Dozens Of Canonical Employees Resign As Ubuntu Switches To GNOME, Shuttleworth Returns As CEO (theregister.co.uk) 191
Alexander J Martin, reporting for The Register: More than 80 Canonical workers are facing the axe as founder Mark Shuttleworth has taken back the role of chief executive officer. The number, revealed today by The Reg, comes as Shuttleworth assumed the position from CEO of eight years Jane Silber, previously chief operating officer. The Reg has learned 31 or more staffers have already left the Ubuntu Linux maker ahead of Shuttleworth's rise, with at least 26 others now on formal notice and uncertainty surrounding the remainder. One individual has resigned while others, particularly in parts of the world with more stringent labour laws (such as the UK), are being left in the dark. The details come after The Reg revealed plans for the cuts as a commercial get-fit programme instituted by Shuttleworth. The Canonical founder is cutting numbers after an external assessment of his company by potential new financial backers found overstaffing and that projects lacked focus.
well (Score:3, Funny)
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It's weird to see a cult cutting membership, isn't it?
Going away party (Score:2)
They at least have a going away party with kool-aid provided.
Re:I'm a really worried longtime Linux user (Score:4, Insightful)
So, in other words, some investors came in and suggested "Just take a few dozen of the employees out back and shoot them, and that will totally focus the rest of the team!"
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Who wants someone else's smelly foot on their desktop?
FTFY
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Linux as my primary desktop died in '08.
there were IO scheduler (allegedly) issues that caused lock-ups of my interface, and it never really got better from their.
I really liked the over-all gnome 2 interface, I liked the "ugly" colors of Ubuntu, and finally felt a Linux Desktop was a nice smooth interface, with Compiz giving it a nice smooth windows moving over windows, slight flourishes (gentle wobble on the windows really made dragging them feel nicer, a good minimize and maximize animation, etc) that ma
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And I didn't really mind Pulse Audio, per application volume was a big pro for me, and maybe it wasn't because of pulse audio, but they came about at the same time.
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Linux has always had audio, you just used to had to be smart enough to set it up and enable it.
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So, 10 years later?
Glad I gave up after a year rather than hung around.
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The people that "Leave" after a short period are the same ones that complain how bad windows is, but want linux to adopt the same shit theyre complaining about windows systems sucking at. they dont want to learn, they want everything to "just work" even if it makes it insecure. the linux community is inherently against that model. so the crappy windows users will never jump ship because Linux isnt crappy enough for them.
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Now you're trolling. If you like Gnome 2 then use Mate. Even XFCE has Edge snapping. Ugly Colors? You talk as if the Colors can't be changed. Obvious Troll is Obvious.
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Re:I'm a really worried longtime Linux user (Score:4, Informative)
Linux is the kernel and Linux is very successful in the embedded world on ARM. For example, Android is currently based on the Linux kernel. Many WiFI routers use Linux.. Linux is becoming strong in the automotive industry for Infotainment systems etc.
Linux is strong in web-servers. TiVo uses the Linux kernel. IBM is a big user of Linux in their super-computers.
The Linux kernel is not going to go away any time soon. It is much bigger than just Desktop Linux on a PC.
The success or failure of a Desktop environment project is independent of the Linux kernel because many of these projects are cross-platform. This cross-platform environment is helped by the use of GNU utilities and libraries which implement POSIX (and other standards). For example, you could use the free BSD kernel like Apple does for their iMacs.
Note that I am not a Ubuntu user as I prefer Mageia (Red Hat based) with a KDE Desktop environment. Mageia is a community run distribution so there is no corporate company behind it to muck things up.
A word of warning from history... do you remember the UNIX wars ? This was caused by commercial UNIX vendors introducing "diversity" to lock their clients into their UNIX systems.
The phrase you are looking for is the "convergence" of desktop environments. In fact, I would say that Ubuntu was using a divergent strategy which has now failed. This means the Desktop Linux systems become convergent again just like in the days before Ubuntu existed.
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Had i not commented above, I would mod you up. It seems people dont understand the difference between the kernel and the surrounding userspace. and they only thing the distros they commonly hear are the only ones that exist. Ive been around since the days of Slackware. As far as enterprise goes, Almost all of them use Linux in one way or another. Thats never going to change as nothing but BSD has the stability, and Linux has the advantage of ease of use over BSD and i feel thats why its winning on the serve
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Re:I'm a really worried longtime Linux user (Score:5, Informative)
Canonical lost 31 of about 700 employees. Most linux distros have 0 employees and maybe a couple of hobbyists. I think Ubuntu can survive.
To the same extent as they always did. That's what makes them linux. Of course they do use different versions.
Actually the variety here has improved. Before systemd and upstart, everybody used sysvinit -- now there's a little variety and there are non-systemd debian forks.
Debian and Fedora both offer a wide variety of desktop environments. Who cares what the default selection may be?
Did they ever not?
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Canonical lost 31 of about 700 employees. Most linux distros have 0 employees and maybe a couple of hobbyists. I think Ubuntu can survive.
The vast majority of distributions without employees are just rehashes of someone else's distribution with a couple of extra packages added and a different desktop background and login manager theme.
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I thank you for clarifying that for users that dont know. I have tried in the past but can not bring myself to do it on every post about linux as the same comment you responded to are in every one. Its human nature to make excuses to abuse yourself with things that you have the power to change, but not the skill or ambition? is that the word im looking for? either way. Thank you and hopefullly you have helped a fed up user of windows/macos get the the courage to try to switch. The world needs more people li
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I'm not sure why you are using 4DOS instead of DOSBOX to run Dos programs?
Consider, taking your ~/.wine prefix and just copying it to your new installation... I realize this suggestion isn't full instructions but it should point you in the right direction to keep you from having to reinstall everything.
https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18606
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Heres some suggestions for the future, while setting your disks up, put your /home directory on its own drive, then you can transfer your user settings between almost any linux distro, Also for beginners Mint might be a better os as there is a little less of change this change that every version. IMO ubuntu ruined version 15, i would check out 16.04(you can upgrade without losing anything currently) i feel its a better os than 15.xx and google is your friend with linux, especially mint/ubuntu as there is hu
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blah lets try this again 'problem i am having "distro" "version" ' obviously without quotes.
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This lack of diversity has resulted in stagnation.
So are you proposing change for changes sake or are you actually saying that things like package managers are missing some killer features?
Where you see stagnation, I see maturity. It's nice that a lot of focus is on other projects that look to bring new functionality (e.g. containers) to the system.
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So is Ubuntu Linux effectively a dead project/distribution at this point?
Wow, hyperbole much? There's a lot of very profitable things with Ubuntu Linux and now they're going to focus on them. That your favorite part of "things Canonical" is being paired back doesn't mean the whole is dead.
A shakeup of this magnitude can't be good for the project's health.
This really makes me worry about the health of the Linux ecosystem as a whole.
Um, Linux is doing quite fine really. I think you're thinking Linux Desktop = All of Linux, which is an incorrect statement.
Between the PulseAudio, GNOME 3, Wayland, and systemd disasters, we Linux users have seen so much turmoil these past several years.
Okay at some point everyone is just going to have to move past this dead horse, it's turned into a jelly like substance from all the beating. All of these projects hav
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Not hyperbole - trolling. The likelihood of the OP just being an ignorant fool decreases greatly when taking into the account the choice of words and presentation.
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This happens all the time in the corporate world. It's not good when it's you that is fired or encouraged to leave, but it very often leads to a boost in stock prices or increased profitability. If a company has too many employees and not enough profit, then you shrink the numbers. Maybe it happened because they grew to fast, there's a temporary down turn, etc.
If you think this is the death knell for Ubuntu, then do you think layoffs at other corporations are the death knell for those guys too?
Ubuntu has
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Ubuntu is dropping a bunch of projects. Development on Unity, Mir, and Ubuntu OS are all ending, so there is less need for developers.
Ubuntu's core products, the desktop and server distributions, appear to be healthy. Abandoning Unity will probably strengthen acceptance of the desktop version, as some users did not like that environment. Ubuntu as a convergence system for phones and tablets is dead, but overall I believe it's alive and well.
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It's even less bad than that! It's no badness at all.
Even with Ubuntu, you can run whatever desktop you want to. The switch to GNOME means nothing, just like the past switch to Unity meant nothing. (Did anyone really use Unity anyway?) Complaining about which desktop it uses, is like complaining about which text editor gets installed by default. If you don't like it, install one of the other ones, and it isn't as though you aren't still running Ubuntu.
I don't have any passion (or even a side) in the syste
Which is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Which is it? (Score:5, Funny)
Summaries here are always incoherent. You should be appreciative it isn't a dup.
Give it time
Company is healthy (Score:2)
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Canonical employs staff in more than 30 countries and maintains offices in London, Boston, Taipei, Shanghai, Tokyo and the Isle of Man.
and:
Canonical has more than 500 employees.
Isn't it the most popular Linux distro? It seems like one of the major OSes of choice for VMs and servers, not to mention desktops. If you count the multifarious derivatives based on it, it's huge.
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I'd have thought DeadRat (and relatives like CentOS, Scientific & Larrynux) and SLES would have been bigger on servers.
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It could be good. If they fire 80 people and redirect remaining staff to work on upstream projects like Gnome and Wayland then we are better off.
Canonical has wasted lots of money on Unity and Mir.
Summary is unclear (Score:5, Funny)
So part of the summary makes it sound like they're leaving in protest, while another part makes it sound like their positions will be going away - perhaps a "quit or be fired" sort of thing?
Of course I could just read the article, but I don't want to lose my Slashdot cred... so what's going on?
Re:Summary is unclear (Score:5, Funny)
Of course I could just read the article, but I don't want to lose my Slashdot cred... so what's going on?
I am sorry. You lost your Slashdot cred when you read the summary!
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Sometimes it goes the opposite direction: We'll offer you X if you resign, but that offer is only open for Y days, after which you may be lad off with no severance.
So then you have to decide whether the severance for resigning is a better deal than unemployment, which you'll only be eligible for if you are laid off.
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So then you have to decide whether the severance for resigning is a better deal than unemployment, which you'll only be eligible for if you are laid off.
If you expect to get another job in time then it is always a better deal, because you leave your UI for the time when you're really going to need it. The question is, who is going to need employees like these? Someone else who wants to build a shitty WM that crashes a lot?
Project lacks focus. (Score:2)
Yea, I hear Linux already had a desktop and they decided to make their own anyway.
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Linux had many different desktops but like Microsoft, they thought that one desktop from phone/tablet to mega server would rulez!
It was an admirable aim but personally, I never thought that it would work.
Re:Project lacks focus. (Score:5, Interesting)
Then they decided to make their own spinoffs of projects that really sucked and splitting off from all the desktop environments that worked, instead of contributing to fixing and making them better. The whole unity thing, Amazon and all the other nonsense. They should have stuck to what they were doing before, it was just fine, instead they tarnished their image and reputation with this crap.
The only spinoff which I think would have been fine is ubuntu on phones and tablets. They had quite a development following on those devices (They had a huge loyal following for the phone, ever since the whole NSA stink and a lot of people were very enthusiastic for it). The phones would been quite successful if they didn't have limited production (Seriously, they sold every handset they made). Their poor business decisions pretty much killed Ubuntu phone.
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I installed RH7 (not RHEL7) on a Gateway (anybody remember them?) lappie without any problems that weren't due to PEBKAC.
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It is not really a linux phone - it uses an android kernel with ubuntu stuff on top. No one really knows whats in the binary blobs. Real Linux is considered open software - this is not.
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It could never work desktop is not a tablet is not a phone. Completely different usage patterns and usage styles and it was a huge mistake. Canonical and Ubuntu lost of lot of ground and they tried way harder than they should have, which caused them to lose more ground but hey Redhat, SuSe et al all had their moments and that is the nature of choice in Linux land.
Mir will or will not survive based upon one thing and one thing only, how well it plays games. So Linux has communications tied up via android an
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The same MS which just released a massive update to its linux subsystem in Windows, incorporating all sorts of improvements, in order to appeal to the self same power users you mention?
I get that you don't like MS. I really do. There is a lot to criticise them for without resorting to making stuff up.
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BSD != Linux (Score:2)
Which version of Linux does MacOS run?
GNOME (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting. This article was first posted with the headline "Dozens Of Canonical Employees Resign, Shuttleworth Returns As CEO." Then it was re-posted less than a minute later as "Dozens Of Canonical Employees Resign As Ubuntu Switches To GNOME, Shuttleworth Returns As CEO."
The only difference between the two is "As Ubuntu Switches to GNOME," but if you look at TFA, the word 'gnome' does not appear. So someone went to the effort of editing this post to add gnome to the headline despite its having nothing to do with the article. I guess to give us a target for hating on? Two of the stories about gnome this month have gotten more than 300 comments, which is relatively big these days for Slashdot.
Just an observation and a theory about the way our overlords try to influence the discussion.
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So someone went to the effort of editing this post to add gnome to the headline despite its having nothing to do with the article.
Haha, that reminds me of this line from Total Recall:
Someone..? We're talking about the fucking agency!
https://gointothestory.blcklst... [blcklst.com]
They are related. (Score:3, Interesting)
They are canceling development on two big in-house projects, Mir and Unity, and laying off many of the people who worked on those projects. The Register article is a followup on a previous article (which they linked), where this is explicitly confirmed by Canonical.
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My first thought was that the employees were resigning BECAUSE Ubuntu is switching to Gnome! Understandable, but a little extreme. ;)
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Well, it didn't actually say the two events were related. You could just as well have written the title as "Dozens of Canonical Employees Missing in Aftermath of April Fool's Day."
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I noticed that in the headline and immediately thought that the resignations had to do with the switch to GNOME...lol @ /. for this click-bait stuff...
From my perspective (Score:5, Funny)
but i use KDE so i don't really know what i'm talking about
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xfce has it's points, but I *do* prefer KDE. Usually. A few features that I use were broken the last time I tried xfce. (Windows getting stuck under menubars, etc. And if I hid the menubar I had to log out&in to get it back.)
I could have gotten around this by only having the menubar at the bottom of the screen rather than both top and bottom as I prefer, or even not having full width menubars. But it was annoying. (OTOH, I'm not running on slow hardware either, so the advantage was less.)
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You use a window manager? That's cute.
I prefer the CLI. But engineers at some companies I've worked with will throw a hissy fit if they don't have a GUI to play with. Xfce doesn't provoke religious wars like KDE and Gnome does.
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You're doing this wrong. You're supposed to imply that I'm the actual noob here, and then demand that I egress from your meticulously manicured landscape.
I would never disrespect a Slashdot elder no matter how wrong. :P
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PBF is no longer producing.
No longer regularly producing.
If you're fat then losing weight is healthy (Score:5, Insightful)
The Canonical founder is cutting numbers after an external assessment of his company by potential new financial backers found overstaffing and that projects lacked focus.
So Shuttleworth is being a responsible adult and cutting the people who aren't doing anything useful and getting things back on track so that they don't waste man/woman hours on projects that don't have any point?
If so then good.
Does this also mean Canonical is going to ditch Mir and focus on helping to improve Wayland instead? Why reinvent a different and incompatible wheel when you could just help refine the one that is already there? This seems to be the reasoning behind switching back to GNOME as the default DE.
Does this mean Canonical is going to stop wasting time on dumb and redundant ideas like Ubuntu phone? I hope so.
If they're cutting these sorts of time wasters then it makes sense that they'd also cut the people that worked on those projects. Unlike Apple, Canonical is showing real bravery here by cutting employees from an already controversial company (open source people like to get angry). But if that's what brings the company back on track then more power to Shuttleworth.
What's curious to me is how Canonical got off onto those bullshit projects in the first place. Seems to me like the execs who suggested such fad-chasing (Ubuntu phone) and wheel-reinventing (Mir and Unity) should also be on the chopping block if they aren't already.
(full disclosure: I use Ubuntu on all of my computers at home and at work)
Re:If you're fat then losing weight is healthy (Score:4, Interesting)
Upstream projects and contributors had a problem with this and so the work of maintaining Mir and backends for upstream projects was pushed back on Ubuntu. Then when the phone flopped all the stuff became surplus to requirements.
I think they would have enjoyed more success with their mobile platform to have used Wayland in the first place. They wouldn't have had to hire so many people to work on it, wouldn't have alienated other contributors, and would probably still have held stewardship of their mobile platform. Even if it still flopped it would have been a cheaper flop than the one they're facing now.
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Wayland came in after they had started and was initially far more hype than substance. It's initial design was also incredibly unrealistic until some other developers came on board. It took a while before it was even clear that Wayland development would proceed instead of vanishing in a puff of hype.
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Also the initial stated design goals of Wayland (linux only, single window manager hard coded in, no support of current X applications etc etc) were not compatible with what Ubuntu wanted to do. Those goals have of course changed and there's no point pretending otherwise unless
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Version numbers (Score:2)
Seriously? In 2013? When it couldn't even be demoed at a conference? Who told you that? Perhaps you should take a look at the mailing list archive of the time or ask someone who was paying attention at the time.
It's come a very long way since 2013.
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Ubuntu have different goals to you (Score:2)
Wayland just did not do what Ubuntu wanted in 2013 and probably does not even do it now. Ubuntu have different goals to you.
I am getting a very strong impression here that you are trying to deliberately mislead the readers for some incredibly petty reason or other. I do not think we should be doing that with software projects and should instead judge them on their actual merits.
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November 2013 (Score:2)
On the "finished" window manger - beyond version 1.0, so it must be finished by your definition above.
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I'm sick of these fucking allegations!!
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Seems to me like the execs who suggested such fad-chasing
In a world seeing a rise in portable devices, a new form factor in the form of slate devices, and a dramatic increase in the number of touch enabled devices all combined with a general decline in the desktop and laptop computers, I wouldn't call it a fad.
A fad is something that comes and goes. For them to have chased a fad, the market needs to shift back first. It hasn't. It also doesn't look like it's going to.
Things like Unity may have been an abortion, but not focusing on interfaces right now will simply
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My understanding is that Mir sprung out of the need for a different feature set than what Wayland allowed -- specifically because of Unity and its use on the mobile platform.
With Unity dead, Mir is aborted, and Gnome is moving forward with Wayland, so Ubuntu will be moving forward with Wayland when it uses Gnome as its default DE.
It's about the only positive news from all this. Diversity is good, but pooling resources around a common shared goal is often better.
I'm conflicted (Score:3)
I'm conflicted here. On one hand, I despise Unity, so I think dropping it is a very welcome change. How refreshing that a company is actually listening to its users. I only wish it would have happened a long time ago. It's a bit ironic that the primary UI is shifting to GNOME though, who practically make a living from ignoring their users' wishes.
On the other hands, I feel really bad for these people who are now out of a job. They were most likely the devs who were just following orders to move Unity forward.
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You'll be back - just like the rest of us ;-)
Nobuntu (Score:2)
Re:Nobuntu (Score:5, Funny)
Ubuntu is by far the buggiest OS ever released, open source or proprietary.
That's why I stick with stable, bug-free, Windows ME, although I'm hearing good things about Vista
"Dozens" (Score:2)
So, of the 30 users who don't think Unity is a counterproductive pile of shit that works against the user if you do anything more than consume media, we now find out that "dozens" of those users were actually the developers of it.
Thomas Voss on GUI by centerfold (Score:2)
Interview: Thomas Voss of Mir [linuxvoice.com] — October 2014
Re: Hopefully (Score:2, Informative)
I hope you don't get modded down because you're absolutely right. I had to stop using Ubuntu because systemd made it so unreliable. I experienced way too many times when my system wouldn't boot properly. Thankfully I had my phone and could search for help online but I just couldn't keep putting up with this. I've switched to FreeBSD and it's so good so far but I would like to use Ubuntu again. If they got rid of systemd and used Xfce I would gladly return to it.
Re:Shuttleworth seems like a real tool (Score:4, Interesting)
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but... I've met Mark and I'm pretty sure his IQ is in the 90th percentile. He's one smart motherfucker... seriously. Bit of a psychopath maybe, like many CEOs, but one smart motherfucker.
Yes, the phone, unity, and Mir were projects competing in saturated markets fighting uphill battles. He funded those out of passion, and put his own money on the table for it. Who can blame him for that? It sucks that he couldn't find the market for it. But driver support won't be impacted by this.
Ubuntu seems to be doing well in the cloud though, and Mark can't keep funding Canonical by himself forever. From a cold commercial perspective, this seems like a smart move.
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The last time I needed to set up a Linux box, I went with Mint because Ubuntu had clearly shat the bed. This was about a year ago.
Ubuntu was the single most successful flavor of Linux for desktop use. It was the closest Linux ever got to being widely appropriate for grandmas and neighbors and other people that people like us are sick of supporting.
I don't keep up with the various distros often enough to know the history of how Ubuntu failed, but I do know that it failed.
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This depends on the flavor of Mint you pick. Or at least it did the last time I tried it. There was a version based on Unbuntu, and another based directly on Debian. (Of course, Ubuntu is, itself, based on Debian...but it at least used to do lots of massaging for compatibility and adding drivers.)
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HiThere covered most of it. The other part of it is what Canonical failed to realize.
When they ruin Ubuntu, others can just take the good and run with it.
Re:Shuttleworth seems like a real tool (Score:4, Insightful)
Cinnamon is not Gnome 3. Not even close. Get a clue.
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So this is wrong? "So they decided to create their own desktop environment, one that retains the same look and feel of a GNOME 2 (or MATE) desktop, but built atop GNOME 3 technologies. That was how Cinnamon came to be. [linuxbsdos.com]"
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you missed the whole Unity fiasco, just a wee six years of that as default
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also they're both steaming piles of shit. so yes, the confusion is understandable. making them and/or using them is what is unforgivable
Re: LOLZ Converged! (Score:2, Insightful)
I never did understand how the bitter unfuckables arrived at "cuck" as their concept of the ultimate sick burn. I mean, I get the idea of projection and all, but why expose one's own ultimate insecurity this way? How is that tactically sound?
Re: LOLZ Converged! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: LOLZ Converged! (Score:2)
Although there is much to be said about the terminally-irresilient and their own issues with paranoia and jumping to conclusions about those they disagree with, there are also some marked differences that make them harder to pin down. Among other things, as you yourself have noticed, the conclusions they jump to actually vary: you had to assemble quite a list of varying list of insults to capture the breadth of vitriol the tumblrites can fling at a person, while the creeplords don't really seem to have anyt