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Is there any particular reason you prefer dogmatism to pragmatism in choosing your Linux distribution?

• buster 13y ago
  Where is the pragmatism to build (in a rather closed manner) software like unity, upstart or mir, in an open source ecosystem that has viable alternatives? I am confident that Linux will be a better system if efforts are combined and focused and not split up. And thus, i think that Linux would be in a better state today if Canonical would have chosen Gnome Shell, systemd and Wayland (for example). Thus, my voice/vote goes to systems where i see the future. Besides i wasn't using Unity anyway and i have learnt and used Debian far before Ubuntu, so it's not like i had trouble switching.
  • mhw 13y ago
    I really don't understand this view that seems to be shared by quite a number of people: that Canonical shouldn't attempt (and some seem to suggest aren't competent) to build their own system components, but should instead confine their efforts into supporting other's projects. To me it seems that there's more than enough development resource available across the Linux community, and for system components where the 'right' solution is not obvious having multiple projects try out different approaches seems like an advantage to me. Let the code do the talking and then we'll see which solution works best.
    • buster 13y ago
      That's fine in itself but Canonical seems to fail to make educated decisions on technical details and is not behaving "nice" when it first says "we'll support Wayland" and then abandon it. It would even be fine to abandon Wayland but Canonical didn't show any intention to do so until they released the first Mir code already (by this time the decision must have been made for quite some time). Plus, spreading FUD about Wayland and how it is not working for Ubuntu is not helping either. Especially since all points have been debunked very fast. It's not putting the decision making at Canonical into a good light. I also never understood why they didn't put their efforts into Gnome Shell to create their vision of a desktop. It's totally possible to customize Gnome Shell (or even fork, see Cinnamon). Instead it's running compiz (which is critized for being hacky, bugridden and understaffed for quite some time) or QML (Unity 2D), two totally different APIs. And how would you rationally justify developing upstart when the rest of the world puts its efforts into systemd? I understand that systemd is not as mature as upstart, but how far would it be with upstart efforts put into systemd? The problem of Canonical is not even working on seperate projects but the utter failure to work with the rest of the Linux community. Do you see other destributions offering Unity, for example? No. Will you see Mir in Fedora or Debian or Suse or Gentoo as primary displayserver? Never. Upstart? Nope. Do i think that it's Canonicals fault to not reach out to the community and combine efforts? Yes. Yes. Yes. And this is the soul of open source movement. Canonical doesn't really get it. What they do get is to make Linux easier to use for the masses, that's for sure.