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Re: [LUG] Ubuntu install taking ages

 

On 11/09/2007, Mark Jose <kernowyon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
That is *your*  view Ben - to which of course, you are entitled. I won't
bother arguing, but I do not agree with it.

My view either produces an IMO prefix or influences the bluntness with which I put a claim. Let me express my point in a more eloquent manner (untagged things I am prepared to guarantee the empirical truthfulness of, the other bits you can just skip over...)

Ubuntu GNU/Linux, as a series of packages, is still fundamentally tied to and dependent upon the Debian project, and indeed started off as a number of usability-and-brownness-increasing patches for Debian. It is, or at least was initially, produced by snapshotting Debian Unstable (sid) and then developing the result every six months, major modifications to which were supposed to be backported to sid. <imo>However, it has now degraded into an unclassifiable mixture of sid (2007-09-12), sid (2007-04-13), sid (pre-2007-04-13), and the previous Ubuntu releases.</imo> The apparently random and uncoordinated upload of packages from sid to ubuntu, coupled with the <IMO>low quality of</IMO> modifications and additions made by Canonical, for the upload of which to Debian a team has been established<AFAIK> but its sole uploads so far have been the new aptitudey apt-get and update-manager after much delay</AFAIK>, produce what we are told is the most popular distribution in the world.

Though Ubuntu uses GNOME by default, there are differently branded derivatives which have ~10, at most, differences in the default package install list but are nevertheless identical; hence, though the two are marketed as separate distributions, it is entirely trivial to run "Kubuntu" and "Ubuntu" at the same time, but people seem to treat them as actual distributions with legitimate differences. Ubuntu is, after all, a part derivative of the Universal Operating System, which had GNOME, KDE and all the rest a long time before Ubuntu arrived.

Until Dapper Drake (6.06), the "Ubuntu installer" was in fact still the Debian installer, which is perfectly sensible for a derived operating system. This <imo>is a powerful, efficient and above all intuitive installer that </imo>runs <afaik>in a heavily stripped-down livecd</afaik> with very low memory requirements, which is one of the reasons specified for retaining it in parallel with Ubiquity, which runs in an ordinary livecd of Ubuntu (with all the usual RAM-eating, etc etc problems this implies.) From what I can tell from debian-devel, Ubiquity's role in the development of the new GUI debian installer is primarily as an example of what to avoid doing.

This is a wholly unsatisfactory and much-too-abrupt ending paragraph, inserted to create some time between reading the body of my message and the signature.

--
Benjamin F. Goodger
~ design and ideas lab ~
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