Fuduntu: Back to Fundamentals, Gets it Right

http://www.linuxadvocates.com/2013/03/fuduntu-back-to-fundamentals-gets-it.html

by tildeslashblog • 13 years ago

77 63 13 years ago

linuxadvocates.com

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

why not replace the window manager?

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water.

willismichael• 13 years ago

Well, the first three letters are FUD.

jimparkins• 13 years ago

Sounded great until I read that Fuduntu does not come with Apt or Deb and uses Yum/Rpm instead...

"Apt is not installed with Fuduntu. Yum (Yellowdog Package Manager) is the replacement. For more help on yum, "man yum" from a terminal, or google "yum howto"."

"The "debi" package installer is not included. Instead, the "rpm" command can be used to install .rpm packages. For more help on rpm, "man rpm" from a terminal, or search the internet for "rpm install howto"."

INTPenis2• 13 years ago

Speaking as a former Debian fanboy, current avid Debian/Ubuntu user, Yum isn't too bad. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had rollbacks. And with 3rd party repos, you can get just as current, if not more current than Debian Sta(b)le, software.

LukeShu2• 13 years ago

I'm a fan of pacman, but find apt/dpkg acceptable (barely). My biggest two beefs with yum/rpm are that it does not track "explicitly installed" vs "installed as a dependency" (dpkg does, but it's fuzzy), and that when processing dependencies, it does a brute-force recursive crawl instead of building a tree.

trumbitta2• 13 years ago

I always had nightmarish experiences with rpm...

Last time I checked, circa 2006, the db got corrupted three times in 1.5 years and I had to dance the hell-dance in order to get a working system back...

[EDIT] And that's primarily why I love apt / dpkg

sciurus• 13 years ago

Distrowatch reviewed it a while back at http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20130121#feature

iNate2000• 13 years ago

That didn't sound "fundamental" to me. The author likes the distro, and it sounds good to me too. But I missed how any of his favorite features were fundamental to the Linux desktop.

tfinch• 13 years ago

Absolutely my feeling too. The review fairly swiftly turns into a list of what programs are installed. Let's face it, all of these are available in the repos of pretty much all distros. The rest of the features seem to be visual tuning and customisation.

I haven't tried Fuduntu, but may be tempted at some point, and I can appreciate the amount of work that has gone into it, but this review doesn't really sell it for me.

claudius9• 13 years ago

I never understand why people spend ages trying out fifty different distros if they could get just what they want if they spent half that time actually installing/adapting one distribution with a reasonably broad package base.

Or, put differently: Given the relatively high dimension of preference space (desktop environment, window manager, file manager, icon set, web browser, editor…), it appears strange to me to assume that more than just a few users will be satisfied with the default DE, WM, file manager etc. installed by a distro. Just five different DEs, five different WMs and five different file browsers already give 125 possible choices. How, then, is it sensible to judge a distribution by its default programmes, especially since these can often be easily swapped out against others.

Surely, the main points in considering which distribution to choose should be the low-level ingredients (package manager, for example) and update policies rather than the default icon theme.

sn0v• 13 years ago

While that ought to be the case, a lot of novice-intermediate level users often fail to take these points into consideration simply because they are unaware of the fact that the default DE+WM etc can be easily swapped out. Often, many people tend to give more weightage to higher visibility points like the DE+WM etc, rather than package manager and release schedules.

ShawnBird• 13 years ago

I ran Ubuntu with cinnamon for a little over a year but finally moved over to Mint. There is just a lot more support and stability for using the default DE+WM and a lot of programs can have problems outside of the expected.

mirkules2• 13 years ago

"I never understand why people spend ages trying out fifty different distros if they could get just what they want if they spent half that time actually installing/adapting one distribution with a reasonably broad package base."

Because if you have to do it more than once, or, say onto 100 desktops in a work environment, the time spent searching for a distro will pay off. Besides that, some people want stuff to work the first time - and every subsequent time - without having to worry "oh I need to install this on another computer, but I can't remember all the steps I took" in order to get to real actual work.

claudius9• 13 years ago

If you just want the same programs on your laptop and desktop, use something like dpkg --get-selections and dpkg --set-selections (for APT, I’m sure RPMland has an analogue). If you also want the same configuration, copy over your homedir or the dotfiles therein and be happy.

Futhermore, testing n distros is not really my definition of ‘work the first time’, nor can you expect that what worked a year ago still works two releases later.

Your point about 100 desktops in a work environment also strikes me as slightly odd, given that I would consider using Puppet, Chef or possibly NFS mounts (depending on the exact setup) rather than configuring/installing 100 desktops individually.

nsmartt• 13 years ago

This is the kind of thing that should be automated anyway. Write a script to do everything you're doing in the process of setting up your system, and you won't ever have to do it by hand again.

BHSPitMonkey3• 13 years ago

Certainly anyone managing 100 corporate desktops will be deploying a customized image to those machines, rather than using a distro's default installer on each one. In which case, it still doesn't matter what the OS defaults are.

gcb05• 13 years ago

well, you just described why there are even distros to begin with.

otherwise everyone would spend 'half the time' reading the LSF guide and having the perfect distro.

claudius9• 13 years ago

Distros, at least in my opinion, are not about choosing default settings, but about making all the different components (Kernel, whatever else you like) work together nicely and distributing them together (hence the name Distribution).

It therefore makes sense to classify a distribution by its mean of distribution (duh!), i.e. the package manager and by the set of things it distributes (the packages).

You may also note that I did not say that everyone is capable of collecting software from ~50 different upstreams and then compiling said software in half the time it takes to install five distributions – but installing the packages of one’s choice from the archive of the distribution is probably roughly as easy as installing the distribution in the first place.

It might well be that I misunderstood something you said, so please feel free to correct me.

regularfry2• 13 years ago

Defaults matter because they're sat in a juicy little feedback loop: more people have them installed, so they get more eyeballs and bug-effort, so they get better and have better support, so more people use them.

At least, in theory.

dmix• 13 years ago

Indeed, there's a delicate balance between customization and fragmentation that can't be ignored.

claudius9• 13 years ago

In practice, developers are usually ‘power users’ that adapt the system to their liking, i.e. don’t use the defaults?

bluedino3• 13 years ago

A lot of my Linux use is similar to sitting in a garage and taking apart an old car. It's fun to install different distributions and play around with them, and then blow it away and start all over. With a fast internet connection and a handful of USB drives you can try all the major distributions in one afternoon.

purplelobster• 13 years ago

I wish I could find it fun to install linux distro's, then I'd find pretty much anything in life entertaining!

stiff• 13 years ago

I think people basically carry over their Windows habits, treat each distro as a completely separate OS offering a certain look & feel and app selection.

aethertap2• 13 years ago

I like that someone else spent the time trying to figure it out so that I could read about his experiences, then spend only 10 minutes figuring it out. I don't know if that was the purpose at the outset (probably not) but I still find it highly worthwhile.

I am a Linux user that likes to stick with distro defaults for everything that isn't part of my core tool set because it seems like my system is less prone to breaking when updates happen, and because I get more updates that way. It's nice to see others' reviews of those distros so that I can make a better decision without doing all of the legwork, so I say kudos to this guy for doing it. I might try Fuduntu now based on his review, and I wouldn't have bothered otherwise.

pekk• 13 years ago

It seems like my system is more prone to breaking when I use obscure distros. I might think a distro's choices were totally awesome but if not many other people are using it and/or the development is not that active, and I expect it to 'just work,' then I'm going to have a bad time.

rpgmaker• 13 years ago

Point taken: you're a 1337 user, but seriously? If you can't see why people want a distro to be _usable_ out of the box then maybe you haven't given much thought to the whole thing.

claudius9• 13 years ago

Y34h, t0t4lly 1337 – I can see why people want a distro to be usable out of the box. I could even see why people want a distro to have their exact preferences as defaults, had you made that point. I cannot see why people prefer opening fifty boxes over properly unpacking one.

EugeneOZ• 13 years ago

Everyone has own opinion what is "right".

Zirro2• 13 years ago

My experience with the designs used by Linux desktop environments is limited, but haven't the dock and some of it's (folder-)icons shown in the article[0] borrowed a little too much from OS X?

I would much rather see them go about improving the GUI in their own way rather than trying to imitate another OS.

[0] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iQDB5aZg__U/UVHDwY33wAI/AAAAAAAAHb...

bluedino3• 13 years ago

Cairo is a project to make a OS X-like dock. It's not enabled in any of the main distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu...), but you can add it if you'd like.

Zirro2• 13 years ago

I see. If that's the case, it seems they are doing a good job ;-)

gcb05• 13 years ago

Not at all!

Cairo is a vector graphic renderer for X (and others, but i think only for X now)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics)

claudius9• 13 years ago

If people like that particular feature of the other OS, why not imitate it? There were also themes for Metacity (Gnome 2.x window manager) looking like Windows XP floating around – if people like that sort of thing…

You still get plenty of diversity and ‘improving’ even though some elements are borrowed sometimes.

christopheraden• 13 years ago

The name choice seems bizarre to me. It's like a portmanteau of Fedora and Ubuntu, yet has very few of the features of Ubuntu. Judging by the default GUI, Facintosh seems more appropriate.

CanSpice• 13 years ago

I keep reading it as FUDuntu -- Ubuntu for spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

da_n• 13 years ago

Same here, I just assumed it was a stripped-down Ubuntu variant. Maybe Fundora would have been a better choice (though I do like Facintosh).

BHSPitMonkey3• 13 years ago

Under-the-hood decisions aside, this distro seems to fairly closely match the philosophy of Elementary OS [1] (which, admittedly, seems to be "follow OSX"). One main difference is that, whereas Fuduntu uses rpm/yum, Elementary OS is an Ubuntu fork and uses its repositories (dpkg/apt).

[1] http://elementaryos.org/

Samuel_Michon2• 13 years ago

Wow, that's by far the best looking Linux distro I've seen. Judging from the screenshots, Fuduntu, like most distros, is pretty fugly. ElementaryOS actually looks like it has someone making UX choices and creating a consistent design language. The system font isn't great and type could really use some font smoothing, but that's the case with all Linux distros I know of.

They're even working on a curated App Store: http://elementaryos.org/journal/introducing-appcenter

I think this is exactly what Linux needs to become a platform consumers like to use. Once it's out of beta, I'm definitely going to install ElementaryOS.

Screenshots: http://elementaryos.org/journal/when-its-ready

xiaomai• 13 years ago

I don't care for the desktop shell they're making, but the applications I have tried are really high-quality. The screen-capture program is really great and feature-full.

joe_the_user• 13 years ago

Looks like a gnome-shell clone with burnished aluminum frames. It may be pretty in the abstract but it's apparent lack of usability makes it ugly to my eyes.

mehrzad2• 13 years ago

>Wow, that's by far the best looking Linux distro I've seen

Have you seen any Window Manager only (without Desktop Environment) desktops? They're very nice, even nicer than OS X or Windows. Examples:

http://www.anony.ws/i/2013/03/28/3BtzL.png

http://www.anony.ws/i/2013/03/28/dV2Ac.png

notmarkus• 13 years ago

Off topic, but Linux Advocates, your "Cloud Categories" widget is morbidly obese. It's a mass of swirling red letters that looks like it's straight out of a 4chan Zalgo-Text thread. It's using more memory than all my other Chrome tabs combined.

kriro• 13 years ago

I have an Aspire One Netbook (Edit: different model, mine is a 722 with 4GB Ram, 1.333 dual core processor, 320GB HDD) like the OP and run Xubuntu on it which works perfectly fine (in case someone is looking for alternatives to Fubuntu).

Might give Fubuntu a try some day for kicks, wasn't aware it existed. I'm perfectly happy with Xubuntu though, I also run it on my beefy desktop.

caycep• 13 years ago

This distro needs a better name. The current one is kind of unfortunate...

renke1• 13 years ago

I am pretty happy using Debian testing with xfce4. It also gives you a minimalistic and traditional desktop. It's perfect for me because I am actually too lazy to configure some fancy window manager and other stuff. Also, everything just works out of the box.

Fuduntu: Back to Fundamentals, Gets it Right

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