Mint: A Thinking Man’s (green) Ubuntu

That heading pretty much sums it up. The version of Mint I tested (11, AKA Katya) is essentially a re-skinned Ubuntu, with a few custom apps thrown on top for flavor. I rather liked it. I found their “super menu” particularly nice to use. It’s like a bizarro-universe Ubuntu, where design choices were made that much more closely match the ones I would have made. I only ever used it in a VM, so I can’t speak to questions of performance and whatnot on bare metal, but I doubt there will be any surprises. Rather than repeat what has been said before, and very likely better than I would have said it, I would direct you over to Dedoimedo’s review of Katya. His opinion and conclusions closely mirror my own.

Fedora is still Redhat

Perhaps some perspective on where I’m coming from vis-à-vis Fedora is in order. I’ve never liked Redhat. RPMs just seem like a really poor packaging system. I know a lot of people use it, and some even claim to like it, but I’ve never seen the appeal. All the various tools that have been created to make dealing with them easier always just end up coming across as attempts at polishing a turd. So, after abandoning Redhat 7.3 (which I used despite my RPM aversion) for Gentoo, I pretty much ignored everything Redhat/Fedora until now. I went into this experiment hoping that things would be better, and you know what? They aren’t. Yum is still slow, still moves tons of data over the wire needlessly every time you do something rather than relying on local caching, still gets caught in weird lock states, and generally just sucks a lot more than APT. I somehow managed to get the system into some sort of a deadlock just by going into their update manager to see what updates were available after the initial installation. I managed to get it unwedged relatively easily, but it still required a few prayers to Google, stopping and restarting some Fedora-specific service I’m not familiar with (I assume it’s part of the update management system, but I didn’t check. I was looking a solution, not nuts and bolts!), and some ministrations with obscure Yum switches on the command line.

That said, the Gnome 3 desktop on Fedora 15 is awful pretty, and things generally have a nice fit and finish. If they could just make their package manager better, they’d have a contender. I also have to say I have a lot of respect for people in the Fedora community. They are really doing a lot of good work that is pushing the state of the art in Linux forward in meaningful ways. One of my favorites is Máirín Duffy. She is doing great stuff in the realm of design and usability that is far too often ignored in OSS. I really want to like Fedora, but every time I have to touch an RPM, I break out in hives. It’s not pretty.

Seems Obvious

So after those mini-reviews it should seem obvious, I’m going with Mint, right? Well, no. Not yet, anyway. While doing this research, I also kept futzing with Ubuntu, and I managed to fix the stability problems I was having. The two things that seemed to help the most was enabling the Gnome 3 Team PPA to get newer versions of Gnome 3 packages, and using the patched Upstart package available from the PPA listed in this comment on Launchpad. Those changes fixed the “showstopper” problems I had, and I’ve started to get used to Gnome 3. It’s not perfect, I still feel somewhat hamstrung, but unless I switch to KDE it seems Gnome 3 is the official Way Forward for the Linux desktop aside from Unity. It definitely has potential though, and historically speaking, the Gnome folks have done a good job of making decisions that meshed well with my computing priorities.

So, for now, I’m sticking with the Onerous Ocelot. I’m not real happy about it, but there you have it. Should something come up that would prompt me to do a bare-metal reload of this machine I’m totally putting Mint on instead, but barring that, I’m sticking where I am. Maybe 12.04 will start turning things around. I feel like I’m rationalizing the behavior of my abuser, but it’s not bad enough right this second to justify the amount of effort it would take to make the switch.

The title of this post comes courtesy of my friend Larry. He said it in response to my tweet that I was fed up with Ubuntu’s flaky releases and had begun examining alternatives. A couple people also responded wanting to know more about what was prompting the change and what I’ve been considering moving to. I’m currently looking at Fedora and Linux Mint. I was going to look at Debian too, but it mysteriously failed during a test install in a VM, and that’s exactly the kind of baseline crap I’m trying to get away from. So for now, it’s off the list.

What prompted this change is a more complex story.

I’ve been a faithful Ubuntu user since the very beginning. I first installed Warty in November of 2004, not long after it had been released, and I’ve looked forward to every release since. I’ve often described it as “Debian with all the nastier bits filed off.”, and until recently that description held up pretty well. My computing priorities are that I have freedom with pragmatism, and modernity with stability. Ubuntu has given me that. Ubuntu felt like coming home. Ubuntu “got” me.

I think things started getting shaky with the 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” release. I remember noticing at the time that there was an awful lot of upgrade breakage and install issues, especially for an LTS release. But, I worked through them in fairly short order, and things quickly got back to normal. I continued working, happily ignoring the half-baked add-ons they included. Every following release seemed to subtly continue that trend of playing things just a bit fast and loose with quality control and consistency for the sake of getting the internal Ubuntu projects out there, and seemingly, to satisfy the whims of their developers. I won’t list them all here, for anyone who has followed Ubuntu, it will be familiar territory. For anyone else, it won’t be meaningful. For everyone, it will be boring. Suffice it to say that this was a “death of a thousand cuts” situation. Any one, or even a handful, of these things would have been innocuous. All together though, they gave me the distinct sense that all was not well with Ubuntu.

The first real crisis of faith though hit with 11.04, Natty Narwhal. That was the first release that shipped with Unity as the default interface. On my dear God, what a trainwreck that was for me. It was pretty, but utterly useless on a multi-monitor setup. Luckily, it was easy enough to revert to a “classic Gnome” desktop, and things went back to normal. “Ok…”, I said to myself, “They had to push this out at some point to make the transition. They did the smart thing and left it fairly easy to revert, so no real harm done.”. And now, we have Oneric Ocelot.

First, my upgrade mysteriously fails. I got bit by this known bug, which has the solution nicely laid out here. This is the first time I’ve had an upgrade fail with Ubuntu due to something that wasn’t my fault. Finally I can login, and I see the Unity again. Ugh. Still no better with multi-monitor. It seems that in the six months since 11.04, 100% of the dev time on this has been spent on sparkles and woosh. None of the usability improvements I would have expected are there. Ok, so back to Gnome classic for me. Oh wait, there is no Gnome classic. Oh sure, you can install gnome-panel, and get a sketchy approximation of the Gnome you know and love, but it’s badly crippled. So, Gnome 3 for me I guess…

Well, it’s not too bad actually. The default multi-monitor setup actually meshes fairly well with how I work.  And, I also get the joy of dealing with this bug in Nautilus. The bug has apparently been fixed though, so I guess that’s something. But I still have a dbus daemon that consumes 100% of my CPU unless I kill it. AND gnome-shell will randomly spike the CPU and have to be killed. AND about 50% of the time the lockscreen won’t come back so I can unlock my desktop. AND I apparently don’t have a screensaver anymore. AND everything takes more clicks than it used to. AND… I could go on. For the first time since they made the questionable choice of disabling ctrl-alt-backspace, I re-enabled it because things have become so crappy and unstable I actually need it to avoid forcibly powering down my machine to recover from some weird glitch.

Looking back, I think that Ubuntu and I have just been growing apart. I like that Ubuntu is keeping up with new stuff, but when that means taking away stability and features I count on, that just doesn’t work for me. I had thought about doing a clean install to see if enough of my gripes could be a result of a dodgy upgrade to make it worth staying. You know, sort of talk it out. But that’s really just a bandaid for a bigger problem. In looking for how to make Ubuntu work the way it used to behave, the way I want it to behave, I’m having flashbacks to my experiences in trying to force OSX to do what I want. Sure, I could spend a bunch of time and customize it to work in a way that makes sense to me, or I could learn a different way to work. But both of those things take an awful lot of time and effort I’d rather spend on other things.

It just feels like you don’t get me anymore Ubuntu, I think it’s time for us to start seeing other people.

The best part is that this little anti-feature of the “Dolby-digital optical out” on this TV isn’t documented anywhere, except in a FAQ buried on Samsung’s website, which you cannot find using their own search engine, only Google knows how to get there. If I want 5.1 from the PS3, I have to go back into the attic and run a TOSLINK cable, or buy a new receiver that speaks HDMI and totally rearrange things.

Thanks DMCA / HDCP! Isn’t our ownership society wonderful? I know it’s improved MY life by forcing manufacturers of consumer electronics to cripple the things I buy. I rest easy knowing my substantial inconvenience has helped prevent the “pirates” from getting unlocked copies Megamind with surround-sound intact out onto the Internet. Oh wait, THAT’S NOT TRUE! My substantial inconvenience has achieved absolutely nothing! Hooray! *Goes away muttering….*

/usr/lib/vmware*

/etc/vmware*

/usr/share/doc/vmware*

/usr/bin/vmware*

After that the new installation proceeded normally and I was up and running again, this time without having to do any manual patching. Yay!

First off, I’m a supporter of Lessig, the Creative Commons and the general “copyleft” movement, and I’d like to point a few items that you seem to be overlooking. I hope you will give the points I raise some real consideration.

First, I want to point out that in all of my reading and listening to Lessig, he has advocated reforming copyright, not eliminating it. Until that reform happens, the CC licenses are a way to enable people who believe that their work should be Free will be Free in the current climate of effectively infinite copyright extension. While Bob’s Photography may theoretically benefit from copyright extensions, it’s doubtful that they do in practice. I would love to see some examples to the contrary, but with the rare exception of the work of truly noteworthy artists (Ansel Adams comes to mind) the commercial value of a photograph beyond 14 years after it was taken (the original period laid out in American copyright law) is going to be vanishingly small. As a result of this, I don’t see this “it helps small business” argument as a sound support for a law which also has the effect of locking up truly significant works of culture indefinitely so that they may only be built upon by the corporate entities which control them. This greatly decreases the value of those works to the society as a whole. An additional side effect of this is that any works for which the copyright status is unknown are, in the current climate, likely to stagnate and be forgotten to history if the authors or their heirs are unreachable to gain license from them. Would you rather that the brilliant work of some unknown artist be lost in the sands of time because the law frightened someone enough that they chose to leave it out of their project which would have preserved it? Or that the TV series you loved in your childhood is never released on DVD because licensing for the music it featured cannot be obtained?

Add to this the new abundance that Brandon mentions above, and you have the fact that each individual creative piece is worth less than it used to be. This is simply a fact that creators need to come to terms with. Ideally, they will not only come to terms with it, but learn how to exploit this new abundance, this new ease of distribution, to drive new revenue streams. You can see a number of articles about how this can be done at http://www.techdirt.com .

In this new sea of creative output, attention is worth more than any one individual work. Your name as a good artist has more value than any single image you can create. This is why I support the concept of CC-attribution licenses. When I create something I want as many eyes on it as possible so that my name will become recognized. I can then take that reputation and use it to leverage revenue from things that are actually scarce, like my time and talent, rather than try to force artificial scarcity on something that by nature is abundant. Obscurity is a bigger threat to you individual prosperity than the CC ever could be. Zach Arias is a great example of a photographer who has leveraged his reputation to create new revenue streams that have nothing to do with selling his photos. I have no idea what his opinions on IP law are. He has though, intentionally or not, learned how to leverage the value of “free” to create what seems to be a respectable income.

IP law is, and always has been, about creating an incentive to create and enrich society. In the past, creating was expensive proposition, with tremendous up front costs. The best way to encourage people to create despite these costs was to grant an artificial monopoly on the commercial exploitation of those creations. However, we’ve now begun to realize some (arguably) unintended consequences of those monopolies within the new context provided by modern technology. The biggest of these is that the system has been abused and modified over the years by monied non-natural legal entities who have the sole goal of extracting value from the creations they control indefinitely. As a result, these laws are no longer serving to enrich our culture, they serve primarily to enrich those entities instead. Unfortunately, this attitude of feeling like one is entitled to profit many times over for a single piece of work has become the norm in many industries. The music industry is the most absurd example, whose party line seems to be that they deserve to get paid for each and every play a of a song, regardless of the circumstance.

In the end, there are only two groups who truly benefit from IP law as it stands. The first are the corporations. There are examples all over chronicling how they have locked up cultural artifacts to the detriment of new creators. The second group are the lawyers, who are able to play both sides against each other and profit, while adding no value whatsoever.

I’ll leave the response to the anti-corruption bit for another post….

The EFF on Facebook’s privacy changes in December. I had always been a little skeptical of Facebook, but had previously decided it offered enough value for the potential reduction of privacy required to use it. This set of changes got me really wondering just how trustworthy they were. I’ve been slowly mulling that over since then.

Then Zuckerberg (Facebook’s head honcho) came out with this little gem. This made it clear that his (and by extension, Facebook’s) view of privacy is a far cry from my own. More fuel to the “can I trust them?” fire.

Finally this week, I found this Wired article and this really interesting visualization. The trends here are clear, and I agree with the Wired author Ryan Singel that there must be a better way to do the things that I use Facebook for, and that I’d rather be part of that movement than add to the inertia of the 1800-lb gorilla.

Anyway, that’s why I’m considering it. I probably won’t do it any time soon, but I expect it will happen.

To fix it, enter the following into a command prompt:

gconftool-2 –set ‘/apps/metacity/general/button_layout’ –type string “menu:minimize,maximize,close”

(Note you may have to fix some of the quotes, since the typographical quotes don’t work like “real” quotes in the shell)

An viola, sane titlebar button placement for your user account. I’m planning on building a little app in Quickly to do this push-button style. If / when I finish that I’ll put it in a PPA and post about it here. It will be of limited utility, but a good way to play with Quickly and setting up  a PPA. Anyway…

The improved boot speed is FANTASTIC. I haven’t actually timed it, but on this laptop it feels as fast or faster than resuming from a suspend, which I think is pretty impressive.

The visual tweaks are good (modulo titlebar idocy…) and I love the “Ambiance” GTK theme. I tend to like darker themes, and this is probably one of the best ones I’ve used.

Of course the version bumps in major apps is nice, and being able to run the latest firefox w/o repo jiggery pokery is convenient. My webcam is also working out of the box, a first on this hardware, and is even working in Flash. Chatroulette here I come! On the downside, I am getting playback hiccup in full-screened videos from Hulu, which I never got before. Hulu has apparently made some changes recently that makes it not work at all w/ 64-bit Linux, so maybe it’s related to that.

So, long story short-ish,I think this will be a solid release. I have my doubts as to whether or not it will meet expectations as an LTS release given the fairly large amount of very visisble tinkering that has apparently gone on, but overall I’m looking forward to it.

Can you tell me what’s wrong with this picture?

No?

Well, the problem with this picture is that fewer than a dozen pixels makes difference between clicking on “File” and clicking on “Close”. Perhaps even worse, less than 6 pixels mean the difference between hitting the main application launch button and clicking “Close”.

This is STUPID. This is going to piss off TONS of people. I’m a 15-year IT veteran and within 30 minutes of using this setup I accidentally clicked on the close button twice. What is the “normal desktop user” that Ubuntu supposedly targets going to do?

Ugh… seriously guys, it’s called Fitt’s Law. Look it up. It’s why things like this are BAD IDEA. If you are going to be making changes like this DO SOME FRIGGING USABILITY STUDIES.

I really meant to do a more thorough post on 10.04, but I have to go de-pressurize my brain after actually seeing this first-hand.