So, before I knew what linux was (and was teased on various forums) I ordered some free CD's from Ubuntu. (I didn't have the internet at home). (eventually I got them; ubuntu 5.04 I think [Horny Hedgehog from memory])
When I received them I was pleased, everything worked.. well, not everything, but it sorta worked! I had a desktop environment and a command line and I felt a small sense of accomplishment because I'd navigated the strange menu's safely before anakonda or full-framebuffer installers...
Because of the peer pressure I learned about how to do my bits, and I carried on.
Later in the year I found fedora, and Blue is a nicer colour than brown (I was young and fickle) but it was less user friendly, so I committed to learn that and get off the "Noob Friendly" Ubuntu OS.
Many years later I got a small laptop for my mother, at this stage in my life I was "awoken" and I knew the power a machine could hold if it ran linux, so I put ubuntu on it- She's not the most technically apt lady in the world but was able to do most things with ease, and I put that down to having a "Good UX outside microsoft" (since most people who learn the microsoft way are generally committed to a mindset and anything outside of that is pushed away).
A few issues with Flash, some performance hiccups on some websites that seemed to try and avoid supporting linux in strange ways (that I take for
granted I know how to bypass) and eventually the machine gave up the ghost.
I bought a new machine and put ubuntu on it (13.10 I think) and she was somewhat less than pleased, the UX had changed, she didn't know what was available anymore, nothing was organised in a way she understood.. and so I installed mint, she's now happy.
So I'll say this for Ubuntu, they put linux in the hands of people who we should really be targetting, it allowed me access to linux acting as a base plate and later acting as a full blown system for someone who was not interested at all in computers. And they pushed a trend for that, so we should all be thankful.
A follow on from this story and many moons after my "fickle" switch to Fedora/RHEL.
At this point in my life I'd been involved in a half dozen large companies and used linux on enormous scale.
I moved to a company that was using ubuntu LTS (10.04) (old at the time) in production, it was heavily invested and I expected that wouldn't change as Developers were very hesitant to change to debian (which is too old/doesn't make things easy enough) or centos/RHEL which suffers the same issues and has the added benefit of having SELinux (which I'm an advocate of understanding rather than disabling).
I go through my daily security advisories and a local privilege escalation means all our virtual machines and virtual machine hosts are affected, luckily it's patched as 10.04 is still supported so I apt-get update;apt-get upgrade and send out an email saying the server will be down for 30 minutes while it receives patches.
I was wrong, it was down for 6 hours.
unfortunately someone upsteam caused that particular kernel update to rebuild all initramfs' on the machine, and had also named lvm2 to lvm, so now my drives wouldn't mount.
On any kernel version/initramfs version..
Normally you can drop to shell load the module, mount the drives and continue startup, but unfortunately that stopped a lot of things from loading such as the bonding we had in place on the nics.
obviously I didn't know why it broke at the time and was attempting to get help from #ubuntu on freenode.
the response was:
"Sometimes it's better not to know why it broke"
that server was smoothly running CentOS that same day, and I managed to get all the Ubuntu VM's back up and working.. and changing apt-get with a shell script which simply echoes "don't do that".
So in my opinion support and enterprise is where it falls down.
On the "support and enterprise" not being ready. The only comment I'd make is that what you tested was the community of users support e.g. on IRC.
In Open source there's fundamentally a trade-off between "money for time, or time for money". In a production enterprise environment where it's urgent to always be available getting professional support makes sense. Then, when you have an issue, rather than the uncertainty of a community channel you can get hold of professional support from the experts in the software.
That's true of any of the major distributions and a lot of other important OSS software used in production.
Note: I have a bias on this point since I set-up Canonical's professional support and consulting organisation.
When I received them I was pleased, everything worked.. well, not everything, but it sorta worked! I had a desktop environment and a command line and I felt a small sense of accomplishment because I'd navigated the strange menu's safely before anakonda or full-framebuffer installers... Because of the peer pressure I learned about how to do my bits, and I carried on.
Later in the year I found fedora, and Blue is a nicer colour than brown (I was young and fickle) but it was less user friendly, so I committed to learn that and get off the "Noob Friendly" Ubuntu OS.
Many years later I got a small laptop for my mother, at this stage in my life I was "awoken" and I knew the power a machine could hold if it ran linux, so I put ubuntu on it- She's not the most technically apt lady in the world but was able to do most things with ease, and I put that down to having a "Good UX outside microsoft" (since most people who learn the microsoft way are generally committed to a mindset and anything outside of that is pushed away).
A few issues with Flash, some performance hiccups on some websites that seemed to try and avoid supporting linux in strange ways (that I take for granted I know how to bypass) and eventually the machine gave up the ghost.
I bought a new machine and put ubuntu on it (13.10 I think) and she was somewhat less than pleased, the UX had changed, she didn't know what was available anymore, nothing was organised in a way she understood.. and so I installed mint, she's now happy.
So I'll say this for Ubuntu, they put linux in the hands of people who we should really be targetting, it allowed me access to linux acting as a base plate and later acting as a full blown system for someone who was not interested at all in computers. And they pushed a trend for that, so we should all be thankful.