7 ms·

Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

71 points by severine 8y ago

awat 8y ago
I have to agree with him on Unity, the reaction to it seemed to outweigh it’s presentation. I gave it a try and liked some aspects but ultimately ended up on Cinnamon. I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it.
- aphextron 8y ago
  >I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it. Agreed. I think a lot of it just came down to performance. Unity was ahead of it’s time, and a lot of people just didn’t have the hardware to handle it with zero lag.
  - jasonkostempski 8y ago
    The last thing a DE should do is consume so many resources nothing else can run properly. There is no benefit to it. DE's should use almost nothing and run lag-free on 10 year old hardware. Show me a single feature in Unity that saved so many people, so much work that it justified extra power consumption across the world. Hell, show me a single feature that didn't actually slow people down compared to, let's say, xfce.
    - gnomewascool 8y ago
      1. Global Menus — by being at the edge of the screen, their "height" effectively became infinite (for the purposes of Fitts's law), so you could very easily and quickly move your mouse to them. However, if they annoyed you, you could turn on Locally-Integrated Menus (at least in later versions of Unity). 2. HUD (Heads Up Display) — by just tapping Alt and typing, you could quickly select an option from almost any application's menu (saving you the time of looking through the menus and trying to remember whether the desired option was under Edit or View). 3. Not a speed benefit, but: better use of vertical space. BTW I think that XFCE is a great DE.
      - mixmastamyk 8y ago
        Those are nice, though #1 breaks down with multiple monitors. None really required a new DE, could have been added to any of the existing.
  - blahblahblahw 8y ago
    >I think a lot of it just came down to performance. Absolutely. I for one embrace (positive) change and had no problem adjusting to Unity. I liked it a lot, even more than Gnome 2, but the performance was just shockingly bad on every computer I used it on. From my Thinkpad T420s with the Intel graphics to my desktop with a GTX 970. Everything was noticeably slower than it was under any other desktop environment. I finally just quit using it. The real shame is they had a version based on Qt a while back that didn't require compositing. If they had continued with that, the performance would have been stellar. Oh well.
- nol13 8y ago
  People (me) were just mad because seemingly in the blink of an eye they went from having a stable mature linux desktop, sometimes even approaching "it just works," to having that ripped away and replaced with a choice between [radical new desktop] or xfce. Unity or GNOME Shell might really be great, but that's a huge change to force on unsuspecting neckbeards. Wish Canonical would have just created MATE themselves.
  - dopeboy 8y ago
    This is exactly right, it was timing. I have been using Ubuntu since 2005 and it was a rough grind on the "just-works" front in those beginning days. By 2010, desktop Ubuntu was in great shape and laptop Ubuntu was nearly there (moreso on suspend/resume, not so much on battery). People were just starting to breathe and then Unity came and threw any semblance of stability out the window.
    - timellis-smith 8y ago
      Lucid and maverick where possibly the best desktop experiences I've had. Going to Natty (and oneric), with its many bugs was such a huge shock that I pretty much stopped using Ubuntu and switched to Mint
- jitix 8y ago
  I actually stopped using linux as my main OS in 2010 because of Gnome3 and Unity. The "Applications","Places","System" menu was clear, intuitive and desktop oriented. I never liked KDE, and MATE seemed like a rather unoptmized fork. So it left me with using Xubuntu VM on a Windows host (and I hate Windows because of it lacks bash). Once I moved to the US I started using Mac and never looked back. The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX.
  - roryisok 8y ago
    > The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX With all the IOS apps they keep bringing to macOS, the merging of the IOS and macOS dev teams, and the imminent release of ARM macbooks I wouldn't get comfortable
    - roryisok 8y ago
      Not sure why that got downvoted but ok. Just expressing my opinion that apple are moving toward exactly this
  - pmontra 8y ago
    There was, and there is, Gnome Flashback which is basically a Gnome 2 desktop with GTK 3. The Compiz cube still works.
- flyinghamster 8y ago
  Have they fixed the problems with Firefox on Cinnamon? I ran it for quite a while, and was thoroughly frustrated by dropdowns showing up in the wrong place on Firefox (this on 16.04). Moving over to XFCE was an effective workaround, but other than the Firefox problem, I preferred Cinnamon.
  - schwank 8y ago
    I've been running Mint Cinnamon as my primary OS for a few years on both a Dell Latitude E74xx and a homebuilt mini-ITX box with no such issues. The laptop is integrated gfx and the desktop is a 1050gtx at 4k. FF is my main browser and I have not seen any such behavior.
    - flyinghamster 8y ago
      Hmmmm... I've had the problem on a 960/Ryzen 7 and an old 9600/FX-6100 rig, and also on a ThinkPad X201 Tablet with integrated Intel graphics. However, I installed Cinnamon from the Ubuntu 16.04 repos, so maybe they had a bad version there.
- pmontra 8y ago
  I don't think that in the Linux world people use something they don't like, unless there are no alternatives. In my case I don't like to have a top bar and that's one of the reasons I never considered buying a Mac since the 80s (the global menu is another one). So I kept using Gnome which let me move everything to a bottom bar (Gnome Fallback with GTK3). Gnome Shell seems to be able to do it too now and I'll give it another try when I'll upgrade to 18.04. So yes, I never used Unity but I didn't ask for its demise. There were alternatives and I was happy with them. Still Canonical decided to dump Unity. Why? They couldn't make money out of it, and out of Mir and the old Convergence project. [1] In his words > Some of the things that we were doing were clearly never going to be commercially sustainable, other things clearly will be commercially sustainable, or already are commercially sustainable. > The decision] meant that we couldn’t have on our books (effectively) very substantial projects which clearly have no commercial angle to them at all. That's not because people were asking Canonical to kill Unity. [1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unity-mark-shuttleworth-explains https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unit...
- zizek23 8y ago
  Unity was the first Linux desktop that was polished and had the just works feel about it. I remember struggling with Linux GUIs since the earliest days of Redhat and we are talking 15 years ago. Unity is comparable to my retina macbook and Win10 desktop. This is not a small achievement. Your grandmother could use it. Internet opinion tends to be loud but may not be representative when you mix in the vested interests pushing their own desktops, astroturfers and a certain community who think they should control Linux and everyone needs their approval and blessings. In Unity's case it was this last group with the most vicious reactions. No one can be so bitter about a desktop unless they are vested in something else. I wish Ubuntu hadn't abandoned it.
- borplk 8y ago
  Cinnamon hands down has the best multi-monitor support out of any other non-tiling desktop I have tried.
jessaustin 8y ago
Found as users -- and Shuttleworth himself -- of the Linux desktop... Good grief. Presumably that should be "Fond as users... are of the Linux desktop"...
- Cyphase 8y ago
  Also, "... Snap contanizeried applications ...". That 'z' is way out there.
a4dev 8y ago
Are those cloud usage numbers missing some zeros? "Ubuntu dominates the cloud with 209,000 instances."
- lathiat 8y ago
  This "Cloud Market" stats they quote (which they've quoted in the past) seems like a very dead website. Looking at the site: http://thecloudmarket.com/stats#/by_platform_definition http://thecloudmarket.com/stats#/by_platform_definition The numbers haven't changed in the last 2 years, looking at "Popular Images": http://thecloudmarket.com/#/popular http://thecloudmarket.com/#/popular The top listed image is Ubuntu 7.10 ("Gutsy") from 2007... .. and looking at recently added the most recent is from 1 year ago: http://thecloudmarket.com/#/recentlyadded http://thecloudmarket.com/#/recentlyadded So a bit of a bad journalism moment there I think that's a very bad source! I'm sure theres a more recent source but one 2015 article claimed that Canonical was claiming "In 2015, over 2 million Ubuntu instances were launched in the cloud – Based on their statistics, Canonical claims that 67,000 new Ubuntu cloud instances are launched every day! That’s by far the largest number that any OS vendor can dream! Ubuntu dominates the LAMP deployments in the cloud." So indeed, probably missing a few zeros :) I can't find a newer public source, but this blog post from 2015 has some numbers for Ubuntu: https://blog.ubuntu.com/2015/12/22/more-people-use-ubuntu-than-anyone-actually-knows https://blog.ubuntu.com/2015/12/22/more-people-use-ubuntu-th... - At least 20 million unique instances of Ubuntu have launched in public clouds, private clouds, and bare metal in 2015 itself. - In fact, over 2 million new Ubuntu cloud instances launched in November 2015. - That’s 67,000 new Ubuntu cloud instances launched per day. Of course some instances last minutes or days, but never the less. (Disclaimer: I work at Canonical just in case that matters to you)
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
I think the major distros defaulting to GNOME is not going to end well. I tried very hard to use (and like) GNOME Shell for a while, and put it on my wife's computer as well. I always ended up finding completely wrong for the way I want to interact with my computer. And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier.
- jeff_petersen 8y ago
  > I think the major distros defaulting to GNOME is not going to end well I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess. > And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier. What did you switch her to?
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    > I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess. I haven't seriously tried KDE, though I've heard lots of good things about it recently. I don't know why Ubuntu chose GNOME over Mate, the latter seems a perfectly fine typical desktop environment paradigm. > What did you switch her to? AwesomeWM (which is technically a windows manager and not a desktop environment, but it's full-featured enough to be essentially like a DE), which I keep coming back even after trying other DEs/WMs. I had hesitated to put her on it since its configuration isn't user-friendly (it's a .lua text file..), but I just essentially copied over my configuration, and she's been much happier than on GNOME.
    - mcny 8y ago
      I've recently started playing with i3. It is very nice. I don't know how to do a lot of things. I have to Google how to connect to a new WiFi connection every time on my phone. However, I like it a lot. Worst case scenario, I have to reboot and log in with gnome. Personally, I am all for standardization and homogeneity. We need standards and homogeneity. I would gladly steamroll over all the people who oppose "monoculture" for the sake of opposing something. You can't please everyone but I think gnome is the right answer for most people. Don't like something? Come join the discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org https://gitlab.gnome.org (I hope I got that right) Better link https://gitlab.gnome.org/groups/GNOME/-/issues https://gitlab.gnome.org/groups/GNOME/-/issues
stewbrew 8y ago
"I'm now convinced a lot of the people who demanded its demise never used it." I personally always wondered if anybody at Canonical had ever used it. It never worked right. You always had the feeling that you have to beg to make unity accept a mouse movement or a key shortcut to view that damned panel -- for starters.
stewbrew 8y ago
Serious question: What are the advantages of Ubuntu on a server over, say, Debian?
- cup-of-tea 8y ago
  Ubuntu has more frequent releases, but since people are using Ubuntu LTS that's a very good question considering Debian also has LTS releases on the same frequency.
  - qznc 8y ago
    Ubuntu constantly backports certain applications like Firefox for LTS so you don't have a two year old browser. Does Debian LTS provide that? Edit: Oh, server. Forgot that context.
    - stewbrew 8y ago
      Firefox on a server?
    - cup-of-tea 8y ago
      Probably not but is that relevant for Ubuntu Server?
    - based2 8y ago
      https://packages.debian.org/en/wheezy/firefox-esr https://packages.debian.org/en/wheezy/firefox-esr https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
- willtim 8y ago
  From the article: "Canonical can deliver an OpenStack platform to an enterprise in two weeks with everything in place."
  - spotinsun 8y ago
    Should delivering "OpenStack platform to an enterprise in two weeks with everything in place" even something that is considered an accomplishment? I have heard such statement from Canonical but I don't understand why it's something to talk about. Why not in an afternoon? One of their competitor products, Sardina FishOS, can be delivered in an afternoon. Our experience was that the whole process in FishOS was automated. From conversation with one of their customers (a European bank), we were told that in their case, they deployed a bank-wide OpenStack cloud in a day, including Ceph. With this in mind, Canonical's two weeks would seem 13 days too long? Of course, that would cut 13 days of services revenue for Canonical ...
ma2rten 8y ago
You can love technology and you can have new projects and it can all be kumbaya and open source, but what really matters is computers, virtual machines, virtual disks, virtual networks. So we ruthlessly focus on delivering that and then also solving all the problems around that. What is he even talking about?
- pram 8y ago
  No more vanity projects for the desktop version of Ubuntu is what I got out of it. He’s probably referring to the spirit in which Ubuntu desktop was originally released (the Linux desktop for everybody) and now the focus is on things that can assist virtualization and containers in the cloud.
ddtaylor 8y ago
Mark changed his mind a lot and Canonical has started and cancelled many projects to the point it's hard to care about their new stuff anymore. Oh you're supporting netbooks and doing a distro related to it? Cancelled. Oh you started a cloud service that stores files forever? Cancelled. Oh you created a competitor to X and Wayland for compositing? Cancelled. Oh you created an alternative window manager to replace Gnome She'll? Cancelled. Did they cancel their phone yet? Didn't they have some kind of $30,000 server they were talking about for a while that wad cancelled? It's hard to keep up with all their cancelled projects.
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  Sure, it's a bummer to see potentially cool stuff get canceled. But Ubuntu was all about innovation from the start. I wouldn't mind seeing twice as many canceled projects, because it's a sign that you're willing to put yourself out there and fail often. Innovation has a cost, and if part of that cost is "we can't support netbooks but other distros will, heck you can even use Xubuntu if you want" that's fine with me.
  - thefifthsetpin 8y ago
    > Ubuntu was all about innovation from the start I thought it was about making a distro that was approachable and accessible? Source: vaguely remembered "What does ubuntu mean?" promo videos from many years ago.
    - themodelplumber 8y ago
      Yes, and at the time that was a huge innovation. Don't ask a neckbeard, but it was a huge innovation.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    That would be fine if they were choices on the side, but most of these were foisted on users as the default choice, only to be canceled later. Making the whole exercise a complete waste of time rather than an interesting experiment. For example, they could have instead contributed to MATE for the last decade, and it might finally be as good as Windows 2000.

71 points by severine 8y ago

awat 8y ago

I have to agree with him on Unity, the reaction to it seemed to outweigh it’s presentation. I gave it a try and liked some aspects but ultimately ended up on Cinnamon. I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it.

aphextron 8y ago
>I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it. Agreed. I think a lot of it just came down to performance. Unity was ahead of it’s time, and a lot of people just didn’t have the hardware to handle it with zero lag.
- jasonkostempski 8y ago
  The last thing a DE should do is consume so many resources nothing else can run properly. There is no benefit to it. DE's should use almost nothing and run lag-free on 10 year old hardware. Show me a single feature in Unity that saved so many people, so much work that it justified extra power consumption across the world. Hell, show me a single feature that didn't actually slow people down compared to, let's say, xfce.
  - gnomewascool 8y ago
    1. Global Menus — by being at the edge of the screen, their "height" effectively became infinite (for the purposes of Fitts's law), so you could very easily and quickly move your mouse to them. However, if they annoyed you, you could turn on Locally-Integrated Menus (at least in later versions of Unity). 2. HUD (Heads Up Display) — by just tapping Alt and typing, you could quickly select an option from almost any application's menu (saving you the time of looking through the menus and trying to remember whether the desired option was under Edit or View). 3. Not a speed benefit, but: better use of vertical space. BTW I think that XFCE is a great DE.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Those are nice, though #1 breaks down with multiple monitors. None really required a new DE, could have been added to any of the existing.
- blahblahblahw 8y ago
  >I think a lot of it just came down to performance. Absolutely. I for one embrace (positive) change and had no problem adjusting to Unity. I liked it a lot, even more than Gnome 2, but the performance was just shockingly bad on every computer I used it on. From my Thinkpad T420s with the Intel graphics to my desktop with a GTX 970. Everything was noticeably slower than it was under any other desktop environment. I finally just quit using it. The real shame is they had a version based on Qt a while back that didn't require compositing. If they had continued with that, the performance would have been stellar. Oh well.
nol13 8y ago
People (me) were just mad because seemingly in the blink of an eye they went from having a stable mature linux desktop, sometimes even approaching "it just works," to having that ripped away and replaced with a choice between [radical new desktop] or xfce. Unity or GNOME Shell might really be great, but that's a huge change to force on unsuspecting neckbeards. Wish Canonical would have just created MATE themselves.
- dopeboy 8y ago
  This is exactly right, it was timing. I have been using Ubuntu since 2005 and it was a rough grind on the "just-works" front in those beginning days. By 2010, desktop Ubuntu was in great shape and laptop Ubuntu was nearly there (moreso on suspend/resume, not so much on battery). People were just starting to breathe and then Unity came and threw any semblance of stability out the window.
  - timellis-smith 8y ago
    Lucid and maverick where possibly the best desktop experiences I've had. Going to Natty (and oneric), with its many bugs was such a huge shock that I pretty much stopped using Ubuntu and switched to Mint
jitix 8y ago
I actually stopped using linux as my main OS in 2010 because of Gnome3 and Unity. The "Applications","Places","System" menu was clear, intuitive and desktop oriented. I never liked KDE, and MATE seemed like a rather unoptmized fork. So it left me with using Xubuntu VM on a Windows host (and I hate Windows because of it lacks bash). Once I moved to the US I started using Mac and never looked back. The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX.
- roryisok 8y ago
  > The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX With all the IOS apps they keep bringing to macOS, the merging of the IOS and macOS dev teams, and the imminent release of ARM macbooks I wouldn't get comfortable
  - roryisok 8y ago
    Not sure why that got downvoted but ok. Just expressing my opinion that apple are moving toward exactly this
- pmontra 8y ago
  There was, and there is, Gnome Flashback which is basically a Gnome 2 desktop with GTK 3. The Compiz cube still works.
flyinghamster 8y ago
Have they fixed the problems with Firefox on Cinnamon? I ran it for quite a while, and was thoroughly frustrated by dropdowns showing up in the wrong place on Firefox (this on 16.04). Moving over to XFCE was an effective workaround, but other than the Firefox problem, I preferred Cinnamon.
- schwank 8y ago
  I've been running Mint Cinnamon as my primary OS for a few years on both a Dell Latitude E74xx and a homebuilt mini-ITX box with no such issues. The laptop is integrated gfx and the desktop is a 1050gtx at 4k. FF is my main browser and I have not seen any such behavior.
  - flyinghamster 8y ago
    Hmmmm... I've had the problem on a 960/Ryzen 7 and an old 9600/FX-6100 rig, and also on a ThinkPad X201 Tablet with integrated Intel graphics. However, I installed Cinnamon from the Ubuntu 16.04 repos, so maybe they had a bad version there.
pmontra 8y ago
I don't think that in the Linux world people use something they don't like, unless there are no alternatives. In my case I don't like to have a top bar and that's one of the reasons I never considered buying a Mac since the 80s (the global menu is another one). So I kept using Gnome which let me move everything to a bottom bar (Gnome Fallback with GTK3). Gnome Shell seems to be able to do it too now and I'll give it another try when I'll upgrade to 18.04. So yes, I never used Unity but I didn't ask for its demise. There were alternatives and I was happy with them. Still Canonical decided to dump Unity. Why? They couldn't make money out of it, and out of Mir and the old Convergence project. [1] In his words > Some of the things that we were doing were clearly never going to be commercially sustainable, other things clearly will be commercially sustainable, or already are commercially sustainable. > The decision] meant that we couldn’t have on our books (effectively) very substantial projects which clearly have no commercial angle to them at all. That's not because people were asking Canonical to kill Unity. [1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unity-mark-shuttleworth-explains https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unit...
zizek23 8y ago
Unity was the first Linux desktop that was polished and had the just works feel about it. I remember struggling with Linux GUIs since the earliest days of Redhat and we are talking 15 years ago. Unity is comparable to my retina macbook and Win10 desktop. This is not a small achievement. Your grandmother could use it. Internet opinion tends to be loud but may not be representative when you mix in the vested interests pushing their own desktops, astroturfers and a certain community who think they should control Linux and everyone needs their approval and blessings. In Unity's case it was this last group with the most vicious reactions. No one can be so bitter about a desktop unless they are vested in something else. I wish Ubuntu hadn't abandoned it.
borplk 8y ago
Cinnamon hands down has the best multi-monitor support out of any other non-tiling desktop I have tried.

jessaustin 8y ago

Found as users -- and Shuttleworth himself -- of the Linux desktop... Good grief. Presumably that should be "Fond as users... are of the Linux desktop"...

Cyphase 8y ago
Also, "... Snap contanizeried applications ...". That 'z' is way out there.

a4dev 8y ago

Are those cloud usage numbers missing some zeros? "Ubuntu dominates the cloud with 209,000 instances."

lathiat 8y ago
This "Cloud Market" stats they quote (which they've quoted in the past) seems like a very dead website. Looking at the site: http://thecloudmarket.com/stats#/by_platform_definition http://thecloudmarket.com/stats#/by_platform_definition The numbers haven't changed in the last 2 years, looking at "Popular Images": http://thecloudmarket.com/#/popular http://thecloudmarket.com/#/popular The top listed image is Ubuntu 7.10 ("Gutsy") from 2007... .. and looking at recently added the most recent is from 1 year ago: http://thecloudmarket.com/#/recentlyadded http://thecloudmarket.com/#/recentlyadded So a bit of a bad journalism moment there I think that's a very bad source! I'm sure theres a more recent source but one 2015 article claimed that Canonical was claiming "In 2015, over 2 million Ubuntu instances were launched in the cloud – Based on their statistics, Canonical claims that 67,000 new Ubuntu cloud instances are launched every day! That’s by far the largest number that any OS vendor can dream! Ubuntu dominates the LAMP deployments in the cloud." So indeed, probably missing a few zeros :) I can't find a newer public source, but this blog post from 2015 has some numbers for Ubuntu: https://blog.ubuntu.com/2015/12/22/more-people-use-ubuntu-than-anyone-actually-knows https://blog.ubuntu.com/2015/12/22/more-people-use-ubuntu-th... - At least 20 million unique instances of Ubuntu have launched in public clouds, private clouds, and bare metal in 2015 itself. - In fact, over 2 million new Ubuntu cloud instances launched in November 2015. - That’s 67,000 new Ubuntu cloud instances launched per day. Of course some instances last minutes or days, but never the less. (Disclaimer: I work at Canonical just in case that matters to you)

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

I think the major distros defaulting to GNOME is not going to end well. I tried very hard to use (and like) GNOME Shell for a while, and put it on my wife's computer as well. I always ended up finding completely wrong for the way I want to interact with my computer. And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier.

jeff_petersen 8y ago
> I think the major distros defaulting to GNOME is not going to end well I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess. > And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier. What did you switch her to?
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  > I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess. I haven't seriously tried KDE, though I've heard lots of good things about it recently. I don't know why Ubuntu chose GNOME over Mate, the latter seems a perfectly fine typical desktop environment paradigm. > What did you switch her to? AwesomeWM (which is technically a windows manager and not a desktop environment, but it's full-featured enough to be essentially like a DE), which I keep coming back even after trying other DEs/WMs. I had hesitated to put her on it since its configuration isn't user-friendly (it's a .lua text file..), but I just essentially copied over my configuration, and she's been much happier than on GNOME.
  - mcny 8y ago
    I've recently started playing with i3. It is very nice. I don't know how to do a lot of things. I have to Google how to connect to a new WiFi connection every time on my phone. However, I like it a lot. Worst case scenario, I have to reboot and log in with gnome. Personally, I am all for standardization and homogeneity. We need standards and homogeneity. I would gladly steamroll over all the people who oppose "monoculture" for the sake of opposing something. You can't please everyone but I think gnome is the right answer for most people. Don't like something? Come join the discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org https://gitlab.gnome.org (I hope I got that right) Better link https://gitlab.gnome.org/groups/GNOME/-/issues https://gitlab.gnome.org/groups/GNOME/-/issues

stewbrew 8y ago

"I'm now convinced a lot of the people who demanded its demise never used it." I personally always wondered if anybody at Canonical had ever used it. It never worked right. You always had the feeling that you have to beg to make unity accept a mouse movement or a key shortcut to view that damned panel -- for starters.

stewbrew 8y ago

Serious question: What are the advantages of Ubuntu on a server over, say, Debian?

cup-of-tea 8y ago
Ubuntu has more frequent releases, but since people are using Ubuntu LTS that's a very good question considering Debian also has LTS releases on the same frequency.
- qznc 8y ago
  Ubuntu constantly backports certain applications like Firefox for LTS so you don't have a two year old browser. Does Debian LTS provide that? Edit: Oh, server. Forgot that context.
  - stewbrew 8y ago
    Firefox on a server?
  - cup-of-tea 8y ago
    Probably not but is that relevant for Ubuntu Server?
  - based2 8y ago
    https://packages.debian.org/en/wheezy/firefox-esr https://packages.debian.org/en/wheezy/firefox-esr https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
willtim 8y ago
From the article: "Canonical can deliver an OpenStack platform to an enterprise in two weeks with everything in place."
- spotinsun 8y ago
  Should delivering "OpenStack platform to an enterprise in two weeks with everything in place" even something that is considered an accomplishment? I have heard such statement from Canonical but I don't understand why it's something to talk about. Why not in an afternoon? One of their competitor products, Sardina FishOS, can be delivered in an afternoon. Our experience was that the whole process in FishOS was automated. From conversation with one of their customers (a European bank), we were told that in their case, they deployed a bank-wide OpenStack cloud in a day, including Ceph. With this in mind, Canonical's two weeks would seem 13 days too long? Of course, that would cut 13 days of services revenue for Canonical ...

ma2rten 8y ago

You can love technology and you can have new projects and it can all be kumbaya and open source, but what really matters is computers, virtual machines, virtual disks, virtual networks. So we ruthlessly focus on delivering that and then also solving all the problems around that. What is he even talking about?

pram 8y ago
No more vanity projects for the desktop version of Ubuntu is what I got out of it. He’s probably referring to the spirit in which Ubuntu desktop was originally released (the Linux desktop for everybody) and now the focus is on things that can assist virtualization and containers in the cloud.

ddtaylor 8y ago

Mark changed his mind a lot and Canonical has started and cancelled many projects to the point it's hard to care about their new stuff anymore. Oh you're supporting netbooks and doing a distro related to it? Cancelled. Oh you started a cloud service that stores files forever? Cancelled. Oh you created a competitor to X and Wayland for compositing? Cancelled. Oh you created an alternative window manager to replace Gnome She'll? Cancelled. Did they cancel their phone yet? Didn't they have some kind of $30,000 server they were talking about for a while that wad cancelled? It's hard to keep up with all their cancelled projects.

themodelplumber 8y ago
Sure, it's a bummer to see potentially cool stuff get canceled. But Ubuntu was all about innovation from the start. I wouldn't mind seeing twice as many canceled projects, because it's a sign that you're willing to put yourself out there and fail often. Innovation has a cost, and if part of that cost is "we can't support netbooks but other distros will, heck you can even use Xubuntu if you want" that's fine with me.
- thefifthsetpin 8y ago
  > Ubuntu was all about innovation from the start I thought it was about making a distro that was approachable and accessible? Source: vaguely remembered "What does ubuntu mean?" promo videos from many years ago.
  - themodelplumber 8y ago
    Yes, and at the time that was a huge innovation. Don't ask a neckbeard, but it was a huge innovation.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  That would be fine if they were choices on the side, but most of these were foisted on users as the default choice, only to be canceled later. Making the whole exercise a complete waste of time rather than an interesting experiment. For example, they could have instead contributed to MATE for the last decade, and it might finally be as good as Windows 2000.

​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next

Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next