Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04
by Ryan Smith on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
It's Free - Gratis
When doing the initial research for this article, one of my goals was to try to identify all of the reasons why I would want to use Ubuntu. While there are many reasons, a lot of them are what amount to edge cases. At the risk of being accused of shortchanging Ubuntu here, after using Ubuntu for quite some time the main reasons came down to this: It's free, and it's secure. That's it. Many of the popular Linux applications can be found for Windows, non-gaming performance largely isn't a concern on a high-end desktop such as mine, and no one is making any serious claims about ease of use when compared to Mac OS X. Ubuntu is free and Ubuntu is secure, but that's about it.
We'll start with “free”, since that's one of the fundamental subjects. When we say Ubuntu is free, there are two elements to that. The first is that Ubuntu costs nothing; it is free (gratis). The second is that Ubuntu's source code is open and can be modified by anyone; it is free (libre). This is expressed in the popular and simplified slogans of “free as in beer” and “free as in speech.” Many software products are freeware (e.g. Futuremark's PCMark) but fewer products are open source. The former does not necessitate the latter or vice versa, although practical considerations mean that most open source software is also freeware in some fashion since you can't keep people from compiling the source code for themselves.
There's fairly little to explain with respect to Ubuntu being freeware. It can be downloaded directly from the Ubuntu website in the form of an ISO disc image, and copied, installed, wiped as many times as anyone would like. Ubuntu's corporate sponsor/developer Canonical also sells it for a nominal price (currently it's listed on Amazon for $12) but there is no difference between the retail version and the download version. It's a free operating system, and free is a very good price.
Being free does mean giving up some things that would normally come with purchased software. Official support is the first element, as since it's a free OS there is no one being paid to support users. We'll dive into support in-depth in a bit, but for now it's enough to remember that Ubuntu does not come with official support. Support options are limited to the Ubuntu Knowledge Base, the forums, and whatever additional help can be found on the internet.
There's more to being able to offer Ubuntu for free than just not offering official support. Incidental expenses of assembling and distributing Ubuntu are covered by Canonical, who expects to eventually make a profit from Ubuntu through selling enterprise support. Development of Ubuntu and the underlying Linux components are done by a variety of volunteers working in their spare time, and paid employees from companies such as Novell, IBM, Red Hat, and others who use Linux in their commercial products and have a vested interest in its development.
However - and this is where we're going to take a bit of a detour - there is also the matter of who is not paid because Ubuntu is free. The United States patent system allows for ideas and methods to be patented, along with the more typical physical devices. What this means is that everything from encryption methods to video codecs to file systems can be and are patented by a variety of companies. As a result a lot of technologies in common use are patented, and those patents must be licensed for use when it comes to the United States (and many other countries with similar patent systems). Ubuntu includes software that uses patented material, but since Ubuntu is free, no one is paying those license fees.
Now I want to be very clear here that the reason I bring this up is because it's interesting, not because it's a problem. The chief example of where patents are an issue is media playback. MP3, MPEG-2, H.264, AAC, and other common formats have paid license requirements. This directly rears its head for the user when you first fire up Ubuntu's movie player and attempt to play a movie using a patented codec. Ubuntu goes through great lengths to point out that it needs to use a patented codec to play the material, and that unless the user has a valid license for the codecs it may be a patent violation to play the material, ultimately giving the user the option to download what Ubuntu calls the “restricted” codec set that is not distributed for legal reasons.
With that said, the legal issues are entirely theoretical for the end user. While using the restricted codecs is technically a patent violation, to our knowledge no individual has ever been sued or otherwise harassed over this, and we don't expect that to ever change. The licensing bodies like MPEG-LA are concerned with commercial products using their property – if someone is making money from their property, they want a piece of it. They are not concerned with home use of their codecs, and quite frankly users have nothing to be concerned about.
It should also be noted that Ubuntu (and other Linux distros) are not alone in this. VLC, Media Player Classic, various Windows codec packs, and many other free media players are also technically in violation of patent law for the same reasons. Even if someone is a Windows user, there's still a good chance they're violating patent law. For all practical purposes it's very hard to avoid being an IP violator, no matter the platform.
Meanwhile for those that absolutely must stay on the right side of the law, there are options, but it's not pretty. Canonical sells licensed software packages that can play back most media formats; Cyberlink's PowerDVD Linux for DVD playback, and Fluendo Complete Playback Pack for everything else. However the price may be shocking: being legit is going to cost you $50 for PowerDVD and another $40 for Fluendo. This makes a small but notable difference from Windows and Mac OS X. It's hard but not impossible to be both free and legitimate on those platforms through legal software that is given away for free – Winamp, Quicktime, DivX, and Flip4Mac all fall under this umbrella. Again, this makes no practical difference – no one who's holding a patent cares – but it's something any Ubuntu user trying to playback media is going to have to pay attention to for a fleeting moment.
Ultimately, the important bits to take away from this are that Ubuntu is free as in beer, and for the price you're only giving up official support. There are some patent issues, but since no one on either side actually cares, it doesn't matter. If nothing else, Ubuntu will be the best-priced operating system you will ever use, and price matters.
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zerobug - Monday, February 1, 2010 - link
Regarding benchmarks and Linux-focused hardware roundups, one thing worth of consideration is that while Microsoft places strong resources on O/S development to create features that will require the end users the need to get the latest and greatest powerful hardware, Linux places their efforts in order that the end user will still be able to use their old hardware and get the best user experience while running the latest and greatest software.So,the benchmarks could compare the user experience when running popular software on Microsoft and Linux O/S's, with different powerful machines.
For this, you could pick up some popular open source and proprietary (or their free equivalents) application that can run both Linux and W7. and compare the price, time and power consumption for retrieving, saving, processing, compiling, encrypting,decrypting compacting, extracting, encoding, decoding, backup, restore, nº of frames,etc, with machines in a range of different CPU and memory capacities.
abnderby - Thursday, September 3, 2009 - link
Let me say this, I am a Senior Software QA Engineer, I have been testing windows, windows apps, DB's and web sites for over 10 year now. I am what you could consider an windows guru of sorts.I have off an on always gone and tried linux from red hat 5, 6, ubuntu, suse, fedora etc... Linux is not and has not been ready for mainstream users. Sure simple email, word docs web browsing it is ok.
But in order to do many things I want to do and many advanced windows users the author and many commentors are right. Linux people need to get out of their little shell and wake up.
Linux has such great potential to be a true contenderto windows and OSX. But it lacks simple usability. Out of the box it can come nowhere close to MS or Apple offerings. The out of the box experience is truly horrible.
Hardware drivers? good luck I run RAID cards that have no support. Forget the newest graphics and sound cards. Connecting to shares just as the author mentioned a hassle of a work around.
Again as stated elsewhere Linux needs someone who programs and or scripts to get things done right. I have neitherthe time or patience for such. I use command line when needed. I would rather have 2 or 3 clicks and I am done then have to remember every CLI for every thing I need to do.
Time is money, time is not a commodity. Linus wastes too much time.
It is geting better with each distro true. But It has been 11 years from red hat 5?? and Linux is not a whole lot better than it was then.
What is needed if Linux really wants to make a stand in the desktop space, is a unified pull togeher ofall distro's. Sit down and truly plan out the desktop. Put together a solid platform that out of the box can really put the hurt on MS or Apple.
Look what Apple did with OSX! And how many developers are wrking on it? How many developers are working on Linux all distro's? OSX is a jewel in 7 years it has matured much farther than any *nix distro. And has a following that cannot yet be challenged by any distro available.
Why is it that when win2k came out Linux was claiming to be superior, and yet after 10 years of development it is hardly comparable to XP let alonevista/win 7 or OSX?
You guys really need to wake up and smell the coffee!
Penti - Monday, September 7, 2009 - link
Of course it's not ready for consumer desktops, there are no serious distributions for that.It means no DVD player OOB, no proprietary codecs, no video editing software, no proprietary drivers which works magically. Of course not is SLED and RHEL Desktop ready for normal users it's targeted for Linux admins to set up the environment. Community distributions won't have as easy time to be set up by those. Community distros will also always lack the above mentioned stuff. It's simply not legal for them to offer it OOB. OS X is actually older then Linux and ran on x86 before Apple bought Jobs NeXT company. It's also supported by an OEM. (OEM = Themselves). Which no Linux dist is. It also uses many GNU technologies like GCC, X11 (optional but included on disc), bash shell and so on, and of course SAMBA for SMB/CIFS, on the server edition they use a modified openldap server, dovecot and postfix for mail, Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL etc. Stuff thats developed on Linux and has matured thanks to it.
There's a lot of problems with having just community supported stuff, but that doesn't mean it's useless or sucks. Sure the kernel aren't really helping getting drivers in there, by locking out closed source stuff but they end up useless if they are proprietary and not updated any way. For the servers just buy RHEL or SLES certified stuff and you get all the hardware support-needed. But on the other hand you wouldn't be much successful in running 7 year old video drivers in Windows either. Community distros definitively don't need to cease existing for the creation of a commercial one. But there will never be one linux and that's really the beauty of it not the course. It wasn't meant to be something rivaling windows and the kernel developers has no desire to create a distro. That's why we can see Linux in stuff like Android and Maemo. And from home routers to mainframes and supercomputers. For a commercial entity targeting that many devices wouldn't be possible. Not with the same basic code and libraries. There are definitively some top notch products and solutions based on Linux and GNU. But Linux doesn't want anything as it's not an entity. And it's really up to GNOME and KDE to create the desktop environment. It's not the distros that shape them and write all the libraries that software developers use to create their software. As there are no major consumer desktop distro maker there is also no one that can really steer them by sponsoring work and holding discussions either. Not towards a unified desktop environment for normal non-tech users anyway. Also GNOME and KDE has no desire to create a exclusive platform around their software. OS X is a innovative 20 year old OS (since commercial release) and is actually based on work before then (BSD code). OS X UI is really 20 years into it's making and builds heavily on the next/openstep framework. On other Unixes there hasn't been any such heritage to build on, X was an total mess on commercial Unixes and I would actually say it's a lot better and more streamline now. There's just Xorg now, sure there are a lot of window managers but only two major environments now so it's still better then when all the vendors had it's own and couldn't make up it's mind on which direction to go and standardize on. In the middle of the 90's there where like at least 4 major Unix vendors that all had their own workstations.
fazer150 - Friday, September 4, 2009 - link
which Linux distro have you tried? did you try the PCLinuxOS which is atleast as usable as windows xp, 2003?nilepez - Sunday, August 30, 2009 - link
Most end users are not comfortable with the command line. Linux, even Ubuntu, is still not ready for the masses. This shouldn't be confused with the quality of the OS. It's mostly GUI issue. I've also had some issues with installers failing. Some were solved from an xterm and others just didn't work.It wasn't a big deal in most cases, because there's generally another program that can get the job done, but for the typical home user, it's a deal killer. Nevertheless, I must give credit where credit is due, and Ubuntu has made huge strides in the right direction. The UI isn't close to Windows 7 and I suspect it's not close to OS X either, but Canonical is moving in the right direction.
Etern205 - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link
See this is the problem with some of linux users, you guys are some what always closed in a nutshell. What you may think is easy does not mean the rest of the world will agree with you. In this day and age, people what to get things done quickly and use the least amount of time as possible. For Mac OS X and Windows getting a simple task done takes like 3 simple clicks, for Ubuntu performing the same tasks requires the user to do extensive amount of research just to complete it.I'm glad this article was written by a author who has not head into linux terriroty before and it shows the true side of linux from the perspective of a new user.
If you like to do ramen coding and so forth does not mean the others will. If linux want's to become mainstream, then they really need to stand in the shoes of Joe or Jane.
forkd - Saturday, October 31, 2009 - link
I use mac, windows and linux and I must disagree with your assessment of "this is the problem with some linux users"This article, and this site for that matter, comes from the perspective of a windows (and some mac) user looking at linux. More specifically Ubuntu. From this point of view of course Linux is difficult. A person who is linux focused thinks windows is difficult at first too and is likely to criticize. If you take the time to learn something instead of just criticizing something because it is different you may be a lot happier.
fepple - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link
Check out all the usability studies the Gnome Project does, then come back and make some more generalization :)SoCalBoomer - Thursday, August 27, 2009 - link
Again - those are done by Linux people. His points are right on. . .someone a while ago did a "Mom" test, which is closer to what is needed, not people who know computers doing studies on usability.