Distros preinstalling software lol. It should be easy to find, install, uninstall, restrict and configure software. I dont care about that bloat in the ISO. Nice to find stuff sometimes, and maybe useful in areas with bad internet, but thats not what a distros job is
thats not what a distros job is
Bundling together a suite of many software packages into a usable system is the entirety of a distro’s job
Hm yes but preinstalling everything just meets the need of some people that dont know what to install
People like new and inexperinced Linux users, who are traditionally Ubuntu’s target audience?
Nothing stopping an experienced user like yourself from using a more hands-on distro
Ubuntu is not just preinstalled packages. You can use it for its software support, more stable releases and uninstall everything and get Apps purely from Flatpak.
I mean, why not just open software and install literally one of the apps on the main page? Libreoffice, Thunderbird, Firefox are all there.
This article is strange… The author uses “being able to open Microsoft Office documents” as a common example of what an OS that claims to be easy to use should be able to do. Then says…
When people download Ubuntu 23.04 they get an OS that can do everything Windows 95 did - with 23.10 they don’t
No default installation of Microsoft Windows EVER opened Microsoft Office documents. If this was a simple oversight in the write-up it’d be fine, but the point is hammered over and over again.
I don’t have an opinion about Ubuntu including or not including more software in the default installation (my guess is it became too big to fit on a DVD?) but this article failed to make it’s point to me by making a comparison to Windows that isn’t true.
Also…
the world’s most popular desktop Linux operating system (that’s Ubuntu, for those of you playing dumb)
Is this supposed to be a cocky joke? I can’t tell. What metric of “most popular” is the author using?
Is this supposed to be a cocky joke? I can’t tell. What metric of “most popular” is the author usiing?
Number of active users.
And how do you know that number? Let alone the numbers of other distributions?
those numbers are nonexistent for most distribution, since forcing telemetry isn’t really a cool move in the free software world
The number of IPs hitting their software repos can be a decent way of estimating active users. Also, ISO downloads and so on.
Local repo mirrors are pretty standard in the enterprise world are they not?
Any company invested enough to host a local mirror will not give a blank install of Ubuntu to their employees though.
You can argue that other distros are popular as well, but when it comes to the “I’ve heard of this Linux thing, let’s try it out” crowd Ubuntu is the goto option, no doubt about it. And the impact on this crowd is exactly what is discussed in the article.
Hundreds of thousands of people using eg. Debian plus a software profile plus a sources.list file with an intranet address don’t count as using Debian?
I’m not arguing about the contents of the article, I’m discussing specifically the relevance of generating usage statistics based on IP hits and ISO downloads.For the purpose of the article: no they don’t.
If you want to discuss telemetry or how to measure popularity of Linux Distros, please submit and link me an appropriate post, I’ll be happy to discuss it there. But it simply adds nothing to the discussion here.
I’m surprised by the comments here, even though the article predicted the opinion of long time Linux users. I had hoped for a more considerate opinion regarding a distro also aimed at new users.
This is a bad move and I hope they reverse their decision for the 24.04 LTS release.i mainly agree on the decision paralysis point and that they had a minimal install opinion available before.
I use arch. Choosing your favorite music player is fun. Choosing your favorite music player, video player, pdf viewer, Browser, file explorer, system monitor, office suite and mail program is not fun. This also completely negates the “faster to productivity, from download to first boot in less time” argument. If you have an install script prepared: yes. If you’re a new user: no.