The Burning Bridges of Ubuntu 346
jammag writes "According to this article, 'Whether Ubuntu is declining is still debatable. However, in the last couple of months, one thing is clear: internally and externally, its commercial arm Canonical appears to be throwing the idea of community overboard as though it was ballast in a balloon about to crash.' The author points out instances of community discontent and apparent ham-handedness on Mark Shuttleworth's part. Yet isn't this just routine kvetching in the open source community?"
Canonical Needs to Make Money (Score:5, Insightful)
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the big deal?
Re:Canonical Needs to Make Money (Score:4, Insightful)
Ubuntu seems to be trying to lock users in with many of its recent changes, but has just succeeded in pushing users away.
Yet isn't this just routine kvetching? (Score:2, Insightful)
kvetching
There you go. Dismiss it. Let us know how that goes for you.
Shame really. Upstart is nice. I've landed on systemd systems because of Shuttleworth, however.
Good will is more important than your vision, Mark. You're killing your own, platform. And I can't figure out why. You're years past your own deadline for profitability, yet here you are, beating this horse to death while people evacuate. WTF??
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:4, Insightful)
But I really feel the community drop-off in ubuntu, compared to a couple of years ago. And that's pretty important. They're going the way of Red Hat.
I'm betting Canonical wish they were going the way of Red Hat, with a billion plus of revenue.
Getting to be a usual thing... (Score:1, Insightful)
The 'linux communities' have all devolved into petty little fiefdoms of some degree.
It's no wonder the masses don't want to get into that mess.
They just want an OS. Not a lifestyle or even try to keep up.
Re:No it is not kvetching. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ubuntu took a perfectly good Debian and fucks it up.
Ubuntu took a perfectly good Ubuntu and fucked it up. Luckily, there are distros like Xubuntu - which take the good parts, and leave off the bad parts (aka Unity).
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Mint have an independent millionaire sugar daddy supporting it?
Although I'm not sure if that's a pro or a con right now. ;)
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
It's always been Debian for me. I'm grateful for momentum that Ubuntu created, especially in things like wifi drivers, but I've always stuck with Debian (for home, that is).
Re:Not every company can act like Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Cannonical is another failing company with Steve Jobs/Apple's attitude of "We will tell you what you like, and will like it."
The attitude can be highly effective ---- but there is one minor important detail: You have to actually be right, for things to work out.
If your UI turns out to be a turd, then you will go down.
Seeking innovation is a high-reward, high-risk thing.
Re:How come nobody talks about SUSE anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
The latest version opensuse actually is the best linux I have ever run, and that counts for a lot having run every major distribution since when the kernel was in the .9x timefame. That also includes all the recent versions of Ubuntu/mint/etc. It falls closer to the "it just works" mantra than any previous version (of course a few things still have hickups).
No one talks about Suse because we are off talking about more exciting things. That is the problem with having a stable sensible distribution that actually works.... Its doesn't have the latest $sexy to ignite peoples fires, or the latest $sucky to piss everyone off.
Personally, I suspect a fair number of people drop suse when they thought KDE jumped the shark a few years back. Now that it turns out its Gnome that jumped the shark no one remembers the one remaining major KDE based distribution.
Finally, there is SLES which is all the goodness of opensuse combined with long term vendor support as good as what is provided by redhat.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
What is happening is flavour of the moment in the Linux world is 'Android' and because of that Ubuntu is in the shadows. Rather than fight Android, Ubuntu should embrace Android with an effective USB or wireless remote to enable data input, configuration and synchronisation of Android phones on a full sized desktop screen. Right now the better Ubuntu desktop/notebook plays with Android the more popular it will become, it has a real chance to gain a big chunk of market share by creating a desktop that links well with an Android smartphones and effectively extends it features onto more workable screen real estate.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
I continued this up until Ubuntu released Unity as the default desktop.
I think this is the main point.
No, contrary to OP, this is not "just the usual Open Source kvetching." Successful Open Source operations listen to their users. Now it's going its own way even further with Mir.
Users were happy with Gnome (or KDE). They did not want Unity, and said so.
By now Ubuntu is too proprietary to be considered "open" anymore. It's not just a Linux distro, but rather it has become its own operating system. That is somewhat contrary to the spirit of Linux. What's next? Its own (proprietary, incompatible) versions of the command-line tools?
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
Users were happy with GNOME 2.x - they hated 3.x. Ubuntu tried to do something about it, which the users didn't like either.
Personally, I feel like you've captured the spirit of current Linux development. Don't like something? Developers don't care. You don't have a choice. Systemd, GRUB2, GNOME3, Wayland, KMS - doesn't matter, you're getting it whether you want it or not. And the old versions (or previous products) are left to die (until projects like MATE and Trinity form later on, if you're lucky).
FWIW, I still can't configure GRUB 2 easily. And KMS broke Linux on several laptops that I was still using. Linux does not run well on old hardware, and really doesn't run well anymore (period).
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I feel like you've captured the spirit of current Linux development. Don't like something? Developers don't care. You don't have a choice.
Wrong. Developers DO care. Just not all the developers. When Gnome3 came about, it was pretty obvious that the Gnome developers didn't care about the users who complained about this new direction. However, a bunch of other developers DID care, and those developers created MATE and Cinnamon.
As for GRUB2 and KMS, you're one of a tiny number of people complaining about such things; everyone else seems to do just fine with them.
Wayland is a pretty important and necesary item too; X is obsolete and doesn't work well for modern hardware. And unlike the others, you can't even use Wayland, since no one's made a distro with it yet; it's still under development, and unlike some other projects in the past, the Wayland developers seem to be concerned with making sure it's actually ready for prime-time use before releasing it as such. Don't complain about it until it's actually out there, and not just under development.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing servers. The huge majority of Linux servers are Red Hat, because that's what the server software vendors support, and you don't run something that's not officially supported. As an additional bonus, IT departments running Red Hat on their servers will pay Red Hat for official support, so Red Hat's actually making money on all this. Almost nobody, of course, runs Ubuntu servers.
People just forget the past... (Score:5, Insightful)
People just forget the past so quickly. Sure, we can argue simple things like if "upstart" is a good runlevel daemon and all that, but think about all the improvements Ubuntu has brought to the Linux world over time. The high quality of other distros these days is due to Ubuntu pushing the bar higher.
Hardware detection: Ubuntu made all your devices "just work" without manual module configuration and kernel recompilation. Unity: good-looking, well-specced desktop that anyone can use. The community and documentation are great. Media playback works easily, printing works great. Nice and clean system configuration file structure. Ubuntu Software Center introduces newbies to high-quality picks of open source software without having to do random poking in the repositories. Ubuntu was stable enough platform to provide the base for Steam. And remember how Ubuntu made enabling non-free drivers easy: you just have that little PCI card tray icon, and from the pop-up dialog you select your device. Ubuntu comes with LibreOffice preinstalled, rivaling the MS Office monopoly from the start.
I mean, are you sure you would want a Linux world without all these improvements?
Let's not forget all the little things that Ubuntu has improved -- the things which we take for granted today.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:3, Insightful)
No X was mature 10 years ago.
Like a cheese it has gone from a delicious mature flavour to a mouldy mess with which you don't know what to do. Yes you could cut the edges off, modify it a bit and maybe make it work. If you cook it it's probably safe to eat too, but the hacks are nasty and you should just go and buy some new cheese.
When your screen saver defeats the lock screen due to a fundamental architecture flaw, when 99% of the features aren't used in favour of straight out bitmap rendering, and when the features people scream about like network transparency actually don't even exist any more, it's time to replace it.
Re:Yes, and (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that's his main target. Shuttleworth is one of the few people (Newell may be another) willing to make fundamental changes to gnu/linux desktop computer to bring it to masses as opposed to just opinionated geekdom. This non-traditional desktop experience is bound to annoy traditional gnu/linux power users who feel their vision is being ignored. What they fail to see is that their vision is not attractive enough for average people.
I for one welcome canonical's changes. For me, the more they deviate from 'traditional gnu/linux desktop', the better. I want to see how far they can push it and how many fresh ideas they can bring. KDE desktop has looked pretty much the same for the last 10 years. Gnome is getting uglier and less useful with each new version (but I do like that they're starting anew). Windows 8's interface, despite its questionable usability, is fresh and people who have used it for more than 10 minutes in a shop, like it.
Re:No it is not kvetching. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with your idea, but you got it a bit wrong: Xubuntu it still Ubuntu. I think many people hate Unity (I don't; I just treat it as an "early beta" of an idea that one day might work), but don't realize that things like Xubuntu and Kubuntu are very much still Ubuntu.
The desktop interface is a *very tiny* part of the OS, really. But it's the first thing most users see, and is crucial for PR.
I love Xubuntu. Hence, I also love Ubuntu (if not the Unity package) and the great work done by everyone involved.
Ubuntu should follow the openSUSE way: when you install it, it asks you which desktop you want. There's no realy need for separate distros, IMO.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
As for GRUB2 and KMS, you're one of a tiny number of people complaining about such things; everyone else seems to do just fine with them.
Grub2 is nice and beautiful when it works. Which it does, most of the time. But when it breaks or you want to do something non standard, it requires a much much higher level of expertise than GRUB did. GRUB was edit a text file. GRUB2 is secret hidden handshake which seems to be illegal to write documentation for.
This kind of thing is becoming standard practice in modern software, unfortunately. Firefox used to export bookmarks in an HTML file, which even the most casual nerd could edit (maybe I only want part of it, or I want to add to it... whatever). Then it became a JSON file or something, which I guess makes it easier for developers to write tools for?
We keep getting software that makes life easier for the developers and harder for the end user. This is only a good thing if you are trying to get rid of end users.
Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, just try using it. It's slow as shit, because X does a terrible job with bitmapped graphics. X was designed to be network-transparent by moving all the drawing primitives to the X server, so the only information going over the wire would be drawing commands, rather than bitmapped graphics. I guess that worked well enough in the days of butt-ugly CDE and Motif, but those days are long past, and now everyone uses Qt and gtk+, which don't use those drawing primitives at all, and instead everything uses bitmapped graphics. X has no compression, so moving bitmapped graphics over the wire is very slow. For comparison, try running a remote desktop session between two Windows machines, or even between a Windows machine and a Linux machine with "rdesktop"; it's much, much faster.
Wayland will be dumping the obsolete drawing primitive stuff and moving to RDP for network transparency, last I read. So maybe we Linux users will finally get network transparency as good as Windows users have had available for over a decade!!! But for some stupid reason, a lot of curmudgeons would rather we stick with 30-year-old technology that doesn't work half as well as what Microsoft has been using for ages and wasn't designed for modern use cases.