6 ms·

Ubuntu has always confused me. It seemed like such an obvious gag from the very beginning, a theme job on Debian unstable without much engineering teeth. But

by kev009 9y ago

Ubuntu has always confused me. It seemed like such an obvious gag from the very beginning, a theme job on Debian unstable without much engineering teeth. But people went crazy for it. The resources would have been better spent working directly with and on Debian, and offering support/consulting/employment to do so and it made Mark's intentions seem seriously dubious to me (although aside from the ad spying thing he hasn't really done anything egregious as I feared initially). It's water under the bridge now and the two have learned to coexist, but I think the future of Debian is unquestionable while Ubuntu has a SPOF in Canonical. I heard a rumor that Shuttleworth is trying to sell Canonical right now. He approached Red Hat and they weren't interested. I can't substantiate that, just hearsay.

sigi45 9y ago
Debian has a total different philosphy on stableness.
- kev009 9y ago
  I don't find that to be true. Both go to extended lengths (but not herculean lengths like RHEL) to provide ABI and API stability over a defined set of time. The primary difference is that Ubuntu LTS releases happen on fairly hard calendar boundaries with a well defined two year schedule. The Ubuntu 6 month releases seem like an antiquated idea to me, a stabilized rolling release like Debian -testing would be a better fit for the Linux desktoper. So LTS to LTS they are quite similar https://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.release-lifecycle.html https://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.release-life... and modern Debian stable releases have been taped out smoothly on a roughly 2 year schedule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history.
  - qznc 9y ago
    Debian stability: do not update except backported security fixes Ubuntu stability: update applications like Firefox because newer versions run more stable
    - kev009 9y ago
      Huh, I haven't run an Ubuntu desktop in several years but I don't remember that being the case (i.e both locked the software down pretty tight). I found Debian Backports to be helpful for the few things an admin might want to go out of phase on for servers. Though to reiterate, I think the desktop class of user would be better served by a stabilized rolling release like -testing in this decade where things generally work better and LTS works against you.
      - qznc 9y ago
        LTS is a nice defense against desktop environments moving buttons around.
  - krylon 9y ago
    > a stabilized rolling release like Debian -testing would be a better fit for the Linux desktoper I have been running openSuse Tumbleweed on my desktop and a laptop for the past year. It is not perfect, but it comes close to being what you describe. The main problem is that the multimedia experience is not that fun without at least one additional repository, and that I need to re-install the nvidia driver upon every new kernel version. Other than that, I have been quite happy with it.
ChrisSD 9y ago
I don't think it's a secret that Shuttleworth is looking for outside investment, or at least to put the company on a more stable financial footing. That's why Unity was dropped. As to you other point, their goal was to make a Linux distro that was easy to install, setup and use for the ordinary person (or ordinary geek at least). They might have lost their way a bit in recent years but they were initially remarkably successful. Sure others had tried to do the same before them but for its time Ubuntu was by far the best of them. That's more arguable nowadays but that doesn't undermine what they achieved.
- kev009 9y ago
  I've been doing Linux for two decades so I know that was the perception at the time. It was almost all marketing though, with just a bit of lucky time window alignment, i.e. the releases happened to be at slightly better cutoff points and therefore had better upstream kernel/xorg/mesa/cups/whatever in the most critical days of 6.04 and 8.04.
  - ChrisSD 9y ago
    So you thought Debian's desktop install and setup process was as simple as Ubuntu's? I don't think that's true even today. And Ubuntu made changes and compromises that I don't think Debian ever would so simply being a Debian installer wouldn't have worked out. It feels like rewriting history to simply brush off most of their engineering efforts as simple being marketing.
    - kev009 9y ago
      Yes, I did think that. The only hard part about Debian was finding the right ISO. The docs and installation experience were fantastic. To this day their landing page is kind of confusing, especially to a layman, so I'll give you that.
      - ensiferum 9y ago
        Does debian support USB installs yet? ;-)
digi_owl 9y ago
No surprise RH would not be interested, they have the Linux ecosystem by the balls.
Profragile 9y ago
>The resources would have been better spent working directly with and on Debian Debian is a slow bureaucratic political organization and works very hard to punish those who want too use it for business. Even if Cannonical had spent double the money, they'd probably get 1% of what they were able to do with Ubuntu. >and offering support/consulting/employment to do so and it made Mark's intentions seem seriously dubious to me Why should they not offer support to those who want too purchase it? >although aside from the ad spying thing he hasn't really done anything egregious as I feared initially The "spying" you are referring to is what Google Chrome and all the browsers do with what you type in your search bar. All Cannonical did was send your search queries to an HTTP endpoint. What are you searching in your app drawyer anyway that you don't want sent anywhere. It's not going to be anything other than the list of apps you have installed and all Linux repos can detect what apps you have downloaded from them.
- kev009 9y ago
  Can you offer any quick examples of your first point, especially punishing business users?
- jerheinze 9y ago
  > is what Google Chrome and all the browsers do with what you type in your search bar Not all browsers do that by default, Firefox for example asks you whether you want that or not, and the Tor Browser has it disabled by default. However that doesn't change the fact that all those who do it by default should correctly be labeled as "spyware", e.g. Google Chrome.
dpwm 9y ago
Regarding the early days of Ubuntu, you've got to consider that where Ubuntu came from is not where we are now. When I first encountered Ubuntu, it was one of the first to try to make something polished for the desktop and not try to charge a lot of money for it. This was and is a very different purpose to Debian and did require customization. Ubuntu's competitors were never Debian, but Mandrake Linux and SUSE. Ubuntu shipped out free CDs internationally and encouraged you to take more than you needed to spread the Ubuntu. In the days of 56k modems this was amazing. This was the era when compiling your own kernel was a fairly normal part of desktop Linux tinkering. Today there are polished distros that just work, Fedora being a great example. Ubuntu wouldn't personally be my choice for desktop or servers for some years now and I haven't used Ubuntu on the desktop since about 2006 and on a server since 2012. Already by 2007 there were nicer out the box experiences such as Linux Mint. Were it not for Ubuntu (and Mandrake before it), I would probably not have got into Linux until several years later. It was Gentoo, Slackware and Arch that taught me the internals.
- padraic7a 9y ago
  I ran Fedora for a few years on my Dell laptop and I have to say that it didn't just work. The thing that makes Ubuntu stand out to me is the very large size of it's user base compared to other distributions. This means that things like edge cases in hardware are much more likely to be addressed, and there will be more chance of other users having the same problem, therefore more chance that you will find a solution.
jdub 9y ago
Mark, to his credit, hired some of the best people involved in Debian at the very beginning of Ubuntu's story. It absolutely had engineering teeth. Then he goofed up over and over and over again, particularly when it came to community relationships.
pjmlp 9y ago
For me, Ubuntu was the best successor to Mandrake, regarding the focus on desktop users and out of the box hardware support, even it required closed source binary blobs. If Shuttleworth is indeed trying to Canonical, it wouldn't surprise me, the reality is that there isn't any big money to be earned on Desktop Linux. Regular desktop users aren't going to pay for enough books, videos, on-site trainings or support, to make FOSS desktop development a viable longterm business. As seen by the netbook failure (yes Microsoft also helped there) and the Android fragmentation, OEMs rather pick a distribution and change it to create "product differentiation" than actually just plain stick to the hardware part. The two most successful Linux based desktop environments, ChromeOS and Android, hide the Linux parts so deep, that it could be changed by another POSIX like kernel and almost no one would notice. Even Tizen is now more of a brand than anything else (Tizen RT is TinyAra not Linux).
jk2323 9y ago
I always liked Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I came from SuSe Linux and was glad to get rid of the .RPM packages; still, I preferred KDE. Recently I have become unhappy with KDE. If you like Ubuntu and want to try something new, try Bodhi Linux.
padraic7a 9y ago
There were layoffs in Cannonical in 2017 and the decision was taken to end Ubuntu Touch and ongoing development of Unity. Mark Shuttleworth made a public announcement that this was in preparation for an IPO. In light of these public announcements about the future of the company I would find any rumour that he tried to sell to Red Hat to be a bit lubricious.

by kev009 9y ago

sigi45 9y ago

Debian has a total different philosphy on stableness.

kev009 9y ago
I don't find that to be true. Both go to extended lengths (but not herculean lengths like RHEL) to provide ABI and API stability over a defined set of time. The primary difference is that Ubuntu LTS releases happen on fairly hard calendar boundaries with a well defined two year schedule. The Ubuntu 6 month releases seem like an antiquated idea to me, a stabilized rolling release like Debian -testing would be a better fit for the Linux desktoper. So LTS to LTS they are quite similar https://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.release-lifecycle.html https://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.release-life... and modern Debian stable releases have been taped out smoothly on a roughly 2 year schedule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history.
- qznc 9y ago
  Debian stability: do not update except backported security fixes Ubuntu stability: update applications like Firefox because newer versions run more stable
  - kev009 9y ago
    Huh, I haven't run an Ubuntu desktop in several years but I don't remember that being the case (i.e both locked the software down pretty tight). I found Debian Backports to be helpful for the few things an admin might want to go out of phase on for servers. Though to reiterate, I think the desktop class of user would be better served by a stabilized rolling release like -testing in this decade where things generally work better and LTS works against you.
    - qznc 9y ago
      LTS is a nice defense against desktop environments moving buttons around.
- krylon 9y ago
  > a stabilized rolling release like Debian -testing would be a better fit for the Linux desktoper I have been running openSuse Tumbleweed on my desktop and a laptop for the past year. It is not perfect, but it comes close to being what you describe. The main problem is that the multimedia experience is not that fun without at least one additional repository, and that I need to re-install the nvidia driver upon every new kernel version. Other than that, I have been quite happy with it.

ChrisSD 9y ago

I don't think it's a secret that Shuttleworth is looking for outside investment, or at least to put the company on a more stable financial footing. That's why Unity was dropped. As to you other point, their goal was to make a Linux distro that was easy to install, setup and use for the ordinary person (or ordinary geek at least). They might have lost their way a bit in recent years but they were initially remarkably successful. Sure others had tried to do the same before them but for its time Ubuntu was by far the best of them. That's more arguable nowadays but that doesn't undermine what they achieved.

kev009 9y ago
I've been doing Linux for two decades so I know that was the perception at the time. It was almost all marketing though, with just a bit of lucky time window alignment, i.e. the releases happened to be at slightly better cutoff points and therefore had better upstream kernel/xorg/mesa/cups/whatever in the most critical days of 6.04 and 8.04.
- ChrisSD 9y ago
  So you thought Debian's desktop install and setup process was as simple as Ubuntu's? I don't think that's true even today. And Ubuntu made changes and compromises that I don't think Debian ever would so simply being a Debian installer wouldn't have worked out. It feels like rewriting history to simply brush off most of their engineering efforts as simple being marketing.
  - kev009 9y ago
    Yes, I did think that. The only hard part about Debian was finding the right ISO. The docs and installation experience were fantastic. To this day their landing page is kind of confusing, especially to a layman, so I'll give you that.
    - ensiferum 9y ago
      Does debian support USB installs yet? ;-)

digi_owl 9y ago

No surprise RH would not be interested, they have the Linux ecosystem by the balls.

Profragile 9y ago

>The resources would have been better spent working directly with and on Debian Debian is a slow bureaucratic political organization and works very hard to punish those who want too use it for business. Even if Cannonical had spent double the money, they'd probably get 1% of what they were able to do with Ubuntu. >and offering support/consulting/employment to do so and it made Mark's intentions seem seriously dubious to me Why should they not offer support to those who want too purchase it? >although aside from the ad spying thing he hasn't really done anything egregious as I feared initially The "spying" you are referring to is what Google Chrome and all the browsers do with what you type in your search bar. All Cannonical did was send your search queries to an HTTP endpoint. What are you searching in your app drawyer anyway that you don't want sent anywhere. It's not going to be anything other than the list of apps you have installed and all Linux repos can detect what apps you have downloaded from them.

kev009 9y ago
Can you offer any quick examples of your first point, especially punishing business users?
jerheinze 9y ago
> is what Google Chrome and all the browsers do with what you type in your search bar Not all browsers do that by default, Firefox for example asks you whether you want that or not, and the Tor Browser has it disabled by default. However that doesn't change the fact that all those who do it by default should correctly be labeled as "spyware", e.g. Google Chrome.

dpwm 9y ago

Regarding the early days of Ubuntu, you've got to consider that where Ubuntu came from is not where we are now. When I first encountered Ubuntu, it was one of the first to try to make something polished for the desktop and not try to charge a lot of money for it. This was and is a very different purpose to Debian and did require customization. Ubuntu's competitors were never Debian, but Mandrake Linux and SUSE. Ubuntu shipped out free CDs internationally and encouraged you to take more than you needed to spread the Ubuntu. In the days of 56k modems this was amazing. This was the era when compiling your own kernel was a fairly normal part of desktop Linux tinkering. Today there are polished distros that just work, Fedora being a great example. Ubuntu wouldn't personally be my choice for desktop or servers for some years now and I haven't used Ubuntu on the desktop since about 2006 and on a server since 2012. Already by 2007 there were nicer out the box experiences such as Linux Mint. Were it not for Ubuntu (and Mandrake before it), I would probably not have got into Linux until several years later. It was Gentoo, Slackware and Arch that taught me the internals.

padraic7a 9y ago
I ran Fedora for a few years on my Dell laptop and I have to say that it didn't just work. The thing that makes Ubuntu stand out to me is the very large size of it's user base compared to other distributions. This means that things like edge cases in hardware are much more likely to be addressed, and there will be more chance of other users having the same problem, therefore more chance that you will find a solution.

jdub 9y ago

Mark, to his credit, hired some of the best people involved in Debian at the very beginning of Ubuntu's story. It absolutely had engineering teeth. Then he goofed up over and over and over again, particularly when it came to community relationships.

pjmlp 9y ago

For me, Ubuntu was the best successor to Mandrake, regarding the focus on desktop users and out of the box hardware support, even it required closed source binary blobs. If Shuttleworth is indeed trying to Canonical, it wouldn't surprise me, the reality is that there isn't any big money to be earned on Desktop Linux. Regular desktop users aren't going to pay for enough books, videos, on-site trainings or support, to make FOSS desktop development a viable longterm business. As seen by the netbook failure (yes Microsoft also helped there) and the Android fragmentation, OEMs rather pick a distribution and change it to create "product differentiation" than actually just plain stick to the hardware part. The two most successful Linux based desktop environments, ChromeOS and Android, hide the Linux parts so deep, that it could be changed by another POSIX like kernel and almost no one would notice. Even Tizen is now more of a brand than anything else (Tizen RT is TinyAra not Linux).

jk2323 9y ago

I always liked Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I came from SuSe Linux and was glad to get rid of the .RPM packages; still, I preferred KDE. Recently I have become unhappy with KDE. If you like Ubuntu and want to try something new, try Bodhi Linux.

padraic7a 9y ago

There were layoffs in Cannonical in 2017 and the decision was taken to end Ubuntu Touch and ongoing development of Unity. Mark Shuttleworth made a public announcement that this was in preparation for an IPO. In light of these public announcements about the future of the company I would find any rumour that he tried to sell to Red Hat to be a bit lubricious.