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It's a shame the way that Canonical have isolated themselves from the rest of the Linux ecosystem. I wonder if the future for Ubuntu Touch would be brighter if

It's a shame the way that Canonical have isolated themselves from the rest of the Linux ecosystem. I wonder if the future for Ubuntu Touch would be brighter if they had more community appeal.

wtracy 13y ago
How so? Android and Firefox OS can run few if any GNU/Linux applications without major modifications. Ubuntu run every Linux app I can think of out of the box.
- hdevalence 13y ago
  I was referring more to isolation in two related senses: 1. A technical sense: Canonical has a significant amount of distribution-specific software that has very little adoption outside of the Ubuntu ecosystem. Examples include: * their own version control system, bzr (which I think has now been essentially abandoned in terms of development, and other than a few GNU projects never saw much uptake at all); * their own desktop shell, Unity, which to the best of my knowledge has never been properly packaged for any non-Ubuntu distribution; their own display server, Mir, whose development is the subject of much controversy, and which has been rejected for well-founded technical reasons that have probably already been discussed at length on HN; * their own init system, Upstart, which was initially adopted by other distributions, who then abandoned it in favour of systemd due to its fundamentally flawed design (for instance, there is no way to 100% reliably keep track of a process's children and the dependency resolution runs backwards, meaning that some configurations can cause hangs). 2. A social sense: Canonical's relationship with the rest of the Linux ecosystem has soured (beginning, in my opinion, around 2009-2010, but as a gradual thing, it's hard to pin down) to the point of outright hostility. In my opinion, most of the responsibility for this lies with Canonical's poor communication with others. There's a very detailed history of some events from 2009-2011 that you can read here [1] detailing their relationship with GNOME. The culmination this year has been disgraceful personal attacks by Mark Shuttleworth on people who raise technical criticism of Canonical's software. I expect that more will follow whatever the fallout of Debian's systemd decision is. The two are obviously related. The big problem is that there's (again, in my opinion) very little community appetite for contributing to Canonical's software. And why would there be, given that in order to submit patches for Ubuntu Touch, I need to give Canonical permission to relicence my code under any proprietary licence they choose? At that point, it's not a community contribution, it's just working for Mark Shuttleworth for free. Does Canonical have the software engineering capability to maintain a bunch of stuff (an init system, a display server) that's really unrelated to their problem (making awesome products for users) and still be able to take on Android at the same time? I don't think so. [1]: http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/relationship-between-canonical-gnome/ http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/relationship-between-...
  - orik 13y ago
    don't forget about the mir/wayland thing.
    - fsiefken 13y ago
      Was noted under section 1.
  - jmhain 13y ago
    Unity has been packaged for Arch. I have absolutely no idea why, but it has.
    - RBerenguel 13y ago
      That tendency of Arch users to port everything and try everything (Arch is my favourite Linux distribution, I quite like this style)
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      I imagine the packager liked Unity and prefers Arch! Unity as an interface is OK ish, apart from the bugs about accelerator keys in LibreOffice and other applications (e.g. Alt-F no longer brings up the file menu).
    - hdevalence 13y ago
      Yes, but it's only in the AUR, so I didn't count it as "properly packaged", in the same way that I wouldn't count something as "packaged by Ubuntu" if it were available in someone's PPA. It's a fair point, but I think that my assessment still holds.
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    I think Canonical are determined to become financially viable. That means trying to generate a fairly high income stream somehow. I'm dubious about these deals with carriers/manufacturers but that is the direction they have decided to go in, rather than trying to do a Red Hat on server/virtualised support. I would quite like a phone that becomes a desktop OS when I dock it. If they can actually pull that one off I think a lot of people might get interested.
- Touche 13y ago
  But the opposite is not true. An arbitrary GNU/Linux distribution cannot run these new Ubuntu Mobile Qt apps.

It's a shame the way that Canonical have isolated themselves from the rest of the Linux ecosystem. I wonder if the future for Ubuntu Touch would be brighter if they had more community appeal.

wtracy 13y ago

How so? Android and Firefox OS can run few if any GNU/Linux applications without major modifications. Ubuntu run every Linux app I can think of out of the box.

hdevalence 13y ago
I was referring more to isolation in two related senses: 1. A technical sense: Canonical has a significant amount of distribution-specific software that has very little adoption outside of the Ubuntu ecosystem. Examples include: * their own version control system, bzr (which I think has now been essentially abandoned in terms of development, and other than a few GNU projects never saw much uptake at all); * their own desktop shell, Unity, which to the best of my knowledge has never been properly packaged for any non-Ubuntu distribution; their own display server, Mir, whose development is the subject of much controversy, and which has been rejected for well-founded technical reasons that have probably already been discussed at length on HN; * their own init system, Upstart, which was initially adopted by other distributions, who then abandoned it in favour of systemd due to its fundamentally flawed design (for instance, there is no way to 100% reliably keep track of a process's children and the dependency resolution runs backwards, meaning that some configurations can cause hangs). 2. A social sense: Canonical's relationship with the rest of the Linux ecosystem has soured (beginning, in my opinion, around 2009-2010, but as a gradual thing, it's hard to pin down) to the point of outright hostility. In my opinion, most of the responsibility for this lies with Canonical's poor communication with others. There's a very detailed history of some events from 2009-2011 that you can read here [1] detailing their relationship with GNOME. The culmination this year has been disgraceful personal attacks by Mark Shuttleworth on people who raise technical criticism of Canonical's software. I expect that more will follow whatever the fallout of Debian's systemd decision is. The two are obviously related. The big problem is that there's (again, in my opinion) very little community appetite for contributing to Canonical's software. And why would there be, given that in order to submit patches for Ubuntu Touch, I need to give Canonical permission to relicence my code under any proprietary licence they choose? At that point, it's not a community contribution, it's just working for Mark Shuttleworth for free. Does Canonical have the software engineering capability to maintain a bunch of stuff (an init system, a display server) that's really unrelated to their problem (making awesome products for users) and still be able to take on Android at the same time? I don't think so. [1]: http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/relationship-between-canonical-gnome/ http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/relationship-between-...
- orik 13y ago
  don't forget about the mir/wayland thing.
  - fsiefken 13y ago
    Was noted under section 1.
- jmhain 13y ago
  Unity has been packaged for Arch. I have absolutely no idea why, but it has.
  - RBerenguel 13y ago
    That tendency of Arch users to port everything and try everything (Arch is my favourite Linux distribution, I quite like this style)
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    I imagine the packager liked Unity and prefers Arch! Unity as an interface is OK ish, apart from the bugs about accelerator keys in LibreOffice and other applications (e.g. Alt-F no longer brings up the file menu).
  - hdevalence 13y ago
    Yes, but it's only in the AUR, so I didn't count it as "properly packaged", in the same way that I wouldn't count something as "packaged by Ubuntu" if it were available in someone's PPA. It's a fair point, but I think that my assessment still holds.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  I think Canonical are determined to become financially viable. That means trying to generate a fairly high income stream somehow. I'm dubious about these deals with carriers/manufacturers but that is the direction they have decided to go in, rather than trying to do a Red Hat on server/virtualised support. I would quite like a phone that becomes a desktop OS when I dock it. If they can actually pull that one off I think a lot of people might get interested.
Touche 13y ago
But the opposite is not true. An arbitrary GNU/Linux distribution cannot run these new Ubuntu Mobile Qt apps.