Canonical Founder Criticizes Free Software Developers Who 'Hate On Whatever's Mainstream' (google.com) 374
Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth said Saturday that "I came to be disgusted with the hate" on Canonical's display server Mir, saying it "changed my opinion of the free software community." After announcing his company was abandoning Unity for GNOME, Shuttleworth posted a gracious thank-you note to the Unity community Friday on Google Plus. But on Saturday, he added a sharper comment:
"I used to think that it was a privilege to serve people who also loved the idea of service, but now I think many members of the free software community are just deeply anti-social types who love to hate on whatever is mainstream. When Windows was mainstream they hated on it. Rationally, Windows does many things well and deserves respect for those. And when Canonical went mainstream, it became the focus of irrational hatred too. The very same muppets would write about how terrible it was that IOS/Android had no competition and then how terrible it was that Canonical was investing in (free software!) compositing and convergence. Fuck that shit."
The comment begins by saying "The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind - it's free software that does something invisible really well. It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control, where being on one side or the other was a sign of tribal allegiance. We have a problem in the community when people choose to hate free software instead of loving that someone cares enough to take their life's work and make it freely available."
The comment begins by saying "The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind - it's free software that does something invisible really well. It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control, where being on one side or the other was a sign of tribal allegiance. We have a problem in the community when people choose to hate free software instead of loving that someone cares enough to take their life's work and make it freely available."
Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting it took him this long to figure out that its common human nature to find a scapegoat and kick it endlessly.
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Interesting it took him this long to figure out that its common human nature to find a scapegoat and kick it endlessly.
Also cynicism lets people that have done nothing feel superior to people actually accomplishing stuff.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
How about extended frustration can really fuck up people's sense of humour. Computer geeks use computers a lot, so frustrations with regard to usability or changing stuff and repeated day after day, all day long. For computer geeks that means months of no longer just focusing on what you are doing with computers but focusing on how you are doing it, why it isn't working, what you have to change, constantly undoing errors, disruption of thought processes, constant grinding frustration and aggravation. Now that is when you decide to make the choice to switch, Having used computer for decades I have done it many, many times with many applications and it never ever gets less annoying but I can tell you, when it is forced upon, wow, that frustration and anger causes you to make even more mistakes, more errors, more disruptions and really does piss you off.
No keep in mind, this is not in isolation but across hardware, applications, operating systems, every corporation seemingly fucking with you. Seriously, why the fuck do you think they would ever be happy with that, just why the fuck do you think that is acceptable. When you make the change it is annoying but not that bad, your choice, when you force it on others, kaboom and not just once but many, many times.
I am surprised some of them don't get violent, so many unsympathetic people in corporations floating around who just ignore the impact of forced changes upon people who do not want them, repeated changes, again and again and again and again and again (now if I wrote that down a thousands times and you were forced to read it every single time and not just once but say a hundred times, how would you feel?).
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When exactly did Canonical go "mainstream"? As in, even today, you ask pretty much anybody not actively developing software who and/or what "Canonical" is in relation to computing, you will get "Never heard of it".
Re:And also... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see it that way. Look at the hits GIMP takes. Look at the hits Python and Perl take. I'm not talking about technical objections; I'm talking about just general hits.
There is some basis for some of the technical hits - for instance, Perl legitimately takes some flack for opposed opinions on its typical readability, and Python legitimately takes some flack for opposed opinions on whitespace. But both take hits as if using them would be the freaking end of the world, and it tends to be way over the top. GIMP is an awesome bit of software. The anti-GIMP diatribes are amazing to read. Etc.
I really do think that people just like to find something they think they have an adequate excuse to kick, and then spend lots and lots of time kicking. It's some kind of perverse instance of self-validation or something.
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I don't see it that way. Look at the hits GIMP takes. Look at the hits Python and Perl take. I'm not talking about technical objections; I'm talking about just general hits.
There is some basis for some of the technical hits - for instance, Perl legitimately takes some flack for opposed opinions on its typical readability, and Python legitimately takes some flack for opposed opinions on whitespace. But both take hits as if using them would be the freaking end of the world, and it tends to be way over the top. GIMP is an awesome bit of software. The anti-GIMP diatribes are amazing to read. Etc.
I really do think that people just like to find something they think they have an adequate excuse to kick, and then spend lots and lots of time kicking. It's some kind of perverse instance of self-validation or something.
While you may be correct with those examples, Shuttleworth just comes of as bitter that his pet NIH project failed.
After all, Mir is not, and never was, mainstream.
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GIMP criticism is different to some of the other projects. GIMP is trying to make an artists tool and the problem is unless they completely rip off Photoshop's interface they will always face criticism for not being photoshop. Art tools are like religions.
The funny thing with GIMP is not only did they target it as a Photoshop replacement, they targeted it only as a professional tool, and get annoyed when "casual" users are using it. Look on their forum [archive.org] where they get annoyed at users for getting annoyed at their fucked up save menu. Of course much like their application where they fuck things up for no apparent reason, their forum is now fucked up, so I had to resort to archive.org.
It's too bad Paint.NET isn't available as a cross platform free tool. Much mo
GIMP=cripple. Shuttleworth's inability w. conflict (Score:2)
GIMP has a long history of being limited by its name. A "gimp" is a physically disabled person. If they wanted to be more extreme, they could have named the program "Lung cancer".
Mark Shuttleworth and
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In real production code you pretty much have to check the type "manually" of every argument to every function. And document the type in the comments. This is much more work that just using a strongly typed language in the first place. Python's a fine scripting language, a tier above the likes of Perl and PHP. But it's not for real code.
Never understood the Ubuntu hate... (Score:3)
Never understood the Ubuntu hate,
particularly for Mir.
Just seemed to be a lot of idiots jumping on the bandwagon.
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
The best reason anyone could come up with was (para-phrasing) "it'll mean closed-source graphics drivers will have to support 2 display servers, and they may not want to do that"
Re:Never understood the Ubuntu hate... (Score:4, Informative)
If memory serves, the initial attitude towards Ubuntu was positive. It was an easy to install and use distro for non-systems type users and newbs. I think the hatred set in when they adopted Gnome 3, and later, systemd.
Re:Never understood the Ubuntu hate... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly the kind of idiotic comment I'm talking about.
So there's just as much hate for Fedora is there? Both OS's use Gnome 3 & Systemd....
Re:Never understood the Ubuntu hate... (Score:5, Insightful)
RH has had its detractors for years, way back to the 90s, so no, it's not just Canonical/Unbuntu or Gnome 3 and systemd. The Gnome project itself is also no stranger to criticism. Distro choice has always been a divisive subject for a variety of reasons, mostly boiling down to technology decisions and the commercial/political aspirations of the vendor.
The "you're just a hater" excuse is a fallacy that shuts down discussion. It's used by those who don't want to address the criticisms made.
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What? Err, FYI, Red Hat was very much behind GNOME 3 and systemd (and PulseAudio and Avahi). Lennart Poettering works for Red Hat.
Ubuntu and all the others are just falling in line behind the Red Hat mafia.
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That's right. I never disputed this.
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Ubuntu and all the others are just falling in line behind the Red Hat mafia.
Here is another example of “Hate on whatever's mainstream”, in this case, Red Hat. Why the hate?
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I know you are but what am I?
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Re: Never understood the Ubuntu hate... (Score:2, Interesting)
My pet hate is for amy application that needlessly seems to have to have a connection to the Internet or set up its own servers and connect to other websites.
Does a programming IDE really *have to* keep all manuals online and require to be connected to the vendors server to send back telemetry?
Does a web browser really need to have a SSDP server and send out multicasts to 239.255.255.250. Who does it hope to connect to? Does a web browser really need to pre-connect to Facebook, Amazon and Google?
Re: Never understood the Ubuntu hate... (Score:4, Interesting)
The ones that really irritate are the downloader installer stubs. I run a whitelisted firewall and it's a royal pain to get those working without disabling the firewall. There's absolutely no need for this. Just give me the full install!
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On occasion I found it useful as there's some networked software where it's pointless not to run the latest version and the stub installer is good for this.
Debian and ubuntu even have it for the whole operating system! The "downloader installer stub" (net install) for debian and ubuntu can use a http proxy, incidentally.
Sometimes the problem if you want the full installer is to find the download link. If not available at all, that sucks.
Ubuntu is the worst at allowing you to find the downloads on their damn
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> systemd
They deserved all of the hate for forcing that on us. I maintain about 60 developer workstations, and it's an absolute pain troubleshooting with systemd since it so often swallows log messages. Problems that should take seconds to fix can take hours because often things just aren't logged. Often we have to resort to using strace and read through thousands or millions of lines of crap to find the error message.
Re:Never understood the Ubuntu hate... (Score:5, Informative)
Upstart and traditional SysVinit pretty much ignored output; if your script didn't send things to syslog or custom logs, then it went nowhere. Pretty much the first thing I noticed about systemd was how much less-frequently I had to modify init scripts to figure out what was wrong.
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If memory serves, the initial attitude towards Ubuntu was positive. It was an easy to install and use distro for non-systems type users and newbs. I think the hatred set in when they adopted Gnome 3, and later, systemd.
Actually, I believe it began with Unity. That was when Canonical began pushing unripe features faster than they themselves could manage them, and the number of downstream bugs gave rise to what Shuttleworth calls the 'hate'. It wasn't hate. It was a bunch of us who just got tired of being rejected out of hand [imagicity.com], and who couldn't get mission-critical bugs fixed through normal channels:
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The very same muppets would write about how terrible it was that IOS/Android had no competition
Mir is running on Ubuntu touch, which is one of the few viable open source mobile operating system alternatives to Android. It seems we should be embracing Mir for that.
I do hate how long it's taken Mir and Wayland to come to the desktop. From my experience, they aren't very stable.
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No it isn't (viable). Ubuntu has given up on it.
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I would blame the fate of webOS more on disastrous leadership than technology. Apotheker was sacked one month after he canned the phone business.
(p.s. HP are now selling WP 10 handsets)
Re:Never understood the Ubuntu hate... (Score:5, Insightful)
I liked ubuntu. I didn't like unity, but only because it was terrible as opposed to any specific political reason.
Mir on the other hand... Mir is not mainstream, it's not even out yet, so you can't lump the hate for Mir in with the hate for Windows. It's different.
The big problem is fragmentation and duplication of work. We all pretty much want the same thing, a free and open desktop operating system we can use day to day. We have this ancient X windowing system that should have been replaced a decade ago that has been standard on pretty much every Linux desktop ever, and instead of everyone working on a solution together, we have, again, different camps creating different solutions.
The problem is this task is so monumental it's taking years to develop, and on top of that it's fragmenting the developer base which not only causes it to take even longer, but support for any of the solutions to be slower.
Why isn't linux on the desktop? Fragmentation. Mir only adds to that problem.
Re: Never understood the Ubuntu hate... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a double edged sword. Windows is so popular because there is only one current version of Windows and everyone knows it and all Windows applications work on it. If you want to develop for Windows there's no guesswork, and the design decisions you make aren't going to split your potential userbase.
If you want to run a Linux application you have to make sure it'll work on your distro, then hope your distro has a package for it or else shit gets fucked up, then make sure it works with your desktop environment, etc. As a developer you have to make design decisions that will split your userbase. Do you support systemd? What distributions do you target? Do you use GTK? QT? Plasma? GNOME? And which version? All of these will split your potential userbase, and now Canonical wants to add Mir to the mix?
This is why Linux on the Desktop will never reach critical mass. It's about the car interior and we're all busy reinventing hundreds of sets of wheels.
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That's absolute bullshit.
Windows is where it is because of pure inertia. Only one current version? Please, people are still using XP, and I bet there are still people still on Windows 98 out there. And everyone knows it? Please. jumping from one version of Windows to another is as jarring as jumping from one version of Linux to another; maybe worse. Just behold the absolute dogs dinner they made of the control panel, going from XP to Vista.
Also, pitting GTK against QT is a false choice. BOTH are guaranteed
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Everyone should use Ford.
There is far too much fragmentation in the car industry. Its even worse than it looks with European cars, because not only can you get several models of German car, you can get British an Italian cars, and you can buy them in a whole range of colours too!
The car intustry is totally fucked.
BUT
You NEVER wake up and find some arsehole has taken you car and converted it to right-hand-drive when you too it in for the 6,000 mile service.
That is what Unity did to us.
I dont hate Unity (a
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There shouldn't be a winner. If things are designed correctly (i.e. not by a nazi shitcock) you should be able to install whichever one you want - even if it came last - without having to transplant one of your kidneys.
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Mir took forever. It over-promised not only delivery schedule, but what it could do, and why. Like Unity, it was perceived as fixing something that wasn't (too) broke, and was more for the glorification of Shutlleworth's ego than a cogent method of ridding ourselves of the trappings of X.
Now that the reality sets in that Ubuntu can't be all things to all people, and Canonical's reality check suffers the scrapes of having hitting the wall hard, it's ok to dust off, and go where reality might actually work. T
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Embrace the hate... (Score:2)
Umm No (Score:5, Insightful)
Wayland was the "main stream" (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does Canonical hate the main stream, and tend to roll their own instead? Wayland, Unity, Upstart ...
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Wayland is on its way to being mainstream. Canonical switched to developing their alternative, Mir, after initially supporting Wayland. Unity was Canonical's alternative to the more mainstream GNOME 3. Canonical just announced they'll be moving from Unity to GNOME 3. BTW, the Ubuntu GNOME [ubuntugnome.org] is how I've been installing Ubuntu for quite a few years since I never cared for Unity. Upstart was a project that started at Canonical and became mainstream for several years. Even Red Hat used upstart until they replace
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Canonical didn't suddenly do anything, they assessed the state and progress of Wayland and decided that if they wanted something done they had to do so themselves. Maybe that assessment was wrong.
Mir was announced in March 2013 (https://compute-fra.ec2.amazon.com/embassy/inspect)
In November 2013, Jolla shipped it's first hardware [wikipedia.org], running Wayland [wikipedia.org].
Three is no question that the assessment is wrong, there was no question in March 2013 that the assessment was wrong, and within 8 months there was proof, yet Ubuntu wasted the next 3+ years investing in Mir when they could instead have helped get Wayland onto desktops sooner.
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Mir was announced in March 2013 [engadget.com]
Amazingly Still Doesn't Get It (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think he recognizes the issue people had - when Canonical became successful they began acting like they were the 800-lb gorilla in the room and that they could do whatever they wanted and everyone else would fall into line. Classic not invented here syndrome, then expecting others to write & maintain support for Canonical's custom software.
Sending user searches to Amazon doesn't help either - the Linux community is much more privacy minded then the general community using public.
Re:Amazingly Still Doesn't Get It (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think he recognizes the issue people had - when Canonical became successful they began acting like they were the 800-lb gorilla in the room and that they could do whatever they wanted and everyone else would fall into line. Classic not invented here syndrome, then expecting others to write & maintain support for Canonical's custom software.
Sending user searches to Amazon doesn't help either - the Linux community is much more privacy minded then the general community using public.
This. There are tons of distros out there, and I don't have problem with people using any of them. What I have problem with is Canonical's attempts to force everyone to Ubuntu and their way of doing things by doing their own versions of already established projects. This way they can lock people in.
Its the same kind of crap that Microsoft and Apple (now with Metal) pull. The only difference is that Mark *thinks* that Canonical is an 800-lb gorilla and when people see through his BS, he throws a tantrum and blames it on the community.
Don't believe me? Read about how Canonical screws the community here:
https://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/ubuntu-not-invented-here-syndrome
Also, read about the crap that Canonical/Mark tried to pull:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/canonical-abused-trademark-law-to-target-a-site-critical-of-ubuntu-privacy/
https://www.wired.com/2013/11/fixubuntu/
The problem is that Ubuntu/Canonical have fanboys just like Apple. These fanboys will keep preaching about it, no mater how badly they keep getting screwed. Its puzzling really.
In reality, if Cannonical/Ubuntu died off, everyone would be better off.
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O RLY? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which one do you mean?
* Pulse Audio?
* Systemd?
* Unity/Gnome 3/KDE 4?
* Windows 8/10?
It's not that people hate something that's mainstream. The problem is that mainstream is often a polished turd which companies or alternatively gifted individuals try to sell you as something which is better and novel, while being in an order of magnitude less usable and having tons of bugs.
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... mainstream is often a polished turd which companies or alternatively gifted individuals try to sell you as something which is better and novel, while being in an order of magnitude less usable and having tons of bugs.
More or less anything can be described this way. Sometimes it's more fair, sometimes less.
Comments like yours are well-described by Mark Shuttleworth. You show much hostility to alternate options or choices. WTF business is it of yours whether others choose differently than you?
For example, yeah, Windows sucks. It's also an easy solution to problems. Easy solutions to problems mean fewer problems, which doesn't suck. So people use Windows and get on with their lives where they focus on something that
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Haters going to hate.
Yeah. They should get told to stop it every time. Some will listen and stop. Society will be better (or less bad).
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Which one do you mean?
* Pulse Audio? * Systemd? * Unity/Gnome 3/KDE 4? * Windows 8/10?
It's not that people hate something that's mainstream. The problem is that mainstream is often a polished turd which companies or alternatively gifted individuals try to sell you as something which is better and novel, while being in an order of magnitude less usable and having tons of bugs.
I think this is exactly the kind of comment that Shuttleworth was talking about.
Let me put it this way: if this software is such an obvious 'polished turd', why haven't *you* coded up a replacement? If it's that easy to enumerate the things they did wrong, why isn't it easy for you to just do it the right way without bugs? (Please don't take this personally, I'm using the universal 'you' for all people reading this)
PulseAudio is not perfect, but it is improving, and is itself a big improvement on older soun
Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me put it this way: if this software is such an obvious 'polished turd', why haven't *you* coded up a replacement?
And that shows the second aspect of the issue nicely: The assholes that come along with the polished turd. You are too dumb to understand, but I will repeat it anyways: There is no need to a replacement. What was there before already works nicely.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Interesting)
> Systemd is not perfect but it is a huge improvement
> on the old script init that couldn't handle modern
> features like hotplugging devices and sleep mode.
Yes, because I'm going to hot plug anything besides a keyboard & monitor on a crash cart into a (hardware) Linux box, or put an EC2 instance into sleep mode.
Half the problem with people "hating the mainstream" is that half-baked tools that don't fit the use case are being forced on us. Systemd may ultimately be perfectly cromulent on a consumer desktop focused Linux like Ubuntu or Mint... though I would still argue that it was rolled out there well before it was ready for prime time. But the majority of Linux systems out there are not consumer desktops, are they? And it has no goddamned business at all in a datacenter distro like RHEL, CentOS, or (upstream) Debian. It breaks modularity, tries to do too many things in one service, needs to be updated & rebooted too often, tells us to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" in too many places, and is difficult to troubleshoot when things go wrong, not least because it also forces journald and its binary logs onto us.
I'm not religiously attached to SysV init scripts by any means. But systemd was not the right replacement for them. It wasn't ready for production when it was launched. And the only reason it's even tolerable now is because the "new way" of doing things is to not try to fix a system that's gone wobbly; but to just unceremoniously kill the instance and launch a replacement. (And even there... you'll note that Amazon has not drank the systemd Kool-aid. Their own (Red Hat based) distro is still happily using init and syslog.)
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This has my vote as the stupidest rhetorical meme since Robinson Crusoe converts mute, g-string Friday to Christian buttlerhood.
The answer, my friend, is not enough Fridays.
Or Saturdays. Or Sundays & holidays.
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Systemd is not perfect but it is a huge improvement on the old script init that couldn't handle modern features like hotplugging devices and sleep mode
Bullshit. Previously my laptop was fine. Now it has an apparently undebuggable systemd related problem which so far no one has been able to help me with. After a shortish amount of time unplugged from power, systemd does a clean shutdown.
That is seriously not what I want what with the battery being OK for few hours not 20 minutes. There's no apparent reason
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"Let me put it this way: if this software is such an obvious 'polished turd', why haven't *you* coded up a replacement?"
systemd *is* the replacement. And all these years later, I still without any hesitation prefer the thing it replaced...which I still use.
You prefer Upstart [ubuntu.com]? That's what systemd replaced on both Red Hat distributions and Ubuntu.
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PulseAudio is not perfect, but it is improving, and is itself a big improvement on older sounds systems that often didn't work at all for many setups. Systemd is not perfect but it is a huge improvement on the old script init that couldn't handle modern features like hotplugging devices and sleep mode.
How is my FreeBSD desktop handling all those 'modern features' without PA or systemd?
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's part of the problem. ALSA has advanced enough that the best way to improve sound handling is to uninstall Pulseaudio. Why polish a turd when there's a perfectly good toilet handy? I thought GNOME2 was quite adequate, but switched to XFCE4 when they totally screwed it up. Udev was handling hotplug just fine without systemd butting in. Suspend works fine with init scripts.
Too many confuse "different" with improved. To really be an improvement, it must either do something useful that the old way couldn't do (or be made to do), or it must do it much more elegantly than the old way could.
So I'll turn it around, why are we beset with these re-invented wheels when they could have made a few tweaks to get the old system to do what they wanted?
If you want the new shiny to be embraced, just offer it up. Don't yank away what was working nad cram it down people's throats. People don't like things being crammed down their throats. If it doesn't catch on and you really want it to, ask yourself and others why? What feature got dropped that turned out to be more important to more people than you thought?
Consider, Xorg took over XFree overnight. It did so because it did everything XFree did but configuring it sucked a lot less. It didn't tell people who were happy the way things worked now that they were wrong and would have to do it differently now. Nobody complained about udev. Nobody got all that upset when sendmail was demoted to alternate.
So why can't Wayland get a foothold? Because they not only refused to promise any sort of support for display over the network, but actually denied that X could do it. (I understand that's been/being addressed now).
Why do people hate on systemd rather than addressing it's issues? Because their bug reports get marked wontfix and notabug. What's the point of submitting a patch if it's already been made clear it will be rejected?
So why not Mir? The correct question is "why Mir?". We've seen claims about things it will one day bring to the party but they aren't yet evident. And now, the other fear is playing out, too likely to be abandoned.
Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Why haven't you done it" is the most idiotic open source response in the world designed to put people in their place as though somehow a person who can't write software (or doesn't have time) doesn't deserve an opinion.
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And that is exactly it. In many cases "mainstream" equals "really bad". Ubuntu in particular tries really hard to follow that principle.
Personally, my Linux runs fvwm (and has done so for now almost 30 years, without much change), no systemd or other Poettering crapware. A desktop is not a "lifestyle-enhancer", it is a tool. Once it is configured nicely, you leave it as it is.
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Removing underlined Gtk3 letters was the one stupid ass thing. Can't they have a system wide setting so they can hide them on their Gnome or other 3D desktop and look good in their marketing screenshots, but leave them for users of traditionals GTK2/GTK3/Qt etc. desktops?
Other than that, GTK3 still works fine for normal looking, normal working software, usually to the point of not noticing whether your app runs GTK2 or GTK3. I like it, and dislike Qt4/Qt5 instead (for no particular reason).
I love my FOSS JMRI. (Score:4, Interesting)
direction (Score:3, Insightful)
What seems to not be able to enter his thick.. opinions, is that Ubuntu diverged sufficiently from what people loved.
The UI seems to be promoted by whoever couldn't get a job with apple.
The controversial systemD was pushed in although Ubuntu isn't red hat nor uses it the same way.
Mir was the 'yeah devs want to refactor to Wayland, but WE can do it better".
On a on a on.
In retrospect, I have no clue how Mr shuttleworth acquired his wealth (nor can be arsed to Google it), but with Ubuntu, some things from that character are reflected in the failed direction: delusion, inability to scope, inability to judge the market userbase, insensitive to the development culture.
Etc etc.
Of course he isn't seeing this as a failure on his end, but instead : entire *communities* are wrong.
Typical psychopath.
Relevance? (Score:2)
I think I speak for the vast majority of open source developers and users when I say 'what is a Mir'?
While I'm sure whatever project it was was important to Mr. Shuttleworth - I don't think it every had awareness outside of a tiny circle of people, let alone is a source of significant hate, criticism, etc. from open source users and developers.
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I think I speak for the vast majority of open source developers and users when I say 'what is a Mir'?
A former Russian space station that was de-orbited in the late '90s.
Bitching about free software (Score:3)
Unity is not mainstream (Score:2)
The Year of the Linux Desktop (Score:3, Insightful)
"I used to think that it was a privilege to serve people who also loved the idea of service, but now I think many members of the free software community are just deeply anti-social types who love to hate on whatever is mainstream."
Mr. Shuttleworth has exactly identified why it will NEVER be the "Year of the Linux Desktop".
Big donors versus small? (Score:5, Insightful)
Summarizing today's news story, wealthy and somewhat benevolent Mark Shuttlesworth doesn't appreciate some of the criticism his projects have received, notwithstanding his mixed generosity. I say mixed because part of the plan was to make money, too (though I think he's donated way more money than he's earned on this Ubuntu thing). His real unhappiness is probably that he feels his generosity is insufficiently appreciated.
I actually agree with Mr Shuttlesworth that much of the criticism was unjustified, but I have two responses: (1) Some of the criticism was merited and (2) What else could they contribute?
Response (1) is about the biggest problem with the big donor model of charity (even if Ubuntu has some non-charitable aspects). Sometimes the big donor makes a mistake. In general the big donors don't just throw in the big money and go away. You can say it's a matter of trust or accountability or whatever, but they stay involved. In the specific case of Ubuntu, the development priorities have sometimes gone a bit astray. Obviously the shell kerfuffles are examples, but the low priority on Japanese language support has actually been the main recommendation barrier in my case. I'd like to encourage people to adopt Ubuntu, but (after using the OS for many years (probably since Dapper Drake in 2006)) I still can't.
Response (2) is really about frustration. At least I don't see what other alternative most of the potential users of Ubuntu have. Some of the top programmers presumably have Mr Shuttlesworth's ear and can influence things, but most of us are on the outside. Way on the outside. I actually think that many of the problems with Ubuntu are ultimately due to programmer-driven decisions. Good programmers want to do fancy things. They want to push the envelope and develop fancy features for fancy hardware. Or maybe it's just my problem that I have other things to do with my time or that I'm too cheap to buy new computers fast enough?
I need to disclaim that I feel some frustration and disappointment with Ubuntu, too. I had hopes that it would become a dominant desktop OS, but it never did. It's not like there weren't major opportunities. For example that Vista fiasco. It's just that Ubuntu never filled any of the big vacuums. However, I mostly didn't care that much, so I never even investigated the details. I just observed the results.
(By the way, I do think there is at least one possible solution. Are you brave enough to ask me about the Charity Share Brokerage for small donors? Hint: Kickstarter and Indiegogo aren't there yet, but maybe that idea could be fixed...)
Anyway, things sometimes turn out for the better, at least when the term is long enough. Turns out the desktop OS doesn't matter that much anymore. Maybe Linux won out after all, but via the backdoor leading to Android smartphones? Still a bit of the big donor problem, but at least the google seems more competent than evil. For now. I recommend Dogfight on the smartphone war, but maybe you have a good book to recommend? (Yeah, I'm sure there are some interesting blogs and webpages, too, but mostly I find them as half-baked as this selfsame noddie.)
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Not Re:Big donors versus small? (Score:2)
Wow, I'm dazzled by your mind reading capabilities. Not to be compared with your screen reading skills. Perhaps you should reread what I actually wrote and clarify how your response is related to my actual words rather than what you think you read directly out of my mind? It's not that I mind going there (though at this point I'd mostly have to guess where you think you're going), but mostly a lack of justification.
Right now I mostly regard your reply as an example of having nothing to say, but insisting on
Thank you (Score:2)
Thank you Mark, fellow South African
some people (Score:2)
The mainstream is usually crap (Score:2)
This guy seems to be unaware of that little fact. Ubuntu is a pretty good example for it though.
Something other than hate ... (Score:2)
I agree that there are some folks who hate anything mainstream. But seriously, there are some rationale to be negative about Mir. Don't want to beat a dead horse, but there's absolutely no reason but "not invented here" syndrome for the existence of Mir in the first place. Fortunately, it seems like for the cases like this natural selection works quite well. OpenOffice isn't quite dead yet, but it surely smells funny. Xemacs, RIP. My gut feeling is that Mir may end up exactly like those two. I'm sure there
meanstream (Score:2)
As Shuttleworth would have it:
* mainstream, n.
A technology so rooted in public acceptance that it's no longer necessary to communicate up front with the users who will most suffer from the upcoming change cycle.
I didn't leave Ubuntu because of Unity.
I left Ubuntu because no transition plan was put forward to aid me in riding out the early adoption cycle from a safe remove whereby I retained the full use of my extra monitors and the meticulous workflow depending upon these that I had painstakingly adopted over many years.
There's nothing intrinsic to mainstream that I reject, other than how becoming meanstream seems to immediately entitle the proprietor to carpet yank—without even
Mir (Score:3)
Swicthed to ubuntu in 2006 (Score:2)
and switched back in 2011/2012.
In 2006 they just fixed the things in debian which were a little bit annoying.
in 2010/2011 they started making the distribution completely unusable (do you remember the first releases with unity?)
Most of their gold-coated crap was badly documented and did not fit into the rest of the distribution.
I'm past the hate, I just ignore Canonical (Score:2)
I was heavy into LTSP back in the Hardy days. Ubuntu was seemingly 100% behind making the project thrive. And then one day, they simply went on to something else. They left our community out in the cold, trying to scavenge for any kind of real long-term support for LTSP networks. It became a real mess. I went (back) to Debian. What a relief that was.
Seems like that's what they're doing the same thing with Unity now. They've lost interest, so they're simply looking at the next new shiny thing. I admittedly k
A touch hypocritical... (Score:2)
Coming from the person who opened 'bug 1' as 'microsoft has the top market share'. I agreed with the Shuttleworth of that time, Windows gets a whole lot wrong (of course back in the day, Linux was competing against single-user Windows, which was miles worse, but MS's uneven evolution into a robust operating system has very little to admire, and a whole lot of stuff that isn't so good).
But anyway, generally it's not 'the same people', that's what it feels like when you see criticism on all sides, but genera
Don't take anything he says too seriously (Score:2)
Come on guys, don't take anything Mark Shuttleworth says too seriously at the moment.
We already know he's just making press releases to line up his company for a buy-out, and needs to make his company look like it's not run by neckbeards.
Nothing more.
People hate crappy change for the sake of change (Score:2)
I don't hate "mainstream" per se. I dislike crap. I *HATE* "new and improved" crap that becomes "mainstream" enough to force its way onto my machine.
1) I started using ICEWM on my home machine in January or February 2010. Since then my "desktop" has remained basically unchanged. System configuration on my machine has remained basically similar, with text files in /etc.
At work, before I retired, I went through Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. Every few years, even power users were reduc
Shuttleworth is just making excusses (Score:2)
Amy Schumer often blames her audience for Amy's own failures, usually calling them "haters."
Must we like everything the industry poops out?
Lots of people hated Linux before Linux had a whopping 1% of the desktop. Lots of people hated, and still MacOS, even though MacOS has a small share of the market.
Systemd is only on about 1% of desktops, but lots of people hate it.
People hated Unity, even though it was only on a small percentage of desktops.
Ironic considering (Score:2)
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while you were fretting over muh ideology, the joos took over this country. just now they have brought us very close to ww3
fuck you cuck
This is why I'm not a Republican anymore.
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But you're still apparently clueless if you left the Republican Party over anti-Semitism.
Re-read my original comment. I wrote "stupidity" of the Republican Party. Any party that takes pride in and makes ignorance a virtue is a party not worth voting for.
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I'm skeptical, but if true I'm sure the Republicans don't miss a Democratic partisan shithead like you.
Without moderate conservatives in the Congress, the Republicans are going to have a hard time rubbing two nickels together (see healthcare bill).
Ignoring the last 16 years of Schumer and Reid and claiming the Democrats are good guys is proof positive you are a fucking moron.
That's your opinion, not mine.
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As a liberal, 'hate' is too kind a word for how I feel about the hypocritical bs shown by the Democrats.
You mean like the Senate Democrats giving the Supreme Court nominee a fair committee hearing instead of boycotting the committee hearing as some liberals have advocated?
I prefer government that works. The Senate Democratic did their job. If you think that's hypocritical, then you're part of the problem.
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What will happen to the government when the weight of "doing their jobs" rests entirely on the minority party?
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What will happen to the government when the weight of "doing their jobs" rests entirely on the minority party?
The tail (minority party) gets to wag the dog (majority party).
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If you agree with them they are your friend, if you have a differing opinion they hate you.
As the old saying goes, "With friends like these who need enemies."
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And down here in the real world, we actually like X11 as it works pretty well.
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Yeah X "works" but the responsiveness hasn't improved since the X11R5 days...
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So what is the correct way to exit the solid black test screen other than adding back functionality that was removed?
Re:Amazon lens (Score:4, Informative)
The GPL also allows criticism, so if you don't like criticism "pipe down and enjoy your slice of GPL freedom"
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Nobody claimed there was any violation of the license.
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The message I received is "We're doing the nasty because if public perception, not because we made terrible decisions. We reserve the right to make terrible decisions again in the future, when public perception can be adequately silenced."
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No, arrogant nerds who think they are better than other people hate those things.
Normal people? They are happy that they can use the tech. That does not make them worth hating or sneering at.