I was reflecting this morning on my previous criticisms for areas that Ubuntu and GNU/Linux needs to be improve in order to reach its potential. I recently had an experience that crystallized the power of Ubuntu for me and I felt I should share this view with you all.
Part of my ICT specialisation is in test management and release management. Naturally my contributions to Ubuntu have tended to lean into bugs and testing. I was playing around with the Intrepid Alpha 1 release. Having raised some bugs and satisfied myself I have sufficiently covered core functions I was interested in, I settled into using it daily. One of the upgrades was for Xorg and for a few days I was without X and Gnome while all the package dependencies were met in development. It occurred to me how powerful Ubuntu is. Even without Gnome, I could still run my Upnp server to watch films on my xbox 360. I could still use apt-get to keep my systems configuration items up to date with the repos binaries. I had nano for basic docos and my printer working fine. Best of all, I was able to leverage the power the system has with logging. I was easily able to determine the problems with X in the logs at \var\log unlike the vaugeries of Windows Server or Vista where at some level the actual problem gets lost inside the web of hidden layers within the system internals. And trust me, I know the Windows platform very well. There is so much exciting things happening too. I hear a rumour that ZFS native in kernel space is coming. DRI2 so that memory on video cards can be fully managed. In comparison, we have more vague references to Windows 7 and "midori". I have the comfort in knowing there is no back door, no hidden little Government probe that can be put into closed code. Am I paranoid? I think not, open code, as Schneider puts it, is a cornerstone of security. I am free to put up new ideas and show how certain functions might be improved. I was interested in the gnome-mplayer, and provided some insights there, which the actual Developer responded too and is now looking at for a future release. I am part of the ecosystem and can support the betterment of it. Going back to xbox 360 media sharing, what do we find? MS implement a upnp service that is not standards compliant so that it works out of the box with Windows stuff only. To make it worse, they also have implemented it in error as the video side is dealt differently to the music side at a technical level. So all their interfacing code has worked around this, rather than doing it in a consistently correct way to start with. The future of ICT relies on open, consistent standards that avoids vendor lock in. In my house, and professionally, I have used Windows, OS X, Unix, Mainframes and so on. No system is perfect, but what is clear to me is that Linux has the momentum behind it and the right free and open approach to be the system that lasts for centuries ahead. I love you Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-au mailing list ubuntu-au@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au