Ubuntu Asks Users To Pay What They Want 280
New submitter major_lima sends this excerpt from Ars:
"When a typical user downloads Ubuntu for free and installs it on a computer with a Windows license that the user did pay for, Canonical gets nothing in the form of payment. There's nothing wrong with that — this is the open source world, after all, and many people contribute to Ubuntu with code rather than money. But starting this week, Canonical is presenting desktop OS downloaders with an optional donation form. ... 'Pay what you think it's worth,' and 'Show Ubuntu some love' are among the messages users will see, and downloaders can direct their donations to specific parts of Ubuntu development. ... Once you donate, the Ubuntu desktop starts downloading. Or, you can just skip the donation and download the OS for free, just as you always could. For some reason, the donation page is not presented to Ubuntu Server users."
I wonder how much of this will go upstream? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how much of this cash will go to the real heroes i.e. upstream people like Debian? Canonical is just a reseller/ISV as they call them in the market.
What an odd coincedence (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd recently decided to switch my laptop to Mint.
Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what you get when you have a system where there's no configurability, and everything has to be hard-coded one way only: if you want to do anything slightly different, you have to fork the whole project.
If they had just gone with KDE instead, they could have made their own "plasma" variant or had a different set of configuration options (and even added new features selectable in the configuration options), and the KDE team would have been happy to accept these changes for inclusion.
Re:Mr. Shuttleworth's car needs a new set of wheel (Score:5, Interesting)
Believe or not, Mark Shuttle worth does not have a car. He bikes to work. When in London he usually either bikes, takes the tube or, in case of something urgent, a taxi.
Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd say the most immediate change was the performance. Unity just performed horrifically for me before and I use fairly high end hardware (Intel i7 series processors, Nvidia GPUs, etc). That was a huge turn off.
I also found that the older Unity had all kinds of odd usability oddities and problems (sometimes various window management features didn't work, parts of unity would crash and I'd have to logout or reboot, etc).
So it was essentially a shuddering clusterfuck that actually impeded my work.
So far the new version is fast, just works and most importantly stays out of my way. Most of the time I don't see much OS UI, just my apps (which is how things should be IMO).
Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I donated... (Score:4, Interesting)
And I donate bandwidth to them all - debian, mint, ubuntu, slackware ... any time I see a new version release notice (usually here on /.) I ssh to my hosted server, start up screen, and start torrenting. Depending on when in the month it is (I get 200gb/mo xfer) and what I've used (typically nothing), I'll seed for 25-50gb upload or until upload from my box is close to nothing.
I can't code well enough to donate that, I don't have any extra $ to donate, so this is how I contribute (and how just about anyone can).
Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount? (Score:4, Interesting)
Kubuntu is pretty well-known as being not well maintained due to lack of developers; basically, someone just slapped the vanilla KDE packages on top of Ubuntu and called it "done". It works, but it's not an official release at all (it is not maintained at all by Canonical, only a volunteer), and could really be a lot better.
If you want Ubuntu under the hood with KDE, Linux Mint KDE Edition is a better choice.