on drivers, on which you have very limited control. Many linux advocates solve that problem by yelling "You're not running a less than two-year-old Intel laptop so you must be an idiot" in slashdot comments.

        • Re:before unbuntu (Score:4, Informative)

          by jones_supa ( 887896 ) on Monday October 20, 2014 @11:57AM (#48186949)
          I still don't understand why we would even need fast chips and premium OpenGL drivers just to run the desktop acceptably. Compositing some simple application bitmaps shouldn't require everything tuned up to the maximum. Windows is super smooth even on GMA950 and there's plenty of eye candy.
          • Windows Vista and higher is the about the equivalent of running Wayland on linux, which still is future technology as of now..
            Or so I visualize the problem, even if the comparison may be not entirely accurate.
            So imagine linux on Wayland, with GMA950 chipset and a "premium" driver i.e. efficient, low CPU use. That ought to be smooth. If you don't have those things then CPU power is wasted and bitmaps are copied uselessly. Even though there's only one physical RAM and it's on the FSB (front side bus) along wi

    • by Anonymous Coward

      emerge world

      There's your problem. You should have been doing emerge -vDNu world --with-bdeps=y.

  • by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Monday October 20, 2014 @10:21AM (#48186151)

    when I distributed my Knoppix-based desktop demo I had a licensed logo (Sitting Baby Tux by Nicolas Rougier) and 8cm printed discs. That thing was insanely popular, probably not least because SQUEEE! factor.

    http://www.labri.fr/perso/nrou... [labri.fr] -looks feckin' fantastic in a frame.

  • by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Monday October 20, 2014 @10:23AM (#48186167) Homepage Journal

    I didn't realize it was only 11000 months old. I thought it was more like 1010 times that age.

  • Happy Birthday (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zoward ( 188110 ) <email.me.at.zoward.at.gmail.com> on Monday October 20, 2014 @10:38AM (#48186259) Homepage

    Between Unity and Mir, it's considered cool to Bash Ubuntu these days, but even their most stalwart detractors have to admit they raised the bar for desktop Linux from the first day of their release. There's a reason it's become both a popular distro and a popular base for derivatives.

    Thank you, Ubuntu, and Happy Birthday.

    • Ubuntu 5.04 was my first exposure to Linux. I chose it because even in those early days of the distribution, Ubuntu was known for fixing the dependency issues in the repositories. That was their claim to fame.

      I moved on a couple years ago (to Linux Mint, of course), but the Ubuntu base is great, since I know I can get just about any linux app packaged for it.

      Happy Birthday!

    • by Trogre ( 513942 )

      I don't know. Can you configure it out of the box to talk to an LDAP server yet, or does it still assume that everyone is outside a managed network?

  • The OS that wasn't (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 20, 2014 @10:38AM (#48186261)

    Yep, everybody hates Ubuntu these days, the only linux distro that had a chance gets hated into oblivion. Open source is anti success. They did everything to stop them from ever getting market share.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If Ubuntu had focused on making a good distro and left the political correctness stuff out it might've gotten less hate.
  • debian to be forked (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 20, 2014 @10:40AM (#48186289)

    http://debianfork.org/

    • by Rob Riggs ( 6418 )
      We definitely need a place for these dinosaurs to roam freely. It is really the perfect solution. They will build their own zoo. We can keep an eye on them from a distance.
  • by emblemparade ( 774653 ) on Monday October 20, 2014 @11:27AM (#48186693)

    Ubuntu changed everything we've come to expect about free, general-purpose operating systems.

    People don't give Launchpad enough credit: for the first time, we have an integrated build/test/deploy process for the whole operating system. It takes the solid Debian root and adds a layer of modern quality assurance that we've never seen before. There's still a ways to go, and I'm sure people will complain about one or other package being broken, but the fact is that Ubuntu raised the bar of what we've come to expect.

    Slashdotters and others also love to complain about one particular package or another. Obviously, the desktop environment (or just the shell) is the first thing that most people see. But it's also a small project in the larger scope of Ubuntu. Don't like Unity or GNOME 3 or KDE or Xfce or LXDE or Enlightenment? You have lots of options. Don't like systemd? Well, Ubuntu devoted a lot of time and effort to Upstart, but made the mature decision to abide by Debian's decision to go with systemd (for now). Don't like either? Yeah, well, life these days must be truly hell for poor little you.

    And now, Ubuntu may do for mobile what it did for the desktop. In 10 years, I hope we can celebrate the existence of truly free devices, onto which we can install any package we want -- including alternative UIs for those who will undoubtedly not like Unity.

    • Hear hear! We switched from Debian to Ubuntu years ago on all production servers...there are some real polishes that make managing the servers that much easier. Yes, it can be done with Debian, but its already done on Ubuntu...
    • Ubuntu is one of the most successful attempt at a Linux (GNU/Linux not something like Android/Chrome OS which just used the Linux Kernel) based.

      Ubuntu was one of the few distro's to take advantage Desktop OS gap.
      Windows XP from 2003 had a Lot of serious Security Issues, Apple Mac's were picking up steam, but Apple isn't for everyone. Most of the other Linux distributions were like We have GNOME/KDE installed so we are Desktop ready. However Ubuntu actually put in effort during that time to make a decent D

  • by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Monday October 20, 2014 @11:27AM (#48186697) Homepage

    People are choosing other distributions for a reason, actually two.
    Get rid of Unity and stop collecting search information, or fade into obscurity.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      or fade into obscurity.

      It's a Linux distro. How much more obscure could it get?

  • by Chewbacon ( 797801 ) on Monday October 20, 2014 @09:54PM (#48191909)

    I have less and less time to tinker with linux to make it work. Started using KDE, but kept running into issues where it refused to let me login - just get a blank desktop. Went to Xubuntu, but half the time I suspended my laptop it would refuse to wake completely unless I restarted lightdm, which restarted my session. What a productivity killer. I recently went back to Ubuntu and Unity and haven't had such problems. I gotta give Ubuntu credit, they make it a nice and easy experience, which Joe Schmoe who just wants to check his email likes.

One man's constant is another man's variable. -- A.J. Perlis

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