Shuttleworth On Ubuntu Community Drama 302
In the wake of the Ubuntu Developer Summit, a number of contributors from its community have been speaking out, saying they're uncertain about their role and their future working on Ubuntu. They're concerned about how Canonical is making decisions, and also how (and when) those decisions are being communicated. Now, Mark Shuttleworth has addressed the issue in a blog post. He said,
"The sky is not falling in. Really. Ubuntu is a group of people who get together with common purpose. How we achieve that purpose is up to us, and everyone has a say in what they can and will contribute. Canonical's contribution is massive. It's simply nonsense to say that Canonical gets 'what it wants' more than anybody else. Hell, half the time *I* don't get exactly what I want. It just doesn't work that way: lots of people work hard to the best of their abilities, the result is Ubuntu. The combination of Canonical and community is what makes that amazing. There are lots of pure community distro's. And wow, they are full of politics, spite, frustration, venality and disappointment. Why? Because people are people, and work is hard, and collaboration is even harder. That's nothing to do with Canonical, and everything to do with life. In fact, in most of the pure-community projects I've watched and participated in, the biggest meme is 'if only we had someone that could do the heavy lifting.' Ubuntu has that in Canonical – and the combination of our joint efforts has become the most popular platform for Linux fans. If you've done what you want for Ubuntu, then move on. That's normal – there's no need to poison the well behind you just because you want to try something else. It's also the case that we've shifted gear to leadership rather than integration."
He also had an interesting comment about Ubuntu's target userbase: "I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say."
True (Score:4, Insightful)
"I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say."
They should all run plan-9 or Haiku
Re:True (Score:5, Informative)
Where is the "crowd" that he referred to? Who wants Linux to be "hard"?
Everyone I know wants Linux to "work". And to work "consistently" with an internal "logic".
Re:True (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not as bad as it used to be, but when I purchased redhat (back when one could go to the store and buy it), some random guy sneared and said "i wish people would use slackware, then you really have to know Linux"
I see here plenty of comments about this vs that leaning the same way.
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"i wish people would use slackware, then you really have to know Linux"
That's kind of funny. All my Slackware installs just seemed to work right out of the "box". My main problem with Linux in general is the lack of compatibility amongst distros. "Packages" are dumb. I like a distro that can take a program, binary (especially binary) or source, without any modifications, or RPMs, DEBs, or any other wrapper.
Of course the biggest problem still is licensing that hinders distribution rights. It's why dependency
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Exactly! My slackware installs are much *MUCH* easier than effing around with RedHat.
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I have been installing slackware since 1995 when you had to have 50 floppies. I never had issues. Then again, PCI have been around since the early 1990s.
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all distros can take a statically compiled package that don't rely on any assumption about the filesystem, I guess. They'd depend on kernel and installed modules only.
Start shipping those and see if people like it.
If not, try arch, which has the most lightweight wrappers.
Personally I think packaging the original source plus the diff (like .deb format does) is the best thing when your distro gets big. Arch begs to differ, but Arch is a german word for "didn't work with PCs long enough to really appreciate de
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I don't know - I am somewhat of the opinion that we're barking up the wrong tree with the FHS and DEB/RPM style packaging these days. Keeping everything and it's dependencies in nice discrete bundles seems somewhat more like what we should be aiming for, and then using copy-on-write semantics to keep space usage down.
Much easier for a user to conceptualize, and easier to virtualize and isolate as well - add some magic in an interface layer to let you upgrade groups of dependent libraries individually and we
Re:True (Score:5, Insightful)
I have seen this as well. It's not uncommon for someone coming from Windows to ask "What is a good Linux distro to learn on?". Some knucklehead will pipe up with Gentoo, LFS, or Slackware so that they "learn" linux.
Most new users have embraced Linux by starting with Ubuntu rather than getting frustrated and giving up like in the "good ol' days".
Re:True (Score:5, Insightful)
The rub comes in that Ubuntu is not necessarily a "fair" representation of what "the Linux" is, anymore than Android is.
I've seen many a person who has been using Ubuntu for a significant amount of time flounder when given another distro to work with: even Debian. There is a "*NIX way of doing things", and Ubuntu often deviates from that. Sometimes dangerously far.
And it can hurt the community. Many an Ubuntu user comes wandering in to the support forums for (insert FOSS project here) all confused, and it is difficult for the community to help them because between Debinization of the package and what Ubuntu does to the Debian package it's often hard to figure out where things have moved.
Ubuntu is walking a path away from what Linux (and other Unices) have been in the past towards something of their own design, often not asking what Linux people want. That's all fine and dandy, but for Shuttleworth to basically tell long-term users "we're gonna do what we want, go fuck yourself" is not right either. And that's basically what he's saying.
Re:True (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, consistency is important - a lesson Microsoft has also forgotten.
If I am to support users, I need to know that they can find programs and applications by following my instructions, and that it doesn't change for them depending on what they do.
And I don't want replacement apps for the standard apps, powercharged to do things badly - Unix and Linux follows a toolbox approach for good reason. If I need to calculate a value in a script, I expect bc to be present. Not having to pull up a fancy schmanzy calculator and manually feed in the numbers. By all means, give the user that too, but don't get rid of the baseline.
Re:True (Score:5, Informative)
I can guarantee such a mentality exists.
From http://dwm.suckless.org/ [suckless.org]
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yeah, but hardly a crowd. If I could invent a world, i would say that shuttleworth is strawmaning.
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Actually, it's popular enough that there are about a dozen or so spin-offs or ports of dwm.
http://dwm.suckless.org/patches/ [suckless.org]
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http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=dwm [debian.org]
0.64% of Debian users have this package installed, according to popcon.
Hardly a crowd.
Re:True (Score:5, Funny)
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Gentoo is by far the easiest Linux distro to use. I remember a discussion I had with a Windows user the other day:
"Windows is soo much easier and less complex than Linux"
My reply? "No, it just seems easier since you know nothing about it."
That is the real problem here, we confuse obfuscation of system functions with easy of use. As long as it work it works fine its easy to use but if something fails or you need to do something else then the majority of the user base, you are in a nonstandard undocumented ni
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I'd agree with this. Ease of use is more often than not a bad phrasing of "familiar to the user". Windows isn't easy to use. My parents can't use it any more than they can use linux. They could use WP 5.1 and DOS just fine, but back then my dad was writing a Phd and my mum was drafting municipal legislation, both of them using them the computer daily. Since then their computer usage has eased off to the point of just email and web browsing, and the odd letter. I could give them an XFCE desktop with firefox,
Windows is hard, indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
My Grandmother's hard drive died a few years ago and ... I got a cheap 1TB drive to replace it (nothing cheaper available really at the time) and of course the XP restore disk decided she was a filthy pirate and that was that.
After installing Debian and KDE for her, my support requests have become nil, except when any of my younger cousins visit and why does this flash game not work... because Adobe hates your freedom children, that's why. But my Grandmother just readers her email and plays KPatience and it Just Works (tm).
Re:True (Score:4, Funny)
Where is the "crowd" that he referred to? Who wants Linux to be "hard"?
You must be new around here. Welcome to Slashdot!
Re:True (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, the criticisms of Ubuntu are that they are largely fragmenting from the norm without a lot of coordination with community projects, not that they are making Linux 'too easy', that would be absurd. It is ironic, as one of the things I appreciated about it versus suse or fedora back in the day was how they made the most straightforward use of 'upstream' function whereas other distros added a lot of distro-specific fluff for management. I was out at Unity, and they continued on to Mir.
I will say that I am also disappointed at what the Linux desktop has been becoming. Ten years ago, Windows was an inscrutable mess of an OS under the covers. If you wanted to do nearly anything from a programming/scripting perspective in terms of managing the platform, you had to understand a ton of obscure stuff off of MSDN if it were possible at all. Linux was a lot more transparent and easy to understand how it worked at a glance. There were some limitations that were rough going from workstation/server to desktop/laptop market (e.g. making a wifi config without root privilege wasn't feasible, handling the acpi sleep button took some contortions, and controlling shutdown/restart similarly required explicit root authentication all the time).
Ten years later, MS has either replaced or hidden much of their overly complex stuff as they have advanced powershell (still a ways to go, and winmgmt is still a lot more fragile than it should be). Meanwhile, the typical Linux distro now has dconf, network manager, polkit, systemd, and worst of all dbus. Some more capability has come about, but it has become pretty inscrutable to the admins with a bourne shell scripting level of understanding. More advanced programmers appreciate some of the additional structure, but shell commands to script some capabilities are no longer easy (complex dbus-send commands, non-obvious configuration location and no longer human readable content) or impossible. The Linux desktop of today is growing a lot of the badness of the Windows desktop of a decade ago, and the Windows desktop is growing a lot of the goodness of the Linux desktop of a decade.
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And
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I don't think so. Right now, sure that's the alternative, but it needn't be that way.
See Emacs. You start off with tool bars and menus... maybe interacting with the graphical customize system to tweak a few things. But then you hit your first "I wish it...", something small. Next thing you know, the interface is peeled away; you check the help page for a similar command, see that you can visit the source there, realize the source is sensible and short, copy and paste and modify one or two things, and ... co
This is why I left Linux. (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux was always a system that required system-level tweaking in order to get and keep a system up and running. Defaults weren't particularly sensible for most use cases, drivers and components were unstable and needed to be replaced/reconfigured/updated/patched in order to achieve a stable, functioning work environment, and so on, and some things weren't "done yet"—drivers still under development years after hardware releases, and so on, with users waiting for them and needing to install/make use of them as soon as they were released.
That's just the nature of the beast when you're talking about a community-driven system with myriad code inputs that bases bunches of code on reverse-engineering.
But so long as Linux was reasonably transparent, anyone that valued free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech software could make the cost-benefit calculation that the amount of extra work and patience required to get and keep a system up and running was justified by the benefits involved.
Already by 2009, however, I felt as though the costs were growing while the benefits were the same as they had always been. An accelerating decrease in the transparency and modularity of desktop Linux distributions led the kinds of tweaking necessary to get and keep a linux system up and running to take longer and longer for me, and the continuous rush of new code and new subsystems that significantly different from the UNIX classics meant a corresponding increase in the need to continue to study and learn how these worked.
But my job wasn't and has never been Linux development, so this extra learning and work didn't contribute to my bottom line. It was just an increasing quantity of valuable time and energy being siphoned away from it, in fact.
There is still a market for a stable, easy-to-use, transparent Linux system with a smooth learning curve from easy-to-use/easy-to-learn through master-tasks/hard-to-learn, one that can open all of the documents, media, and network streams that mass market users need to be able to open and that is also free and open in all senses.
The problem isn't that Canonical is leading, it's the content of the leadership—both in terms of social/political issues, and in terms of the technical result, that aren't encouraging. Maybe one day someone will take up the mantle and finally deliver an easy-to-use, modular, transparent and powerful Linux system that's stable, has sensible defaults, and is both free and open. But to date nobody's come near the target, which is kind of a shame, because everyone's been able to see it for a decade, and it's often seemed as though "just a little bit of leadership" would get Linux there.
But I don't think Canonical is it; they're out to fulfill other goals/purposes, leaving that opportunity to continue to be open.
Re: (Score:3)
I think that your "huge proportion of the userbase" is actually "loudest proportion of the userbase". Linux is used widely in industry and that dwarfs individual use. Most of the kernel is maintained by people working for commercial companies, furthering that company's agenda.
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Ubuntu suffers from the longstanding practice of targeting the abstract group of "normals"
Quite true.
A wiser strategy would be a "just works" distro aimed specifically at power users.
We have them already, and they are among the oldest which exist: Debian and Slackware.
Linux on the desktop is good for people who know their way around, and people who have a very limited use spectrum (Mail/Web/Chat/Photos). For all others, Win/Mac is better suited.
Trying to make a desktop system for the consumer masses out of Linux has failed until now because of lack of support from hw and sw vendors. And with the rise of tablets, a general-purpose desktop os will probably be obsolete soon anyw
Re:True (Score:5, Insightful)
Every post Shuttleworth plays this "1337 crowd" card just to avoid actually discussing the issues.
The issues at hand this time were "Mir" and "the lack of descision power from the Ubuntu community". But he choose yet again to blame everything on the "1337 crowd".
Re:True (Score:5, Informative)
True? this is utter bullshit.
Or more speciffically, it's utter bullshit in the way that he's talking about.
Noone wants Linux to be hard.
The trouble is that he's focussing solely on a minority of desktop users, labelling their problems as more importand then dismissing everyone else as "leet" and saying they want it to be hard.
That is bullshit.
I don't want Linux to be hard. I want it to be easy. As easy as possible, in fact. This is why I'm in general getting rather leery of Ubunbu and have moved to Arch on a number of my systems.
Basically, ubuntu is so full of magic to make it "easy" that it's getting harder and harder to make it work the way I need to, and figure out what the hell is going on under the hood when something does go wrong.
Arch by comparison is much simpler, and much better documented. Therefore getting it to do interesting and useful things is often considerably easier than the same with Ubuntu. And if it's set up you can have all the user nicieies that one expects in a modern system (sane audio, 3D graphics, sane hot plugging, sane package management).
I mean sure, he can go nuts with ubuntu if he wants. It's his distro. Just don't expect me to help create a system I don't enjoy using and don't be surprised if people wanting control over their own system abandon it for an easier, simpler distro.
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You really need to remember that you are not Ubuntu's average target user. Metaphorically, you are complaining that the lemon you bought from the supermarket is too sour and not sweet enough. Maybe you should have bought some sugar.
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Linux is supposed to be hard (Score:5, Insightful)
I can leave my girlfriend at a Gnome 2 machine forever and not get any questions about how anything is supposed to work, because it's functionally very similar to Windows.
Put her in front of a machine running Unity and she's continually asking 'why is this doing this?', 'how do I do this?', 'where did that window go and how can I get it back?', and 'what is this crap anyway?'
So I would say that Canonical has gone out of its way to make Linux hard to use.
Re:Linux is supposed to be hard (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Linux is supposed to be hard (Score:5, Funny)
Obvious troll. We all know that you don't have a girlfriend.
He did until he left her at that Gnome 2 machine
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He did until he left her at that Gnome 2 machine
Doesn't Unity show JPGs? If so, I can understand why the nerds hate it.
Re:Linux is supposed to be hard (Score:4, Insightful)
Whoosh - missing the point (Score:2)
By even using Ubuntu, you are enabling the bad, increasingly draconian behaviour of Shuttleworth. The main freaking point of Linux was to no longer be dictated to by the powers on high - a point he is willfully dismissing in his pursuit of money.
Re:Linux is supposed to be hard (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't hate Unity. I think it's decent, just not good enough for me to recommend it to a newbie over XFCE, KDE, or Cinnamon.
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Agreed, I installed Ubuntu not so long ago on my XBMC PC... and when Unity popped up I was like "What on earth is this?!?" I couldn't figure out how to navigate it. I could have spent a while getting used to it, but why bother? I formatted and had another distro on the machine in less time than it would have taken me to learn Unity. I've no interest in using a Tablet UI on a desktop. There should be a pop up that asks "Is this a tablet? y/n" and be done with it.
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My wife actually prefers the Unity layout to the older Gnome 2 style. I actually asked her what her feeling was when I upgraded her laptop and she was faced with Unity where just a few hours earlier she had been using (for many months) the traditiional Gnome DE. She never complained after that.
For her, the layout and most specifically the "dock" on the left made more sense than a menu driven experience.
Personally, I hated Unity at first. But since they've fixed many of the worst bugs and I've learned my way
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I've switched to XFCE on my Ubuntu laptop, mostly because I don't want the hassle of moving to Mint yet. It's OK, but there are things I miss about Gnome 2.
Xfce rocks (Score:2)
I'll be back as an Ubuntu user when they have a reasonable UI again. Unfortunately I have one box xUbuntu won't install on, so I have to run Mint on it (that's my 2nd choice).
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I've got most of my machines running Ubuntu with the cinnamon repo and my wife's laptop running Mint. It's fantastic and I don't find myself missing gnome2 much. Takes a slight amount of readjustment and a bit of tweaking but it's not bad and I was die-hard gnome2 user. It's really worth the switch at this point.
Mark
Re: (Score:2)
He side-steps the issue, confronts a bigger one. (Score:5, Insightful)
This was the core of his rant:
He's side-stepping the issue in that the point is that Canonical wields more power than the average contributor, and thus is in more of an authoritarian relationship.
However, he's hit on a bigger point, which is that in any collaborative software project, someone needs to be the silverback who forces everyone else to focus, or people do only what they want to do and blow off the unfun stuff.
Unfortunately, unfun stuff includes refinements to code to make sure it works well, drivers, documentation, gnarly bug fixes, and the like.
Re:He side-steps the issue, confronts a bigger one (Score:4, Insightful)
The unfun stuff is the killer every time. Either you pay somebody to do that work, or it doesn't generally get done. I have used Ubuntu for several years now, and I have never seen the reason for the wrath some people have toward Unity. That said, there are a few glitches and odd functionalities that, were I a programmer, I would contribute fixes for. But I'm not. And the work required to correct these problems is certainly going to be time-consuming and tedious. Therefore, it probably won't get done.
In total, though, I'd still rather work on Ubuntu than Windows or Mac any day. Windows because it seems to be able to slow down the fastest machine in no time flat, and Mac because despite its reliability I don't like it and I can't change the things I don't like. With Ubuntu I (generally) can.
Re: (Score:2)
> I have used Ubuntu for several years now, and I have never seen the reason for the
> wrath some people have toward Unity.
It's funny - I went from Windows to Ubuntu and was happy until Unity came out (didn't work, everything was different and unintuitive, it wasn't anywhere near configurable enough - it was as if the developers didn't want me to configure it so there was One Experience for everyone). I moved to Mint (apparently I wasn't alone) and tried gnome 2,3, kde, lxfe and some other variations o
Re:He side-steps the issue, confronts a bigger one (Score:5, Interesting)
There is also a golden rule in life -- The one with the most gold makes the rules.
Seriously though, Canonical has more "skin in the game" than any other Ubuntu contributor and they are funding the lion's share of the expenses. You'd think this would be justification enough for them to "wield more power than the average contributor". Unlike other "authoritarian" regimes, you are free to leave and start your own fork without fear of being hunted down and shot. You can always go help Mint. I agree with Shuttleworth, if you don't like the conditions at Ubuntu then go somewhere else and try to be grown up and not poison the well when you leave.
I agree. I think Shuttleworth is just voicing his frustration with the very vocal few who dust up drama whenever they feel slighted like the recent announcement that Ubuntu Developer Summits will be held online and happen more frequently.
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There is also a golden rule in life -- The one with the most gold makes the rules.
That always true on community distros though. Influence is power in large community-based distros, moreso than money.
I agree. I think Shuttleworth is just voicing his frustration with the very vocal few who dust up drama whenever they feel slighted like the recent announcement that Ubuntu Developer Summits will be held online and happen more frequently.
This is the conflict. Shuttleworth has a lot of money, but there are others who have a lot of influence. Why is it OK to use money to hire developers to work on one set of priorities, but it is not OK to use influence to get a lot of other developers to work on a different set of priorities? The former just tends to be a lot less visible and doesn't involve making a stink on public lists.
Re:He side-steps the issue, confronts a bigger one (Score:5, Interesting)
The tedium is found in writing code multiple times for uncommon formats, CPUs and OSs, increasing code complexity (bugs), and knowing that it will probably be dead one day. Yes, competition and multiple standards is probably a good thing initially, and hardware is certainly changing and improving for a while, but when things finally settle down in a century or two (?), the real productive work will have just started.
Food for thought regarding standardization. (Score:4, Interesting)
I get dreamy thinking about this. It would simply everything. However, I have one thought of caution.
Standardization creates a single point of failure.
Allowing solutions to exist simultaneously, and develop independently, allows there to be no single point of failure and for multiple solutions to be tried at once.
I think there's a reason nature (insert name of deity or deities if you'd prefer; I'm agnosticism agnostic!) chose to go with natural selection. While less efficient on the surface, it works in every situation and eventually, produces a time-tested quality result.
Just food for thought, not a contrarian argument.
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Actually, the really big problem that he's ducking here is the question the complaining community developers may not have explicitly asked but were probably thinking, which is: "Is Mark Shuttleworth basically just treating us like free labor for Canonical? And if so, why are we bothering to help him?"
However, he's hit on a bigger point, which is that in any collaborative software project, someone needs to be the silverback who forces everyone else to focus, or people do only what they want to do and blow off the unfun stuff.
How that works in a lot of projects is the BDFL: Linus, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, etc. And that seems to work well enough, without being tied into a specific for-profit company's bottom line.
Re:He side-steps the issue, confronts a bigger one (Score:4, Insightful)
He's side-stepping the issue in that the point is that Canonical wields more power than the average contributor, and thus is in more of an authoritarian relationship.
Well duh, are you also going to complain that Red Hat calls most the shots for Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Unless things have changed radically while I wasn't paying attention, Ubuntu is still very much Canonical's product. Working with the community and being run by the community are two entirely different things and Canonical clearly isn't planning to let someone else tell them what to do. This is more of a wagon train, if you want to join up with Canonical because you're going in the same direction you can, but they still set the destination and if you don't like it, well maybe you shouldn't be in it instead of complaining that this not where you'd like to go. There's not really a shortage of other distros to work with if their goals are more similar to your own, is it?
Translation: It's mine, and you don't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
To an extent, I like the distro, but I've had similar complaints about how they have changed user level features in the past without offering any kind of migration path. Now it looks like the same mentality behind Canonical's management and release style has finally reached developers as well.
Well, it isn't the end of the world. There are plenty of other distros. I wouldn't be surprised to see most of the devs just go back to Debian.
Re:Translation: It's mine, and you don't matter (Score:5, Informative)
That is exactly what I did. It's the same thing, less the fluff, less the drama and less the commercial interest.
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It's what I did too. Debian and XFCE4 on my daughter's laptop. I'll be doing the same thing on my own laptop the next time it gets a re-install or upgrade. I've got a few work machines that'll probably go over to Debian as well.
Remember... (Score:2, Insightful)
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too bad it's true (Score:3, Insightful)
He also had an interesting comment about Ubuntu's target userbase: "I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say."
Too bad that's the opinion of way too many people on too many Linux forums. In fact, that attitude launched Linux. It wasn't about total computer cost or features. It was about "I'm better than you" and they shut out all the other problems Linux had to pretend it's an ideal OS instead of addressing them to make it more user-friendly.
Re:too bad it's true (Score:5, Insightful)
This post makes you sound like a dumb person with a massive chip on your shoulder.
In fact, that attitude launched Linux.... It was about "I'm better than you"
No, the attitide that launched Linux was: I'm writing a kernel for fun and I want to share it with you.
The fact that this has transformed in your warped little brain to other people trying to make themselves look better than you has become a self fulfilling prophecy. They gave away cool stuff for free and you complain aabout it. Now, they do look much better than you.
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That is a problem, but I don't think Shuttleworth is the cure. Superficial complexity is to a large part just that, a thin skin on top of a mass of the same complexity. You can take away all the screensaver options you'd like but it doesn't make it simpler when people have hardware that doesn't work right or upgrades that has regressions or the desktop is messed up or applications that crash or don't work right. Every time I've had to fix things with command line-fu it's because things don't work as they ou
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I agree that there are elitists who join Linux forums, but this is no different than any other OS or pretty much anything else.
I disagree that this elitist attitude launched Li
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DIfferent parts of linux started out with different implications. The kernel started out as a hobby, and out of a desire to enable other hobbyist. Apache started out from a desire to provide a framework for collaboration, to support a particularly piece of software. GNU started out with a very definite attitude. Ubuntu started out with a mass market, consumer appeal agenda. RedHat, started off with a business focus.
Of course, because many users are technical, there is an ability to cope with technical probl
The man is 100% right (Score:4, Insightful)
At some point someone has to say that "I can't run this ship by consensus". Now that everyone and their dog have access to the internet it is very visible that whenever something changes, there are people who voice their disagreement with the new thing; and if there's no change, then people will vote with their feet and say that they will choose the most innovative product/company/project.
What is regrettable with all this is that whenever there's news from Ubuntu, there's no shortage of people saying that they moved away to Mint or whatever. If that is the case, why comment Ubuntu stories at all?
Red herring (Score:5, Insightful)
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. Both Fedora and OpenSUSE installs with relative ease these days.
I don't know about Fedora (not a user), but OpenSUSE has had an utterly super-simple and super-smooth install for several years, now. I think you have the best chance of installing (Open)SUSE on a problematic system, than any other Linux distro.
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Re:Red herring (Score:4, Interesting)
If You Don't Like Ubuntu Use Something Else (Score:5, Insightful)
At the end of the day it's his company and if he wants to take Ubuntu in his/their own direction that's up to them.
I used Ubuntu for many years and was really happy with it. I moved on since then and use another distro.
Ubuntu has done a lot of great work for the Linux community and also got a few things wrong (in my humble opinion).
There is no reason to hate them for it. People make the opinions known and it's up to Conanical to take these opinions on board or not.
There is so much choice out there for Linux and if you don't agree with Ubuntu's direction use something else. Ubunutu is open-source so you can roll your own version or use a derivative.
But really all the hate for Ubuntu and Shuttleworth is childish.
Freedom as in speech not beer.
Ok but (Score:2)
"He also had an interesting comment about Ubuntu's target userbase: "I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say."
I'm cool with that, as long as it's not used as an excuse to block me from doing what I want to do. Don't take the Apple approach to dumbing tech down please.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a philosophical question (Score:2)
I guess I hoped Ubuntu would succeed because it was good Free Software not in spite of it. It seems like Ubuntu is cooling off on some of the values that make free software great including openness (secret Mir developments), collaboration (going their own way on new infrastructure), respect for privacy (Amazon Dash) etc.
I wish the Ubuntu guys would stop trying to be another Apple, and instead focus on what they and the community can offer than Apple never could.
On the subject does can anyone make a suggesti
!Hypocrisy! (Score:4, Insightful)
upstart, now unity, now mir.
Ubuntu is at the forefront of non-standard projects that fracture the GNU/Linux community, with software that generally sucks btw.
Mir has yet to be seen but going by upstart and unity, I don't have much hope.
No, I don't want linux to be exlcusive for experts only, I want it to be easy to use, and I want it to use compatible software as everyone else, so what runs on ubuntu runs on red hat, runs on arch, so we have a shared knowledge base.
This was a reality since glibc became ABI stable.
wanting to be different (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's why he keeps breaking long-established UI convention and keeps reinventing the wheel in any shape but round?
"Wanting to be different" is what is destroying Ubuntu.
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Shuttleworth isn't very imaginative... (Score:2)
I can think of lots of dumber things a smart person could say.
The Shuttleworth Plantation (Score:2)
--An LMDE convert
Kubuntu LTS and Server LTS (Score:2)
I have been a user of Ubuntu for many years. Since 2005 or so.
All these debates about Ubuntu, Shuttleworth and Unity do not affect me in the least.
Why?
Because I use KDE Ubuntu (Kubuntu), not Gnome/Unity at all. I also stay with the latest LTS and not upgrade to the twice annual releases.
The same goes for servers. I use Ubuntu Server LTS, which has a longer support cycle of 5 years vs. 3 years for the desktop.
Not affected by any of those ongoing debates or controversies ...
Re:Somebody needs to remind him (Score:4, Insightful)
It is a false choice to say that pandering to mercantile interests will always go against the FOSS/Server interests. They often can align. Plus, Linux has succeeded despite its desktop and difficulty to install, not because of it. Shuttleworth isn't advocating putting trusted computing in the hands of MS, he just is saying things should be easier on the desktop. And why the hell not?
Z
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I definitively agree. Canonical is taking a leadership role and there's nothing wrong with that. It often easy for a few developers to say "hey, let's implement a FOSS version of c#, Java, Windows, SMB, etc." Sure people want these but at the same time, where is our new desktop paradigm, our more efficient file sharing protocol? MIR is an example of getting out of this pattern where we simply FOSS things but actually show some innovation. Obviously there is innovation in the FOSS arena but it need to be mo
Re:Somebody needs to remind him (Score:5, Interesting)
He try to frame things in a binary fashion. Either you want to have easy stuff on the desktop and then you should not criticize him, or if you are against him, then are against having stuff for everybody. That's just a rhetorical tactic.
In practice, the issue is not that Ubuntu make things easy, because that's a good things to do, it is that Canonical is not respecting the community and do not discuss, because they think time to market ( or cadence, as they explain ) is more important. That's ok to believe that, but you have to be clear. removal of UDS 3 months before without discussing first, lack of respect for those that have bought plan ticket, and took care of accomodation. Not caring about community rules ( ie pushing changes after freeze ), that's the same, not caring about respecting rules for community. Using the Ubuntu name becuase they own the trademark. Not respecting the rules that community should follow.
Of course, Mark never say he is treating people unequally. Or never even try to defend that, he prefer to attack stawman, like the minority of people who think "ubuntu should be kept for elite". I never seen people like this, at most, I have seen people that complain we removed what they used, which is not exactly the same. So yeah, infuriating opponents by using lame tactics is the way he react to that. He did like this for the Amazon issue, he did that for Unity, etc.
The only thing I can say is that he is being too emotional about the project, thus making everybody realize this is *his* pet project, not the one of everybody.
Re:Somebody needs to remind him (Score:4, Insightful)
It's more than a rhetorical tactic. It's an intellectual fail that was inherited from the GNOME project. The fail goes like this: "We must have a good default UI. Instead of giving advanced users the ability to tweak that interface via an 'Advanced' button, let us just take away their ability to tweak. Because noobs are so noobish they will click on Advanced, screw things up, and then complain to us."
False and Wrong, idiots. And a big fail. There is plenty of software (especially a lot of Apple software, which I hear is quite popular), with preference dialogs that have "Advanced..." buttons, and guess what, noone on the forums is complaining of stuff that was misconfigured. (They are complaining of actual Apple fails, but that is another story).
That one epic fail---that one decision that you can't have both a simple UI, and a button somewhere in the preferences that caters to your advanced users, is the root of all the backlash against GNOME and Ubuntu. Your hubris is costing you dearly.
Put an effing advanced button on all your preferences. And no, gconf-editor or dconf-editor or any of that garbage doesn't cut it. It needs to be COMPREHENSIBLE to be useful.
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http://xkcd.com/1172/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Somebody needs to remind him (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sad to agree with you.
Mark calls anybody who disagrees with his vision (which was never entirely presented to the public, but is instead rolled out in "surprises" like Ubuntu phone and then tablet) a "whiner." Anyone who criticizes a decision is being "selfish" and "childish." (These are all words he uses in interviews, blogs and bug comments on Launchpad.) But you are very right that he is setting up a straw man. Sure, there are a few childish whiners, but a large group of people criticizing the directions of Ubuntu are people heavily invested in free software, and they have an interest in seeing Ubuntu succeed. These critiques are not "selfish," they are all about trying to make Ubuntu succeed.
But Mark avoids any kind of discussion by pretending that he's dealing with "dumb" people.
Mark, it's not a black-and-white world.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Well it's a good thing that IBM, Red Hat, and Microsoft (you know, the people who write so much of the kernel thee days) have no mercantilist interests, then.
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'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say.
He's right, you know,
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say.
He's right, you know,
Yes, he is. Only he's NOT, because the whole argument is a straw man. I haven't *ever* heard or read someone in the community say anything remotely similar. Except as an straw man, you know.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say.
He's right, you know,
Yes, he is. Only he's NOT, because the whole argument is a straw man. I haven't *ever* heard or read someone in the community say anything remotely similar. Except as an straw man, you know.
No, of course nobody says it. They DO, however, imply it heavily, and that's what's being heard. Every time a user interface improvement gets shot down in discussion because it's "not important" or "not worth our time testing", every time documentation gets put off because it's boring, every time a new user is treated condescendingly because they couldn't decipher poorly-written incomplete documentation (or are told to read source code), every Debian user (it's always the Debian users) grumbling over some
Re:Somebody needs to remind him (Score:5, Funny)
I was reading that as a shot to everyone who hates Unity.
You know, Everyone.
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Linux desktop is dead I repeat. LINUX DESKTOP IS DEAD.
After 20 fucking years. First time in my life, I did not try to replace my failed desktop. Just looking around to find way to install a linux distro to my new deadly cheap chinese knock off tablet.
Attach a keyboard and mouse.
Volia.
So what you're saying is you installed a full Linux distro - ie a desktop distribution - on a tablet. And you're saying it's dead? Riiiight...
Re:No one care anymore (Score:4, Funny)
Shut up Hairyfeet, we know it is you hiding behind that bad English.
Re: (Score:2)
I find it hilarious that he states he has zero interest in just being different.
Yet they continue to do stupid shit like whatever that UI was they slapped on top of Gnome 3, or Wayland, or... whatever the next one is (I can't recall exactly)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because Unity's license forces contributors to give their copyright over to Canonical, which is the only reason it exists.
Here's a fun exercise: Go to the Ubuntu website and try to find the word Linux anywhere on the front page. It's as if they're trying to hide the fact that they're a distribution of Linux all of a sudden, as if they want to sell themselves as Ubuntu the -platform- (for tablets and phones) rather than Ubuntu the distribution. And there's no room for freedom on a tablet or a phone.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Because Unity's license forces contributors to give their copyright over to Canonical, which is the only reason it exists.
That's an outright lie, plain and simple. Look up the Canonical Contributor License Agreement and then promptly eat your hat.
What you're saying is a prime example of poisoning the well, or, at least, an irresponsible level of applied ignorance.
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That's because Debian can be either Linux, FreeBSD, and I believe Hurd.
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I have just had someone bring his netbook to me because he was using gnome-shell, and he (or his kids or cat) had accidentally clicked the button that changes the UI back to Unity, and was unable to use the machine.
The administrator needs to be able to totally de-install Unity Kde and Xfce can sit there, and if accidentally started, do no harm. Unity renders the machine unusable by the unsuspe
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"The Linux community is full of egotistical dickheads that like to control the product and then work it when the move on. Mark Shuttleworth is a perfect example of this type of characters."