But the experience of acquiring and running Ubuntu, coupled with horror stories like this one, is convincing me that the Open Source movement REALLY needs to recruit a community of users who are NOT in the top 2 percent of computer-savviness. If we’re REALLY serious about spreading Ubuntu and other Open Source tools (and I think we should be), then we need to make the experience MUCH more intuitive. Hence the non-savvy community I’m talking about: Ubuntu needs these people to help create a better / easier user experience.

Right now, you read ANYTHING to do with Ubuntu / Kubuntu / Mint and it’s ALL written by Linux geeks for Linux geeks. It’s a great product, but it’s y’all’s private playground. Which is fine if that’s what the community wants, but the community always seems to be TALKING about serving the larger world by spreading the technology and giving people better tools.

You can do this — but you’ve got to start by addressing the user experience for a general audience. There are trade-offs — you’ll lose some OS efficiency by replacing command line control with GUI options and wizards — but here’s what you’ll get in return: The larger your user base, the more support you’ll get for open source drivers for video cards, etc., etc. Right now it’s a geek ghetto. Bring in another 20 million users and you’re a force.

Dave: Perhaps I was vague; /etc should definitely *not* be on its own partition. Some files from /etc are portable across OS versions, however; for example; /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. That, at least on Fedora’s older releases, contained the WPA key for my home wireless network; this is definitely portable across OS version boundaries(at least the value of the key), and should be archived off and copied to various OS installs wherever needed. It was items such as that that I was suggesting be squirreled away, not the entire partition. Oh, and welcome back to the Land of Gnome! I don’t intend to strike up desktop/Linux Distro holy wars, but I welcome you to the Gnome brotherhood.

Andrew: the uuid is magic indeed. Device persistence is a Good Thing. I use Fedora, and I really need a scheme to go from bleeding edge to stable with minimal hand-wringing on my home systems. Thanks for the nudge!
-k-

Andrew, that’s a good tip. I’m not using UUID and I really should. Thanks!

Chris, this laptop has an 80 GB hard drive and after 3 years I’m using about 30 total. I don’t need to preserve space here, and if anything I might go the other way. If I had 4 OS versions, then I’d always have one LTS release in there. The management cost between having 2, 3 and 4 is almost nil. You install one new OS in one partition, and change the boot parameters. There is probably a one minute difference in time, and the space is inconsequential to me. KDE is slicker and the apps are generally better but after going back to Gnome a week ago, I feel happier and more productive. I think I’ll stay with Gnome for the duration.

I’ve had /home and /boot in separate partitions since Day 1 with Linux. Three separate partitions for the OS seems like overkill — shouldn’t two be plenty? I dunno, I just wipe clean and reinstall the OS with every LTS release and keep the /home partition chugging along.

No disrespect to Ken Nelson, but DO NOT UNDERSIZE /BOOT like he said. Maybe Ubuntu has fixed this, but a while back I found that Ubuntu happily downloaded and prepped updates without warning you about partitions filling up. Kernel updates pile up in there, and Very Bad Things happen when you do a routine security update and fill up the boot partition. Give it a gig or two like you said.

I stick with GNOME, since that’s basically the native environment of Ubuntu. I’ll admit to not knowing a damn thing about KDE or even caring all that much, and I can understand that once you’re used to one it’s tough being with the other. But from what I understand, KDE and Ubuntu seem to be slightly repellent of each other.

Using UUID makes moving partitions around seamless

One other observation; if Ubuntu is in any way Fedora-like, the /boot partition can be drastically reduced, say to 100-200MB or so. The only thing that’s there is various initrd and vmlinuz files for the kernels you have installed, along with grub.conf, and some smallish other files.

I’d also suggest rounding up a master list of items that should go into /etc for all the partitions, stuff like networking settings and such. Those items are needed to make a system, well, a system.

I’m also having a facepalm moment for not doing this with my Fedora systems. Ahh, a weekend project. Bleeding edge, back to stability when needed.

-k-