The next version of the world's most popular desktop Linux operating system (that's Ubuntu, for those of you playing dumb) will come with less software
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.
Any company invested enough to host a local mirror will not give a blank install of Ubuntu to their employees though.
You can argue that other distros are popular as well, but when it comes to the “I’ve heard of this Linux thing, let’s try it out” crowd Ubuntu is the goto option, no doubt about it. And the impact on this crowd is exactly what is discussed in the article.
Hundreds of thousands of people using eg. Debian plus a software profile plus a sources.list file with an intranet address don’t count as using Debian?
I’m not arguing about the contents of the article, I’m discussing specifically the relevance of generating usage statistics based on IP hits and ISO downloads.
If you want to discuss telemetry or how to measure popularity of Linux Distros, please submit and link me an appropriate post, I’ll be happy to discuss it there. But it simply adds nothing to the discussion here.
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…
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…
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
filecommand 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.
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.
There’s also the check connectivity to Internet ping that network manager does. Arch Linux defaults to Arch’s servers, etc.
Local repo mirrors are pretty standard in the enterprise world are they not?
Any company invested enough to host a local mirror will not give a blank install of Ubuntu to their employees though.
You can argue that other distros are popular as well, but when it comes to the “I’ve heard of this Linux thing, let’s try it out” crowd Ubuntu is the goto option, no doubt about it. And the impact on this crowd is exactly what is discussed in the article.
Hundreds of thousands of people using eg. Debian plus a software profile plus a sources.list file with an intranet address don’t count as using Debian?
I’m not arguing about the contents of the article, I’m discussing specifically the relevance of generating usage statistics based on IP hits and ISO downloads.
For the purpose of the article: no they don’t.
If you want to discuss telemetry or how to measure popularity of Linux Distros, please submit and link me an appropriate post, I’ll be happy to discuss it there. But it simply adds nothing to the discussion here.
And how do you know that number? Let alone the numbers of other distributions?
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.