Alex Payne — Good Things: Ubuntu and Android | Hacker News Reader

Alex Payne — Good Things: Ubuntu and Android

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69 pointstwampss30 comments

I switched laptops last November and have been having a Linux just works experience ever since. Previously I'd been on a System76 pre-installed linux laptop where I was paying them to make sure it works. This time I just walked into best buy and walked out with a dell and installed everything myself.

All hardware worked out of the box including wireless and suspend.

I started reading OMG Ubuntu (http://omgubuntu.co.uk/) which clued me into some good productivity tips and also some bling. I like Docky as much as I ever liked the Mac dock. Ubuntu Go is the Ubuntu equivalent of Quicksilver.

Even stuff I expected to be hard, like my Verizon USB 3G card, was easy. That in particular has been a moderate pain on other operating systems but was just a drop down option in the ubuntu networking widget.

For times when I need to be mainstream compatible I run Windows in Virtualbox. That's how I sync my iphone, play online poker, run Quickbooks, etc. Plus laptops come with such enormous hard drives, I felt like I could leave myself a dual boot option in case I wanted to play games.

Overall, I'm much happier having my day-to-day operating system match my servers. There's just something nice about having a dev environment that's so close to my production environment.

I wrote a longer version of this here: http://www.stubbleblog.com/index.php/2009/11/linux-on-the-de...

I feel old when I read articles like this because I remember back when Linux was difficult. I meet new Linux users all the time who almost can't believe stories from the bad old days.

Anyway, we use Ubuntu at my office, and we're super productive with it. I would recommend it to everyone.

Heh. My "when Linux was bad" story was when I was 14 and trying to bootstrap mkLinux for PPC on my PowerBook 1400. It had a problem that whenever an interrupt would happen close to an HD ACCESS, the text {IDE TIMEOUT} would crawl across the screen until you pressed the debugger interrupt switch, after which it would continue on. This meant that any form of input while it was accessing the HD would result in the interrupt switch being hit, or even transferring data from the CD to the HD would take for-ev-er.

This meant the normally 45-minute install process turned into about two-and-a-half-hours of babysitting the poor laptop. I also became very conscious of memory/swap usage early on, so I had to use a rather light window manager (I think I settled on AfterStep as a decent combination of features and light-ness). I also learned how to tune X11 color requirements, since only 256-color mode was supported.

A good way to cut my teeth initially. Later on I got my parents to purchase a 7200/75, which was the cheapest Mac I could find that would run the official Linux/PPC distribution. That box carried me a hell of a long way - used it as a print server and as the family NAT router, compiled my own kernels for the first time, even wound up doing a Linux From Scratch build at some point.

Good times, those.

I remember Slackware Linux back in the mid-late 90s that involved creating loads and loads of 3 1/2 floppies for installation. It was not an easy process back then, at all. But, it was young then, and I learned a whole lot more having to build everything myself, before the package managers.

Linux has totally arrived. As someone who occasionally gets asked to help fix friend's computers(as I'm sure many HN'ers do) my latest approach is to just recommend linux and then just do the install for them. Everything works out of the box, old computers breathe new life (and speed) and with the addition of a few proprietary fonts (which come with Adobe Acrobat Reader) the OS looks BETTER than OSX. I like Kozuka Gothic Pro.

I think that the pretty OSX apps are mostly a myth. The only one I really want is Skitch and I'm doing OK without it.

Myth? Keynote alone makes OS X a necessity for me. I can spend 1/3 as long and come up with something that looks 5 times better than either Powerpoint or Impress. When Open Office gets Magic Move, let me know.

(Actively uses OSX and Windows. Also long time Linux Debian user.)

Have you tried Google Docs presentations? They have some great looking templates that I think might be just as simple and beautiful as what you get with Keynote.

I'd never heard of the "Magic Move" cited by the parent comment so I looked it up and it's pretty neat: http://movies.apple.com/media/us/mac/iwork/keynote/2009/tour...

I like S5: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ It's quick, easy, open, universally accessible, and as customizable as any web page.

For sheer presentation beauty per unit of user-effort, Keynote still is way ahead. S5 does have its uses, though.

> ...and with the addition of a few proprietary fonts (which come with Adobe Acrobat Reader)

Can you elaborate on this please? Edit: I mean, what is your method of acquiring them, and having your system use them?

i just downloaded a .tar.bz2 version of acrobat reader from http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/ and it includes a common.tar archive that has "Adobe Pi Std", "Courier Std", "Minion Pro", "Myriad Pro" and "Adobe Sans MM" opentype fonts.

I've been using Ubuntu Netbook Remix on a Dell Mini 9 as my primary setup for over a year now. UNR is dangerously close to being mass-market ready, and it's certainly ready for developers and power-users. Virtually everything 'just works', and the Netbook Remix UI is far preferable to Windows or OS X on a small screen.

The most remarkable thing is that you never have to drop to a command prompt, unless you want to. All of the linux infrastructure and tools are there, but it's all been abstracted away with a nice clean GUI. For the first time in my life, I actually prefer using X over the shell for managing my machine.

It's also amazing to look at how rapidly Canonical is improving Ubuntu. Every six months, I get more functionality and new software, with an improved UI and fewer rough edges. I'm anxiously awaiting 10.04, and I know that 10.10 should be another big improvement. That kind of predictability is nice.

I jumped ship from Linux to OS X nine years ago, when OS X 10.0 came out. I hated wrestling with X, battling device drivers, and constantly missing basic functionality. All those problems are finally solved, and I'm back on board. 'Desktop Linux' may never happen, but 'Mobile Linux' is definitely here, and it's pretty darned cool.

I have a serious problem with the UNR: Why the fuck did they include an email client? I mean seriously.

Worse, removing the e-mail client removes the Gnome-Panel. Genius, guys.

In my opinion, not having a unified package management system (as Windows and OSX do not) is a serious usability and security bug.

How many users accidentally install malware b/c they don't know exactly the proper workflow for installing security updates. Many older users (60+) are fearful of installing any security update b/c they have heard that that's how viruses get there.

For OSX there are some alternatives (mac ports and that new git based one) which look awesome, but it's not the same as having it fully integrated into the OS and automated security update notification and/or install for all apps.

OSX is not immune to the security bug -- as it gains in popularity people will begin writing viruses for it and it'll be the same windows nightmare all over again.

Agreed, apt-get that just works is the "magic sauce" for me. It blows my mind that there are so many packagers out there doing that work, but it's freakin' awesome as a user.

Exactly! It is the highly labor intensive nature of this process (and Apple's greed for money as in the iPhone Store incarnation) that prevents this from happening in mainstream OSes.

It's really quite a phenomenal achievement and I think it will begin to be broadly recognized very soon.

That is reasonable, albeit something i regret at times.

I have many friends who develop open source software but resist Linux. I have been working on Linux desktop for some years, but at times it is irritating to no end, especially in the realm of design. I often advocate for Linux, but it is still messy, it is not for everyone.

interface design seems to be a real problem for open source apps, few manage to get it polished enough, and mostly on web apps, not on the desktop.

I used KDE for years, and switched to Gnome when KDE 4 was too messy to deal with. now that KDE 4.4 i think ii might give it a try, but from online video i wasn't too impressed

I think the real problem with Linux ui/ux design spawns from the X Server. It's old and decrepit, levied in aged development standards, and guarded by a bunch of grognards who fear change.

Absolutely untrue. The X server is an orthogonal issue to UI design. The real problem is that a lot of Linux apps still have GUIs designed by programmers rather than UI designers.

In fact, how many open source apps have dedicated UI designers? Probably Mozilla stack, but who else?

Even very popular OS apps, such as GIMP, Inkscape, Open Office have questionable design.

Granted sometimes UI designer can misunderstand user experience in a particular domain, but programmers are more apt to do so.

Disclaimer: I program and sadly, also design(not by choice, I can't really design) UIs on Linux.

can good open source interface design be achieved? and if so how?

I agree with this, it has nothing to do with X. this has to do with design choices, and the method in which the consensus is achieved.

My friend Mushon Zer-Aviv is attempting to tackle this issue

http://www.mushon.com/2009/12/18/shortaudio-my-open-source-d...

I've loved Linux for a while, but needed to stay in Windows for the Adobe apps (Illustrator, most notably). I just made the switch to Ubuntu about a month ago. Now when I need to run Illustrator, I just fire up a VM and boot Windows. I'm using Virtualbox for the ease of use and its "seamless integration" feature. The Adobe products are a bit slow reading from/writing to Ubuntu shares, but the gain in productivity I get from having Linux for everything else more than makes up for it, and I can dedicate 4G of RAM to the VM so Illustrator & Photoshop can still run fast side by side without slowing the primary OS down a bit.

I really like Android. I never had an iPhone, though, just an iPod I rarely used. I just could never get into it. Yes, the animations and scrollings are probably smoother - that's actually what I hate about Apple stuff. I don't care about fancy animations, I want to get things done. The smooth animations of Apple things just make me feel cheap, like a marketing whore. Not to say that Android isn't pretty, but I am guessing iPhone fans would have trouble adapting.

The Nexus is the first real mobile internet device I own - might be part of the excitement. But I am actually surprised how well everything works. I was expecting Android to remain in perpetual beta state, but it seems very usable to me.

I know I should be more excited about iPhone development, because of the huge money making opportunities. But I just can't. iPod and MacBook have been sitting on my desk for a year and I could not really get started. Getting a Nexus just made click and I feel enthusiastic about coding once again. Ever since I got it last week, I spent every spare minute on coding for it. Unfortunately I hate Java, but for the time being I try to see how far I can get with HTML+Javascript, otherwise, maybe some of the JVM languages can be made to run.

One thing that's bugging me about Android right now - there's no widely accepted location standard for storing data on the SD card. Some of the "in the box" apps put all their data inside the Android directory, but others use "data", some use the Java-style reversed DNS (com.example.App), others use the same but with dashes (com-example-App), and others again just dump their guts into the root directory (espeak-data, amazonmp3) etc.

It all reminds me of DOS days when people would install their apps in subdirs of the root directory, or even worse, neophytes who installed their apps in the root directory itself. It really makes me feel like I'm living in the wild west when I put files on the SD card - the data might be safe today, but what if some app tomorrow happens to choose the same directory name?

There definitely needs to be more guidance given here. A harder line like, store app-specific data in Android/data/com.example.YourApp, media of kind x in <here>, etc. would be very helpful.

For example, it's the blind leading the blind here:

http://androidforums.com/updates-cupcakes/5930-definitive-an...

And calls for clarification go unanswered:

http://osdir.com/ml/AndroidDevelopers/2009-08/msg00721.html

Haven't reached that aspect yet (trying to stay in HTML), but I am surprised. I thought apps would be shielded from each other, which would imply they could not mess with each others files. Well, I am curious to learn more about it.

Because of some weird need for backward compatibility here, the sdcard needs to be dos/vfat formatted so file perms can not be enforced. This makes USB mounting work on all OSes, but this means many apparently need the "can modify sdcard contents" perm, which is global for the entire sdcard. I think this is why apps can not be stored and run from the sdcard currently.

The OS presents a file system API to programs. It isn't necessary for the characteristics of the underlying file system to be directly reflected in the view programs see. It would be perfectly possible for the OS to lie to processes, somewhat like chroot, and present each an idealized and sandboxed view of the sdcard.

It appears, at a minimum that Clojure, Scala and Kawa Scheme are known to work on Android. It's also possible, as I understand it to compile to native code for everything but the UI if you prefer.

Ok, let's leave aside that Ubuntu is basically just Debian with much better "OMG usability" hype--the biggest difference is that Ubuntu doesn't have as many packages available by default.

With the increasing acceptance and widespread development/use of Linux, I have progressively seen it become more and more like Those Other OSes.

Once upon a time, Linux was fast as hell on any hardware. It isn't these days. Now, we generally run a massive desktop environment (GNOME/KDE) on a massively bloated display system (X.org), so we can display disgustingly huge programs (Firefox/Chrome, OpenOffice, even Pidgin is a pig). I run Debian on my T22 laptop (PIII, 512 MB of RAM), with the 9wm window manager, and it is slow.

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