13 ms·

Some individuals in the Linux community regularly criticize Canonical for "not playing along well with others" and taking Ubuntu in directions that go against "

by cs702 13y ago

Some individuals in the Linux community regularly criticize Canonical for "not playing along well with others" and taking Ubuntu in directions that go against "the community's wishes." I think those individuals are misguided. Canonical does try to collaborate with other projects and distributions. It's just that such collaboration is not the company's priority. Canonical's priority, as best as I can judge, is to make Ubuntu the world's leading Linux distribution for desktops and other platforms -- cloud, tablet, phone, etc. So they will use whatever F/LOSS code works best to achieve this goal, regardless of whether it's internally or externally developed. They are not letting 'ego' and 'pride' get in the way of achieving their goal. If using systemd will help them achieve their goal more than using upstart, they will use systemd. Ditto for Unity versus Gnome, and for Mir versus Wayland. For them, it's not about "winning the argument," but about "winning the #1 spot."

deleted 13y ago
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simonebrunozzi 13y ago
Unity and Mir have been two good choices.
- yxhuvud 13y ago
  Mir isn't really rolled out enough to settle the score on that one. Totally agreed on Unity though - it is a breath of fresh air compared to most alternatives on linux.
  - rpdillon 13y ago
    Unity was rolled out too early, and in a hardly stable state. It sacrifices desktop usability for consistency across devices: desktop, tablet and phone. I disagree that desktop computing design should be constrained by the limitations of touch-based devices. So, rather than a breath of fresh air, I see it as a disruptive change in UX, intended to win in the long term, but at the expense of short-term usability. Ditto for the move to Mir. But I don't resent Canonical for this -- I use Linux because I can choose the experience (KDE 4 at the moment). I just hope the short-term sacrifices in terms of usability and fragmentation don't harm adoption too much.
    - Arnor 13y ago
      I was on that same wave length for a long time. But I gave it a year then rounded up the usual suspects (xfce, gnome, kde) and was surprised to see how much I missed unity.
    - mekoka 13y ago
      It sacrifices desktop usability for consistency across devices I don't know what kind of usability impediment you're talking about? To be honest, I'm kinda tired of hearing this, because it seems to come from people who never really used Unity. I have extensively used KDE (v 2), Gnome (v 2), xfce4, Unity and now i3. I tried Unity simply because I was puzzled by the conflicting arguments. Power users complaining so much, while newbies were raving. I thought I would test drive it for a month just to see, I ended up using it for a year. Unity isn't perfect (no graphic environment is), but it does have its highlights. Most of the essential functions are documented in the cheatsheet that appears when someone keeps the WinKey pressed. In my opinion, most power users who complain never took the 2 minutes required to understand how that desktop works and presumed that all they had to do was to plug in their mouse and click away. If they'd taken the time, there would be less complaints, since Unity is rather keyboard centric. Newbies on the other hand thought "let's learn Linux", read the manual, and came out ecstatic.
      - mcintyre1994 13y ago
        Just an anecdote of course, but on my not very beefy laptop Unity is the only environment I've tried that runs slower than Windows. Using it it seemed great and I'd like to use it, but unusably slow for me.
      - joe_the_user 13y ago
        I don't know what kind of usability impediment you're talking about? Not being able to use the programs installed on my computer? That seems like a pretty big usability impediment to me. I have a Unity and non-Unity laptop. The problem that Unity allows less than ten apps on the side. It's true that I can search for the things - but that requires me to know the name of the many oddly named Linux apps out there. And yes, I've spent more than minutes, in fact I've spent days using and attempting to customize the thing. The screen mechanics are ghastly also imho but I could learn them if, like, the GUI let me actually run my installed application. Sure it works as a kiosk or those who just start a shell and leave. But if you're really using seriously, why pontificate about it.
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    I rather liked Unity but bug #739184 means I can't use it. Hopefully, someone sorts that out by the LTS 14.04 release.
- dublinben 13y ago
  What's so great about Unity? I think the latest version of Gnome is much better.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    For small screens, it preserves a lot of real estate. When most notebooks are limited to 1366x768 screens, it's an excellent choice.
    - ralphc 13y ago
      To emphasize, it preserves a lot of vertical real estate.
      - dontdieych 13y ago
        Yes, really.
    - dublinben 13y ago
      Thanks for providing some insight. I guess that's not a concern for me, since my laptop is 1920x1200.
    - collyw 13y ago
      Fair enough, but most people are using Ubuntu on a desktop or laptop with moderately large screen (or is 1366x768 on a laptop considered small?) Can you actually run Ubuntu on a phone yet?
- csense 13y ago
  I haven't tried Mir yet. Unity was a terrible choice. The early versions crashed a lot. Every time I've tried to use it, I get frustrated and end up removing it within a day. There's some magic key combination you have to know in order to do something as fundamental as opening multiple instances of an application. The "start" menu equivalent in more traditional desktops has a list of installed applications by category. Browsing this to figure out what applications you have is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with your system. The "search" function in Unity requires you to know what you're looking for; there's no way to discover what's installed by browsing. Unity would be fine as an extra option. It might even be a good default for smartphones. But I jumped ship for Linux Mint when Ubuntu tried to shove Unity down everyone's throats by making it the default.
  - chrismorgan 13y ago
    For the first two releases where Unity was the default, I tried to like it but had to give up within a week because it was simply too buggy, given the Compiz plugins I wished to run. (Had I used it stock, doubtless it would have worked better.) In the third release featuring Unity, also the release where they removed the classic GNOME shell, I tried Unity again and was satisfied. It was better than the GNOME shell I had been using theretofore. I do not believe Unity to be perfect, but I do enjoy using it more than almost any window manager. (For completely unrelated reasons, I switched to i3 a couple of months ago, but of window managers directed at normal users, Unity is certainly my favourite.)
  - bad_user 13y ago
    Unity was buggy in the beginning, but it has been usable ever since 12.04 LTS. I'm typing this on a MacBook that I use for work and when I'm in OS X, I miss Unity. The screen is uncluttered, the shortcuts are great, the dashboard is great, the various special effects are finally not nauseating, the only thing bothering me is that I can't move that launcher on the right side, but lack of customization is a problem with Gnome in general.
pekk 13y ago
Red Hat also wants the #1 spot. This conflict is a source of a lot of FUD and technical conflict
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Red Hat wants enterprise/server. Canonical seems to be shooting for consumer.
  - leobelle 13y ago
    The many thousands of ubuntu-server installs are probably eating into RedHat's earnings.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Maybe... but the companies buying support contracts and sending real dollars RedHat's way are going to be mostly the big shops, the enterprise shops, and I've never seen ubuntu-server in an enterprise shop.
      - leobelle 13y ago
        What's an enterprise shop? I've worked at a big public company that used ubuntu-server.
        sixbrx 13y ago
        One that values support from companies like Oracle, is a good first approximation.
        leobelle 13y ago
        If you define an enterprise shop to mean a company that doesn't use software like ubuntu-server, congratulations, you are right, but you have also made a completely meaningless observation.
njharman 13y ago
I'm one of those individuals. Color me impressed (with Canonical). They will all ways have this "correct" decision.
- faddotio 13y ago
  Their decision to deprive me of choice with GNOME2 sucks.
  - null_ptr 13y ago
    Isn't that the GNOME Team's decision?
  - jsaxton86 13y ago
    You might want to try out Xubuntu. XFCE is even more lightweight that GNOME2 and I have really come to appreciate it.
    - JAFTEM 13y ago
      XFCE is great and all, but isn't MATE an actual fork of GNOME 2?
    - imsofuture 13y ago
      Or just install XFCE. I'm continually confused when people recommend different operating systems to change the window manager.
      - lukeschlather 13y ago
        Xubuntu is just a set of packages for Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu LTS and one of the first things I do on a new install is sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop . Now, if you're on RHEL then Xubuntu would be a bit of a leap, but just installing xfce on Ubuntu is going to be a lot more painful than installing xubuntu-desktop which has a little more functionality out of the box.
        13y ago
mdeslaur 13y ago
Well said.
deleted 13y ago
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by cs702 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

simonebrunozzi 13y ago

Unity and Mir have been two good choices.

yxhuvud 13y ago
Mir isn't really rolled out enough to settle the score on that one. Totally agreed on Unity though - it is a breath of fresh air compared to most alternatives on linux.
- rpdillon 13y ago
  Unity was rolled out too early, and in a hardly stable state. It sacrifices desktop usability for consistency across devices: desktop, tablet and phone. I disagree that desktop computing design should be constrained by the limitations of touch-based devices. So, rather than a breath of fresh air, I see it as a disruptive change in UX, intended to win in the long term, but at the expense of short-term usability. Ditto for the move to Mir. But I don't resent Canonical for this -- I use Linux because I can choose the experience (KDE 4 at the moment). I just hope the short-term sacrifices in terms of usability and fragmentation don't harm adoption too much.
  - Arnor 13y ago
    I was on that same wave length for a long time. But I gave it a year then rounded up the usual suspects (xfce, gnome, kde) and was surprised to see how much I missed unity.
  - mekoka 13y ago
    It sacrifices desktop usability for consistency across devices I don't know what kind of usability impediment you're talking about? To be honest, I'm kinda tired of hearing this, because it seems to come from people who never really used Unity. I have extensively used KDE (v 2), Gnome (v 2), xfce4, Unity and now i3. I tried Unity simply because I was puzzled by the conflicting arguments. Power users complaining so much, while newbies were raving. I thought I would test drive it for a month just to see, I ended up using it for a year. Unity isn't perfect (no graphic environment is), but it does have its highlights. Most of the essential functions are documented in the cheatsheet that appears when someone keeps the WinKey pressed. In my opinion, most power users who complain never took the 2 minutes required to understand how that desktop works and presumed that all they had to do was to plug in their mouse and click away. If they'd taken the time, there would be less complaints, since Unity is rather keyboard centric. Newbies on the other hand thought "let's learn Linux", read the manual, and came out ecstatic.
    - mcintyre1994 13y ago
      Just an anecdote of course, but on my not very beefy laptop Unity is the only environment I've tried that runs slower than Windows. Using it it seemed great and I'd like to use it, but unusably slow for me.
    - joe_the_user 13y ago
      I don't know what kind of usability impediment you're talking about? Not being able to use the programs installed on my computer? That seems like a pretty big usability impediment to me. I have a Unity and non-Unity laptop. The problem that Unity allows less than ten apps on the side. It's true that I can search for the things - but that requires me to know the name of the many oddly named Linux apps out there. And yes, I've spent more than minutes, in fact I've spent days using and attempting to customize the thing. The screen mechanics are ghastly also imho but I could learn them if, like, the GUI let me actually run my installed application. Sure it works as a kiosk or those who just start a shell and leave. But if you're really using seriously, why pontificate about it.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  I rather liked Unity but bug #739184 means I can't use it. Hopefully, someone sorts that out by the LTS 14.04 release.
dublinben 13y ago
What's so great about Unity? I think the latest version of Gnome is much better.
- rbanffy 13y ago
  For small screens, it preserves a lot of real estate. When most notebooks are limited to 1366x768 screens, it's an excellent choice.
  - ralphc 13y ago
    To emphasize, it preserves a lot of vertical real estate.
    - dontdieych 13y ago
      Yes, really.
  - dublinben 13y ago
    Thanks for providing some insight. I guess that's not a concern for me, since my laptop is 1920x1200.
  - collyw 13y ago
    Fair enough, but most people are using Ubuntu on a desktop or laptop with moderately large screen (or is 1366x768 on a laptop considered small?) Can you actually run Ubuntu on a phone yet?
csense 13y ago
I haven't tried Mir yet. Unity was a terrible choice. The early versions crashed a lot. Every time I've tried to use it, I get frustrated and end up removing it within a day. There's some magic key combination you have to know in order to do something as fundamental as opening multiple instances of an application. The "start" menu equivalent in more traditional desktops has a list of installed applications by category. Browsing this to figure out what applications you have is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with your system. The "search" function in Unity requires you to know what you're looking for; there's no way to discover what's installed by browsing. Unity would be fine as an extra option. It might even be a good default for smartphones. But I jumped ship for Linux Mint when Ubuntu tried to shove Unity down everyone's throats by making it the default.
- chrismorgan 13y ago
  For the first two releases where Unity was the default, I tried to like it but had to give up within a week because it was simply too buggy, given the Compiz plugins I wished to run. (Had I used it stock, doubtless it would have worked better.) In the third release featuring Unity, also the release where they removed the classic GNOME shell, I tried Unity again and was satisfied. It was better than the GNOME shell I had been using theretofore. I do not believe Unity to be perfect, but I do enjoy using it more than almost any window manager. (For completely unrelated reasons, I switched to i3 a couple of months ago, but of window managers directed at normal users, Unity is certainly my favourite.)
- bad_user 13y ago
  Unity was buggy in the beginning, but it has been usable ever since 12.04 LTS. I'm typing this on a MacBook that I use for work and when I'm in OS X, I miss Unity. The screen is uncluttered, the shortcuts are great, the dashboard is great, the various special effects are finally not nauseating, the only thing bothering me is that I can't move that launcher on the right side, but lack of customization is a problem with Gnome in general.

pekk 13y ago

Red Hat also wants the #1 spot. This conflict is a source of a lot of FUD and technical conflict

sliverstorm 13y ago
Red Hat wants enterprise/server. Canonical seems to be shooting for consumer.
- leobelle 13y ago
  The many thousands of ubuntu-server installs are probably eating into RedHat's earnings.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Maybe... but the companies buying support contracts and sending real dollars RedHat's way are going to be mostly the big shops, the enterprise shops, and I've never seen ubuntu-server in an enterprise shop.
    - leobelle 13y ago
      What's an enterprise shop? I've worked at a big public company that used ubuntu-server.
      - sixbrx 13y ago
        One that values support from companies like Oracle, is a good first approximation.
        leobelle 13y ago
        If you define an enterprise shop to mean a company that doesn't use software like ubuntu-server, congratulations, you are right, but you have also made a completely meaningless observation.

njharman 13y ago

I'm one of those individuals. Color me impressed (with Canonical). They will all ways have this "correct" decision.

faddotio 13y ago
Their decision to deprive me of choice with GNOME2 sucks.
- null_ptr 13y ago
  Isn't that the GNOME Team's decision?
- jsaxton86 13y ago
  You might want to try out Xubuntu. XFCE is even more lightweight that GNOME2 and I have really come to appreciate it.
  - JAFTEM 13y ago
    XFCE is great and all, but isn't MATE an actual fork of GNOME 2?
  - imsofuture 13y ago
    Or just install XFCE. I'm continually confused when people recommend different operating systems to change the window manager.
    - lukeschlather 13y ago
      Xubuntu is just a set of packages for Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu LTS and one of the first things I do on a new install is sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop . Now, if you're on RHEL then Xubuntu would be a bit of a leap, but just installing xfce on Ubuntu is going to be a lot more painful than installing xubuntu-desktop which has a little more functionality out of the box.
      - 13y ago

mdeslaur 13y ago

Well said.

deleted 13y ago

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