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"That's hubris on the part of Canonical." I genuinely find this attitude confusing. I gave a presentation to a user group at a senior center last night on Ubu

by fader 15y ago

"That's hubris on the part of Canonical." I genuinely find this attitude confusing. I gave a presentation to a user group at a senior center last night on Ubuntu, during which one person made a similar argument. (The only real difference was that he used the word "arrogant" rather than "hubris".) I don't know your background so I can't speak to it, but this person I spoke with had contributed no code, artwork, translations, etc. to the project. He received a product entirely gratis, which he got value from. But then the product moved forward and changed. He still had what he had been given freely, of course. But he demanded that the people doing this work for free either never make changes to their work, or if they do to continue to maintain the old system as well. This work should also be given to him without charge or without him having to put forth any effort. And for those of us actually spending our lives building the thing for him to do otherwise was arrogant. I'm literally speechless when confronted with these sorts of arguments.

angusgr 15y ago
Well I did also say that I was whining like an indulgent nerd about an OS I got given for free. Which pretty much sums up the characterisation you've given here, as well. ;) I do see your point, I really do. My concern, and the part that I specifically labelled hubris - which in hindsight is a regrettable term - was neither the desire to make changes nor the desire to not maintain old configurations. Those things are understandable. When I tried Unity in 11.04 I was impressed that Canonical were working to advance the state of the art. The part that irks me is when I try to imagine the assumptions behind the choices for the upgrade behaviour in 11.10. Users are proactively prompted to make that upgrade, and I perceive a disconnect between their expectations of a simple upgrade and the resulting user experience. In the post above I mentioned some ways in which this could have been made much smoother (simply warning users that their entire desktop environment was about to change, for instance.) Canonical doesn't have to answer a single thing to me for the operating system they worked hard to give me for free, but I still wonder why they chose that path.

by fader 15y ago

angusgr 15y ago

Well I did also say that I was whining like an indulgent nerd about an OS I got given for free. Which pretty much sums up the characterisation you've given here, as well. ;) I do see your point, I really do. My concern, and the part that I specifically labelled hubris - which in hindsight is a regrettable term - was neither the desire to make changes nor the desire to not maintain old configurations. Those things are understandable. When I tried Unity in 11.04 I was impressed that Canonical were working to advance the state of the art. The part that irks me is when I try to imagine the assumptions behind the choices for the upgrade behaviour in 11.10. Users are proactively prompted to make that upgrade, and I perceive a disconnect between their expectations of a simple upgrade and the resulting user experience. In the post above I mentioned some ways in which this could have been made much smoother (simply warning users that their entire desktop environment was about to change, for instance.) Canonical doesn't have to answer a single thing to me for the operating system they worked hard to give me for free, but I still wonder why they chose that path.