10 ms·

Has Ubuntu lost it?

121 points by alipang 13y ago

untog 13y ago
Unfortunately, the learning curve was too great for most people, and users elected to put the buttons back in their rightful place with gconf-edit." Some users did. The vast majority did not. The target market for Ubuntu doesn't even want to be using gconf-edit. "Even today a Google search for 'window buttons on right' brings up a guide to fixing Ubuntu - and this is for a design change made two and a half years ago Yes, it's called the internet and it's a fantastic resource for looking up old information that people have archived. The entire premise of the article appears to be "Ubuntu is opinionated. Here are the controversial decisions they made". I don't see any bearing on whether they've "lost it".
- mtgx 13y ago
  Yes, the title seems harsher than the actual article, and at the end they give Ubuntu quite a bit of praise, too.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - velodrome 13y ago
    Totally agree. Linux is really organic. Users are doing what they feel is the best way of doing things. If something better comes along, users will switch. The mindshare shifts to better project and old projects die. It is survival of the fittest. If Ubuntu and others are willing to take the risk...let them.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
  I guess I felt the gist was more that Shuttleworth and the upper echelon of Ubuntu have appointed themselves soft-BDFLs and despite the cries of the community, design decisions are not something he tends to bend on. The justification was flimsy at best to shift the buttons left. It just made it more "Apple-ish"
  - H3g3m0n 13y ago
    Moving the buttons to the left was important for maximizing in Unity with the combined menu/titlebar. They could have kept them on the right but then they would get confused with the systray icons/indicators.
    - ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
      Another way of wording that would have been to say that window manipulation (including scroll and resize) have always existed on the right side of the window and moving some of those controls to the left is not only a flaw in Unity, but in OSX as well. Granted, the paradigm is shifting with touch, but it has been an established guideline in window design for quite some time. Perhaps Unity should have been designed with this in mind, instead of altering established behavior.
      - TheCraiggers 13y ago
        >Perhaps Unity should have been designed with this in mind, instead of altering established behavior. But.... /innovation/! I'm a firm believer that you innovate to solve interesting problems, not just to be different (ahem... Apple). And while I agree that sometimes we don't even know a problem exists until we fix it, I don't really think I'll ever exclaim "Woowee, having these buttons on the left totally makes everything so much easier! How did I ever work like this before?"
      - irahul 13y ago
        > Another way of wording that would have been to say that window manipulation (including scroll and resize) have always existed on the right side of the window and moving some of those controls to the left is not only a flaw in Unity, but in OSX as well. As GP explained, it plays well with systray icons which have been on the right for a long time. There is only one bar to use(or use extra screen space) and I would rather have systray untouched.
      - marssaxman 13y ago
        This sounds reasonable if you only look at the last decade, but it simply isn't historically true. The notion of a window manipulation widget first arrived[1] in 1984 with the Macintosh, which had a close box on the left hand side of each window's title bar. Windows 1.0 shipped a year or two later, with one widget on the left and another on the right.[2] Amiga Workbench launched the same year, with a close widget on the left and two layering widgets on the right.[3] Macintosh added a maximize button on the right a couple of years later. Windows 3 echoed the Amiga look, with a close/menu widget on the left and minimize/maximize on the right. CDE and the other Unix window managers which came along around this time generally used the same setup: a close and/or menu widget on the left and one or two zoom widgets on the right. [4] It was not until Windows 95 that Microsoft moved all of its widgets over to the right side of the title bar. Mac OS and the Unix window managers did not follow. In my recollection it was only with the rise of KDE that Linux GUI design started to follow the Microsoft path, with min/max/close on the right... but of course there was the pin widget on the left for a while. Mac OS continued to have the close widget on the left and the min/max widgets on the right until OS X, which moved all three to the left to make room for a new toolbar show/hide widget. The toolbar concept flopped and the button went away, so there were no right-hand widgets for a while; but now there's the full-screen widget. In conclusion, the window title bar is a land of contrasts. Thank you. 1 - The Macintosh predecessor "Lisa" had an icon on the left side of its window title bar, but I don't know whether this was an active widget or just a decoration. 2 - I never used Windows in this era and don't know what the widgets actually did. 3 - I think they were layering widgets, but I could be wrong; I only used an Amiga for an hour at a friend's house once. 4 - I remember Solaris, Irix, and NeXTStep; the former two had the same system as Windows 3, while NeXTStep put the close box on the right and a single max/min button on the left.
- H3g3m0n 13y ago
  I think even most of the people who did put them back on the right are probably using them on the left now. At the time it did seem a bit arbitrary and I thought it was an attempt to be more 'mac like'. However looking at it along side Unity and the rest of the UI changes it made perfect sense to move the buttons their. Personally I had no problems adapting to the buttons being on the left, it seemed to be more of an issue to change it from the defaults than to just get used to it. I also like the idea of Mir provided they keep it compatible with Wayland. Having Android support for native Linux apps would be great. About my only issue with Unity right now is the 'disappearing' menu. Not having it visible things visible can make you forget it exits, you do need that visual reminder. My mum keeps asking me things like how to print, the only thing I have to do is tell her to move the mouse to the top of the screen then she can figure it out. The apps draw is a bit of a pain to navigate. I think something the UI people have forgotten is that you need to be able to 'discover' these features (or the apps) and be reminded that they exist. If I browse a menu, then I will see all the apps I have installed or all the options I can choose. In any case I'm using Awesome now. The desktop environment is mattering less and less. Almost everything is either in a terminal or web browser.
- gnaffle 13y ago
  I don't think the article was very good at explaining _why_ they've lost it. A lot of controversial decisions turn out to be good in the end. I think the biggest mistake has been to neglect Linux power users, which has been their biggest grassroots evangelists. At one point some years ago _every_ Unix guy I knew ran Ubuntu on their laptops because it "just worked" (well, compared to other distros). And some of them had started recommending it to friends and family. Nowadays, many of the same people are running Macs, and guess what they recommend? Macs (or iPads). Their second biggest mistake has been the "me too" attitude. Netbooks popular? Ubuntu Netbook Remix! Oh wait, tablets you say? Ubuntu for Tablets! Google and Apple launch TV platforms? Ubuntu TV! Oh, and don't forget that we have a phone OS as well! To make any one of these succeed they would need to dedicate great salespeople and marketers to secure deals with PC, tablet, TV or phone manufacturers or operators. Or they would have to make them so insanely great that people would line up to get them. Google TV, backed by a big company is pretty much dead in the water. I would LOVE for all of these products to succeed and to use well designed open source products. But it's just not going to happen this way.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    Google TV's biggest hurdle was content companies breaking desktop video sites and demanding special treatment, effectively based on screen size.
  - methodin 13y ago
    You cannot always be the first, especially when you aren't the one making hardware. I'd rather have Ubuntu doing what is currently is rather than thousands of Linux derivatives making slightly different variations of the same model on the same hardware it's been on since the beginning.
  - doctorpangloss 13y ago
    >Their second biggest mistake has been the "me too" attitude. Netbooks popular? Ubuntu Netbook Remix! Oh wait, tablets you say? Ubuntu for Tablets! Google and Apple launch TV platforms? Ubuntu TV! Oh, and don't forget that we have a phone OS as well! They think they're a content company trying to put their on OS on as many devices as possible (control a horizontal). Really they're a platform company, and they should be trying to make exactly one most popular thing (my guess is Amazon instances running Ubuntu) run as well as possible with all their other services, like their package manager, their cloud, etc. They should try to own a vertical, like Apple does.
- josteink 13y ago
  > The target market for Ubuntu doesn't even want to be using gconf-edit. I consider myself an advanced user (currently running i3 tiling window manager, very recommended) and even I really didn't ever want to be using gconf-edit. Jesus christ.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    Agreed. Seriously, what's wrong with text config files and a text editor?
zdw 13y ago
Ubuntu could have gone much further focusing on helping people learn to love the Unix CLI than trying to chase and reimplement GUI trends over and over for the last decade.
- adeaver 13y ago
  People are by and large visual creatures so it makes sense that they would focus on the GUI rather than the CLI. Though I agree that they were less innovative than I would have liked on the graphical side of things. However when they did 'innovate' with Unity people complained (and still do). Not a lot, but they were extremely vocal.
- xradionut 13y ago
  Really? Anyone who wanted the CLI has had plenty of choices of various operating systems and distributions over the years. Ubuntu's strength is that it's useable and installable with a minimum amount of CLI. That means there's less of a barrier to newbies and casual users. ("Real" users can use blinking LEDs and chorded keyboards instead of fancy GUI cheats...)
- takluyver 13y ago
  One of my pet peeves is that I think Linux users are disproportionately obsessed with the command line. A well designed GUI can actually be really powerful, but it seems like we compare well-designed CLIs to badly designed GUIs, decide that CLIs are amazing and keep not bothering to write good GUI apps. That's not to say that CLIs aren't powerful - I have a terminal open all the time, and for many things it's the quickest option. But I think we underestimate how useful GUIs can be.
air 13y ago
"the Upstart init daemon (which pointlessly duplicated much of the work done in SystemD)" I think this chronological confusion sums up the insight that can be found from the article.
- Sammi 13y ago
  Jup, I stopped reading when I got to that. If basic facts are wrong, then what else is wrong with this article?
- ash 13y ago
  Thank you! Upstart was released almost 4 years earlier (Wikipedia): Upstart initial release - 24 August 2006 systemd initial release - 30 March 2010
durzagott 13y ago
Whenever I see a headline with a leading question in its title my automatic response is "no". It's lazy writing and tries to colour my opinion before even presenting the facts.
- mattbessey 13y ago
  You've adopted Betteridge's law of headlines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
  - eertami 13y ago
    Is there a law about how this wikipedia article will turn up in the comments section of every headline with a question mark?
    - disgruntledphd2 13y ago
      Not yet....we could call it eertami's law though....
anon1385 13y ago
In a speech at the Linux Plumbers Convention in 2008 he criticised Ubuntu for not contributing more to the Linux kernel, saying that, of the 100,000 kernel patches made in the preceding five years, only 100 of these came from Canonical, creating the strange situation whereby the world's most popular Linux distribution contributed only 0.1 per cent of the work needed to keep the kernel going. Four years later, in 2012, Kroah-Hartman complained that "Canonical uses me as a gatekeeper of what bugs get fixed in their kernel package and sent to their customers. There's so much wrong with this, I don't know where to start..." If the Linux kernel maintainers are that upset about this then they should have used a licence that forced Canonical to contribute (code or financially), but they didn't, they made the Linux kernel 'Free Software', and that means Canonical can do what they want with it (freedom 2 in this case), so long as they are not restricting the freedom of others. Either change the licence or shut up.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Why? What is this new strange rule, that prevents one from criticizing others if one doesn't want to contractually force them to do the right thing?
  - sz4kerto 13y ago
    That's what's going on in the other thread where some people are criticising Linus and some others say that he's not paid by them, so shut up. My opinion is that even you're a volunteer, you should listen to criticism or don't call yourself a volunteer (as this usually means that you want to achieve something for the benefit of others (at least in part), or you're doing something in cooperation with others). If you're not completely isolated then your actions have an effect on others so you should be prepared for criticism.
  - GravityWell 13y ago
    Similar to the position some have that if you comment on a bug/flaw/shortcoming of an open source app, that you are somehow obliged to shut up and get involved in the bug report process. In case it's not obvious, I don't subscribe to this view.
andrewcooke 13y ago
i don't know, but opensuse continues to be awesome and more american users should try it out. i have to use a variety of linux distros for work, and i use opensuse on my own machines where i get the choice. it's so frustrating that such a polished, easy to use but powerful system gets so little love :o(
- zandorg 13y ago
  I too use OpenSUSE. I tried Ubuntu on my huge-screen Dell Precision M70, and it couldn't find the Nvidia driver. OpenSUSE got it right first time. I also think OpenSUSE is most like Windows, which is a plus for me.
ricardobeat 13y ago
No. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
- jccalhoun 13y ago
  Nice. I was going to complain about how terrible question headlines were but I didn't know there was a name for them.
- pessimizer 13y ago
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neya 13y ago
Hardcore Ubuntu user here. I come from a Windows background. I mean like for 15 years almost, I was running on Windows. When I first got introduced to Ubuntu (5 years ago), it was a breath of fresh air. I loved the terminal and I loved the freedom of choice and the fact that nothing was thrusted into my throat. It was really nice. Until they introduced Unity. It was one of the poorest User experience designed, ever. Suddenly the OS I was in love with became so alien. Of course I could switch back to the original normal GUI with a few command line entries and a few option entries. But it was already too late. The flexibility I had in 10.xx was gone in 12.xx. 12.xx become so clunky, heavy and painful to use, that I had to abandon it altogether. I can back up my statements too - Try comparing boot/shut down times of 10.xx and 12.xx, you'll know. Meanwhile, on Windows, the start button just disappeared. And I DID get used to it, but the fact that Ubuntu's Unity had become synonymous to Microsoft pushing their Metro UI into my throat was a nail in the coffin. Now I run dual boot - Mac OS X along with Windows 8.1. I'm using the Mac OS for about a year or two now and it's really good at what it does. Almost feels like Ubuntu's 10.xx w.r.t boot times. And I never will be looking back. Ubuntu is a perfect example of "Don't fix something if it ain't broke."
- talles 13y ago
  I felt exactly as you. IMO, Ubuntu 10.04 was the best version. ever.
  - tomrod 13y ago
    I don't know, I'm enjoying the latest, but with Xmonad.
  - velodrome 13y ago
    Most people I have talked to tend to agree that 10.10 was on of the best point releases. However, 10.04 was a really solid the LTS release. I have had a lot of odd issues with 12.04 (random freezes after unsuspend, crashing apps, etc). 13.04 seems to fix a lot of the outstanding stability issues.
  - fein 13y ago
    13.04 server + xorg and fluxbox. I know not what this 'Unity' hate is all about. apt-get still works last I checked. You guys need to stop equating OS releases with the UI that ships with the desktop versions. 13.04 is loads better than 10.04, and it has nothing to do with whatever DE happens to ship with it. If you don't like Unity, download Xubuntu.
eksith 13y ago
Summary: Ubuntu has become Windows. It's pursuing devices and fragmenting the ecosystem. The problem with Ubuntu, by and large, seems to be a Metro style revolt against Unity although Unity achieved suckdom first. Things broke with change... often this was unnecessary change. But you know what? The nice thing about Linux is that there's so many more distros to choose from. Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com http://linuxmint.com) for example is actually quite nice. Don't like Ubuntu? Don't use it for crying out loud! It's not like Windows; a whole 'nother platform. The same software you know and love will still work. Best of all, it's got a bloody start button!
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- drdaeman 13y ago
  Fragmenting what? There were no solid ecosystem, ever, nor there's any. There's Linux kernel, GNU base userspace (although some replace it with BSD or Solaris one, huh) and bunch of various software running above those. After this there were nothing common in those software since the very beginning. Just more and less popular software. Edit: removed X11 as possibly common component, because I totally forgot about DirectFB, huh.
  - eksith 13y ago
    >Fragmenting what? I can't quite figure that out from the article either, but from the language, I guess they're insinuating that the architecture changes ( in the Ubuntu way as opposed to the traditional "Linux way" ) will mean different approaches to software. Daniel Stone, contributor to X.Org (one of the base technologies without which we'd still be staring at blinking green text on a black background), put in: "I'm not worried about Wayland's future at all. I'm just irritated that this means more work for us, more work for upstream developers, more work for toolkits, and more work for hardware vendors."
    - drdaeman 13y ago
      I don't get the fuss about Wayland and Mir. Like inventing a new mostly-incompatible subsystem is something new in GNU/Linux world. I mean, there were no "Linux way" ever - just take a look at zoos of sound subsystems, network management subsystems, init/rc subsystems and so on. GNU/Linux world is well-known for having magnitudes of software doing same things but in completely different ways, sometimes with some compatibility layers (like ALSA-OSS), but frequently completely mutually incompatible. This is not good, nor bad thing, it's just that there's no any established rules beyond fundamentals POSIX and FHS (and even those are poked from time to time), just more or less popular approaches. GTK ran on DirectFB just fine, without X11 stack, so getting rid of X11 is nothing new. There were XDirectFB that worked as a X11 server, too. Not sure if the code's maintained and works now, though - haven't visited that land for, IIRC, about 5 years. Anyway, and I don't remember any worries about that.
tomrod 13y ago
I don't normally complain about articles. The content is valid. I'm having a hard time parsing over the ads though!
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Does anyone know if commits 'offered' is tracked? One of the issues Google always had was they would submit their changes back to the community but then the community would reject them for one reason or another (a lot of the container stuff seemed to start out that way).
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
Any "open" community that has to publicly state that it will only work with those that have established credibility in its own community has "lost it" I'll politely withhold my comments about the disasters of Unity and now Ubuntu mobile.
null_ptr 13y ago
> of the 100,000 kernel patches made in the preceding five years, only 100 of these came from Canonical Still better than 0, and that's not counting all the fixes they do to other system components and tools that other distros benefit from. I think it's great that Ubuntu is using Canonical's resources to go in wild directions. I prefer Cinnamon as my desktop environment, but I'm glad Unity is being worked on too. It's awesome they want to be on phones and TVs, you never know where great ideas can sprout from. That being said, I plan to give OpenSuse and Fedora a try soon just to see what I've been missing out on the past few years.
shubb 13y ago
It looks like Canonical, as well as Microsoft, think that something in the form factor of a MS Surface is the way things are going. If you are going to have a desktop/tablet, you need a touch driven UI. Five years ago, when Samsung Q1 UMPCs were exciting [1], I'd have agreed, but it turns out that tablets (with tiny their screens even when you plug in a keyboard), are crap for creation. People don't just want to be passive consumers. Hence, this unified Tablet/PC idea is a bad one. I'm sure it'll fly eventually, just like mice over trackerballs, but that doesn't mean it's better. Dedicated devices that are good at creation and consumption respectively (PC, Laptop, TV, Tablet) are better. Unified Tablet/PCs yield interfaces that are bad for everything, and extra RSI from the touchscreen. But it's the way of the future, so Linux had better be ready. Because soon it'll be hard to buy a laptop that isn't a tablet. And can you think of a better Desktop Environment for touch screen than Canonicals? [1]http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Samsung-Q1-UMPC.htm http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Samsung-Q1-UMPC.ht...
- tehwalrus 13y ago
  > "something in the form factor of a MS Surface" you mean something in the form factor of the iPad? I don't want to get into a debate about who made that shaped device first, but the iPad was the first that anyone normal had heard of.
  - shubb 13y ago
    The vision of the surface (unlike the ipad) is that it is both a tablet, and a PC. You can mount it on a wall, put a bluetooth keyboard and mouse under it, and you are at a PC. You can clip in the little clippy keyboard, and it's a laptop. I don't have a problem with ipads. Ipads are a specialist device for consuming content, and apple make laptops for doing other stuff on. You're supposed to have both. I have a problem with Tablet/PCs, like the surface, because they are trying to be both, and failing. It's like asking for a lorry that's also a sports car - you're gonna get something, and it's gonna be really really bad.
    - DennisP 13y ago
NanoWar 13y ago
Why we can thank Canonical: "To innovate is to get a chance to define the future, but it comes with the risk of alienating your current users. The unique advantage desktop Linux has is that we can do both. Ubuntu can innovate while Mint, OpenSUSE, and all the others play it safe. That's the advantage of the open source ecosystem that we've built up over the years. But we only have that advantage if people are willing to take risks. Mark Shuttleworth is taking a tremendous gamble. If it pays off, then the whole Linux community benefits."
- areski 13y ago
  Canonical is making a huge difference for thousands of newbies, thanks to them they can use a Desktop Linux without the fear of complexity. It's bravery to be willing to take those risks, not everybody have to follow that direction and the diversity of the linux ecosystem is what made his strength. Some will succeed some will fails, but at the end, the whole Linux community will get better!
mindcrime 13y ago
Lost what? Sorry, lump me into the camp of linux die-hards who don't much care for Ubuntu. I grudgingly use it at OSI[1] because it's our standard, but I much prefer Fedora or CentOS. Although, once I muster up the time and energy to switch this Ubuntu box to KDE, I'll probably like it a lot more. Anyway, having used Ubuntu on my work desktop for the past year and a half, I don't see what all the hype is about. It isn't "better" than Fedora in any way that is particularly noticeable to me, and the much vaunted "apt-get" seems to do exactly what yum does for me on Fedora. If it's better, it's such an incremental level of "better" that I find it hardly distinguishable. But Unity... uuugggghhhhhh.... [1]: http://www.osintegrators.com http://www.osintegrators.com
- ajross 13y ago
  RPM/yum has grown up a lot, and yes -- it works as well or better than apt-get at basically everything now (openSUSE's zypper is actually spiffier still). But for a long time Debian and its derivatives had an overwhelmingly better package management experience, and a much larger universe of packages to draw on than the RPM distros did. And this intuition persists in the community. Though I will say this: for all the feature and usability improvements we've seen in yum, the Fedora people seem to be trying their damndest to break them all by this insane wrapping in "PackageKit" that manages to succeed in both dumbing it down to the level of unusability and "enhancing" the power user experience by spending 3-5 seconds every time you typo a command trying to figure out how to install "mkdri".
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    FWIW, Ubuntu has it's own "waste time everytime you typo a command" functionality, at least in the release I'm on. It's actually useful every once in a blue moon...
rocky1138 13y ago
It seems sort of unfair to compare kernel contributions from Canonical to a company like Red Hat simply because of the time-frame during Linux's development that Red Hat was a part of. Isn't is possible that Red Hat helped out more because it was around closer to the start of the Linux project? Also, Canonical's and Ubuntu's strengths may not lay in kernel development, but instead pushing the boundaries in what can be done on the UI. I certainly don't remember Red Hat or SUSE doing the sort of risky things with their UI that Canonical is willing to try.
- desas 13y ago
  Redhat is probably the biggest contributor to gnome shell
- takluyver 13y ago
  This is actually what the conclusion of the article says - that Canonical is taking worthwhile UI risks, and probably doesn't feel much need to work on the kernel.
_sabe_ 13y ago
I actually think all this ambivalence is Ubuntus bigest problem. Now it has become apparent that all along they wanted to go down the path of only using the kernel, and then build a whole new software-stack on top of it, just like Android. But they have not communicated this to the community, all the community has seen is half-hearted attempts to contribute (to projects that they where going to get rid of anyways) and sporadic design changes that went to far away from the vanilla experience of gnome (making it feel fragmented), and then ultimately replacing fully functional software (with software that's full of bugs and obviously not stable yet). Now, in the normal Linux community world, everything above seems like total madness, unless as stated in the first paragraph your endgame was all along to replace everything to make a unified product. If they only communicated this, I think they would have gotten alot of support and understandig instead of alienating them selves.
- takluyver 13y ago
  I don't think it is the case that they had always planned to build a whole new software stack. And that's not even what they're doing - Ubuntu runs loads of 'Linux ecosystem' applications, which Android never aimed to do. On the system level, only last year they were talking about one day moving to Wayland - which they later decided against for reasons I don't know enough about to judge. My understanding is that they only made Unity because they felt they didn't have enough influence in the design of Gnome 3. I don't think there's as much of a master plan as you suggest.
NateDad 13y ago
I think it's funny when people complain about unity and how users hate it. The only users that even know what it is are the hardcore linux geeks. I used ubuntu back in the day (2006-ish) and moved off Linux because it was too much of a pain in the butt to use for everyday use... even my standalone email server I just gave up on eventually because it was too much of a hassle running linux. I just started using Ubuntu again last year and... I couldn't figure out what this Unity thing was that people kept complaining about. I guess it's the menubar that appears at the top? And the transparent start menu thingy that pops up when you click the button at the top of the launchbar on the left? Is that what people are complaining about? Seriously? I didn't even notice that it was something that was supposed to be different after the first 2-3 times I saw what it did. Maybe because I'm not a hardcore linux guy? Maybe because it doesn't really look that different from Windows 7 / 8 stuff? So... from a Windows user's point of view, I think Ubuntu is doing well. It's easy for me to use (it does take a lot of getting used to for the windows buttons to be on the left).. and honestly, for most people, we're in a post-desktop-OS world. Nothing matters outside the browser. I install Chrome and log into Chrome sync, and my world is the same across all desktops.... because the browser is everything. That, more than anything else has made my transition back to Ubuntu easy... because the OS doesn't matter anymore for day to day things. For dev, sure, you need your dev tools, and the environment matters a lot.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  > The only users that even know what it is are the hardcore linux geeks. Which is what... 90% of the user base?
  - NateDad 13y ago
    The point of Ubuntu is to bring Linux to the masses. People bring up Unity like it's hurting Ubuntu... and I don't think it is. It doesn't hurt the average non-techie's perception, and techies can install KDE or whatever. Maybe one day I'll install a different window manager and marvel at what a big difference it makes... but right now, it really doesn't matter to me. I can get to Chrome, the terminal, and my text editor of choice. Nothing else really matters to me.
monokrome 13y ago
Ubuntu lost it 5 years ago.
etler 13y ago
What Ubuntu got popular off of was it's ease of setup. They now seem to be using that validation to justify their decisions in UI and everything else, which has nothing to do with what people liked about Ubuntu in the first place. I feel like their PR takes a "we know better than you" attitude for their decisions, but they never proved themselves to be competent at any of the things they're pushing for.
- takluyver 13y ago
  I get the impression that now most desktop distros have quite simple installers. Were they difficult before because of some technical obstacle, or simply because they hadn't spent the time to make it easy? (honest question - I didn't use Linux until Ubuntu). If it's the latter, that seems to give Canonical at least one point for knowing what users would want.
  - etler 13y ago
    It wasn't the simplicity of the installer interface. It was the actual installation. Ubuntu did the best job simply working with a large variety of hardware. You installed it and you didn't have to do a bunch of painful manual setup by modifying a dozen obscure config files. Linux had the reputation of being a pain to setup, and ubuntu addressed that.
derleth 13y ago
Once again, I feel that I'm the only one who knows it's possible to run non-Unity UIs on Ubuntu. Window Maker. It works. I run it. Have for years. I can't be the only one, because it's still right there in the repos.
poopscoop 13y ago
Is nobody going to mention that atrocity of a pie chart rendered at an angle?
rob22 13y ago
Never. When i saw the unity interface on couple of years ago, its truel impressive and new kind of UI. People would change M$ to Ubuntu its quite useful( unity UI).. I realy love the interface... Most of the hardcore linux geeks doesn't like that environment.in future it would be occupied any other interface..
synchronise 13y ago
I personally find it interesting that they bothered to mention Ubuntu TV. That project hasn't seen a code commit in months, and by the looks of it there have been little effort to transition away from the deprecated Unity-2d base it's built on.

121 points by alipang 13y ago

untog 13y ago

Unfortunately, the learning curve was too great for most people, and users elected to put the buttons back in their rightful place with gconf-edit." Some users did. The vast majority did not. The target market for Ubuntu doesn't even want to be using gconf-edit. "Even today a Google search for 'window buttons on right' brings up a guide to fixing Ubuntu - and this is for a design change made two and a half years ago Yes, it's called the internet and it's a fantastic resource for looking up old information that people have archived. The entire premise of the article appears to be "Ubuntu is opinionated. Here are the controversial decisions they made". I don't see any bearing on whether they've "lost it".

mtgx 13y ago
Yes, the title seems harsher than the actual article, and at the end they give Ubuntu quite a bit of praise, too.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- velodrome 13y ago
  Totally agree. Linux is really organic. Users are doing what they feel is the best way of doing things. If something better comes along, users will switch. The mindshare shifts to better project and old projects die. It is survival of the fittest. If Ubuntu and others are willing to take the risk...let them.
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
I guess I felt the gist was more that Shuttleworth and the upper echelon of Ubuntu have appointed themselves soft-BDFLs and despite the cries of the community, design decisions are not something he tends to bend on. The justification was flimsy at best to shift the buttons left. It just made it more "Apple-ish"
- H3g3m0n 13y ago
  Moving the buttons to the left was important for maximizing in Unity with the combined menu/titlebar. They could have kept them on the right but then they would get confused with the systray icons/indicators.
  - ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
    Another way of wording that would have been to say that window manipulation (including scroll and resize) have always existed on the right side of the window and moving some of those controls to the left is not only a flaw in Unity, but in OSX as well. Granted, the paradigm is shifting with touch, but it has been an established guideline in window design for quite some time. Perhaps Unity should have been designed with this in mind, instead of altering established behavior.
    - TheCraiggers 13y ago
      >Perhaps Unity should have been designed with this in mind, instead of altering established behavior. But.... /innovation/! I'm a firm believer that you innovate to solve interesting problems, not just to be different (ahem... Apple). And while I agree that sometimes we don't even know a problem exists until we fix it, I don't really think I'll ever exclaim "Woowee, having these buttons on the left totally makes everything so much easier! How did I ever work like this before?"
    - irahul 13y ago
      > Another way of wording that would have been to say that window manipulation (including scroll and resize) have always existed on the right side of the window and moving some of those controls to the left is not only a flaw in Unity, but in OSX as well. As GP explained, it plays well with systray icons which have been on the right for a long time. There is only one bar to use(or use extra screen space) and I would rather have systray untouched.
    - marssaxman 13y ago
      This sounds reasonable if you only look at the last decade, but it simply isn't historically true. The notion of a window manipulation widget first arrived[1] in 1984 with the Macintosh, which had a close box on the left hand side of each window's title bar. Windows 1.0 shipped a year or two later, with one widget on the left and another on the right.[2] Amiga Workbench launched the same year, with a close widget on the left and two layering widgets on the right.[3] Macintosh added a maximize button on the right a couple of years later. Windows 3 echoed the Amiga look, with a close/menu widget on the left and minimize/maximize on the right. CDE and the other Unix window managers which came along around this time generally used the same setup: a close and/or menu widget on the left and one or two zoom widgets on the right. [4] It was not until Windows 95 that Microsoft moved all of its widgets over to the right side of the title bar. Mac OS and the Unix window managers did not follow. In my recollection it was only with the rise of KDE that Linux GUI design started to follow the Microsoft path, with min/max/close on the right... but of course there was the pin widget on the left for a while. Mac OS continued to have the close widget on the left and the min/max widgets on the right until OS X, which moved all three to the left to make room for a new toolbar show/hide widget. The toolbar concept flopped and the button went away, so there were no right-hand widgets for a while; but now there's the full-screen widget. In conclusion, the window title bar is a land of contrasts. Thank you. 1 - The Macintosh predecessor "Lisa" had an icon on the left side of its window title bar, but I don't know whether this was an active widget or just a decoration. 2 - I never used Windows in this era and don't know what the widgets actually did. 3 - I think they were layering widgets, but I could be wrong; I only used an Amiga for an hour at a friend's house once. 4 - I remember Solaris, Irix, and NeXTStep; the former two had the same system as Windows 3, while NeXTStep put the close box on the right and a single max/min button on the left.
H3g3m0n 13y ago
I think even most of the people who did put them back on the right are probably using them on the left now. At the time it did seem a bit arbitrary and I thought it was an attempt to be more 'mac like'. However looking at it along side Unity and the rest of the UI changes it made perfect sense to move the buttons their. Personally I had no problems adapting to the buttons being on the left, it seemed to be more of an issue to change it from the defaults than to just get used to it. I also like the idea of Mir provided they keep it compatible with Wayland. Having Android support for native Linux apps would be great. About my only issue with Unity right now is the 'disappearing' menu. Not having it visible things visible can make you forget it exits, you do need that visual reminder. My mum keeps asking me things like how to print, the only thing I have to do is tell her to move the mouse to the top of the screen then she can figure it out. The apps draw is a bit of a pain to navigate. I think something the UI people have forgotten is that you need to be able to 'discover' these features (or the apps) and be reminded that they exist. If I browse a menu, then I will see all the apps I have installed or all the options I can choose. In any case I'm using Awesome now. The desktop environment is mattering less and less. Almost everything is either in a terminal or web browser.
gnaffle 13y ago
I don't think the article was very good at explaining _why_ they've lost it. A lot of controversial decisions turn out to be good in the end. I think the biggest mistake has been to neglect Linux power users, which has been their biggest grassroots evangelists. At one point some years ago _every_ Unix guy I knew ran Ubuntu on their laptops because it "just worked" (well, compared to other distros). And some of them had started recommending it to friends and family. Nowadays, many of the same people are running Macs, and guess what they recommend? Macs (or iPads). Their second biggest mistake has been the "me too" attitude. Netbooks popular? Ubuntu Netbook Remix! Oh wait, tablets you say? Ubuntu for Tablets! Google and Apple launch TV platforms? Ubuntu TV! Oh, and don't forget that we have a phone OS as well! To make any one of these succeed they would need to dedicate great salespeople and marketers to secure deals with PC, tablet, TV or phone manufacturers or operators. Or they would have to make them so insanely great that people would line up to get them. Google TV, backed by a big company is pretty much dead in the water. I would LOVE for all of these products to succeed and to use well designed open source products. But it's just not going to happen this way.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  Google TV's biggest hurdle was content companies breaking desktop video sites and demanding special treatment, effectively based on screen size.
- methodin 13y ago
  You cannot always be the first, especially when you aren't the one making hardware. I'd rather have Ubuntu doing what is currently is rather than thousands of Linux derivatives making slightly different variations of the same model on the same hardware it's been on since the beginning.
- doctorpangloss 13y ago
  >Their second biggest mistake has been the "me too" attitude. Netbooks popular? Ubuntu Netbook Remix! Oh wait, tablets you say? Ubuntu for Tablets! Google and Apple launch TV platforms? Ubuntu TV! Oh, and don't forget that we have a phone OS as well! They think they're a content company trying to put their on OS on as many devices as possible (control a horizontal). Really they're a platform company, and they should be trying to make exactly one most popular thing (my guess is Amazon instances running Ubuntu) run as well as possible with all their other services, like their package manager, their cloud, etc. They should try to own a vertical, like Apple does.
josteink 13y ago
> The target market for Ubuntu doesn't even want to be using gconf-edit. I consider myself an advanced user (currently running i3 tiling window manager, very recommended) and even I really didn't ever want to be using gconf-edit. Jesus christ.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  Agreed. Seriously, what's wrong with text config files and a text editor?

zdw 13y ago

Ubuntu could have gone much further focusing on helping people learn to love the Unix CLI than trying to chase and reimplement GUI trends over and over for the last decade.

adeaver 13y ago
People are by and large visual creatures so it makes sense that they would focus on the GUI rather than the CLI. Though I agree that they were less innovative than I would have liked on the graphical side of things. However when they did 'innovate' with Unity people complained (and still do). Not a lot, but they were extremely vocal.
xradionut 13y ago
Really? Anyone who wanted the CLI has had plenty of choices of various operating systems and distributions over the years. Ubuntu's strength is that it's useable and installable with a minimum amount of CLI. That means there's less of a barrier to newbies and casual users. ("Real" users can use blinking LEDs and chorded keyboards instead of fancy GUI cheats...)
takluyver 13y ago
One of my pet peeves is that I think Linux users are disproportionately obsessed with the command line. A well designed GUI can actually be really powerful, but it seems like we compare well-designed CLIs to badly designed GUIs, decide that CLIs are amazing and keep not bothering to write good GUI apps. That's not to say that CLIs aren't powerful - I have a terminal open all the time, and for many things it's the quickest option. But I think we underestimate how useful GUIs can be.

air 13y ago

"the Upstart init daemon (which pointlessly duplicated much of the work done in SystemD)" I think this chronological confusion sums up the insight that can be found from the article.

Sammi 13y ago
Jup, I stopped reading when I got to that. If basic facts are wrong, then what else is wrong with this article?
ash 13y ago
Thank you! Upstart was released almost 4 years earlier (Wikipedia): Upstart initial release - 24 August 2006 systemd initial release - 30 March 2010

durzagott 13y ago

Whenever I see a headline with a leading question in its title my automatic response is "no". It's lazy writing and tries to colour my opinion before even presenting the facts.

mattbessey 13y ago
You've adopted Betteridge's law of headlines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
- eertami 13y ago
  Is there a law about how this wikipedia article will turn up in the comments section of every headline with a question mark?
  - disgruntledphd2 13y ago
    Not yet....we could call it eertami's law though....

anon1385 13y ago

In a speech at the Linux Plumbers Convention in 2008 he criticised Ubuntu for not contributing more to the Linux kernel, saying that, of the 100,000 kernel patches made in the preceding five years, only 100 of these came from Canonical, creating the strange situation whereby the world's most popular Linux distribution contributed only 0.1 per cent of the work needed to keep the kernel going. Four years later, in 2012, Kroah-Hartman complained that "Canonical uses me as a gatekeeper of what bugs get fixed in their kernel package and sent to their customers. There's so much wrong with this, I don't know where to start..." If the Linux kernel maintainers are that upset about this then they should have used a licence that forced Canonical to contribute (code or financially), but they didn't, they made the Linux kernel 'Free Software', and that means Canonical can do what they want with it (freedom 2 in this case), so long as they are not restricting the freedom of others. Either change the licence or shut up.

icebraining 13y ago
Why? What is this new strange rule, that prevents one from criticizing others if one doesn't want to contractually force them to do the right thing?
- sz4kerto 13y ago
  That's what's going on in the other thread where some people are criticising Linus and some others say that he's not paid by them, so shut up. My opinion is that even you're a volunteer, you should listen to criticism or don't call yourself a volunteer (as this usually means that you want to achieve something for the benefit of others (at least in part), or you're doing something in cooperation with others). If you're not completely isolated then your actions have an effect on others so you should be prepared for criticism.
- GravityWell 13y ago
  Similar to the position some have that if you comment on a bug/flaw/shortcoming of an open source app, that you are somehow obliged to shut up and get involved in the bug report process. In case it's not obvious, I don't subscribe to this view.

andrewcooke 13y ago

i don't know, but opensuse continues to be awesome and more american users should try it out. i have to use a variety of linux distros for work, and i use opensuse on my own machines where i get the choice. it's so frustrating that such a polished, easy to use but powerful system gets so little love :o(

zandorg 13y ago
I too use OpenSUSE. I tried Ubuntu on my huge-screen Dell Precision M70, and it couldn't find the Nvidia driver. OpenSUSE got it right first time. I also think OpenSUSE is most like Windows, which is a plus for me.

ricardobeat 13y ago

No. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

jccalhoun 13y ago
Nice. I was going to complain about how terrible question headlines were but I didn't know there was a name for them.
pessimizer 13y ago
previously posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6051838 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6051838 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6051885 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6051885 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6050005 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6050005 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033705 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033705 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092040 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092040 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126390 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126390 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5993532 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5993532 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4432743 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4432743 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907225 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907225 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5131430 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5131430 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3069940 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3069940 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3681835 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3681835 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5290948 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5290948 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4845506 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4845506 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2071746 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2071746 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4204684 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4204684 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366180 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366180 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5140817 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5140817 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843320 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843320 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5851922 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5851922 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5932835 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5932835 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818931 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818931 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4344059 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4344059 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5718567 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5718567 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4362884 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4362884 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2148927 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2148927 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726192 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726192 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4516313 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4516313 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510398 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510398 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3967543 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3967543 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853639 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853639 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5050894 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5050894 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4205347 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4205347 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853602 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853602 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5964628 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5964628 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4550397 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4550397 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016801 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016801 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5668334 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5668334 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4351090 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4351090 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5855384 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5855384 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4337332 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4337332 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4923126 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4923126 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860925 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860925 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5933767 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5933767

neya 13y ago

Hardcore Ubuntu user here. I come from a Windows background. I mean like for 15 years almost, I was running on Windows. When I first got introduced to Ubuntu (5 years ago), it was a breath of fresh air. I loved the terminal and I loved the freedom of choice and the fact that nothing was thrusted into my throat. It was really nice. Until they introduced Unity. It was one of the poorest User experience designed, ever. Suddenly the OS I was in love with became so alien. Of course I could switch back to the original normal GUI with a few command line entries and a few option entries. But it was already too late. The flexibility I had in 10.xx was gone in 12.xx. 12.xx become so clunky, heavy and painful to use, that I had to abandon it altogether. I can back up my statements too - Try comparing boot/shut down times of 10.xx and 12.xx, you'll know. Meanwhile, on Windows, the start button just disappeared. And I DID get used to it, but the fact that Ubuntu's Unity had become synonymous to Microsoft pushing their Metro UI into my throat was a nail in the coffin. Now I run dual boot - Mac OS X along with Windows 8.1. I'm using the Mac OS for about a year or two now and it's really good at what it does. Almost feels like Ubuntu's 10.xx w.r.t boot times. And I never will be looking back. Ubuntu is a perfect example of "Don't fix something if it ain't broke."

talles 13y ago
I felt exactly as you. IMO, Ubuntu 10.04 was the best version. ever.
- tomrod 13y ago
  I don't know, I'm enjoying the latest, but with Xmonad.
- velodrome 13y ago
  Most people I have talked to tend to agree that 10.10 was on of the best point releases. However, 10.04 was a really solid the LTS release. I have had a lot of odd issues with 12.04 (random freezes after unsuspend, crashing apps, etc). 13.04 seems to fix a lot of the outstanding stability issues.
- fein 13y ago
  13.04 server + xorg and fluxbox. I know not what this 'Unity' hate is all about. apt-get still works last I checked. You guys need to stop equating OS releases with the UI that ships with the desktop versions. 13.04 is loads better than 10.04, and it has nothing to do with whatever DE happens to ship with it. If you don't like Unity, download Xubuntu.

eksith 13y ago

Summary: Ubuntu has become Windows. It's pursuing devices and fragmenting the ecosystem. The problem with Ubuntu, by and large, seems to be a Metro style revolt against Unity although Unity achieved suckdom first. Things broke with change... often this was unnecessary change. But you know what? The nice thing about Linux is that there's so many more distros to choose from. Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com http://linuxmint.com) for example is actually quite nice. Don't like Ubuntu? Don't use it for crying out loud! It's not like Windows; a whole 'nother platform. The same software you know and love will still work. Best of all, it's got a bloody start button!

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
drdaeman 13y ago
Fragmenting what? There were no solid ecosystem, ever, nor there's any. There's Linux kernel, GNU base userspace (although some replace it with BSD or Solaris one, huh) and bunch of various software running above those. After this there were nothing common in those software since the very beginning. Just more and less popular software. Edit: removed X11 as possibly common component, because I totally forgot about DirectFB, huh.
- eksith 13y ago
  >Fragmenting what? I can't quite figure that out from the article either, but from the language, I guess they're insinuating that the architecture changes ( in the Ubuntu way as opposed to the traditional "Linux way" ) will mean different approaches to software. Daniel Stone, contributor to X.Org (one of the base technologies without which we'd still be staring at blinking green text on a black background), put in: "I'm not worried about Wayland's future at all. I'm just irritated that this means more work for us, more work for upstream developers, more work for toolkits, and more work for hardware vendors."
  - drdaeman 13y ago
    I don't get the fuss about Wayland and Mir. Like inventing a new mostly-incompatible subsystem is something new in GNU/Linux world. I mean, there were no "Linux way" ever - just take a look at zoos of sound subsystems, network management subsystems, init/rc subsystems and so on. GNU/Linux world is well-known for having magnitudes of software doing same things but in completely different ways, sometimes with some compatibility layers (like ALSA-OSS), but frequently completely mutually incompatible. This is not good, nor bad thing, it's just that there's no any established rules beyond fundamentals POSIX and FHS (and even those are poked from time to time), just more or less popular approaches. GTK ran on DirectFB just fine, without X11 stack, so getting rid of X11 is nothing new. There were XDirectFB that worked as a X11 server, too. Not sure if the code's maintained and works now, though - haven't visited that land for, IIRC, about 5 years. Anyway, and I don't remember any worries about that.

tomrod 13y ago

I don't normally complain about articles. The content is valid. I'm having a hard time parsing over the ads though!

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Does anyone know if commits 'offered' is tracked? One of the issues Google always had was they would submit their changes back to the community but then the community would reject them for one reason or another (a lot of the container stuff seemed to start out that way).

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

Any "open" community that has to publicly state that it will only work with those that have established credibility in its own community has "lost it" I'll politely withhold my comments about the disasters of Unity and now Ubuntu mobile.

null_ptr 13y ago

> of the 100,000 kernel patches made in the preceding five years, only 100 of these came from Canonical Still better than 0, and that's not counting all the fixes they do to other system components and tools that other distros benefit from. I think it's great that Ubuntu is using Canonical's resources to go in wild directions. I prefer Cinnamon as my desktop environment, but I'm glad Unity is being worked on too. It's awesome they want to be on phones and TVs, you never know where great ideas can sprout from. That being said, I plan to give OpenSuse and Fedora a try soon just to see what I've been missing out on the past few years.

shubb 13y ago

It looks like Canonical, as well as Microsoft, think that something in the form factor of a MS Surface is the way things are going. If you are going to have a desktop/tablet, you need a touch driven UI. Five years ago, when Samsung Q1 UMPCs were exciting [1], I'd have agreed, but it turns out that tablets (with tiny their screens even when you plug in a keyboard), are crap for creation. People don't just want to be passive consumers. Hence, this unified Tablet/PC idea is a bad one. I'm sure it'll fly eventually, just like mice over trackerballs, but that doesn't mean it's better. Dedicated devices that are good at creation and consumption respectively (PC, Laptop, TV, Tablet) are better. Unified Tablet/PCs yield interfaces that are bad for everything, and extra RSI from the touchscreen. But it's the way of the future, so Linux had better be ready. Because soon it'll be hard to buy a laptop that isn't a tablet. And can you think of a better Desktop Environment for touch screen than Canonicals? [1]http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Samsung-Q1-UMPC.htm http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Samsung-Q1-UMPC.ht...

tehwalrus 13y ago
> "something in the form factor of a MS Surface" you mean something in the form factor of the iPad? I don't want to get into a debate about who made that shaped device first, but the iPad was the first that anyone normal had heard of.
- shubb 13y ago
  The vision of the surface (unlike the ipad) is that it is both a tablet, and a PC. You can mount it on a wall, put a bluetooth keyboard and mouse under it, and you are at a PC. You can clip in the little clippy keyboard, and it's a laptop. I don't have a problem with ipads. Ipads are a specialist device for consuming content, and apple make laptops for doing other stuff on. You're supposed to have both. I have a problem with Tablet/PCs, like the surface, because they are trying to be both, and failing. It's like asking for a lorry that's also a sports car - you're gonna get something, and it's gonna be really really bad.
  - DennisP 13y ago

NanoWar 13y ago

Why we can thank Canonical: "To innovate is to get a chance to define the future, but it comes with the risk of alienating your current users. The unique advantage desktop Linux has is that we can do both. Ubuntu can innovate while Mint, OpenSUSE, and all the others play it safe. That's the advantage of the open source ecosystem that we've built up over the years. But we only have that advantage if people are willing to take risks. Mark Shuttleworth is taking a tremendous gamble. If it pays off, then the whole Linux community benefits."

areski 13y ago
Canonical is making a huge difference for thousands of newbies, thanks to them they can use a Desktop Linux without the fear of complexity. It's bravery to be willing to take those risks, not everybody have to follow that direction and the diversity of the linux ecosystem is what made his strength. Some will succeed some will fails, but at the end, the whole Linux community will get better!

mindcrime 13y ago

Lost what? Sorry, lump me into the camp of linux die-hards who don't much care for Ubuntu. I grudgingly use it at OSI[1] because it's our standard, but I much prefer Fedora or CentOS. Although, once I muster up the time and energy to switch this Ubuntu box to KDE, I'll probably like it a lot more. Anyway, having used Ubuntu on my work desktop for the past year and a half, I don't see what all the hype is about. It isn't "better" than Fedora in any way that is particularly noticeable to me, and the much vaunted "apt-get" seems to do exactly what yum does for me on Fedora. If it's better, it's such an incremental level of "better" that I find it hardly distinguishable. But Unity... uuugggghhhhhh.... [1]: http://www.osintegrators.com http://www.osintegrators.com

ajross 13y ago
RPM/yum has grown up a lot, and yes -- it works as well or better than apt-get at basically everything now (openSUSE's zypper is actually spiffier still). But for a long time Debian and its derivatives had an overwhelmingly better package management experience, and a much larger universe of packages to draw on than the RPM distros did. And this intuition persists in the community. Though I will say this: for all the feature and usability improvements we've seen in yum, the Fedora people seem to be trying their damndest to break them all by this insane wrapping in "PackageKit" that manages to succeed in both dumbing it down to the level of unusability and "enhancing" the power user experience by spending 3-5 seconds every time you typo a command trying to figure out how to install "mkdri".
- mindcrime 13y ago
  FWIW, Ubuntu has it's own "waste time everytime you typo a command" functionality, at least in the release I'm on. It's actually useful every once in a blue moon...

rocky1138 13y ago

It seems sort of unfair to compare kernel contributions from Canonical to a company like Red Hat simply because of the time-frame during Linux's development that Red Hat was a part of. Isn't is possible that Red Hat helped out more because it was around closer to the start of the Linux project? Also, Canonical's and Ubuntu's strengths may not lay in kernel development, but instead pushing the boundaries in what can be done on the UI. I certainly don't remember Red Hat or SUSE doing the sort of risky things with their UI that Canonical is willing to try.

desas 13y ago
Redhat is probably the biggest contributor to gnome shell
takluyver 13y ago
This is actually what the conclusion of the article says - that Canonical is taking worthwhile UI risks, and probably doesn't feel much need to work on the kernel.

_sabe_ 13y ago

I actually think all this ambivalence is Ubuntus bigest problem. Now it has become apparent that all along they wanted to go down the path of only using the kernel, and then build a whole new software-stack on top of it, just like Android. But they have not communicated this to the community, all the community has seen is half-hearted attempts to contribute (to projects that they where going to get rid of anyways) and sporadic design changes that went to far away from the vanilla experience of gnome (making it feel fragmented), and then ultimately replacing fully functional software (with software that's full of bugs and obviously not stable yet). Now, in the normal Linux community world, everything above seems like total madness, unless as stated in the first paragraph your endgame was all along to replace everything to make a unified product. If they only communicated this, I think they would have gotten alot of support and understandig instead of alienating them selves.

takluyver 13y ago
I don't think it is the case that they had always planned to build a whole new software stack. And that's not even what they're doing - Ubuntu runs loads of 'Linux ecosystem' applications, which Android never aimed to do. On the system level, only last year they were talking about one day moving to Wayland - which they later decided against for reasons I don't know enough about to judge. My understanding is that they only made Unity because they felt they didn't have enough influence in the design of Gnome 3. I don't think there's as much of a master plan as you suggest.

NateDad 13y ago

I think it's funny when people complain about unity and how users hate it. The only users that even know what it is are the hardcore linux geeks. I used ubuntu back in the day (2006-ish) and moved off Linux because it was too much of a pain in the butt to use for everyday use... even my standalone email server I just gave up on eventually because it was too much of a hassle running linux. I just started using Ubuntu again last year and... I couldn't figure out what this Unity thing was that people kept complaining about. I guess it's the menubar that appears at the top? And the transparent start menu thingy that pops up when you click the button at the top of the launchbar on the left? Is that what people are complaining about? Seriously? I didn't even notice that it was something that was supposed to be different after the first 2-3 times I saw what it did. Maybe because I'm not a hardcore linux guy? Maybe because it doesn't really look that different from Windows 7 / 8 stuff? So... from a Windows user's point of view, I think Ubuntu is doing well. It's easy for me to use (it does take a lot of getting used to for the windows buttons to be on the left).. and honestly, for most people, we're in a post-desktop-OS world. Nothing matters outside the browser. I install Chrome and log into Chrome sync, and my world is the same across all desktops.... because the browser is everything. That, more than anything else has made my transition back to Ubuntu easy... because the OS doesn't matter anymore for day to day things. For dev, sure, you need your dev tools, and the environment matters a lot.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
> The only users that even know what it is are the hardcore linux geeks. Which is what... 90% of the user base?
- NateDad 13y ago
  The point of Ubuntu is to bring Linux to the masses. People bring up Unity like it's hurting Ubuntu... and I don't think it is. It doesn't hurt the average non-techie's perception, and techies can install KDE or whatever. Maybe one day I'll install a different window manager and marvel at what a big difference it makes... but right now, it really doesn't matter to me. I can get to Chrome, the terminal, and my text editor of choice. Nothing else really matters to me.

monokrome 13y ago

Ubuntu lost it 5 years ago.

etler 13y ago

What Ubuntu got popular off of was it's ease of setup. They now seem to be using that validation to justify their decisions in UI and everything else, which has nothing to do with what people liked about Ubuntu in the first place. I feel like their PR takes a "we know better than you" attitude for their decisions, but they never proved themselves to be competent at any of the things they're pushing for.

takluyver 13y ago
I get the impression that now most desktop distros have quite simple installers. Were they difficult before because of some technical obstacle, or simply because they hadn't spent the time to make it easy? (honest question - I didn't use Linux until Ubuntu). If it's the latter, that seems to give Canonical at least one point for knowing what users would want.
- etler 13y ago
  It wasn't the simplicity of the installer interface. It was the actual installation. Ubuntu did the best job simply working with a large variety of hardware. You installed it and you didn't have to do a bunch of painful manual setup by modifying a dozen obscure config files. Linux had the reputation of being a pain to setup, and ubuntu addressed that.

derleth 13y ago

Once again, I feel that I'm the only one who knows it's possible to run non-Unity UIs on Ubuntu. Window Maker. It works. I run it. Have for years. I can't be the only one, because it's still right there in the repos.

poopscoop 13y ago

Is nobody going to mention that atrocity of a pie chart rendered at an angle?

rob22 13y ago

Never. When i saw the unity interface on couple of years ago, its truel impressive and new kind of UI. People would change M$ to Ubuntu its quite useful( unity UI).. I realy love the interface... Most of the hardcore linux geeks doesn't like that environment.in future it would be occupied any other interface..

synchronise 13y ago

I personally find it interesting that they bothered to mention Ubuntu TV. That project hasn't seen a code commit in months, and by the looks of it there have been little effort to transition away from the deprecated Unity-2d base it's built on.