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Datamation examines the Debian and Ubuntu distros in detail by starting with the question, what is the difference between Debian and Ubuntu? Neither GNU/Linux distro has been out of Distrowatch's top six since 2005, and for the last four years neither has been out of the top three. There are good reasons for that. Though if systemd is not your cup of tea, there is also a Debian fork, Devuan, which is basically Debian GNU/Linux minus systemd.
[Ed Note: For many in the community who are Linux experts, this article may have no appeal. For those of us that are new to it and trying to learn, something this basic is a nice read and contains good information.]
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Debian vs. Ubuntu: What's the Difference?
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TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 16 2017, @05:20PM (5 children)
I find your post to be a little humorous. No, Ubuntu wasn't the first to "just work". My first working installation of Linux was Suse Linux, on an early AMD Sledgehammer build. I had already tried to install Windows XP 64-bit, and failed. I tried installing a few Linux distros, and failed. I downloaded the then-current Suse, and magically, everything "just worked". I found out later that Suse had an early, inside track on some of the 64 bit data that was necessary to make everything work correctly. Every single driver I needed was packaged with the distro, and it wasn't necessary for me to do ANYTHING more than give it a name, password, and time to write to disk.
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday July 16 2017, @10:17PM (3 children)
I knew the parent post here would engender a bunch of "no, X already was 'just works'..." comments, and lo and behold, here they are.
It depends on one's definition of "just works" as well as one's personal experience and how many different types of systems one tried to install things on.
I think for many people "just works" means something like a stereotypical Windows or Mac OS installation experience post year 2000 or so. (And before we hear the flood of nightmare stories about how hard it was to install Windows on some machine... yeah, that happened too. Hopefully all of us here know that, so most of us also know that Windows and Mac OS was deployed on millions of computers around the world with standardized installations that usually worked well with little fuss.)
"Just works" for most former Windows etc. users = you install the OS without having to resort to command line hacks. If a driver is missing or something, a few clicks and download or two will generally fix it. Done.
While Suse, Red Hat, and various other Linux distros over the years simplified the installation process and provided better support out of the box, it was undoubtedly part of Ubuntu's philosophy to be a "just works" distro for the VAST MAJORITY of standard PC hardware configurations, thereby allowing a more widespread adoption of Linux.
Unfortunately, I don't think Ubuntu actually succeeded at that initially. I've been using Linux for ~20 years (and Unix derivatives for years before that), but around a decade ago I finally got a bit fed up and wanted a "just works" distro myself that didn't require me to spend a few hours after install or upgrades sorting things out.
At that time (ca. 2007) Ubuntu still wasn't "just works" for someone like the common Windows user who didn't want to deal with CLI for basic stuff during installation. I first tried installing Ubuntu on a standard Dell business desktop (one of the most popular models of the time, with a standard Dell monitor), and was stuck in Xorg config hell to even get a GUI on booting up after install with Ubuntu. That or some other random thing broke on various installs of newer versions over the next few years, causing me to abandon Ubuntu and go back to Debian for a while.
For me (and I do not claim my experience to be universal), the first "just works" Linux distro was probably Mint ca. 2011. At that time, I tried installing Mint not only on several of my own machines, but several belonging to my family, and recommended it to several friends who had not used Linux before. Every install went down without a hitch or need to resort to command line config files to fix something, or tweaking obscure settings just to get basic audio codecs going, etc.
So yeah, I'm sure you (and many others) have had "just works" experiences before then. But Ubuntu really tried to make that experience even easier and more widespread. I think Mint finally accomplished it earlier, and Ubuntu and some others have since caught up in terms of hardware compatibility and ease of install.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @12:30AM
I don't think Ubuntu actually succeeded at ["just works"] initially
They knew that their first release (Ubuntu 4.10, October 2004) still had lots of rough spots, so they called it Warty Warthog.
The June 2006[1] release (6.06, Dapper Drake) was clean enough that there was a serious uptick in folks trying Linux.
(It didn't hurt that they would mail you a CD, gratis, anywhere on the planet.)
[1] They missed their release date, projected for April; that has since become standardized (x.04).
Dapper was the point at which they started the alphabetical order thing with release names.
.
Yeah, when Mint hit its stride, that was a notable inflection point for average folks who wanted to try Linux.
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(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Monday July 17 2017, @01:08AM
In the 90s, I had played around with various early distros and found doing even trivial stuff extremely hard. So I always went back to Windows. But in 2002/2003 I got a new motherboard/case/HD, and wanted to have a real legal install of Windows on it. So I headed over to the O/S section and Windows 2000 Workstation was listed at $199, while Red Hat workstation 7 was $49 and came with a manual. So I decide to try Linux again. A few hours and 5 CDs later, I had a fully operational system with every application installed. Getting up on the internet was a simple as providing the dial up number in the GUI and with Mozzila's built-in popup blocker, life on the Internet was like 1996. There were definitely challenges such as games and installing software that wasn't on the extensive CD repository. But mostly, I could immediately do everything I needed to. Thus Linux became the O/S of my primary workstation.
I never went back to Windows. I did eventually install SUSE a few years later. My kids were out playing in the leaves and I had just got a digital USB camera. I needed to transfer the pictures to a computer quickly so I could take some more. There are only so many times you will get good pictures of your kids playing in leaves. :) I didn't want to dick with on Linux so I plugged the USB in to a Windows machine I still had and....
Nothing. No recognition of the device, no new drive letter, nothing. Finally, I figured out you had do download 100mb of crapware from Kodak to get drivers to recognize the camera. It took an hour. I was trying to avoid shit like this by using the "it just works" for Windows. And USB is supposed to
be plug in play.
After all of that, I tried plugging in the camera to my SUSE machine. Once I plugged it in, a dialog box popped up:
"A USB camera has been detected. Would you like to import photos into F-spot?" And the shit just worked. At that point, Windows was done. I later replaced that SUSE machine with a sweet Dell Ubuntu and never looked back. Now you can find pretty much anything you need in the repositories, Wine runs lots of Windows only stuff (sometimes better than current version of Windows) and Steam/GOG provides more Linux games than I can possibly play.
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 17 2017, @04:30AM
Ya know, I think you pretty well nailed it. Along with Reziac's "it's that no two user experiences are alike!!" sums everything up very nicely.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday July 17 2017, @02:38AM
Huh. Back in the 32bit era (before live ISOs), SuSE would *never* install for me. In the 64bit world, it's still the most likely to fail to load from a live ISO.
Well, if there's one thing you can always say about linux, it's that no two user experiences are alike!!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.