[buug] (forw) List owner needed for callug_discuss at lists.berkeley.edu

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Karen Hogoboom (khogoboom at gmail.com):

> Ubuntu is in TiVos?  The recording device for televisions?  If so, thanks
> for that bit of info.

Yes, every single TiVo runs a Linux distribution published for TiVo,
Inc. for that purpose -- and is used every day by the hordes of people
who claim, idiotically, that Linux is not ready for 'simple end users'.

Grant was claiming that Ubuntu is unsurpassed among Linux distributions
at reaching out to 'simple end users'.  This is a traditional (and
meaningless, and tired) bit of advocacy rhetoric among Ubuntu partisans.
We're supposed to think that Ubuntu is A Good Thing because it is
alleged that some unspecified and unmeasured number of 'simple end users' 
are claimed on the basis of no credible data to run Ubuntu.  (We've
heard this sort of thing before.  It used to be said about Red Hat
Linux.)

Even if you grant the various underlying assumptions -- which I do not
-- Grant has conveniently forgotten a number of other Linux
distributions that are rather more well targeted at 'simple end users',
including the (non-Ubuntu, just to be clear) distribution embedded into
every single TiVo.

One could equally well cite any number of other specialised Linux
distributions that are all markedly more usable by 'simple end users'
than is Ubuntu, e.g., various Linux loads onto smartphone handsets by
Motorola, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung and a range of regional players like
China's Datang, Haier, Huawei and ZTE, and by any number of
manufacturers of SOHO wireless / network gateway devices.

And no, that was not 'tongue in cheek'.  That was absolutely serious,
and I'm really tired of the bullshit advocacy from partisans of a really
rather poorly debugged, inflexible, and bloated desktop distro du jour.