Is the success of Linux directly proportional to its ability to integrate with existing proprietary systems like Windows? If so, should free software developers be spending more time integrating with it instead of building better software for free platforms?
According to Ubuntu X.Org expert Bryce Harrington, the number of X.org related bugs in Karmic “literally went off the chart.”
In my recent article on Ubuntu, I made two suggestions to improve the overall experience of for users.
My main suggestion was to delay update-manager from prompting an upgrade until initial major issues were fixed. I copped a lot of flack (read hate mail) for my suggestions. Personally, I believe that someone had to say it – it’s been the elephant in the room for a long time.
Now however, I feel somewhat vindicated as Bryce agrees with me:
One suggestion that I think might be good would be for releases like Karmic where we feel it is a bit more ambitious technologically, to make update-manager hold off on recommending users upgrade for a few weeks. This would give time for SRUs to make their way through the system for critical issues people run into. In fact, this might even be a good idea for the LTS. Anyway, just wanted to toss out this as an idea.
Yes! I totally agree 🙂
Gentoo is awesome, but it’s not without its issues. I talked with a representative of the Board of Trustees to find out what they’ve been doing to repair damaged image. While I’m at it, I compare stable package versions in Gentoo with other distros such as Arch, Fedora and Ubuntu.
Gentoo just turned ten. So what’s this distro all about, and why has it stood the test of time? I take a look in my latest article.
Jeffrey Layton has written an interesting overview of schedulers under Linux.
When the change in scheduler is performed the “old” scheduler completes all of it’s requests before control switches over to the new scheduler (ain’t Linux grand?).
Of course you can only change to schedulers which are included with the kernel.
The state of web multimedia on Linux is pitiful. Proprietary codecs, plug-ins and closed standards are helping to keep Linux a second rate citizen. What Linux needs is not another proprietary framework like Moonlight, but more open standards. Can Google help by making YouTube a Theora-fest?
There’s been a lot of talk about Google’s new Linux based operating system for netbooks and desktops, Chrome OS. I thought that I’d talk about it a bit too.
-c
My first article for Linux Magazine has just gone live.
The TomTom case exposed a long-simmering problem resulting from the combination of patents, proprietary software companies and open source. Andrew Tridgell recently patched Linux’s VFAT implementation, but the cult of silence that surrounds intellectual property will bedevil open source projects for some time to come.
Feedback welcome!
-c