Hey, Owen. I'm now running Kubunto on about 15 different machines now, both at home and at work. It is the distribution that I have standardized on. These days it is arguably one of the most popular Linux distributions, but like politics, the topic of "Which is the best Linux distro?" is highly polarizing. There are Debian bigots. There are Ubuntu bigots. There are RHEL bigots (although fewer than from the other camps). As long as there are more than two Linux users, there will never be "a desktop of choice". There will, however, probably be a majority opinion, and I suspect that (K)ubuntu will be it.
I run Kubuntu on laptops, and it works flawlessly. With Sun's VirtualBox, I also run XP on them. Since Ubuntu is Debian-based, package management/updates/upgrades are painless and bullet-proof. I can play any media format that is out there. I have not found one that I cannot play/view. Well, ok. Silverlight. There is no native Linux Silverlight client. I am running Kubuntu 8.04 on most of the machines because it is the more stable long-term supported relase. I am running 8.10 on a laptop, for testing purposes. 8.10 is good, but not quite as stable as 8.04, but that is what it is for: to provide a hardend, tested platform a few months from now to become the next long-term release. --Doug -- Doug Roberts, RTI International [email protected] [email protected] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 12:06 PM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: > Canonical, the company creating the Ubuntu linux distro, apparently is > getting close to profitable. > http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/20/1627243 > > I haven't used Linux/Unix for several years as my main desktop, opting for > Mac's "Unix with a pretty face" OS X. So here are a few questions for our > Unix/Linux users: > > 1 - Have the distro wars settled enough so that Ubuntu is emerging as the > desktop of choice? > > 2 - Can Ubuntu run on the most modern laptops, with full access to the > often proprietary device drivers? > > 3 - Is Ubuntu's package management sophisticated enough that upgrades are > trivial to perform and free of version conflicts? > > 4 - Are there players/viewers/editors for the common media/formats? Maybe > this is better asked as: What applications and data formats are you missing > most? > > -- Owen > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
