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?
I reckon a nifty idea instead of preinstalling software is to have a file extension finder that suggests software based on the file extension. Sure, there are some file types that have multiple uses, but many proprietary solutions use distinct extensions, making it quite straightforward to organize the recommendations.
You don’t even need to look at the extension to identify most file formats, as there are unique magic numbers stored at the beginning of most (binary) formats. Only when a single binary format is reused to appear as two different formats to the user, e.g. zip and cbz are extensions relevant. This is how the file command and most (?) Linux file explorers identify files, and why file extensions are traditionally largely irrelevant on Linux/Unix.
This means your idea of suggesting software based on the file type is even more practicable than you described.
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.
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.
Absolutely. The author is criticizing something that can easily be solved by… installing more software that it’s probably in the same media a user used to install the OS. I don’t see the point of this review other than “I need to write something in my blog today.”
I think the whole point of this exercise is to not have the extra software in the media. Could be wrong.
Which media are you talking about? The installation media, or the running system?
Yeah that’s a pretty funny error, seems to forget that MS office is a very expensive bit of software and doesn’t come included with windows.
It does in recent times. My laptop came pre installed with win 11 and office home 2021(i think).
All i had to do was click activate to link the key to my email account. It showed up as a notification on first login.
Even if not activated it still would open files with that warning.
Including a trial to incentivize users into paying for the software doesn’t make it “built-in”.
What metric of “most popular” is the author using?
Ubuntu claimed be the most popular Linux distro on their website, backed by hot air. People who didn’t know any better took that at face value, including the author of this shoddy article, perhaps.
They do have statistics about how many systems send upgrade pings. There are some caveats to that, but I believe the difference with other distros is significant enough for that not to matter.
What other desktop Linux would be more popular? Fedora? Arch?
Ubuntu chooses to log upgrade pings to create such statistics. Contrary to Ubuntu, others respect your privacy, and don’t log upgrade pings. Hypothetically, if Ubuntu is the only distro that logs upgrade pings even though everyone uses Linux Mint in practice as an example, they can’t claim to be the most popular distro as for a matter of fact, that reality has more people that use Linux Mint than Ubuntu.
This is not a big issue. In the installer or first time boot welcome pop up, just add a page where some popular apps are shown and can be selected to be downloaded and installed.
Also what the fuck does the author mean when he says ubuntu is special¿? It is not that different from other distros and the ways that it is different does not make it better
Also what the fuck does the author mean when he says ubuntu is special¿?
There are two ways I read that:
- Ubuntu is special just to the author. It’s their favourite distribution and it holds sentimental value to them. The author doesn’t want Ubuntu to change, because they like it just the way it is.
- Ubuntu is special because of its high popularity between new users. For a long time, Ubuntu was/is suggested to newbies because of its ease of use and solid defaults. The removal of the apps could make the experience of future new users worse, so less people would stick with Linux.
Or alternatively they can add similar to the mediacodecs and such check a “install the office and other helpful stuff”
Just make it that if I open an office document that the software center shoes up with “app not available yet, here are the best options”.
Yeah; if I was picking the aspects of Ubuntu where they were making a mistake, ‘minimal default install but easy to download more’ would not be what I’d have selected - that actually sounds a good thing. Having too much out-of-date crud was starting to be a problem. ‘Everything is a snap, which runs like a three-legged dog even on a powerful machine, and causes me disk space issues on less powerful ones too’ - that’s a problem. ‘Keeping on messing with Firefox, and replacing my ppa version with an out of date snap, which means I’ve changed my works machine over to Mint to avoid their nonsense?’ - that’s a problem.
I love it. Ubuntu is already bloated enough and have been using the minimal install for a long time. It’s actually better imo. because now the “minimal” version will hopefully include just a bit more so have to manually install a bit less. If I ever got lazy and took the full install I alway uninstall or remove the bloat from my sidebar as the first thing anyway. Hopefully this will strike a nice ballance instead
