Canonical's Troubles With the Free Software Community 155
puddingebola (2036796) writes "Bruce Byfield looks back at the soured relationships between Canonical and the free software community. Partly analysis, partly a review of past conflicts, the writer touches on Mir and Wayland, and what he sees as Canonical's attempts to take over projects. From the article, 'However, despite these other concerns, probably the most important single reason for the reservations about Ubuntu is its frequent attempts to assume the leadership of free software — a position that no one has ever filled, and that no one particularly wants to see filled. In its first few years, Ubuntu's influence was mostly by example. However, by 2008, Shuttleworth was promoting the idea that major projects should coordinate their release schedules. That idea was received without enthusiasm. However, it is worth noting that some of those who opposed it, like Aaron Seigo, have re-emerged as critics of Mir — another indication that personal differences are as important as the issues under discussion.'"
Infighting: Linux's biggest weakness (Score:4, Insightful)
The second any one party becomes big enough, or popular enough, to start making meaningful changes in the way Linux is implemented in their distributions, the knives come out.
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That's why I still laugh every time I hear someone predicting "This is Linux's year!" For that to even have a chance of coming true, there would first have to *BE* a "Linux OS." If you put 10 random Linux fans in a room with a ticking time-bomb set for an hour, they would spend 1 minute agreeing that something needed to be done, and the next 59 minutes arguing over 200 proposed competing solutions.
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I have used it on the desktop for 15+ years, it works like a charm for my uses. then everyone else can fight over which distro is "best" or that it is not ready to for the desktop. i will just go on using it on my desktop.
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linux has already had its "Year" its called android.
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Re:Infighting: Linux's biggest weakness (Score:4, Insightful)
That is the beauty of Linux. It'll never be mainstream and I'm okay with that.
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Where did you pull that shit up from? I think red hat is a huge linux company, and i don't see any knives against them. Also IBM, where are the knives? The only knives against canonical is because their own fucking up and acting like they don't need to care and not contributing, and it's not the kind of knife you are thinking of.
Leadership is both good and bad (Score:1)
People don't like/want leaders. Think about presidential candidates: as soon as one stops talking about how he'll competently adminstrate, and starts going on about leadership, you start thinking, "oh well, I sure ain't gonna vote for that one." What people want, is for others to get the fuck out of the way and stop putting up obstacles. And while most leadership isn't about really creating obstacles, if you have any ideas of your own, someone else's leadership is usually going to look like that.
Sure, yo
Strength is weakness (Score:1)
Yes, damn Canonical for not toeing the party line as set forth by the self-appointed central committee of the supreme soviet who decide what The Software should be. The whole gang of miscreants should be banished to the gulag until reeducated properly to the free market, that is to say the market fee of competitive ideas. Only then will the One True Way be realized. Until then, they are stealing bread from the mouths of our software children.
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Not that being Apple has done that much good for their computing platform. They are still the same marginal also-ran that they have been since before Linux ever started.
With $160 billion in the bank. And growing about $1B/week.
I think they're ok with you calling them an also-ran.
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It's not about money! It's about Freedom.
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PS. it is NOT in any US bank, or they would have to pay taxes on it. Its all offshore benefiting whom?
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So, you are saying you are proud to overpay for products that allow apple to have that money?
Well when the choice is a free product vs an (subjectively) overpriced product and the latter is more popular then clearly they are doing something right. I'm sure many would like to believe that what they are doing right is all just marketing so they can stick their collective head in the sand and pretend Linux is perfect and it's everybody who doesn't use it that is the problem and that's fine if you want to be ignorant.
The reality is that it is not just marketing, that the Mac really *is* a really good p
Re:Infighting: Linux's biggest weakness (Score:5, Informative)
That, and the collective mentality of open source is not unlike a bunch of cats which have no desire to be herded by anybody who claims to be in charge.
People work on projects they like, for their own reasons. Not to make something which benefits Canonical.
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which is fine when you're a cat, but when you're a group of supposed computer experts who think the world should be a better place and want to improve upon the old, it's not fine, it's a complete waste of energy and the top #1 reason why linux only makes steps forward when somebody steps forward to take that charge, e.g. Linus, Google (with android), Nvidia, ATI, the wayland team
can you remember how bad the linux desktop was before ubuntu? it was atrocious....what about before x.org?
the list is probably end
Re:Infighting: Linux's biggest weakness (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you forgetting that Linus created Linux? He didn't step forward to take charge. You can't even include him in that list.
When I started using Linux (0.99a Kernel, Slackware on a million floppy disks), the X interface (and OS) was several years ahead of anything Microsoft produced. And I still consider fvwm to be one of my favorite desktop environments of all time, because it was lean, and worked quite well.
I finished university using that machine, and having learned UNIX and C on it, it got me my first job.
You know what I think are terrible desktops? The new stuff which looks like a dumbed down Windows from 10 years ago.
Well, you've made a point. I don't find it nearly as compelling as you do.
Is open source fragmented and beset with infighting? Sure it is. Has it created really cool stuff despite that? Yup. Has it needed someone to be in charge of it (especially when that someone is a for-profit entity)? Nope. Is this likely to change? Doubtful.
Re:Infighting: Linux's biggest weakness (Score:5, Insightful)
The Linux kernel was nothing special. Seriously. There were many such hobby projects at the time, and it wasn't a particularly great one. The success of Linux was the success of Linus as "the guy in charge" of an open source project. It grew and flourished because of leadership, not (early) technological advantage.
The open source community certainly needs more such strong leaders. What it doesn't need is CEO-style wankers. Any sort of "business leader" needs to find a new space. What's lacking are engineering leaders, who have a strong and consistent vision of what say, the desktop, should be that resonates with contributors, and who has the political savvy to lead. You can't boss around an open source project based on any granted authority, but you can lead and inspire people to follow. That means you have to appeal to the people who'd likely do the work, not follow some business plan to grow the customer base.
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The Linux kernel was nothing special. Seriously. There were many such hobby projects at the time, and it wasn't a particularly great one. The success of Linux was the success of Linus as "the guy in charge" of an open source project. It grew and flourished because of leadership, not (early) technological advantage.
I hear you say it but my impression is that Linus personally wrote a lot of the critical code in early Linux. To use a car analogy, it's a whole lot easier to get people to work on fenders and windshield wipers if you know the engine is developed by someone with real drive so you won't end up with all the accessories (GNU utils) with no engine (HURD). It's easy to sit at the top and say this is the direction we're going and by we I mean you because by myself it's not moving at all, compared to actually taki
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Yes: part of being an engineering leader is building credibility with the engineers. No one can force them to listen to you (this is true for closed-source jobs as well), but demonstrate that you know what you're doing and they will. The code Linus wrote established his creds, gave coders a reason to follow him early on. Later of course (for most of the life of Linux thus far) it was his demonstrated skill at running the project.
Re:Infighting: Linux's biggest weakness (Score:5, Informative)
The Linux kernel was nothing special. Seriously. There were many such hobby projects at the time, and it wasn't a particularly great one.
What? That's news to me. I was on comp.os.minix when Linus announced it, and downloaded version 0.11 (but I don't think I ran it until 0.12).
The only other UNIX-like OS at the time IMHO was Minix, but due to Tannenbaums resistance to "complicating" Minix into something that used the full capabilities of the 386 (i.e. the MMU etc.) Linux took off like a rocket. (There was even a patch set adding i386 capabilities to Minux, but it had to be distributed as a patch set, Tannenbaum wouldn't let it be integrated into Minix proper.
So, sure, 0.10, 0.11 and 0.12 weren't even complete but it only took on the order of weeks before Minix was left in the dust feature wise, and the rest as they say, is history. Remember that while 0.10 etc. may have lacked an init, it ran almost everything else, in particular they could self host gcc, i.e. they could compile gcc, which was no mean feat. (And something that Minix couldn't, though my memory is vague on that point).
So what were these other systems that were so much more sophisticated? You aren't thinking about the various i386 BSD-variants that sought to bring BSD to the masses? They weren't really "hobby projects", the legal ramifications weren't at all clear, so their development was severely hampered, and the people had this stick up their collective asses about what hardware was good enough to be worthy of support. Which lead to the consequence that you couldn't actually run your BSD-of-the-month on hardware you had. Linux was above all a much more pragmatic affair. If the hardware was in widespread use, it usually got support quite quickly, no matter how much of an ugly cluge it was deemed to be. But of course some of them were fairly feature complete, since they were original UNIX, source code and all. (And also slower on i386, but that's another story.)
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Oh, I was thinking of the BSD jazz. I may also be overestimating how good Minix was back then (if you're right about not being self-gcc yet!).
The main advantage Linux had was that Linus didn't turn up his nose at the hardware people actually had and wanted to use - he was a smart "product manager" from the start.
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Yes, indeed. We're in violent agreement. That probably had something to do with him being just as poor a student as the rest of us. He had to make it work with the hardware he could afford. :-)
Re:Infighting: Linux's biggest weakness (Score:5, Insightful)
can you remember how bad the linux desktop was before ubuntu? it was atrocious....what about before x.org?
I'm afraid some of us think the ubuntu desktop was and is atrocious.
Re:Infighting: Linux's biggest weakness (Score:5, Insightful)
Last year, the Mac took 45% of all profits in the PC market and earnt an average 19% operating margin on its Mac sales.
In comparison, it was 4% for Dell and less than that for HP, Lenovo, and Acer.
Pretty good for a "marginal also-ran" if you ask me.
source [asymco.com]
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I've noticed a number of Mac computers running Windows 7 lately. It's kind of disturbing.....like seeing a Chevy engine in a Ford Mustang. Just wrong.
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I've noticed a number of Mac computers running Windows 7 lately. It's kind of disturbing.....like seeing a Chevy engine in a Ford Mustang. Just wrong.
Why? The hardware is good and has the ability to dual boot so that you can have all of your OS X and Windows applications on the same machine.
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About the time Boot Camp came out, people (IIRC including PC World) were calling it the nicest Windows computer anywhere.
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Or that some of the other manufacturers are cutting their production costs to the point that the product is starting to suffer and they are losing customers because of it.
There's no fixed cost for the production of a computer. Quality of components, design, materials, etc can be varied over a very large range and the quality of the final product is dependent on these inputs. Apple is certainly getting quite the profit margin, but I've used many computers over the years and their products fare very well in f
Re:Infighting: Linux's biggest weakness (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet more people use apple for desktop computing than all linux combined. Stop with the hater bullshit. Linux has a long way to go for even OSX level of adoption on the desktop. I LOVE linux, but I cant use it because 90% of the apps I need are not on it nor have any real viable replacements.
Example: video editing suites. NOTHING useable on linux compared to Final Cut X, AVID, or Sony Vegas. NOTHING on linux even close to After Effects.
Nothing in linux even close to Lightroom.
I want them to exist, but they dont.
Hell even for business, NOTHING on linux even close to a real business accounting package. etc...
every year I try to use linux in one way or another, and every year I have to go back to Windows or OSX because it just is not there yet.
I WANT to use linux, sadly all the linux people are busy screwing around with bullshit like Desktop UI changes and doing nothing to make the platform useable for the masses.
Linux weakness (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting point on lack of business and video suites buy why blame Linux for that. When vendors look to port their apps, Windows and Mac are considered, forget Linux. For crying out loud, ever tried to use a web app like Netflix! Supported by everything but Linux. Many vendors are scared to death of Linux and open source with other vendors pushing FUD so nothing gets done. Find a way to overcome all the "haters" and may have something.
As for replacements, I agree. For personal use, other than Netflix an
Re:Infighting: Linux's biggest weakness (Score:5, Insightful)
The apps don't materialize because serious app developers (instead of the system tinkerers in FOSS who like to imagine themselves as good apps developers) with passion and committment to their ideas try out "Linux" and experience the following:
1. Scant control of hardware features (even getting the screen to turn off can be a challenge) and the controls that exist suck, because the proper level of vertical integration isn't there.
2. Myriad desktop environments and administration applets that make the thought of guiding users through tech support a nightmare. This is the most obvious reason why "Linux" is not a desktop platform, because most non-techie users of said distros wouldn't even be able to recognize most other distros (or the same distro with a different DE).
3. Myriad combinations of support libraries; even the common ones are bundled together with versions of each other that create a unique and unsupportable platform 'landscape' for each distro.
4. Distro culture itself: 'Thou art a creepy skank if you sell apps and/or offer direct downloads of a product.' Invoking Yum and Apt are almost like genuflecting before entering a pew. Only its a cult, not a religion, because strong dynamic relationships with people outside the repository are frowned upon.
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Here's a thought experiment:
Imagine you're a 7th grader who has become intrigued by computers. If that kid tries programming on "Linux" and creates her first couple of apps using whatever tools and libraries she can grasp at the start-- then what will happen??
1. She becomes a web developer. OK, fine... but don't expect desktop apps from her. In fact, don't even expect "Linux" to enter her mind when she thinks of users.
2. She gains a yen for all the *nix plumbing and becomes a system-level tinkerer, writing
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NOTHING on linux even close to a real business accounting package
Try Moneydance, which is close to QuickBooks for a small business, depending on your needs:
http://moneydance.com/ [moneydance.com]
In my limited experience it's well-designed, well-supported, and geek-friendly [infinitekind.com] (extensible with Python, open API, etc.). It appears to be multi-user but I've never tried that feature.
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Android carries with it expensive patents, I think this is why chrome os exists.
Given the cost of a Windows license I hardly think the patent cost of Android is prohibitive.
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They may not officially coordinate (Score:1)
but from what I can tell, the Ubuntu style release schedule took off over-all.
And as long as things are consistent, it will have the effect Ubuntu wanted (or close too it, they basically wanted upstream to release 4 months before them, so they could integrate if memory serves).
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yeah.
Ubuntu started projects used to get adopted, as time went on, they went more off the walls, and their projects became tainted.
The Mir thing is really upsetting to me as a user, because Wayland has demonstrated the ability to take feedback and adapt, making the whole split seem like lies.
Wayland really seems like a smartly run project handled very well, that seems to be a huge mistake.
Even if in principal I like the idea of Android drivers working, I think Wayland has been working on that too though.
Ups
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Ubuntu is switching to systemd:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316
Lets hope they'll eventually switch to Wayland, too.
Unfortunately it also remains true that Ubuntu is the most usable Linux distro out there for the "I'm not afraid of computers, but also don't have the time to learn Linux, I just need a working environment and the ability to quickly google stuff" crowd.
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And Unity isn't terrible, as long as they keep things easily replaceable (by using Wayland etc. under it), they have real potential I think.
What they are doing with phone has real promise too. They really need to work within the system though. KDE is working on similar things with Plasma (netbook, vs desktop, vs active), it'd be great if at least some of the work between the two is sharable. Not just great, but part of the platonic idea of FOSS.
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In my limited poking at Linux Mint, it seemed as usable as Ubuntu.
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Even if in principal I like the idea of Android drivers working, I think Wayland has been working on that too though.
The library supporting Android drivers, libhybris, does not come from Canonical. It was developed by a Jolla employee, and is already in use in the Wayland powered Jolla phone. Canonical just gave the impression that they were the ones creating it -- one more reason for the current bad blood in the community, I guess.
For a short history of the library, check http://mer-project.blogspot.fi/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-android-gpu-drivers.html.
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I did state take credit for "ideas", "even falsely".
I thought the wayland/android thing was a response to Mir though. And that part of the reason Mir came to be was to use Android driver.
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No. The idea was to make things easier for upstream. If every distro pulling in for example VLC at the same time, VLC would have less of a problem coordinating all the issues. Problem is everyone is so blinded by their canonical hate that they don't see these good ideas that they come out with.
Sadly for Canonical... (Score:3, Insightful)
... they and Shuttleworth disappeared up their own backsides in a blinding flash of self importance and inability to listen to users (Unity - the OSS version of Windows 8 Metro, need I say more). I'm afraid their We Know Best doesn't tend to adhere them to many people and I suspect they've now peaked in terms of their importance in the free software world and will slowly fade away as the years go by.
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That and once they decided to monetize our search results and share it with Amazon ... well, I'll never have an Ubuntu installation again.
My perception of Canonical is now "greedy assholes who don't care about user's privacy"
Re:Sadly for Canonical... (Score:5, Insightful)
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They should do it because they like to code and produce something. When they start thinking about profit, they become control freaks.
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Yea! Like GNU Hurd!
What version are they on again?
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Canonical also dump buckets of money into a lot of things that are either of no interest to me (Ubuntuphones) or actively putting me off Ubuntu (divergence away from mainstream Debian and linux in general because of NIH syndrome). Covering such losses with cheap tricks like feeding Amazon search (yes, I know I can turn it off) just makes them even more unappealing.
If Canonical stopped tilting at windmills for five minutes and invested their money in finding ways to sell more real services, they'd probably b
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yeah, fuck them for not wanting to be in the red in perpetuity. They apparently care about user privacy enough to anonymize the data and allow to opt out entirely.
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Yup the Facebook of Linux distros. The worst thing is when you are wiping all your friends and families Ubuntu and putting on Mint instead, you get the groans "I have to learn a new desktop AGAIN?". It was an uphill battle shifting people from Windows to Unity. Having to shift people between distros makes it look pretty unstable and fragmented.
On the plus side, nothing like an impending reformat to remind people to back up their data!
Phillip.
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That and once they decided to monetize our search results and share it with Amazon ... well, I'll never have an Ubuntu installation again.
How is it different from Google?
My perception of Canonical is now "greedy assholes who don't care about user's privacy"
But it's open source, it's free software. If there's one little element there that you don't like then just turn it off, change it. That's the whole point of free software!
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You're wrong. I like unity and I'm glad as a ubuntu user that they developed it. It disgusts me how many self claimed free software users get angry when someone wants to go off and make something different.
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endear: cause to be loved or liked.
Re:Sadly for Canonical... (Score:5, Insightful)
... they and Shuttleworth disappeared up their own backsides in a blinding flash of self importance and inability to listen to users (Unity - the OSS version of Windows 8 Metro, need I say more). I'm afraid their We Know Best doesn't tend to adhere them to many people and
The same load of BS is repeated over and over again. That doesn't make it true.
Unlike Metro:
1. Unity actually provides some benefits. Like for example full screen zoom on smaller laptop screens.
2. It breaks much less of UI conventions.
3. You can actually replace Unity with something else within minutes. (Or you can even install the Ubuntu edition without it.)
First two are also applicable to GNOME3 v. Unity comparison.
I suspect they've now peaked in terms of their importance in the free software world and will slowly fade away as the years go by.
Yeah. Ubuntu is going to be replaced by Mint. Oh wait, Mint *is* an Ubuntu-based distro.
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Yeah, this is basically how I feel. I use Ubuntu with XFCE. I don't even have Unity installed so it doesn't bother me any. The main reason I use Ubuntu is that I can easily find answers with a quick Google search when I run into problems. I just don't have time to spend hours dealing with minor driver issues or finding out why my OS isn't playing nice. As much as the idealistic "fragmentation leads to competition which leads to more and better options" sounds nice, I think it's good that Ubuntu provides a m
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Maybe CentOS will succeed in getting the community behind it while simultaneously extending Linux's popularity beyond its current niche, but I fear that if Red Hat succeeds in making CentOS more popular and accessible then the community will just turn on them the minute they try something new.
That has already happened - with the Red Hat Linux 8 & 9, the predecessor of Fedora.
I was there and the results were not pretty. I mean: it looked very very pretty, but the rest of it was turning ugly very often.
Red Hat is too much of a mindless corporation to deliver any innovation. (On desktop one needs to tell users what to do - RH fails at that. Mindlessness works on server side, because there customers are engineers and can tell you what they need.)
Canonical's problem is that they overplay a
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1. Unity actually provides some benefits. Like for example full screen zoom on smaller laptop screens.
The start screen provides benefits as well. Larger shortcuts allow for information to be displayed (live tiles) which means I don't have to open some applications to get the information I need. The ability to customize the layout via drag and drop is a vast improvement over the start menu. The ability to deep pin shortcuts is another big advantage as well (i.e. I can pin shortcuts to websites, or shortcuts to albums that I frequently listen to). Also the start screen and all my preferences sync across all m
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1. Unity actually provides some benefits. Like for example full screen zoom on smaller laptop screens.
LOL! full screen zoom! such advanced technology! its only been there in windows and linux for ~15 years.
2. It breaks much less of UI conventions.
no it doesn't. it breaks everything. at least windows has the decency of letting users switch between the desktop and metro.
3. You can actually replace Unity with something else within minutes. (Or you can even install the Ubuntu edition without it.)
forgive me if i don't want a neglected product without any sort of support. and the easily replaceable part is moot, that is a property of linux. if canonical thought they could get away with it, they would have locked that down too.
Oh wait, Mint *is* an Ubuntu-based distro.
yeah, one that cares for and upholds the principles
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Stop using phrases ".. replace with something else". XXX is alright, because you can replace it by YYY. Something default is not optional, it is the DEFAULT. Here, have this ton of spam; no problem, you can opt out right?
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When compared to the Windows' Metro, which you can only try to avoid, yes, this is definitely a feature.
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Availability of alternative shells doesn't suddenly convert back all Metro applications into native Windows applications.
All they do is replace/bring back the start menu, so you see less of the Metro. But it is still there. You still can accidentally invoke it.
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Availability of alternative shells doesn't suddenly convert back all Metro applications into native Windows applications.
Of course not, it's a shell. What metro applications do you love so much that you need converted to Windows applications?
All they do is replace/bring back the start menu, so you see less of the Metro.
Litestep?
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Litestep?
Wow. That brings memories. One of the few things which helped to use the WinNT 4.0 on 16MB RAM.
Have they finally fixes the tray? It was mostly broken why in the end I had to go back to the default shell (explorer.exe) instead.
Re:Sadly for Canonical... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup. I suspect Canonical is going to continue down a path towards irrelevancy. They've got a solid userbase and a pretty good lead for now, which means it's not going to happen soon, but I can't see anything but a decline in the future for them.
I'm seeing a lot of parallels with Cyanogen Inc, the company that was formed by some of the CyanogenMod leads. They're delusionally self-important and consistently speaking things in direct conflict with their actions ("Everything you see now will remain open-source" at the same time they're trying to force a contributor to dual-license a major GPL work so they could have commercial rights to it. Fortunately their CLA wasn't as powerful as Canonical's). I suspect they're going to wind up going down the same road as Canonical.
Cyngn is doing EVERYTHING in nearly the exact same way Canonical has - and seems oblivious to the fact that Canonical has been doing a good job of alienating all of their potential partners and many of their contributors. Canonical should serve as a shining example of how NOT to monetize open source software in a sustainable fashion (especially by coopting existing projects), yet certain people feel that Canonical's example is the best one to follow.
Re:Sadly for Canonical... (Score:5, Interesting)
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No, there are at least 6 others, and that is not counting the ones who are drawing a paycheck from canonical.
"Ubuntu is the distro that got me to switch from Win 7 to Linux (still have to keep Win 7 around for one or two things though). I really don't understand all the hate other than the stupid Amazon search lens thing (which I disabled). My best guess is that it might be because I'm a new convert to Linux rather than a long time user."
Yes, that's likely to have a lot t
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Nope. I hated it at first, and held off really using it until 12.04. But it has steady improved and as I've got used to it I've come to like (most of) it.
I'm not emotionally invested in it though - every now and again I'll think I need to switch to something else and I'll go back to Debian with some other desktop, but the others just seem less polished and I end up back on Unity again.
It's not just me either - recent Ubuntu releases have meant the small software company I w
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I really like it too, but obviously not enough to post "OMG I LOVE UNITY AND PONIES" every time this discussion comes up. Dislike of the status quo/a future direction is more motivating to make people speak up.
But yeah, I've been using it since the netbook remix days, in which it was a godsend for my eee pc (clawing back my 7" screen, 24 pixels at a time). Until the end of last year I was primarily a mac user though; Apple's direction post 10.6 combined with unity's superior experience (tiling, super-A for
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It's always seemed to me (since they started pushing Unity, anyway) that Canonical is mainly concerned with pushing their own in-house software out as open source. It's like they want to point everywhere and say, "See, RedHat uses an init system we created, a display server we wrote, and a desktop environment we built. We ARE the Open Source Desktop."
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Not really a problem (Score:1)
As long as they don't push changes just for the sake of pushing them...
systemd. That is all that needs to be said. (Score:1)
Unfortunately it has spread to other distros.
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yea the problem it solved is ensuring there will exist continued access to udev and udisks which are a hard dependency a long way up the stack now. The systemd folks are doing everything they can to make sure the udev and udisks projects end up having systemd as a dependency.
So in short no I guess nobody held a gun to any other distro maintainers heads and forced them to package systemd but its been made abundantly clear that not doing so means they will have to devote enormous resources to maintaining com
Bazaar anybody? (Score:1)
Once dubbed the official version control system of GNU (partly because of Git's GPLv2-only licensing and stuff), it's been sunk into oblivion, mostly by Canonical pulling off their own workers and nobody wanting to fill the void given Canonical's assignment policies and contracts (in contrast, the FSF at least gives guarantees regarding free-only use in return for an assignment).
Now even Emacs, once the poster child for Bazaar, is organizing its transition to Git.
Open Source Is About Decentralization (Score:5, Insightful)
'... probably the most important single reason for the reservations about Ubuntu is its frequent attempts to assume the leadership of free software ... [S]ome of those who opposed it, like Aaron Seigo, have re-emerged as critics of Mir â" another indication that personal differences are as important as the issues under discussion.'
Seeing the same critics reappear does not necessarily mean it is a personal difference. It really only indicates that the underlying disagreement remains. Mark Shuttleworth believes in centralization of authority, Open Source is implicitly about decentralization of authority. That is a difference with Mark Shuttleworth's world view; as long as he holds it, and particularly when he tries to be the central authority, he will not fit in the Open Source world. That is not personal in the sense of holding a grudge, but it won't change unless Mark genuinely embraces the decentralized nature of this method of software development.
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What is the purpose of benevolent dictators for life then? (Torvalds/Stallman/ blender/drupal/mullenweg etc.)
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I was actually hopeful when Shuttleworth first got into the OS business he would provide a much needed benevolent-dictator function in exactly this way. And he's tried to. But I am afraid they have bungled it so badly and often his credibility is shot.
What's he actually produced? A distro with advertising, and a UI even more broken than is typical.
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What is the purpose of benevolent dictators for life then? (Torvalds/Stallman/ blender/drupal/mullenweg etc.)
To continue to curate the projects and organizations they founded, for as long as the community continues to trust them to do so. Sort of like Shuttleworth directing his distro, if his position were dependent on grassroots support instead of a corporate charter.
As a KDE user... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Its sad that these days it is easier to theme Windows than it is Linux. It's also sad after so many years of mocking Windows users for their unstable desktop experience that we're now stuck with Unity, GNOME 3 and KDE 4 which are less stable than Windows ME. It's like Linux on the desktop is going backwards instead of forwards. I have all my hopes on Wayland but if I don't see major improvement in Linux desktop distro's within the next year I'm just going to give up and move to FreeBSD for servers and Mac O
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KDE4, in the latest releases, become stable and fast, but this was what we got on KDE3 years ago...
So, basically, now each 2 years, we have the same cycle where Linux desktops starts a migration to a
As the Sun sets (Score:2)
Re:As the Sun sets (Score:4, Interesting)
LMDE (Score:3)
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Not likely. You can already see most people moving to Arch, Gentoo or one of the RPM based distros in greater numbers. Linux Mint is just a slightly less ugly Ubuntu and the Debian edition doesn't offer any compelling benefits over the Ubuntu edition for end users. I'm sorry to say but apt/dpkg really haven't aged well and are replaced nicely by yum/pacman and other tools.
walked away from 'buntu (Score:1)
proprietary firmware (Score:1)
Weasel words (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't like software form Canonical? Don't use it. They're a commercial company, so they have to break even ultimately. I understand if, after listening to everyone, they make their own decision. Their Mir project is all about Ubuntu phones: should that platform be successful, they'll take the merit, should they fail, the Free Software Community will still have Android as their reference platform. Even if Google is a commercial company, too, and compared to them Canonical is Candy Candy.
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What is this Ubuntu package format you speak of? dpkg, apt and the like are all Debian. Ubuntu is just a Debian variant run by a megalomaniac.
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I see no problem with this. You had to deal with it when people only released software for Windows. How is this any different?
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Apparently you dont know what a windows
However it is different, because Windows has never really been a platform that claimed to respect user freedom.