Shuttleworth Calls Ubuntu Performance Art, Calls Out Critics

darthcamaro writes "Mark Shuttleworth has taken a lot of heat for Ubuntu's decision to use Unity, to move away from Wayland and about its stance on the community distros like Kubuntu. In a new interview Shuttleworth shoots back claiming no matter what he does people will always find fault due to...'competitive pressures.'"

Re:He has a point, no?

[YukariHirai]

Microsoft has the same problem: change is hated by their users. Probably even more so, in the Windows ecosystem.

There's a reason for this: in the Windows world, change is mostly for the worse. Sure there are some important steps forward and changes for the better in amongst it, but it always seems like those are eclipsed by dumb decisions and change for the sake of change.

Re:Mark Shuttleworth is a copy of Bill Gates

[deusmetallum]

I don't know if you've seen/heard much of what Mark Shuttleworth has ever said, but he is clearly very passionate about Linux and open source. I get this feeling that a lot of people are attributing to malace that which can easily be attributed to a differing opinion. He doesn't want to destroy linux, he doesn't see it as a play thing, but he does want to give users a great experience, give administrators/engineers a great platform, *and* make some money out of it. The latter point seems to be what many people have an issue with, which to me is insane! Just take a look at Geary. They've been asking for $100,000 for an email client, yet Canonical are trying their best to give you the best desktop environment for free, while persuing a buck in other ways.

Re:He has a point, no?

[ozmanjusri]

in the Windows world, change is mostly for the worse.

Not just that.

In the Windows world, there are just two choices; run an old version, or put up with the awful interface. At least with Linux, you can use Mint, or even pick an XFCE, Enlightenment etc etc respin if you want Ubuntu and don't like Unity.

Ubuntu vs. Slackware

[oldhack]

An interesting contrast: Volkerding does what he does with Slackware with no fuss. Shuttleworth gets all defensive on what he does with Ubuntu.

Forcing change before you are ready is the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

IF Unity and Gnome 3 had taken the time to FIRST fully develop their products while at the same time fixing existing products, maybe they would have been better received. But they didn't do that. Gnome, Linux, Ubuntu are far from perfect. Nautilus for instance is a nightmare with samba shares. None of this has been fixed. If you got a spotty internet connection and connect a 3G modem, there is no easy way anymore to tell Ubuntu to prefer one over the other. Multi-monitor support finally works but you can still only select one wallpaper.

It works... but it could be better.

And then instead of improving, fixing what is there, KDE, Unity and Gnome 3 all decide to instead go for something new and unproven and give us highly buggy versions of it as non-optional replacements... and the users said FUCK NO! It isn't just that the basic core idea is wrong (more on that later) but that we would have prefered to:

A: have existing bugs fixed.

B: Not be forced to change how we use our computers.

C: Not be forced to deal with a whole lot of new bugs, on top of the old bugs.

Windows 8, Unity, Gnome 3 and KDE have taken a fundamentally flawed approach to the desktop. Their unified idea seems to be: The user wants to see his desktop and play with it.

Reality: The desktop is there to put things on, that then obscure the desktop which I never ever see again unless something crashes. In real life, if you can see a users desktop, the user is not doing anything productive. I got a large screen multi-monitor setup and the desktop is barely visible, what you do see instead are the applications I am running because THAT is where my work is being done.

Go back to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop or Enlightenments animated wallpapers. All very nice, very cool and totally and utterly useless on an actively used PC because the moment you start using your PC, the desktop is hidden underneath the application you want to use. A pro has few desktop icons because to reach them, he would first have to close a dozen windows.

An active desktop is like the stock picture in a picture frame, useful to have something on the screen when the PC/frame is in the shop, but essentially useless once actively used. You take the picture frame, open it and put your own picture in front. Bye bye active desktop, won't see you again until my PC crashes and the few seconds between boot and me having opened my applications again.

OSX is just as bad with that gigantic dock at the bottom. Thank you Steve Jobs, just what I wanted, less horizontal pixels for my windows. At least Unity puts it to the side. Screen space is simply not cheap/available enough yet to waste pixels on stuff I don't "need". The only people that like Windows 8 and the likes are people who have toolbars installed in their browser. The rest of us want more SPACE! Not less.

And I be honest, once I had winamp/xmms installed with skins and made room for it in my windows layout. These days my music player lives on the notification bar and is 16 by 16 pixels or so.

Had these new "desktops" launched as optional side extra's (how many of you ever used Active Desktop or the various versions of Widgets), they might have been well received... well, as well received as their ancestors. Which is to say, not at all. Remember, ALL THE PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS AT TURNING THE DESKTOP INTO A GADGET ZONE: FAILED

So, instead of taking the hint, developers thought: "Well we just not going to make it fucking optional anymore!".

"Yah... well I am simply fucking not going to install it then".

With mobile phones the old idea got some new fuel but lets face it, how many of us think of our mobile phone as a marvel of usability? I sure as hell don't. It would be like taking away the mouse form a PC gamer and give him a touchpad instead... NO! It is not that touchpad on laptops are totally unusable but why should I replace the far superior mouse on my desktop with a laptops second rate input method?

The new desktop work slight

Re:He has a point, no?

[Vintermann]

Just because people will criticize you no matter what you do, still it may be the case that the criticism is valid. In the article, Shuttleworth does nothing to defend Mir - he calls it convenient and effective for them, but that wasn't the issue. The issue was why Wayland would NOT be convenient and effective for them.

Wayland isn't primarily a library, it's a protocol, and the big challenge for a protocol is getting people and companies (like NVidia!) on board, not that work has to be duplicated. Realistically, some will choose to go with one and not the other, and that means more wasted effort, whoever "wins" in the end.

Re:He has a point, no?

[pmontra]

I'm also a TB user so I'm happy you can use it on KDE (no surprise). However a mail application doesn't belong to an OS. It's a matter of personal choice and what one was using on other computers and in previous years. For example, I've been using TB for maybe 10 years over 4 maybe different computers and I'll keep using it on the next one, if I ever find a modern laptop worth buying. So, no good mail client on KDE should not be a problem. Actually, why bother developing an integrated client?

Same thing for a web browser: it's nice if the OS provides a default browser so the user can download the one s/he prefers after the first boot, but that's it. Any toy browser preloaded with links to the major ones would be good enough for that.

Re:He has a point, no?

[jones_supa]

Windows 2000 and Windows 7 are the best releases. Win2000 took the best parts of NT but also allowed consumer stuff such as most games to work. XP only brought extra bloat, slight instability and horrible security record (which was later mostly fixed with service packs). Windows 7 is the pinnacle of the classic desktop: polished, secure, fast and nice.