Ubuntu Focusing on Tablets and the Cloud in 2013 202
sfcrazy writes "Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has shared his plans for 2013. It was clear from the Nexus 7 initiative that Ubuntu is eventually looking into the mobile space more seriously. Google created the cheap device Ubuntu was looking for wider testing and development. The initial builds of Ubuntu for Nexus 7 also showed that, despite popular perception, Unity is far from ready for the mobile devices. In fact quite a lot of 'controversial' technologies introduced in Unity don't fit on a mobile devices such as Global Menus or HUD. So there are many challenges for Mark — redesign Unity for mobile, which may upset users again, get Ubuntu app developers to redesign apps for Ubuntu mobile, get top developers to write apps for Ubuntu... Is it all feasible when companies like RIM or Microsoft are struggling or is Ubuntu becoming a 'me too' company which is not brining anything new to the table and is simply trying to claim a pie?"
Shuttleworth also wants to do something or other with the cloud: "It’s also why we’ll push deeper into the cloud, making it even easier, faster and cost effective to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice, or create clouds for your own consumption and commerce."
What about retina? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is all well and good, but Ubuntu and other Gnome based desktops still can not deal with retina displays well yet (unless you go to kubuntu, and even KDE is iffy). Why aren't they working on this? There are good laptops out there that we can't use yet, and I haven't seen any indications anyone a Canonical cares. IMHO this is a lot more important than getting it on the Nexus line (as cool as that might be).
One condition (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as we can run our own cloud on our own server at home, I'm all for it. Otherwise, screw it. I don't want to give any company control over my own godamn data.
Fuck the cloud, fuck tablets (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It was fun while it lasted! (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the desktop is a solved problem, KDE provides an excellent, highly polished desktop experience, which contains a number of innovations -- but remains not-too-different from the desktops of the naughties.
Different devices, with different input capabilities require different interfaces. If you do it the KDE way, the inerface is largely abstracted from the core of the programmes, and you can switch fromone to the other. If you are GNOME, ubuntu of microsoft (or apple), you try to have one interface to rule them all. IMHO, this is a bad idea, but some people seem to like it, so...
Re:Ubuntu vs Android (Score:5, Insightful)
what is the difference between a tablet and a fully fledged PC? My first response would be that it could run raw linux apps without re-codoing them significantly.
Re:What about retina? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure it's more important to you, but what's in it for Canonical? I'm thinking there's very few people who'll spend $1699 (minimum) on a rMBP in the first place. And Linux has around 1% market share, so at best I'm thinking one in hundred of those few people are interested in putting Linux on it. Actually my gut feeling is that the intersection between people willing to buy a very expensive Mac and insisting on putting a $0 operating system on it is even less than that. But yes, let us say it could marginally increase desktop *bunbu market share.
Since we're talking Apple it'd be a cold day in hell before it shipped with *buntu OEM option, so it'd be all self-installs. Does Canonical make any money on the people who download and install it themselves? Well they tried now recently with their Ubuntu lens to great uproar, but I'd say the answer is no. They certainly seem to focus on everything else like smart phones, tablets and smart TVs to make money. Maybe they're getting something from OEM deals like Dell, maybe they're making a bit on desktop support contracts - server support contracts is another thing entirely - but on the whole I doubt getting proper Retina support would contribute anything to Canonical's bottom line. Trying to be a contender to Android has more potential, but honestly they're now far, far behind Google on that.
Re:Ubuntu vs Android (Score:5, Insightful)
You can port onto phones with comparative ease. But there are both limitations and enhancements.
You can use the phone's sensors, crowd source data, use location info more meaningfully, and interact with the user with whatever touch mechanisms are supported.
But there are severe limitations: storage is small and not getting larger quickly. User space isn't huge. You're limited to 32bit memory models. There aren't serious math co-pros, but ARM does integer math quickly enough. And despite what you've heard, ARM still uses power, and doesn't magically become a Xeon. Even with multiple cores, you don't get multiple work.
That said, the screen IO gets faster, juicier, and more colorful all the time. I'd love to have Debian underneath, rather than Google anything on my phone.
But I think that Shuttleworth doesn't understand cloud. Civilians aren't going to do much with cloud because Shuttleworth overestimates civilians. They don't have time to program, they just want to use this stuff-- that's why they pay others to do the work in the form of program loads and competitive *native* features. They're just not going to create and port a LAMP stack, then do geophysics array curve fitting. Instead: they're going to play games, and not ones they wrote themselves.
Goodbye Canonical, it has been nice knowing you (Score:4, Insightful)
What saddens me is that Canonical's roots are in Africa. A huge place where there is sporadic 3G connection.
I'd really like someone to explain to me how their vision of 'the Cloud' can work when there is no universal 3G data connection available to the majority of the people. Perhaps they have forgotten what Ubuntu originally meant?
Then there is the cost of 3G. Don't even get me started on 4G (EE is a joke) data plans.
Until they become IMHO an order of magnitude cheaper then frankly you can forget universal cloud adoption.
Cloud afficitionados seem to forget (or have a blind spot) this (insignificant in their eyes at least) essential feature.
I run my own private cloud but I am under no illusions about the sort of connectivity I will have to it from the parts of the world where I do most of my business namely, the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa.
Re:Fuck the cloud, fuck tablets (Score:4, Insightful)
Has the definition of cloud changed so much that it can even be done now, with a single server?
The definition of cloud has always been intentionally hazy (pun intended.) Because it's not fixed, it can mean whatever the speaker needs it to mean in the current context. At home, I might define the cloud to be "remote access to my data from whatever device I have at hand". That might mean accessing data stored on my own server, or access to my data stored on other people's servers. At work, many of the app people equate "Software as a Service" with cloud, while our infrastructure guys can use it to mean "scalable on-demand platforms" like EC3.
In the most general terms, the cloud is access to any kind of remote resource via the network. Once upon a time, the old name for it was client/server, but that terminology came from the days of dedicated point-to-point lines between machines, and was too technically correct for the illiterate managers who didn't yet understand that an IP network allowed access to any machine on the network.
Anyway, there is no one precise definition of "cloud". In my experience, anyone who is overly hung up on the word seems to be missing the bigger picture.
Re:Whose perception? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can innovate by putting barbecue sauce on peach ice cream. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Depressing: no reference to Debian, f**k that!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
when someone prefers XFCE to Unity, they are still benefiting from enormous efforts by hundreds of people to make the core Ubuntu platform
I feel truly depressed. A quick look at some Debian packages with apt-get showsrc xfce4-terminal shows 2 uploaders, and the work being done mostly by Yves-Alexis Perez. Then having a look at the Ubuntu package shows that there's almost no work at all from Ubuntu on that package, but the rework of 2 patches, AND THAT'S IT.
So, instead of a self-satisfying self-congratulation, and telling about the "hundreds of people" behind it, Marc should truly thanks the thousands of Debian Developer doing the real work FOR FREE (and the other thousands of maintainers who aren't DD and get their package sponsored). These are the real persons that makes it possible.
If you’ve been arguing over software licenses for the best part of 15 years then you would probably be fine with whatever came before Ubuntu.
If what Marc is saying here is that Ubuntu doesn't care anymore that software should be free (as in Freedom), then yes, it's time that everyone stops using Ubuntu. By the way the recent global search spyware finished to convince more and more people.
Whether you’re building out a big data cluster or a super-scaled storage solution, you’ll get it done faster on Ubuntu than any other platform, thanks to the amazing work of our cloud community.
With all the due respect Marc, I believe my Folsom packages of Openstack, which I'm slowly uploading to Debian experimental (but also available on a non-official repo), are both better and more easy to use than the ones currently in Ubuntu. You'd better stop touching yourself, and remove these lintian warnings which are all over the place on the Ubuntu packaging.
Consider it a gift from all of us at Ubuntu.
That's it, now I want to slap you in the face... We are talking about COMMUNITY SOFTWARE, not Canonical. Neither XFCE or Openstack are (c) Canonical. If you want a list of the top committers in each project to show you are wrong, I can do that, no pb.