4 ms·

> Let them innovate If Canonical were good at it, everybody would be saying "yeah, go for it!" But they're not. Every time they strike out on their own, they

> Let them innovate If Canonical were good at it, everybody would be saying "yeah, go for it!" But they're not. Every time they strike out on their own, they seem to end up producing overly complex, badly performing, messes, with tons of issues, that everybody hates. bzr, unity, ... The only reason people use any of their stuff is because ubuntu pushes it on their users, and people with little experience end up using it by default. Sound familiar...? [Worse, with Mir, they seem to going for the lockin effect: "mir will integrate especially well with unity"... >< ] That perception, that Canonical is not competing on fair terms—almost anything they come up with, no matter how awful, will come with a built-in user base—is one of the big reasons they get so much flack for this sort of thing. If it were just some guy in his garage hacking on his new display server after lunch every day (like, you know, Wayland...), and gaining users the hard way, by being better, then nobody would blink an eye. For that reason, I think people expect more maturity from an influential company like Canonical. They expect them to play nicely and work with others (e.g., if they think they've identified issues with wayland, work to fix wayland; or cooperate in designing a next-generation replacement) instead of striking out boldly on their own every 15 minutes. Again, if they had proven really good at it, they'd get a pass to some degree—but they haven't. Instead, by making technical merit less of a factor in determining what becomes widely used, they're effectively reducing the overall quality of FOSS. Can you blame people for being annoyed?

tedks 14y ago
Can you elaborate on what you dislike about bazaar and Unity? Or how Canonical is able to "force" a vcs on its userbase? I've used Unity since it was released, never had any issues, and generally think it's the best GNU/Linux window shell around. Bazaar is also ridiculously simple, and I've started using it as a front-end to every other vcs. The support for git is a little rough, but I can do in one command what git users have to do in four, so I deal with it. I think that the vocal minority of Ubuntu power-users (which is sort of a laughable term) hates change. This is what made Unity such a "failure" when really it's a pretty great system.
- reidrac 14y ago
  Launchpad supports Bazaar only. That's one of the "top ten reasons" to switch to Bazaar according to the docs [1]. That said, I don't really think Canonical is "forcing" anyone besides playing the "defaults" card in the distribution they control, and even then you can simply not use the stuff is installed by default (although I think that making the desktop dependent of some applications that I may not want to use is a little bit against the bazaar philosophy of Linux distributions). [1] http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to-bazaar.html http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to-b... EDIT: formatting
  - mnazim 14y ago
    Launchpad, like Github, is offering a service and that too free. It is not a valid argument. It would be like asking Github why don't they support other VCS. > making the desktop dependent of some applications that I may not want to use Examples please.
    - Jach 14y ago
      But github does support other VCS!
      - McP 14y ago
        Really? Link please
        snogglethorpe 14y ago
        https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clients https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...
        mnazim 14y ago
        Supporting parts of subversion client is not same as subversion repository.
nl 14y ago
[if Canonical were] gaining users the hard way, by being better, then nobody would blink an eye. Maybe they are "being better". I have no doubt that technically Wayland is better than Mir, but for me (as a user who lost interest in configuring Linux back when FVWM95 was considered interesting) I don't care. I use Ubuntu (including Unity!) because it works. I never, ever want to deal with weird configurations to work around some bug, and for the most part Ubuntu lets me avoid that. For me, "better" means "it just works". No other distro does that as well as Ubuntu. (BTW, Unity isn't that bad once you've used it for a while)
- rdtsc 14y ago
  I agree. I for one, also like Unity. My mother who is in her late 60 also learned it quickly now likes it. Interface is less cluttered and easier to use. At first there was a small learning curve, but I don't remember often thinking "hmm, I wish I had my GNOME 2 environment or my KDE environment back". Maybe I too got old and spending hours tweaking my GUI settings just stopped being fun. I just want to fire up the machine and get work done.
dgrant 14y ago
I beg to differ. I used Redhat, Mandrake, Gentoo, Debian, and now Ubuntu and I have been happily using Ubuntu for a long time now. Unity is great. I barely need to do any configuration with it, everything just works. Under the hood it's still good ol' old-school Linux. I have tried Mint on 2 other computers for all the talk about Mint being the next great Distro, I find it to be far less stable than Ubuntu. I have also started only using Ubuntu's LTS releases with a handful of PPAs to get more recent packages. Helps with stability a lot.

tedks 14y ago

Can you elaborate on what you dislike about bazaar and Unity? Or how Canonical is able to "force" a vcs on its userbase? I've used Unity since it was released, never had any issues, and generally think it's the best GNU/Linux window shell around. Bazaar is also ridiculously simple, and I've started using it as a front-end to every other vcs. The support for git is a little rough, but I can do in one command what git users have to do in four, so I deal with it. I think that the vocal minority of Ubuntu power-users (which is sort of a laughable term) hates change. This is what made Unity such a "failure" when really it's a pretty great system.

reidrac 14y ago
Launchpad supports Bazaar only. That's one of the "top ten reasons" to switch to Bazaar according to the docs [1]. That said, I don't really think Canonical is "forcing" anyone besides playing the "defaults" card in the distribution they control, and even then you can simply not use the stuff is installed by default (although I think that making the desktop dependent of some applications that I may not want to use is a little bit against the bazaar philosophy of Linux distributions). [1] http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to-bazaar.html http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to-b... EDIT: formatting
- mnazim 14y ago
  Launchpad, like Github, is offering a service and that too free. It is not a valid argument. It would be like asking Github why don't they support other VCS. > making the desktop dependent of some applications that I may not want to use Examples please.
  - Jach 14y ago
    But github does support other VCS!
    - McP 14y ago
      Really? Link please
      - snogglethorpe 14y ago
        https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clients https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...
        mnazim 14y ago
        Supporting parts of subversion client is not same as subversion repository.

nl 14y ago

[if Canonical were] gaining users the hard way, by being better, then nobody would blink an eye. Maybe they are "being better". I have no doubt that technically Wayland is better than Mir, but for me (as a user who lost interest in configuring Linux back when FVWM95 was considered interesting) I don't care. I use Ubuntu (including Unity!) because it works. I never, ever want to deal with weird configurations to work around some bug, and for the most part Ubuntu lets me avoid that. For me, "better" means "it just works". No other distro does that as well as Ubuntu. (BTW, Unity isn't that bad once you've used it for a while)

rdtsc 14y ago
I agree. I for one, also like Unity. My mother who is in her late 60 also learned it quickly now likes it. Interface is less cluttered and easier to use. At first there was a small learning curve, but I don't remember often thinking "hmm, I wish I had my GNOME 2 environment or my KDE environment back". Maybe I too got old and spending hours tweaking my GUI settings just stopped being fun. I just want to fire up the machine and get work done.

dgrant 14y ago

I beg to differ. I used Redhat, Mandrake, Gentoo, Debian, and now Ubuntu and I have been happily using Ubuntu for a long time now. Unity is great. I barely need to do any configuration with it, everything just works. Under the hood it's still good ol' old-school Linux. I have tried Mint on 2 other computers for all the talk about Mint being the next great Distro, I find it to be far less stable than Ubuntu. I have also started only using Ubuntu's LTS releases with a handful of PPAs to get more recent packages. Helps with stability a lot.