Intrepid Ibex – Catering to the Wrong Users?
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Ars Technica has an article expounding upon the changes to the next revision of Ubuntu, arguably the most popular operating system of the Linux variety.
The tale begins with news that the upcoming release will include support for the sub-notebooks based upon the Intel Atom processor. Very nice, but what portion of the market will be using these things? The main market for these is ostensibly the ‘on-the-go’ corporate type, who is what I call the ‘forget about instructions, let me at it’ type – you know, the idiot who has no idea of what is actually happening in the machine. The type that gets a really puzzled look when the OS tells that the hard drive is out of space, simply because they have never bothered to empty the little trash icon on the screen – for the entire life of the machine.
Is this, or will it ever be, the expected Ubuntu user? If it is, the dev boys better get honking on the wireless drivers, and fully polish the way one acquires a wi-fi connection. Never mind about that, they need to do this no matter what.
The next revelation is that there will be new looks for the release. While some might say this is good, to me it is similar to the old car modder’s adage, ‘if it doesn’t go, chrome it!’ That is to say, if the car moves out like a lame toad, at least some relief can be had by making it look better. This seems to be the tack that this flavor of Linux is taking. Another article, out today, on ZDNet, has the admitted fan ready to go postal over some small problems that should have been worked out several revisions ago.
Can this possibly be good for Linux in general? I don’t think so – the new user will still have workability problems, and the longtime user will simply call it what it appears to be – the Emperor’s new clothes.
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Technorati Tags: Ubuntu - Intrepid Ibex - Linux - wi-fi - wireless connectivity - target audience - corporate user - Intel Atom processor
2 Comments
Ahmed Nasheed
June 30th, 2008
at 12:40pm
II was supposed to have a lot of improvements like all the other releases.. i agree it needs to improve wifi and some other driver stuff like nvidia stuff, but you are being too much of a critic, it doesn’t hurt to have a visual improvement as well. right now ubuntu looks plain ugly to me, while all the other major distros got better visuals, it might not be very important for certain users, but it’s still a factor. but i agree with you on one thing, it certainly needs to focus more on usability and ease of use, like i for one want to see all the language related stuff in one place, for example TTF installer, keyboad layout, language install in just one place. ubuntu needs a better way to ease the installation of fonts really. there’s no way a newbie gonna know fonts are supposed to go in ~/.fonts or /usr/share……/truetype
Ryan
June 30th, 2008
at 2:39pm
Intel and Ralink wifi works out of the box
Broadcom:
sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter
(tell it to grab the firmware
Atheros:
Don’t have any of these myself, but you could use Madwifi.
So yeah if you’re too ignorant to Google “Ubuntu broadcom) then trot back to Windows and have fun with all your spyware, viruses, worms, backdoors, trojans, bad performance, product activators, and reinstalling the whole thing two or three times a year.