5 ms·

Linux should rival Apple, urges Ubuntu founder

18 points by kirubakaran 18y ago

bprater 18y ago
It can not happen. Until you can bring in a visionary dictator like Jobs that everyone channels their energy through, it is impossible to bring Linux to the level of Apple. "The challenge for us is to figure out how to deliver something which is crisp and clean." Crisp and clean? That's all it takes to match Apple? A great movie requires a visionary director. Shuttleworth has does some amazing stuff with Ubuntu, but I think attacking directly at the bow of Apple is a misguided battle.
- krschultz 18y ago
  Shuttleworth IS the Steve Jobs of Linux. Linus is the poster child for the technical guy, but Shuttleworth needs to lead the style. However I find him lacking in specific vision, he says these things are problems, we need to find solutions, but Ubuntu never provides a revolution. I feel like Ubuntu has found the annoyances of Linux and fixed many of them, but they aren't necessarily visionary changes.
  - unalone 18y ago
    Because Linux's problem isn't its bugs, or its glitchiness. Its problems revolve around the design theory that builds it. That's where Apple wins big-time over the other two. It has a consistent theory of how to reduce clicks to get effects. From not having a lower bar to HAVING an upper menu to Spotlight to its Dock, everything is designed to make things faster for you. Ubuntu won't ever have this. It can't. Nothing that's designed to be truly open can. You can't tweak things to the same level of control. You can't implement multitouch and make programs that RELY on multitouch. You can't put iTunes controls on the keyboard, or an Eject key. You can't make iChat integrate with Mail and your Address Book when not everybody will have each of those programs. It's not possible. I've used both thoroughly. The level of polish on the one side is VASTLY superior. Look even at Adium versus Pidgin. They run the same library. But one takes up far less space, has better-designed themes, runs more smoothly... because Apple allows for that. It offers big screen resolutions and superior font support, so you can keep things tiny and out-of-the-way and still readable. It deals with a modern-day theme that means a focus on professionalism still works. It knows it can use Growl and the Dock for notifications, which keeps it much less in-your-face than anything FLASHING ever would. You can't get keyboard shortcuts that are as good when you don't know the keyboard. You can't get software support when you don't know the hardware. You can't have a superior user interface when people use five hundred different displays and two thousand different methods of input. (Exaggeration.) Ubuntu can not win a battle when it can't control the tools used to fight. It can't control hardware, it can't control software, without betraying its design theories. Apple can, and so Apple will always win in a fight hands-down.
    - nailer 18y ago
      > You can't implement multitouch and make programs that RELY on multitouch. Yes you can. Make the canvas widget support multitouch - bang, all apps support multitouch. > You can't put iTunes controls on the keyboard, or an Eject key. Multimedia keys and eject both work fine out of the box today. > You can't make iChat integrate with Mail and your Address Book when not everybody will have each of those programs. It's not possible. Yes it is, and it's used today. Pidgin uses the Evo address book, as do all Gnome programs. Ubuntu ensures that every desktop indeed has these programs, __because it controls the platform__.
      - unalone 18y ago
        Yeah, it has that, but at the same time this isn't a matter of pure functionality. This is a matter of getting a consistent polish. And having a hodge-podge set of applications doesn't do it. I'm sorry if I misspoke earlier. I know that Gnome uses Evo to tie things together. It's just that it doesn't GIVE that impression when you use it. Evo seems, when you turn on the computer, to be a random program thrown in because it's free. Ditto Pidgin. Ditto OpenOffice and Firefox. It's because Linux has never had a consistent set of do-everything apps written by one person. And users notice this. I did. With iChat, I immediately understood the connection. I did because Address Book is a well-known application. Ditto iChat. Evo isn't. Pidgin is, but its integration with Evo isn't. The eject key is supported, yes. But it's not the same as having a key on the keyboard that does it and NOT a button next to the CD slot. The Mac hardware is tight. And... no other hardware is. Linux can't copy that, because that introduces a matter of PAY into things. You can implement multitouch, but you can't RELY on its being there. And for me, that's what made Leopard the OS that it is: powerful and tight multitouch.
        deleted 18y ago
        [deleted]
        Tichy 18y ago
        "And having a hodge-podge set of applications doesn't do it." Nowhere is it written in stone that a Linux Distribution needs to ship with a hodge-podge of applications.
jdoliner 18y ago
I've been using Ubuntu for over a year now first on a T60p laptop, now on a custom built desktop. The only compatibility issue I've had is the lack of ati support for Linux, other than that smooth sailing. I use linux simply because of how powerful it is, it doesn't stand in your way at all. As far as usability goes I'm a poor judge, everything seems logically placed to me, although it lacks the unity of MacOs and even to some extent of Windows. The open source community seems to finally be concentrating on elegant design, so this might change soon.
Herring 18y ago
As War Nerd said, the enemy of your enemy is usually also your enemy. It's fine to hate the occupiers, but the real enemy is the rival militia.
tx 18y ago
"Desktop" is too broad of a definition. Gnome/Nautilus already kick Finder's ass, but is it enough to recommend Ubuntu over OSX to my parents? No. What Linux needs, is PC manufacturer's support. I am not talking about drivers here, I'm talking about quality pre-installs done at the factory. Once suppliers see this, they'll provide quality Linux drivers in order to compete. And for users stuff "will just work". ThinkPad T61 running Ubuntu is in many ways superior to MBP/OSX (and 30% cheaper), but only because I deliberately configured it with only Linux-compatible components and spent a weekend tuning it upon arrival.
- Prrometheus 18y ago
  >What Linux needs, is PC manufacturer's support. I am not talking about drivers here, I'm talking about quality pre-installs done at the factory. That would be wonderful. Ubuntu is making my laptop search very stressful. It is so much fun to use that I don't want to go back to Windows. However, if I buy a laptop that isn't compatible with Ubuntu then it will be hard or impossible to switch out the components for compatible ones like I did on my desktop. The only hassle-free solution is to buy Ubuntu laptops from Dell, but they currently charge about $150 more for the same hardware with Ubuntu installed compared to Windows (what happened to the "Windows tax"?).
  - wmf 18y ago
    The Windows tax is offset by the crapware subsidy.
    - tx 18y ago
      Dell charges $1-2 per crapware install, but sometimes those are free if Dell feels like they add value. Vista Basic, OEM edition, is probably $50 (I am guessing about this one). This requires 20-25 cases of infection with useless shit to offset Microsoft tax. This still can't explain how come Ubuntu-based machines are more expensive. I think that Dell simply rides the demand train: they're the only big-name brand that sells Ubuntu-powered machines (very few know that Lenovo sells SUSE) and they're enjoying higher profit margins on them.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
Prrometheus 18y ago
>"The challenge for us is to figure out how to deliver something which is crisp and clean," without sacrificing the community process, he said. There are multiple architectures for open source projects that run the spectrum from anarchic to authoritarian. If a founder has a particular artistic vision that he feels passionate about, nothing is stopping him from forcing it through and then releasing the source code. Personally, I love using my Ubuntu desktop. The team has done a great job on meeting the usability challenge. The days and weeks spent troubleshooting hardware problems were ugly, horrible, and frustrating (I would love to have an Ubuntu "Installs for sure" hardware list somewhere), but the Ubuntu user experience is a delight compared to Windows. A caveat: I've never used a mac for a significant period of time so I can't say how it compares to that competition.
- wmf 18y ago
  If a founder has a particular artistic vision that he feels passionate about, nothing is stopping him from forcing it through and then releasing the source code. Except the fact that he'll receive virtually no contributions from the community and thus he'll be limited to whatever can be done by himself and his employees. Also, community-controlled distros have set themselves up as gatekeepers, so most users never even discover software that the distros don't like. I think Shuttleworth has identified the correct problem: We know how to get a large number of programmers to produce high-quality software (employ them) and we know how to get a large number of programmers to produce a large amount of software for free (the bazaar), but we don't know how to convince a large number of programmers to produce high-quality software for free.
pavelludiq 18y ago
I don't like apple that much. I like the fact that they are good. Microsoft spoiled us, we thought that just because its open source its automatically better than anything else. Apple showed us that open source is just automatically better than windows, not better than anything else. Its good to finally have good competition.
donw 18y ago
The point that most Linux users and developers seem to miss is not that a good user interface needs to be pretty -- it needs to be consistent. Sure, the stylish looks of OS X do a lot to woo people to the platform, but the experience is why people stay. Consistency is the area where Linux fails miserably. Perhaps this is due to the lack of a single visionary who leads the way in Linux desktop development, but I'd say the problem lies more in the 'not built here' mentality of the developers. Which is kind of ironic, because the entire point of free software was that anybody could contribute to improving it. Consider this: Think of your top ten Linux applications, and the GUI toolkits they use to handle their interaction with X11. I'll wager that, out of those ten applications, you can probably list four or five different GUI toolkits, each of which works slightly differently. Why isn't there just one really good GUI toolkit? I think the answer lies in pride -- everybody wants to have 'their' project, so they start their own, rather than contributing to an existing codebase. For the same reason, open-source project maintainers often do an awful job of listening to their users and co-developers, because their pride of being at the head of the train is threatened by other people making key decisions. This pride also extends out into assuming that the user of said application wants to be an expert in its use, which leads to overly complicated preference panes, nonsense confirmation dialogues, and so on. This is why Linux applications often have the most appallingly inconsistent interfaces, and sadly, I can't think of a good solution to the problem. Frankly, I wish I could, because I would love to run Debian Linux on a Lenovo tablet, and have a GUI that is as useful for me as OS X.
- wmf 18y ago
  One way to start to fix this problem is with marketing. Linux is just the kernel; GNOME is the OS. Ubuntu and Fedora are GNOME distros. You shouldn't expect to run KDE or Motif programs on GNOME; after all, they were written for a different operating system. Of course, this divides the former "Linux" market into even smaller pieces...
  - donw 18y ago
    But this is the exact problem. Why should each window manager be its own platform? This is like having every car produced by GM or Toyota being totally custom-built, with parts that can't be interchanged, without great pain, with anything else in the range.
Hexstream 18y ago
"Linux, Shuttleworth said, must link up with Windows. He stressed his belief that 'Linux is the platform of the future. But I think it's essential that we learn how to work with Windows'." I'm sure Linux developers would be more than willing to link up more with Windows if it didn't keep getting out of its way to prevent it.
hs 18y ago
it's hard when ubuntu role model is windows, implicitly by promoting it to convert windows user to linux, explicitly by making some apps look and feel similar to windows the role model should be osx ... i'll wait the day when i see tutorials about 'how changing my osx desktop to feel & look like Ubuntu'
Tichy 18y ago
Why does open source work better for code than for design (or does it)? I thought the reason for the good quality of many open source projects is that people fix the flaws for themselves, and all the fixes accumulate. Why does it not work the same for design (or does it). Are designers less prone to fixing flaws in products? Are they just lazy and use Apple stuff? Personally I can't really see a fundamental difference between an ugly widget (looks) and an ugly piece of code, they are both bugs?

18 points by kirubakaran 18y ago

It can not happen. Until you can bring in a visionary dictator like Jobs that everyone channels their energy through, it is impossible to bring Linux to the level of Apple. "The challenge for us is to figure out how to deliver something which is crisp and clean." Crisp and clean? That's all it takes to match Apple? A great movie requires a visionary director. Shuttleworth has does some amazing stuff with Ubuntu, but I think attacking directly at the bow of Apple is a misguided battle.

krschultz 18y ago
Shuttleworth IS the Steve Jobs of Linux. Linus is the poster child for the technical guy, but Shuttleworth needs to lead the style. However I find him lacking in specific vision, he says these things are problems, we need to find solutions, but Ubuntu never provides a revolution. I feel like Ubuntu has found the annoyances of Linux and fixed many of them, but they aren't necessarily visionary changes.
- unalone 18y ago
  Because Linux's problem isn't its bugs, or its glitchiness. Its problems revolve around the design theory that builds it. That's where Apple wins big-time over the other two. It has a consistent theory of how to reduce clicks to get effects. From not having a lower bar to HAVING an upper menu to Spotlight to its Dock, everything is designed to make things faster for you. Ubuntu won't ever have this. It can't. Nothing that's designed to be truly open can. You can't tweak things to the same level of control. You can't implement multitouch and make programs that RELY on multitouch. You can't put iTunes controls on the keyboard, or an Eject key. You can't make iChat integrate with Mail and your Address Book when not everybody will have each of those programs. It's not possible. I've used both thoroughly. The level of polish on the one side is VASTLY superior. Look even at Adium versus Pidgin. They run the same library. But one takes up far less space, has better-designed themes, runs more smoothly... because Apple allows for that. It offers big screen resolutions and superior font support, so you can keep things tiny and out-of-the-way and still readable. It deals with a modern-day theme that means a focus on professionalism still works. It knows it can use Growl and the Dock for notifications, which keeps it much less in-your-face than anything FLASHING ever would. You can't get keyboard shortcuts that are as good when you don't know the keyboard. You can't get software support when you don't know the hardware. You can't have a superior user interface when people use five hundred different displays and two thousand different methods of input. (Exaggeration.) Ubuntu can not win a battle when it can't control the tools used to fight. It can't control hardware, it can't control software, without betraying its design theories. Apple can, and so Apple will always win in a fight hands-down.
  - nailer 18y ago
    > You can't implement multitouch and make programs that RELY on multitouch. Yes you can. Make the canvas widget support multitouch - bang, all apps support multitouch. > You can't put iTunes controls on the keyboard, or an Eject key. Multimedia keys and eject both work fine out of the box today. > You can't make iChat integrate with Mail and your Address Book when not everybody will have each of those programs. It's not possible. Yes it is, and it's used today. Pidgin uses the Evo address book, as do all Gnome programs. Ubuntu ensures that every desktop indeed has these programs, __because it controls the platform__.
    - unalone 18y ago
      Yeah, it has that, but at the same time this isn't a matter of pure functionality. This is a matter of getting a consistent polish. And having a hodge-podge set of applications doesn't do it. I'm sorry if I misspoke earlier. I know that Gnome uses Evo to tie things together. It's just that it doesn't GIVE that impression when you use it. Evo seems, when you turn on the computer, to be a random program thrown in because it's free. Ditto Pidgin. Ditto OpenOffice and Firefox. It's because Linux has never had a consistent set of do-everything apps written by one person. And users notice this. I did. With iChat, I immediately understood the connection. I did because Address Book is a well-known application. Ditto iChat. Evo isn't. Pidgin is, but its integration with Evo isn't. The eject key is supported, yes. But it's not the same as having a key on the keyboard that does it and NOT a button next to the CD slot. The Mac hardware is tight. And... no other hardware is. Linux can't copy that, because that introduces a matter of PAY into things. You can implement multitouch, but you can't RELY on its being there. And for me, that's what made Leopard the OS that it is: powerful and tight multitouch.
      - deleted 18y ago
        [deleted]
      - Tichy 18y ago
        "And having a hodge-podge set of applications doesn't do it." Nowhere is it written in stone that a Linux Distribution needs to ship with a hodge-podge of applications.

jdoliner 18y ago

I've been using Ubuntu for over a year now first on a T60p laptop, now on a custom built desktop. The only compatibility issue I've had is the lack of ati support for Linux, other than that smooth sailing. I use linux simply because of how powerful it is, it doesn't stand in your way at all. As far as usability goes I'm a poor judge, everything seems logically placed to me, although it lacks the unity of MacOs and even to some extent of Windows. The open source community seems to finally be concentrating on elegant design, so this might change soon.

Herring 18y ago

As War Nerd said, the enemy of your enemy is usually also your enemy. It's fine to hate the occupiers, but the real enemy is the rival militia.

tx 18y ago

"Desktop" is too broad of a definition. Gnome/Nautilus already kick Finder's ass, but is it enough to recommend Ubuntu over OSX to my parents? No. What Linux needs, is PC manufacturer's support. I am not talking about drivers here, I'm talking about quality pre-installs done at the factory. Once suppliers see this, they'll provide quality Linux drivers in order to compete. And for users stuff "will just work". ThinkPad T61 running Ubuntu is in many ways superior to MBP/OSX (and 30% cheaper), but only because I deliberately configured it with only Linux-compatible components and spent a weekend tuning it upon arrival.

Prrometheus 18y ago
>What Linux needs, is PC manufacturer's support. I am not talking about drivers here, I'm talking about quality pre-installs done at the factory. That would be wonderful. Ubuntu is making my laptop search very stressful. It is so much fun to use that I don't want to go back to Windows. However, if I buy a laptop that isn't compatible with Ubuntu then it will be hard or impossible to switch out the components for compatible ones like I did on my desktop. The only hassle-free solution is to buy Ubuntu laptops from Dell, but they currently charge about $150 more for the same hardware with Ubuntu installed compared to Windows (what happened to the "Windows tax"?).
- wmf 18y ago
  The Windows tax is offset by the crapware subsidy.
  - tx 18y ago
    Dell charges $1-2 per crapware install, but sometimes those are free if Dell feels like they add value. Vista Basic, OEM edition, is probably $50 (I am guessing about this one). This requires 20-25 cases of infection with useless shit to offset Microsoft tax. This still can't explain how come Ubuntu-based machines are more expensive. I think that Dell simply rides the demand train: they're the only big-name brand that sells Ubuntu-powered machines (very few know that Lenovo sells SUSE) and they're enjoying higher profit margins on them.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

Prrometheus 18y ago

>"The challenge for us is to figure out how to deliver something which is crisp and clean," without sacrificing the community process, he said. There are multiple architectures for open source projects that run the spectrum from anarchic to authoritarian. If a founder has a particular artistic vision that he feels passionate about, nothing is stopping him from forcing it through and then releasing the source code. Personally, I love using my Ubuntu desktop. The team has done a great job on meeting the usability challenge. The days and weeks spent troubleshooting hardware problems were ugly, horrible, and frustrating (I would love to have an Ubuntu "Installs for sure" hardware list somewhere), but the Ubuntu user experience is a delight compared to Windows. A caveat: I've never used a mac for a significant period of time so I can't say how it compares to that competition.

wmf 18y ago
If a founder has a particular artistic vision that he feels passionate about, nothing is stopping him from forcing it through and then releasing the source code. Except the fact that he'll receive virtually no contributions from the community and thus he'll be limited to whatever can be done by himself and his employees. Also, community-controlled distros have set themselves up as gatekeepers, so most users never even discover software that the distros don't like. I think Shuttleworth has identified the correct problem: We know how to get a large number of programmers to produce high-quality software (employ them) and we know how to get a large number of programmers to produce a large amount of software for free (the bazaar), but we don't know how to convince a large number of programmers to produce high-quality software for free.

pavelludiq 18y ago

I don't like apple that much. I like the fact that they are good. Microsoft spoiled us, we thought that just because its open source its automatically better than anything else. Apple showed us that open source is just automatically better than windows, not better than anything else. Its good to finally have good competition.

donw 18y ago

The point that most Linux users and developers seem to miss is not that a good user interface needs to be pretty -- it needs to be consistent. Sure, the stylish looks of OS X do a lot to woo people to the platform, but the experience is why people stay. Consistency is the area where Linux fails miserably. Perhaps this is due to the lack of a single visionary who leads the way in Linux desktop development, but I'd say the problem lies more in the 'not built here' mentality of the developers. Which is kind of ironic, because the entire point of free software was that anybody could contribute to improving it. Consider this: Think of your top ten Linux applications, and the GUI toolkits they use to handle their interaction with X11. I'll wager that, out of those ten applications, you can probably list four or five different GUI toolkits, each of which works slightly differently. Why isn't there just one really good GUI toolkit? I think the answer lies in pride -- everybody wants to have 'their' project, so they start their own, rather than contributing to an existing codebase. For the same reason, open-source project maintainers often do an awful job of listening to their users and co-developers, because their pride of being at the head of the train is threatened by other people making key decisions. This pride also extends out into assuming that the user of said application wants to be an expert in its use, which leads to overly complicated preference panes, nonsense confirmation dialogues, and so on. This is why Linux applications often have the most appallingly inconsistent interfaces, and sadly, I can't think of a good solution to the problem. Frankly, I wish I could, because I would love to run Debian Linux on a Lenovo tablet, and have a GUI that is as useful for me as OS X.

wmf 18y ago
One way to start to fix this problem is with marketing. Linux is just the kernel; GNOME is the OS. Ubuntu and Fedora are GNOME distros. You shouldn't expect to run KDE or Motif programs on GNOME; after all, they were written for a different operating system. Of course, this divides the former "Linux" market into even smaller pieces...
- donw 18y ago
  But this is the exact problem. Why should each window manager be its own platform? This is like having every car produced by GM or Toyota being totally custom-built, with parts that can't be interchanged, without great pain, with anything else in the range.

Hexstream 18y ago

"Linux, Shuttleworth said, must link up with Windows. He stressed his belief that 'Linux is the platform of the future. But I think it's essential that we learn how to work with Windows'." I'm sure Linux developers would be more than willing to link up more with Windows if it didn't keep getting out of its way to prevent it.

hs 18y ago

it's hard when ubuntu role model is windows, implicitly by promoting it to convert windows user to linux, explicitly by making some apps look and feel similar to windows the role model should be osx ... i'll wait the day when i see tutorials about 'how changing my osx desktop to feel & look like Ubuntu'

Tichy 18y ago

Why does open source work better for code than for design (or does it)? I thought the reason for the good quality of many open source projects is that people fix the flaws for themselves, and all the fixes accumulate. Why does it not work the same for design (or does it). Are designers less prone to fixing flaws in products? Are they just lazy and use Apple stuff? Personally I can't really see a fundamental difference between an ugly widget (looks) and an ugly piece of code, they are both bugs?