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Among all the desktop distros, Ubuntu/Unity came closest to making me switch away from macOS. While I'm a programmer, my interests in the desktop are that of a

by Udo 10y ago

Among all the desktop distros, Ubuntu/Unity came closest to making me switch away from macOS. While I'm a programmer, my interests in the desktop are that of a simple user: I want stuff to work without me having to spend time actively keeping it alive, and I want some amount of polish and UX. I also firmly believe in order to accomplish something, you sometimes have to be a pioneer and charge ahead in a direction the majority doesn't deem worthwhile, even if that means making mistakes and incurring aggressive dissent. Not everything can advance by committee or mass consensus. Ubuntu de facto cancelling their desktop program to focus on the cloud sounds to me like the premature death of something that worked pretty well, at least for my use cases. I really hope that decision was not entirely based on petty open source community squabbling. I love Brian Lunduke (he has a pretty good open source podcast by the way), but I really find it hard to get behind his long-standing criticisms of Mir and Unity. Among the arguments against Mir and Unity, I find the one based on duplication of effort the hardest to swallow. Innovation is an exploratory process. Sometimes that means many people coming up with many solutions. In other areas of open source development this doesn't seem to be perceived as a problem. In fact, it's celebrated as a marker of freedom for giving the user a lot of choices. But somehow, Ubuntu lost all of its public support, for no reason I can (as an outsider) readily identify. If this is symptomatic of the future of open source, it's a bad precedent.

Freak_NL 10y ago
> But somehow, Ubuntu lost all of its public support […] That seems hyperbolic. Ubuntu is popular and pretty mainstream for a Linux distribution. That will always attract hate and virulent nay-saying, as well as valid and constructive criticism.
- Udo 10y ago
  > That seems hyperbolic. I disagree. While it's probably impossible to come to an objective consensus about any matter of public discussion, at least the vocal people all fall over themselves celebrating the death of Mir and Unity. It also seems to me the hatred toward these software packages prompted Ubuntu to abandon them in the first place, and mind you these were integral pieces that set the Ubuntu desktop apart from every other distro. So, no, I don't think it's hyperbolic at all to come to this conclusion since we're talking about losing public support to the point of Canonical outright canceling two of their most distinguished programs.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    at least the vocal people all fall over themselves celebrating the death of Mir and Unity I'm close to celebrating the death of Unity but won't because: 1. the damage is done. Ubuntu and Linux already lost a whole lot of momentum. We had a really nice desktop. We were selling it everywhere, looking forward to be able to justify paid support agreements. 2. Some people actually seems to like Unity and while I really cannot see myself using it I think it would be offensive toward those if I celebrated loudly
bkor 10y ago
> I find the one based on duplication of effort the hardest to swallow Having a display stack specific to one distribution makes things quite a lot more difficult than just another desktop environment. That was heavily criticised. Mir supporters often mention that the toolkit will easily handle this; but that's not the case. The Wayland version of Firefox still has quite a few issues. It took a huge amount of effort to have X11 applications work nicely under Wayland using Xwayland (copy/pasting, dragging, etc). There's still various things left. Various things in Wayland are still a bit iffy. E.g. some Wayland solutions are specific to one desktop. Fixing all of this and getting an agreement across desktop environments is a huge amount of effort. Then this has to be doubled because hey 'Mir'. Obviously that's heavily criticized. Though various developers just said "No" (e.g. Kwin developer).
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Yes, I'm usually not one to whine about "fragmented" project spaces and "wasted talent", but Mir is a special case because the Linux desktop is necessarily dependent on cooperation from hardware vendors. Historically, they've seen Linux as a source of confusion, and avoided wading too deep because they couldn't really make anyone happy, and because it was hard to tell if their investment would pay off or if they'd have to redo all the work when the "community" decided to shift again. With Wayland, we had the opportunity to present a unified, modern desktop environment to them and say "Here, support this and we'll be happy". Then Mir showed up with absolutely no substantiation or value proposition and retriggered the prospect of nightmarish half-support across a fragmented ecosystem, which tires everyone out, not just vendors. It was a great illustration that open-source and Linux haven't changed: they're still difficult to work with, and you still don't know if the engineering effort you're dedicating is going to be flushed away due to distro infighting. NVIDIA had already said they were playing a wait and see game before committing more resources to the next-gen Linux desktop, and Canonical only proved their decision right.
fauigerzigerk 10y ago
>Sometimes that means many people coming up with many solutions. In other areas of open source development this doesn't seem to be perceived as a problem. In fact, it's celebrated as a marker of freedom for giving the user a lot of choices. That's because in other areas more choice is always a good thing as it doesn't equal fragmentation. Yet another choice for parsing JSON? Yet another email program? Great, why not? But operating systems are platforms, not just libraries or tools that you can combine ad libitum. For an OS to be an attractive target for developers it needs users. If you split the user base into several smaller user bases, the OS becomes that much less attractive for developers and as result it becomes less attractive for users as well. A big player like Canonical should understand that and consider consensus building as much part of its role as creating new software.

by Udo 10y ago

Freak_NL 10y ago

> But somehow, Ubuntu lost all of its public support […] That seems hyperbolic. Ubuntu is popular and pretty mainstream for a Linux distribution. That will always attract hate and virulent nay-saying, as well as valid and constructive criticism.

Udo 10y ago
> That seems hyperbolic. I disagree. While it's probably impossible to come to an objective consensus about any matter of public discussion, at least the vocal people all fall over themselves celebrating the death of Mir and Unity. It also seems to me the hatred toward these software packages prompted Ubuntu to abandon them in the first place, and mind you these were integral pieces that set the Ubuntu desktop apart from every other distro. So, no, I don't think it's hyperbolic at all to come to this conclusion since we're talking about losing public support to the point of Canonical outright canceling two of their most distinguished programs.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  at least the vocal people all fall over themselves celebrating the death of Mir and Unity I'm close to celebrating the death of Unity but won't because: 1. the damage is done. Ubuntu and Linux already lost a whole lot of momentum. We had a really nice desktop. We were selling it everywhere, looking forward to be able to justify paid support agreements. 2. Some people actually seems to like Unity and while I really cannot see myself using it I think it would be offensive toward those if I celebrated loudly

bkor 10y ago

> I find the one based on duplication of effort the hardest to swallow Having a display stack specific to one distribution makes things quite a lot more difficult than just another desktop environment. That was heavily criticised. Mir supporters often mention that the toolkit will easily handle this; but that's not the case. The Wayland version of Firefox still has quite a few issues. It took a huge amount of effort to have X11 applications work nicely under Wayland using Xwayland (copy/pasting, dragging, etc). There's still various things left. Various things in Wayland are still a bit iffy. E.g. some Wayland solutions are specific to one desktop. Fixing all of this and getting an agreement across desktop environments is a huge amount of effort. Then this has to be doubled because hey 'Mir'. Obviously that's heavily criticized. Though various developers just said "No" (e.g. Kwin developer).

cookiecaper 10y ago
Yes, I'm usually not one to whine about "fragmented" project spaces and "wasted talent", but Mir is a special case because the Linux desktop is necessarily dependent on cooperation from hardware vendors. Historically, they've seen Linux as a source of confusion, and avoided wading too deep because they couldn't really make anyone happy, and because it was hard to tell if their investment would pay off or if they'd have to redo all the work when the "community" decided to shift again. With Wayland, we had the opportunity to present a unified, modern desktop environment to them and say "Here, support this and we'll be happy". Then Mir showed up with absolutely no substantiation or value proposition and retriggered the prospect of nightmarish half-support across a fragmented ecosystem, which tires everyone out, not just vendors. It was a great illustration that open-source and Linux haven't changed: they're still difficult to work with, and you still don't know if the engineering effort you're dedicating is going to be flushed away due to distro infighting. NVIDIA had already said they were playing a wait and see game before committing more resources to the next-gen Linux desktop, and Canonical only proved their decision right.

fauigerzigerk 10y ago

>Sometimes that means many people coming up with many solutions. In other areas of open source development this doesn't seem to be perceived as a problem. In fact, it's celebrated as a marker of freedom for giving the user a lot of choices. That's because in other areas more choice is always a good thing as it doesn't equal fragmentation. Yet another choice for parsing JSON? Yet another email program? Great, why not? But operating systems are platforms, not just libraries or tools that you can combine ad libitum. For an OS to be an attractive target for developers it needs users. If you split the user base into several smaller user bases, the OS becomes that much less attractive for developers and as result it becomes less attractive for users as well. A big player like Canonical should understand that and consider consensus building as much part of its role as creating new software.