However, installation can be a pain at times, if certain hardware is not supported out of the box, in particular wifi and printer drivers! You should test that using a live CD, which runs ubuntu from RAM, without installation on the harddrive.

The community really helped me fixing my problems. But, If you want to get ubuntu for your grandparents, you should get them a computer with preinstalled ubuntu.

Regards

kikl

People have been led down the same path throughout history, forgetting the principles that they once fought for and instead selling out to what works now. Short-sightedness, it seems, robs us all of refinement in the long run.

There are a host of reasons to at least try Linux, not the least of which is the principle. In the computer world, Linux is the equivalent of revolutionary wars of past, putting the user or citizen FIRST in all elements involved. But as the people have been slowly misled and robbed of their liberties, and in fact of their definition of liberty (in all countries), likewise people ignore the principle of Linux and indulge in the fruits of greed enjoyed by Microsoft and Apple.

Despite this, many others as well as myself enjoy what the OS itself offers, independent of principle, as only a free entity can construct. Its base is stable, it offers multiple approaches to the manipulation of desktop, it can be configured in nearly any way, it is free to the end user, it can run a good portion of Windows applications with the proper software (WIne, Cedega), and is infinitely supported by a community with a respect for you and your choice.

There has never been a better time to try Linux, for it surely is more capable than it ever has been, and will likely become more capable as time goes on. Most importantly, its development is governed by the user, with the users “rights” or freedoms at its design center.

Seriously, your position takes you to the other end of the scale. I’ve seen nests of Solaris fanatics who would rather hold on to their gold-plated Sun “solutions” until they (and their jobs) are all replaced by Windows boxes (and by Windows consultants) rather than transition to GNU/Linux.

And since you mention OS X, a comment about that and earlier mentions in defense of OS X as non-proprietary and “based” on free and open source software. Sure, it has some free and open source software in it, great big chunks of it, in fact. But, in the end, it’s riddled with unabashedly proprietary software like, for instance, the display layer Aqua. No small thing, that. And then there’s the that whole policy-du-jour, on again, off again rollercoaster with the licensing of their projects.

It’s great that you find what you need, Unix-wise. But the appeal of GNU/Linux isn’t *just* that it’s like Unix. It’s also that it is free and open source. The rump of proprietary Unix that continues to survive does so due to legacy reasons or *despite* the fact that it is Unix, not because it is true-blue Unix.

As for bloat, sure. Ubuntu is bloated. But, that’s its target market, and it compares favorably in that regard with a full-blown install of either of its major full-blown proprietary desktop counterparts. On the other hand, with an Ubuntu server installation CD or, for example, a Debian install, one can install a very light, lean base install and then dribble in packages that one wants. But again, I don’t think that’s the context that’s relavent to this sort of discussion.

I mean, if you think training the typical MacOS or Ubuntu Desktop user on ports is that tenable a proposition, I’ve got two words: Get real.

Herewith, five reasons to consider running Unix instead of GNU/Linux:

1) Freedom from package managers. Instead, BSD systems give you port
managers that provide the same functionality, the same thousands of
applications, and even the ability to install binaries if that’s
what you want. But they also make it trivial to build variants
customized to be exactly what you need. OS-X has no fewer than
three such systems, most notably including the NetBSD pkgsrc system
(which to be fair can also be used on some GNU/Linux systems).

2) Freedom to use the latest technologies. The obvious ones are easy:
ZFS and DTrace are simply incredibly, and once you’ve used them
you’ll never want to go back. They’re both available for all the
BSD-based Unices, OpenSolaris, and OS-X. On a broader note, the
BSD-based systems don’t incorporate nearly as much software into
their “base system” (see 3b below), meaning they port managers tend
to have newer versions of most tools available sooner, as udpating
them doesn’t disrupt the OS. So besides having the latest
technologies, you tend to get a better selection of up-to-date
tools to use on them.

3a) Freedom from bloat. The system commands for Unix are designed to
be parts of a system that work together and complement each
other. The system commands for GNU/Linux come from different groups
of people and seem to be struggling with each other for mind share,
hence they have seemingly arbitrary extensions that often duplicate
functionality found in other commands on the same system.

3b) Freedeom from bloat. A “base system” install for GNU/Linux
frequently includes many applications that you probably have no use
for. Unix systems usually include an install variant that’s pretty
much the bare minimum to get the system up on a modern network and
let you install the parts you actually need. This really isn’t for
the casual – or probably even common – user, but it’s a tweakers
paradise.

4) Freedom from downtime. Like most modern systems, you can upgrade an
OpenSolaris system – kernel and all – with a few commands. Unlike
most of them, you can do it while the system is up and running,
providing services to users. You convert to the new system with a
reboot, and can revert to the old one with one command and another
reboot should there be problems with the new one.

5) Freedom from “improvements” that aren’t. Unix systems tend to
distribute applications set up the way the author provides
them. GNU/Linux systems seem duty bound to set things up the way
the distro maintainers want them, no matter what the end user
wants. Nor do they worry about how these settings may screw up
other systems (reminds me of Windows that way….). So not only do
I find a typical GNU/Linux command line nearly unusable, but I find
that logging into one from a Unix system adds injury to insult by
screwing up the window managers on my Unix systems. Worst of all,
in many cases these settings aren’t set in the default user setup -
where they belong on any proper Unix system – but are in a
system-wide setup that requires intimate knowledge of the
application to undo, assuming it can be undone at all.

For example: “The installation is much faster and when it is complete you will not spend the next two hours installing patches, drivers and applications like you would with Windows.”

Not true. Once you install a CD version you need to run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (or use Synaptic, aptitude, etc) before you’re up to date. The files are all downloaded first, which may take ages, so you’re essentially taking the longest amount of time between installing the system and starting to patch it. In Vista you install and then the update manager pops up like GNOME Update Manager on the systray, the difference being that the updates are totally independent of one another (no broken dependencies!) and the updates themselves can be redistributed to a computer without an internet connection with no fear of running into dependency issues in GDebi. Also, the way APT currently does updates is redownloading the entire archive instead of the delta (change data, much like a diff). If that was changed, getting an up-to-date system out of the box would require downloading about 10% of what you currently have to, in some cases whole suites such as OpenOffice.org (a hundred or so megabytes) for a single security update which actually adds maybe 50kB of new code to each package.

So, it’s far from optimal, but it’s better than Vista/OSX for a lot of reasons, probably the most prominent being the centralisation of updates, followed closely by less frequent restarts required and ease of removal of more common features you simply do not use (my examples are Bluetooth, graphics tablet and Palm/PDA support, which you couldn’t remove in Windows without making a custom install CD).

If you want me to discuss more stuff, let me know, there’s a few more points I disagree with. It just takes way too long to write if you’re not actually going to read it.

In other words, people come for the Ubuntu, but stay for the Ubuntu forums.

I had Ubuntu on a laptop I don’t use very often and when I patched it back up it was 150 days since my last update and there were 160+ updates. Do you have any idea how long it would take me in Vista to check every app that I have available for updates much less download and install all of them?

With Ubuntu I just select update and it’s taken care of.

Keith

2. Security : take Linux security, and now add draksec ( a tool allowing to control security settings and send by email automatic reports about possibles vulnerabilities in your system ), drakfirewall ( easy firewall configuration ) or drakgw ( allow to share an internet connection with local DNS, transparent proxy cache, firewall based on shorewall ).
http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/view/KB/SecureSmsec
http://doc.mandriva.com/en/2009/Mastering-Manual/Mastering-Manual.html/draksec.html

3. Lower Cost: Mandriva have a community XFCE one release ( Live CD ), but also provide an even more lightweight desktop : LXDE.
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0_Tour#LXDE
Please note that Mandriva is able to detect low specs hardware and so provide the corresponding package selection.

4. Community : on this I have no numbers. Maybe Ubuntu community is stronger.

5. Ease of Installation : Mandriva is easy to install, but also easy to configure. The Mandriva Control center allow to configure nearly every aspect of your system with graphical wizard. Some server stuff can even been done like this ( apache, FTP server, PXE server, DNS server, DHCP server, NIS server, NFS server, SAMBA server, … ).
http://doc.mandriva.com/en/2009/Mastering-Manual/Mastering-Manual.html/advanced.html