Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Ubuntu Hate: A Sign Ubuntu Is Succeeding.

I was scrounging Digg (tho, I prefer reddit) and found a blog post titled "STFU Ubuntu Users!!!". What an angry blogger, I think he should have tossed some 1's into his !'s just for good measure. It seems his main attack on Ubuntu was for being too... corporate?

I've supported Ubuntu in other posts. While Ubuntu probably has more buzz than the product deserves on its technical merits alone, at least in light of all the other Linux distros available... the buzz is still a GOOD THING.

There's a word for stuff that's popular even when other stuff is equally as good - "Trendy". iPods, for example, are also trendy. Ubuntu is most definitely trendy. It's a trend, that means lots of people are following the same lead. Humans have heard mentalities.

The success of Ubuntu ultimately means more money moving into the open source universe. More money means more opportunities and technological advancements. Any distro could have caught on as a trend, but they haven't... and Ubuntu has. And the wonderful irony of the STFU post is that it will only serve to draw more attention to this trend.

My personal metric for the success of an operating system is the entertainment software available for it. The day that I see as many Linux games next to PC games on the shelf at Best Buy or Fry's is the day I declare that Linux pwn'd Microsoft. The open source community had best hurry, however... I hear that OSX is looking tight these days.

I'm not a trendy person. I rarely support a trend. Long live Ubuntu!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Humans have heard mentalities."

I recently installed Ubuntu after about a year and a half of Redhat. I decided to go for Ubuntu because I had 'heard' much about it.

Mispelling or play on words?

A herd mentality seems suggests more or less mindless following, an animal instinct ingrained since birth for survival. Whereas I made a cognitive decision based on qualities I have 'heard' of. I prefer the 'heard' as a play on words.