Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04
by Ryan Smith on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Applications: Audio Organization/Playback
Windows Default: Windows Media Player
What I use: iTunes/Winamp
Ubuntu Default: Rhythmbox/Totem
There are 3 things people will never agree on in this world: Politics, the Yankees versus the Red Sox, and what multimedia player to use. It doesn’t take much effort to find someone who hates any given player and has their own idea of what the best player is, so looking at the players included with an OS is somewhat academic. No matter what OS it is, a number of users are going to replace the default with something else. So for our discussion on multimedia playback, I’m going to preface this with a thought: the Ubuntu defaults aren’t the only options, there are other programs out there if the defaults aren’t satisfactory.
With that said, when it comes to audio organization and playback Ubuntu comes with two programs: Rhythmbox and Totem. Rhytmbox is Ubuntu’s dedicated audio organization and playback suite – analogous to iTunes – while Totem is a combined audio/video player, similar to VLC or the classic versions of Windows Media Player. In spite of the fact that Rhythmbox is the dedicated audio suite, I mention both of these since Ubuntu will in fact use both. Attempting to open an audio file from the file browser will default to Totem, while Ubuntu’s application menu calls Totem “Movie Player”, leaving the “Music Player” distinction to Rhythmbox. As a result Ubuntu is a bit schizophrenic about its audio software – it’s inconsistent throughout the OS.
Since Totem is an audio/video player, we’ll save it for our Video section and focus on Rhythmbox. As I mentioned previously, Rhythmbox is analogous to iTunes; even the manual specifically mentioned that the program was “originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes.” In fact there’s not a lot to be said about Rhythmbox: it looks mostly like iTunes, it acts mostly like iTunes, and it does most of what iTunes does. Consider it iTunes-lite, and that’s Rhythmbox in a nutshell.
As iTunes-lite, Rhythmbox holds both the benefits and the downsides to such a design. Monumental among these are the fact that Rhythmbox isn’t nearly as bloated as iTunes can be. Rhythmbox gives you the basic iTunes experience while eating less than half the memory and loading in less than half the time it takes for iTunes to load. iTunes may have a lot of features, but you’re paying for them somewhere. For most people, the complete iTunes feature set is overkill and they would be better served by lighter program like Rhythmbox.
The price of that lightness however is the feature set that Rhythmbox doesn’t implement. Among other things it lacks its own ability to extra audio from CDs, instead relying on another Ubuntu program, Audio CD Extractor (Sound Juicer) to accomplish this. Similarly, it lacks the ability to quickly encode existing songs in to another format. Last, for purchasing music it doesn’t have access to a full-featured store – the included interfaces are for Magnatune and Jamendo, which are best described as indie stores. Purchasers looking for mainstream music would be limited to Amazon’s store, which has a proper web interface and may be a curse or a blessing depending on how much you like the iTunes Music Store being integrated in to iTunes.
Rhythmbox does have the ability to synchronize music with portable media players, however since Apple actively blocks their iPhoneOS based devices from syncing with anything besides iTunes, Rhythmbox can’t actually sync with the portable media players most people have. This meant that I was unable to sync my iPhone with Rhythmbox, and had to dual boot instead. We don’t have a legacy iPod on hand, but it sounds like the latest Classic/Nano models won’t work either. Users with legacy iPods would need to seek out something like GTKPod, which is designed specifically for iPod synchronization and should do the job.
Ultimately the usefulness of Rhythmbox depends on how well you know iTunes and how many of its deeper features you use. For basic music organization and playback it does just fine – you may as well be using iTunes. But power users will probably be unsatisfied. Meanwhile Windows Media Player users will find it a tossup; it still has fewer features than WMP, but WMP has always needed to take a hint or two from iTunes when it comes to layout.
Final Verdict: Satisfactory/Only Meets Some of My Needs
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brennans - Sunday, August 30, 2009 - link
I use both XP64 and Hardy (Ubuntu 8.04).I am also a power user.
Both these operating systems have pros and cons.
Cons for XP64:
1. It does not recognize my hardware properly.
2. Finding 64 bit drivers was/is a mission.
Cons for Hardy:
1. It does not plug and play with my hardware (i have to compile the drivers).
2. Not as user friendly as windows.
Pros for XP64:
1. Windowing system is super fast.
2. User friendly.
Pros for Hardy:
1. Recognizes my hardware.
2. Command line tools are awesome.
Conclusion:
I think that the article was good.
I am one of those people who has always had problems installing windows straight out of the box and thus find that paying a large amount of money for their buggy OS is unacceptable.
I can get a lot of stuff done with Hardy and it is free and if I find a problem with it I can potentially fix that problem.
I also find it unacceptable that manufacturers do not write software (drivers or application software for their devices) for Linux.
For me, it is difficult to live without both XP64 and Hardy.
ciukacz - Sunday, August 30, 2009 - link
http://www.iozone.org/">http://www.iozone.org/JJWV - Sunday, August 30, 2009 - link
How can people use something like Aero and its Linux or OSX equivalents (that pre-dates it if I am not mistaken) ? The noise is just hiding the information. Transparency is one issue, another are those icons that are more like pictures : one looses the instant recognition. With Aero knowing which is the active window is not something obvious, you have to look at small details. The title of the window is surrounded by mist making it more difficult to read. Even with XP the colour gradient in a title bar is just noise : there is no information conveyed by it.The OS GUIs are more and more looking like those weird media players, with an image of rotary button that is to be manipulated like a slide button.
The evolution of all applications to a web interface reminds me of the prehistory of personal computers : each program has its own interface.
The MS Office Ribbon UI is just in the same vein: more than 20 icons on each tab. The icon interface is based on instant recognition and comprehension, when you have so many it turns into a mnemonics exercise. And of course with MS one does not have a choice : you just have to adapt to the program. An end user is only there to be of service to the programs ;-)
If i want to look at a beautiful image I will do it, but the when I want to write an letter or update a database all those ultra kitsch visual effects are just annoying.
As a summary the noise is killing the information and thus the usability.
Ronald Pottol - Saturday, August 29, 2009 - link
The thing with windows has been seen before, back in the win 3.1-OS/2 days it was found that while one instance of excel didn't run any faster under OS/2, two in separate VMs (ok, not technically the same thing) ran in about the same time as one on windows.I like the package management, and hate when I have to install something that doesn't support it, it means I have to worry about updates all my self. If they have one, they I get updates every time I check for Ubuntu updates, very handy. Nice to get the nightly Google Chrome builds, for instance (still alpha/very beta).
Frankly, supporting binary kernel drivers would be insane. Now they are stuck supporting code they cannot look at and cannot fix, they cannot fix their mistakes (or are stuck emulating them forever). If they supported them, there would be even more of them, and when they wanted to fix something broken or that was a bad idea, they would have to wait a reasonable amount of time before doing it, so it would be supported. Frankly, I don't see why people don't have automated frameworks for doing this and automated deb/rpm repository generation. I add their repository, when I get a kernel update, perhaps it is held up a day for their system to automatically build a new version, but then it all installs, instead, I am stuck with having to run a very old kernel, or not having 3D on my laptop, for instance.
cesarc - Sunday, August 30, 2009 - link
I found this article very interesting, because is oriented to windows user and is helpful to them because you just didn't die trying it.But you can't blame ubuntu (or any distro), about the pain in the ass a video card's drive could be to install, blame ati and nvidia for been lazy, and if using wine for playing games is not as good as playing in windows blame games company for don't release a GNU/linux version.
Also, the thing about why GNU/linux overpass windows in file management is because ntfs is a BAD file system, maybe if windows somehow could run under ext3 would be even better than it is.
And why your negligence to use a console (stop saying cli please), you are not opening your mind trying to use GNU/linux as a windows just because it is not windows is a completely different os. Look from this point of view... something that you can do in windows with 5 clicks maybe you can do it in GNU/linux in just one line of bash code. So, sometimes you will use GUI and others you will use console and you will find that having this options is very comfortable. So start using the console and do the same article a year later.
I hope some day have a paid version of GNU/linux (still open source), that could pay salaries to programers to fix specific issues in the OS.
In the other hand, when you do the IT benchmark is very disappointing that you don't use linux with those beautiful Xeons. Servers environment is were GNU/linux get stronger. And Xeons with windows are just toys compared with unix on sparcs or power architectures.
PS: try to get 450 days of uptime in a windows 2003.
rkerns - Saturday, August 29, 2009 - link
Ryan,Thanks for your good work.
Many people considering linux are still on dial-up. These are often folks with lesser expertise who just want to get connected and use their computer in basic ways. But getting connected with dial-up is something of an adventure with many distros and/or versions. Ubuntu 9.04 has moved away from easy dial-up, but Mint7KDE includes KPPP for simple dial-up connection. Mint7KDE has other nice features as well.
I am asking you to expand your current picture of the landscape to include people who want to use linux with a dial-up connection. This of course would have to include a brief discussion of 1) appropriate modems and 2) distro differences. Thanks,
r kerns
William Gaatjes - Saturday, August 29, 2009 - link
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lgude - Saturday, August 29, 2009 - link
Really glad to find this in depth article after all this time. Thank you Ryan. I too have run Ubuntu as my main OS even though most of my experience is in Windows and have had similar experiences. Because this was a very long article it got into detail about things like the Package Manager or the multiple desktops that I have not seen discussed elsewhere from a user perspective. As someone else pointed out it is moot what people would like or complain about if they were moving from Linux to Windows or OSX, but imagine for a moment if they were used to getting the OS and all their apps updated in one hit and were asked to do it one app at a time and expected to pay for the privilege!If you go on with the Linux series I'd like to see discussion of the upcoming Ubuntu and other distros - I've been impressed with SUSE. I'd also like to see projects on how to build a Linux server and HTPC - including choice of distro and the kind of hardware needed. I'm less sure of where benchmarking is really useful - the tradition of detailed benchmarking at AT arose from the interest in overclocking and gaming which I think is a much lesser consideration in Linux. More relevant might be comparisons of netbook specific distros or how to work out if that old P4 will do as a home server. There is a lot of buzz in the tech world about things like Symbion, Chrome OS, Moblin, Maemo on portable devices that could possibly draw new readers to the Linux tab at AT. A great start in any case.
jmvaughn - Saturday, August 29, 2009 - link
I just wanted to say thank you to the author for a very thorough article. After reading it, I decided to use Ubuntu for a PC I'm building out of spare parts for a retired friend who's on fixed income. My friend just uses web, e-mail, and some word processing, so this will be perfect.The article gave me a good idea of what to expect -- a good honest appraisal with all the good and bad. After installing Ubuntu 9.0.4, I am very impressed. The install was very quick, and easier than XP. Everything is quite snappy, even though it's running on a AMD 3800+ single core processor and an old hard drive.
xchrissypoox - Saturday, August 29, 2009 - link
I only skimmed the article (I saw the part on gaming being poor), I'd like to see a comparison of several games using the same hardware on windows and linux (results given in fps). If this has been mentioned sorry and good day.