Mac OSX is BSD based just because of reliability reason. My prediction is Google desktop OS will be as crash prone as other Linux.

I install ubuntu in around 50 computer in office. I am using 6.06 because newer version break a lot of things. It is a good thing that OpenOffice can install even on old version. Unfortunately I have to use newer version on unfortunate new computer.

Maybe its me but i dont mind spending the time to get things working but hate it when i get it working and for some reason the next bootup I have to try again.

I helped a guy setup his MAC Book at work and i must agree with you OS-X realy sleak and it has a linux feel

Thanks for the heads up on the new Skype beta version! I will definitely give this a look. The version of Skype that I’ve been using for a seemingly long time, which has given me a bunch of problems with pulseaudio is Skype 2.0.0.72-1. It would sure be great if the new version of Skype is addressing the issues that I mentioned in my post!

And thanks for the advice on Karmic and using proposed. FWIW, I’m running Karmic on my MacBook Pro 5,5 and it runs absolutely flawlessly, after I got around the initial problems of rEFIT not being able to deal with GRUB2.

Thanks again for the comments! Keep up the great work! =:)

Also Intrepid IS old. I meant to say Jaunty, but the fact is I have a few guys running Intrepid just because it runs great, and they live with slightly worse Ath9k, which is usable via backports, but is far from ideal in terms of suspend resume and intermittent disconnects.

I found your contributions on launchpad (https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/~vr-movingparts) which is great.

Our team, myself included, use the Ath9k. On Karmic, we now benefit from the 2.6.32 backports, which IMHO are great. We now run Skype video conferences wirelessly from our boardroom frequently. As recently as last Friday I participated for a few hours with Skype video over OpenVPN to the office. So for ath9k, I would say Karmic is the right choice, albeit a bit new and unstable in some respects. Stick to -proposed for the first few months.

Your 5,5 system is good hardware; Known to be stable. You mentioned installing wireless-compat from tarballs. We have several identical laptops here, and instability issues historically in our experience can frequently be traced back to some of our team (with other Linux distro experience _ which poisons Debian best-practice frequently IMHO) who have installed VMWare, Virtualbox, ATI/NVidia, Skype, Netbeans from non_packaged sources. It is very difficult to get back into a stable evergreen state using “make uninstall” and “apt-get –reinstall” and there are no guarantees. You may want to try a fresh start with 64bit Karmic and stick to the .debs (including Skype 2.1beta) so that removal and upgrade/downgrade can be performed cleanly without introducing ongoing cruft and instability.

Package management is what makes Debian based distros so advanced and stable. The concept of package maintainer is near impossible for the current Apple/MS distribution framework to adopt, and can’t be supported properly with closed source. If you truely never want to reinstall, you have to stick with it.

What we have not focused on here are the really great things about Karmic that make it difficult to go back to the simpler Mac / Windows interfaces; On the desktop its all a bit new (but pretty and advanced), but the stability and reliability, and .deb package benefits are all well established in the backoffice. Not many people realize just how much larger the Debian base is than the Ubuntu base, both in users and contributors and until the community grows and the package policies mature there are going to be these post-release periods of instability.

My advice is to stay positive, involved and excited about where the Linux space is going.

Um. What bugs would you like me to track? Against Skype? Not sure where you’re getting that.

And… um… I’m not sure where you’re coming from saying I should switch to Intrepid. If I wanted to run something old, I’d use RedHat.

Really confused about your comments, man… I don’t see how they’re relevant to my post.

Skype is not great at packaging and distributing; There is no way to know what flavour of install path you took to get to your crash (32bit + ia32libs, pure 64bit). As our group are heavy users, I know that the current Skype from .debs actually says “Beta” in the title bar _ A note worth mentioning if you are going to be complaining about it crashing.

You should be running Intrepid, not the recently released Karmic. Hardware support issues can’t be expected to stabilize so quickly _ you’ll need some knowledge to deal and resolve the issues on your own if you jump in that fast.

Being a software developer doesn’t mean you can understand the package framework and problem solve effectively in the Debian package space _ Why no references to bugs tracked against your issues?

All our developers now run Ubuntu desktops and they fall into two distinct groups. Normal and Power users.

If you want hardware support and hardware stability for the desktop for business use, don’t jump into the latest release, unless you are willing to work with -proposed and do some debugging. Our team is split between those like yourself (focused more on the business aspects) running Intrepid, and those tweak-freaks that can manage their own hardware bugs, who have stepped forwards to Karmic and support the community actively in resolving current issues related to the new release.

My advice, switch to Intrepid, and learn to love Karmic six monthes from now.

People have been talking pointing how Linux runs on servers for years.

It doesn’t change the fact that Linux is a total mess on the desktop.

You can’t blame the lack of proprietary apps on Linux’s low marketshare. The iphone had much better support from game developers when it had less than .01% of the market.

Start by losing the anti-proprietary attitude. Then end the KDE/GNOME war and the multiple sound api problem.

I doubt that will happen though since the Linux desktop has be held back by warring factions since the 90′s. The only thing these factions can agree on is that all software should be open source. That’s an unrealistic belief. The FOSS army hasn’t been able to provide enough alternatives to proprietary software. You can either deal with this reality or go back to your imaginationland where Gimp is as good as Photoshop.