Today, the Dell XPS-13 with Ubuntu Linux is easily the most well-known Linux laptop. Many users, especially developers – including Linus Torvalds – love it. As Torvalds recently said, “Normally, I wouldn’t name names, but I’m making an exception for the XPS 13 just because I liked it so much that I also ended up buying one for my daughter when she went off to college.”
So, how did Dell – best known for good-quality, mass-produced PCs – end up building top-of-the-line Ubuntu Linux laptops? Well, Barton George, Dell Technologies’ Developer Community manager, shared the “Project Sputnik” story this week in a presentation at the popular Linux and open-source community show, All Things Open.
Ubuntu needs to stop being a standard. There are better alternatives at this point
Popularity makes all forms of support infinitely easier. I’d struggle to come up with any technical reason that could be worth giving up the ability to easily google for issues or install software. That doesn’t mean I think you shouldn’t use other distros, just that I believe Ubuntu is the best choice for a default install targeting average people.
Yes, that’s me. I have no interest in a nerdy deep-dive into esoteric distros that may be “better” according to whatever metric you suggest. To me, it’s just a machine that needs to work.
With Windows, getting help when things break is easy. For a non-nerd USER, it has to be the same for Linux. Ubuntu was intended from the start to be made for people like me, and with AskUbuntu there’s a large support site.
I know you can tweak your distro better, and it’s faster, and so on. But it requires knowledge that I don’t care to learn - just as I am not an auto mechanic, I just drive the machine.
If you want it to stop being a standard, help your distro do a better job at marketing. Ubuntu is one of the few that do some actual market research and dedicate resources to getting the OS into the hands of people by getting them interested in it. It’s one of the things we are looking forwards to doing better in Fedora.
Ubuntu got to be most popular because they focused on making it easy to setup and use by non-technical people. Even now they, for example, patch gnome to make it usable.
They patch GNOME to maintain the look and feel similar to Unity, which became their signature look.
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As much as people don’t like Ubuntu, for users who aren’t enthusiasts they don’t want a million different options to choose from
If we keep changing the standard it’ll drive people away and leave behind support
Or you could just recommend Linux mint. It is so much more usable
Recommend yes, preinstall maybe not. Anyway as others have said if Ubuntu runs any distro should
There may be, but realistically it’s probably the most well known.
I’m just happy to have Linux as a standard at all. If it works on Ubuntu, there’s a high chance it works on other distros and can be easily replaced
Ubuntu sucks for many reasons, but new user experience is on the better side. I don’t want to use Ubuntu over Debian myself but I feel like it’s the mandatory corporate evil that can make Linux more appealing to more than just techies while also making Linux desktop more appealing to corpos in Microsoft’s ecosystem. Intune already has some rudimentary support for managed Linux Desktop, with Ubuntu currently supported.
I don’t know the last time you used Ubuntu but its user experience is not on the “better side”. They are pushing snap so hard that they are blind
hi, can you please elaborate why that is wrong? I am fairly new to Linux and have been using Ubuntu for the past month and so far I am satisfied with it…
Snap is a package manager like apt but I’m not sure why that other user is so upset about Ubuntu using/pushing it
Because it’s shit.
If I apt install an app, I expect it NOT to be a snap. I want it to use shared libraries, not bring its own along. They hide from you that they are installing the snap not deb package.
Then you run into all sorts of permissions issues accessing the filesystem from the snap app… Because snap is rather broken in this regard.
Functionally snap is a worse solution then deb, but I guess it’s easier on the developer/maintainer as you don’t get lost in shared dependincy hell.
I feel snaps should be an option if you need cutting edge version of a software that can’t use your shared libs, but never the default install method.
Thanks for explaining the actual issue with snap.
Snap packages are files that contain a file system and get mounted. They contain the application and libraries and such it depends on.
It doesn’t sound like such a bad idea on paper, and speaking for myself and from what I’ve gathered from stuff I see in the community, a general bias against Canonical probably plays a part.
But specifically as a desktop package solution, I do think it’s a poor one. It’s messy, slow, bloated and sandboxing creates usability issues (though it has benefits too, of course).
The problem is that when you install a app via apt it sometimes will install the snap version. This may not seem like a problem until you want to just have native packages or flatpaks.
This one is tough for me. I’m opposed to any distro being considered the “standard”. It feels so antithetical to what makes Linux great.
But it’s also probably what we need for better user adoption. I don’t know which I’d pick if I had to, but I know it wouldn’t be Ubuntu.
What we need it distro independent tooling. We already have flatpak and XDG portals to that’s a start
It’s fine, I bought an XPS 13 years ago with Ubuntu and immediately put OpenSuSE on it. At least I’m not paying Microsoft. I still have that laptop, and it’s great. I think Lenovo deserves an honourable mention here, too - we buy T and X series laptops at work with Ubuntu and they work great too.
such as?
Linux mint, Fedora, openSUSE and tons of other options
Yeah and there is a big issue. I would place myself as quite tech savvy, but last time i looked for a distrobI got overwhelmed… Good thing: there are questionnaires that lead you to a good enough suggestion… Back then it proposed mint
But then the next question: which desktopp environment?
I installed on my huawei matebook and it worked okay-ish, but it had one dealbreaker: even with a lot of tinkering there was no way I got standby or hibernation to work. Which is a must for me…
So I removed mint and installed kubuntu… Now standby and even hibernate work (kind of) But it totally craps up when I try to use my external monitor together with the internal screen… Even a lot of terminal tinkering later I don’t have it working… Oh and the speakers still crap now
There is a lit of information around how to maybe get stuff working, but a lot of it requires a lot of upfront knowledge:
EmI do love tinkering, but sometimes it’s really frustrating even for me. No way I could my GF to try that out…
Agreed, still when you sell a laptop and want to put in an OS that’s going to be supported for the whole lifetime of the device then there are not options for people who don’t tinker.
You think Arch is going to replace Ubuntu on commercial and corporate machines? Or some other funny distro like Fedora that cannot survive an upgrade? Ubuntu is based off of Debian Unstable, with a lot of UX polish and Snaps that allow for sandboxed system programs.
It also runs terribly. What we need is a more diverse ecosystem that is more than just ubuntu
…aaaand what is it going to be, other than Debian/Ubuntu based distros? Stable AND LTS only, NO rolling release options. Last I saw, Debian is harder than Ubuntu (source I used Ubuntu LTS for 6 years before adopting Debian 12 Stable upon release).
I have a Linux/Windows computing guide made from a couple decades of experience, and simply see nothing beating Ubuntu and GNOME as far as UX polish goes. https://lemmy.ml/post/511377
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