Mark Shuttleworth Sees Increased Demand For Enterprise Ubuntu Linux Desktop (zdnet.com) 158
Canonical's real money comes from the cloud and Internet of Things, but AI and machine learning developers are demanding -- and getting -- Ubuntu Linux desktop with enterprise support. From a report: In a wide-ranging conversation at Open Infrastructure Summit, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and its corporate parent Canonical, said: "We have seen companies signing up for Linux desktop support, because they want to have fleets of Ubuntu desktop for their artificial intelligence engineers." This development caught Shuttleworth by surprise. "We're starting actually now to commercially support the desktop in a way that we've never been asked to before," he said. Of course, Ubuntu has long been used by developers, but Shuttleworth explained, "Previously, those were kind of off the books, under the table. You know, 'Don't ask don't tell deployments.' "But now suddenly, it's the AI team and they've got to be supported."
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
It's the year of the Linux desktop!
If only someone thought of that before (:
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Won't happen, ever. Flying cars and fusion reactors will have MS-Windows screens.
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This is why Ford dropped MS and went with QNX for recent revs of their SYNC console. QNX has its issues, but it is a solid RTOS, and I've not read many complaints about it when it is serviced or updated.
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I fear that ship has passed. Thing will be way worse - they'll have Android screens.
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
And all it needed was microsoft to try harder to destroy windows.
This could be the year (Score:3, Funny)
This could be the year Linux finally makes it to the desktop.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of Enterprise Ubuntu Linux Desktops!
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Imagine a beowulf cluster of Enterprise Ubuntu Linux Desktops!
It's not going to happen until it gets popular support as systemd-beowulfd
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No shit (Score:3, Insightful)
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Lots of companies won't touch IBM's stuff, so they're looking for alternatives.
How the mighty have fallen - that's a major shift from "you don't get fired for buying big blue"
It would only be news if he did NOT. (Score:1)
CEO of company that makes X predicts X will take off this year.
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The Year of the Linux Desktop (Score:2)
The pivot point to this ongoing joke will be when and if Microsoft is stupid enough to turn Windows into a subscription service.
If that point in time doesn't become the Year of the Linux desktop, then it will never happen.
I own many, Many, MANY thousands of dollars worth of software and hardware that runs under Windows only and even I would
give serious consideration to giving it all up and going full Linux if / when Microsoft decides to go subscription only.
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Device driver flag day (Score:2)
It would get the server market into their hands without killing the backwards compatibility that keeps them alive
It would be a big flag day [catb.org] for device drivers. Previously, makers of multi-thousand-dollar specialized peripherals have seen flag days such as the Windows XP to Windows Vista transition as an opportunity to turn years-old yet still-working kit into e-waste that the end user must repurchase in order to keep it working.
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The pivot point to this ongoing joke will be when and if Microsoft is stupid enough to turn Windows into a subscription service.
It already is. There are many combinations of license types and contents at MS, and I'm sure there's more than those I know of where the OS is not paid up front + maintenance.
Here's an interesting variant: Microsoft 365 [microsoft.com]
A complete, intelligent solution, including Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security, that empowers everyone to be creative and work together, securely.
Add a Surface machine and you have the whole lot supplied by MS: hardware, OS, first party applications coexisting with oth
Does it work with PowerPC? (Score:2)
Read the books about the Power Platform
But does it work with a Power Architecture computer, or does it need x86-64? #falseadvertising
And what's that about "Low-Code Development Platforms for AD&D Professionals" in the Forrester Research infographic? I thought there wasn't any code in tabletop games like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
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All names are taken! No more new products are to be invented until we increase the namespace !
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I own many, Many, MANY thousands of dollars worth of software and hardware that runs under Windows only and even I would
give serious consideration to giving it all up and going full Linux if / when Microsoft decides to go subscription only.
Exactly this. We have so much industrial and scientific software that is Windows only, and costs thousands and thousands of dollars. Windows fucking up compat, or making it so that updates ruin the working of our business would push us to linux or atleast windows vm on linux.
Long Past Time For Defenestration (Score:1)
Only real impediment at this point are graphics drivers and the rather iffy state of accelerated desktops/3D
Hopefully that improves fast. I really would like to see the Microsoft Tax end before I do.
Unity (Score:2)
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People shit on it all the time but my tiny chromebook flashed with Linux works GREAT on it. It makes very good use of TONS of meta key combinations.
I also bind invert SINGLE WINDOW and invert screen to keys.
Invert single window ISN'T AVAILABLE on most display managers because it's only available with Compiz. It's practically an essential feature for me. It lets me negate one window (ANY window I choose) while having another one beside it not-flipped and it's a single keypress away. If a website has a dark m
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I was the "linux guy" at my first CS job and I would dazzle people with my windows moving around all with keyboard commands. Inverting. And unity made such great use of screen real estate.
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The other main reason I didn't look to closely at it was its ties to GNOME dependencies.
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Desktop Enterprise support? (Score:2)
Who has Enterprise support on their desktop? What for? What do these people do with their desktops that needs full-on support contracts?
Most places I've worked, we got server support (both hardware and software), got long warranties on desktops and left it at that. If a desktop fails, you swap it with one from the store and get the old one repaired to replace the spare in the store. If software is a problem, you google for a solution or find another way to work. If you're using some 'big' software, then you
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Where I work, unsupported software cannot be used. That's not the likely answer, but one you haven't considered.
Having a direct line to someone when an update fails or something screwy happens can be important. Rather than spending time searching the web or figuring it out yourself, call up support and either they have an answer or will do the finding for you.
Professionals who need uptime aren't going to rely in an in house Linux expert to find the answers when there is a company making the distro, responsi
Condolences (Score:2)
Full Disclosure: I work for Microsoft as a PFE supporting Enterprise Customers. I have had Linux boxen as primary workstations for personal and business use for decades.
I sincerely hope that enterprises don't start managing Linux desktops the same way they do Windows. I specifically do not want the McAfee EPO, Cylance, Crowdstrike, Tanium, SCCM, Bromium, BeyondTrust, and Avecto agents force-fed onto my machine that is "required" to be built from a bloated 22GB OS image that hasn't had a single update sinc
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"I want to continue to treat people badly. Especially people who are different to me, because they're really scary".
Re: Enterprise has destroyed Linux (Score:1, Troll)
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This is bs, I have seen the discrimination and there certainly was not an attitude that everyone was treated identically. And the attitude was not about competence when there are so many incompetent white males in the in-crowd. The upshot is that when a culture is toxic you scare people away, good and smart people, people smart enough to realize they don't want to be around such an environment. I have seen the computing world go from having a reasonable representation of women from 30-40% from when I sta
Re: Enterprise has destroyed Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Ha, you weren't around I guess. CS department was well represented when I was in college, and during summer jobs and later full time we had half the sysadmins as women. Where friends worked they had good female representations in computer areas where they worked, sysadmins, developers, qa. This was all before 1990.
Remember, when computing was new in the 50s, much of the hands-on computer work was considered women's work as it was an extension of secretarial work. I've got a paper now introducing a preliminary unix implementation to a group of 14 people at Bell Labs, 5 of whom were female (1972). I've got an ILLIAC manual pdf from 1956, and of the two photos included there are two women but only one man pictured.
Re: Enterprise has destroyed Linux (Score:2)
Re: Enterprise has destroyed Linux (Score:1)
Where did you go to school?
I was at Berkeley in the late 80s to mid 90s. There were women in my classes but more like 5%. I have never from that point forward seen this horde of 30-40% women in CS you claim. Citing a few ancient manuals or pictures from a single company is not statistically meaningful.
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the hordes were definitely there when I took graduate CS classes in late 90s at illinois institute of technology
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Thwarting moderation abuse.
"You are full of bullshit. There were almost no woman in high tech 30 years ago and the percentage now involved continues to grow. Stop lying you disingenuous turd."
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But is it the "toxic" BS or that men simply do not want to take the risk? There have been several studies recently showing men do not want to work with women because they fear the #metoo "always believe women" culture and I know despite being happily married and a person that would never cheat on my wife would I want to have to work alone in a room with a female? Not a fricking chance in hell!
What about working with men? Kevin Spacey's downfall was due to men invoking #metoo with reports of his predatory behaviour. So why aren't you afraid of being accused of sexually assaulting the men you work with?
they had to find a way to fire a black woman
So actually there are consequences for people who make ridiculous, unfounded complaints and the company took action to protect people from her. Not sure what your point is here.
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If they hire some average 20 something white dude with a wife or GF and a kid or two to support? They are about as big a threat as milktoast, they are gonna put in their time and walk out the door. He may be a good worker, or average, or shitty, but firing him won't be an issue because in PC culture nobody gives a fuck if a straight white guy tries to throw a victim card.
And you are ignoring the dead elephant in the room....explain why EXACTLY there is ANY benefit for me or any company to take the risk?
Ah, so it's just simple prejudice. As in the dictionary definition of judging someone before establishing the facts about them. If they are female or non-white they might be trouble, so best not to hire them.
To me this all just sounds like the latest misogynist and racist excuse. Used to be that women were just too fragile, and black people were too dumb and only suited to manual labour. The menace of black savages raping white women. Now it's just "they might turn out to be a arsehole, best go with a strai
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A lot of white men are playing the victim card these days. No one is safe. Stay at home and work from your basement!
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"So actually there are consequences for people who make ridiculous, unfounded complaints and the company took action to protect people from her. Not sure what your point is here."
They don't have to "find a way to fire a straight white man" they can just fire him at will. Also, he has no ability to abuse in this fashion in the first place because nobody takes any claims of racial or gender discrimination against white men seriously even if true. Even if proven it will be applauded.
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"What about working with men? Kevin Spacey's downfall was due to men invoking #metoo"
I'm not gay but I certainly have enough friends who are to venture a guess with the understanding everyone is different. Gay men are still men. They are far more likely to be receptive to sex and less inclined to feel overtly threatened by someone who wasn't happy about being rejected when they aren't. Generally speaking, the Kevin Spacey thing is unusual. Gay men often go the direction of enjoying the drama of spreading su
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But is it the "toxic" BS or that men simply do not want to take the risk?
I'm just going to go ahead and get to the point. If your comment is any indication of your position in general, it's not a healthy or sane position to have. To sum it up, your suffering from paranoia and your reaching for examples to justify. Yes, the examples given are well known, but in context that incidence rate is low nation-wide. The well known examples you are giving are serving as confirmation bias to your paranoia. I'm not going to sit here and say, "Oh you're full of shit. Your opinion is co
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So one bad person who's a woman is a major trend and a reason to avoid women in the workplace, but one bad person who's a man is just business as usual?
I've only seen one of these cases ever happen, and HR (mostly women) were very dubious of the claims from the start and they went nowhere. Evidence is needed in almost every work place before any sort of action gets taken; that's why they always suggest you keep records, emails, and the like before you make a discrimination complaint. I also heard storys l
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"Yes. We definitely want to treat those who are different than us "badly" assuming badly means telling them they are not wanted on the project. You just fail to understand that we have never cared about the gender, race, color, creed, or political beliefs of the contributor. The difference we want to use to discriminate is "we are competent. You are not. There is the door." If one of those people isn't a white male they decide to claim it is because they are not a white male, and that is complete and utter
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We're un-ironically pushing you creeps out of Linux and the FOSS world in general. And everyone is better off for it.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out. You won't be missed! Embrace the void. Fade away. Be forgotten. Be replaced.
Oh. Be a dear and don't shoot up any public places in impotent rage as you come to terms with your own irrelevance. That's just bad form.
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It might only barely be on topic but he speaks the truth.
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I would not be surprised that the only reason they are seeing an uptick is because of Red Hat being purchased by IBM.
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I would not be surprised that the only reason they are seeing an uptick is because of Red Hat being purchased by IBM.
You're making me wonder if Scientific Linux being is being discontinued because IBM bought Red Hat, the OS it's based on.
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Has it occurred to that the things you are trying to do probably aren't baked enough to be using in the enterprise space in the first place?
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Many actually, Bash, Python, Perl and the many many libraries commonly used within them. Ubuntu is a great choice for your personal toys/servers.
Yes, you can jump through hoops and get it all working by why would you when you can just install a system that does all the things RHEL does and apt-get update/apt-get upgrade and then just apt-get install what you need?
Of course there are very good reasons RHEL is behind on many things (although maybe not as behind as it is) but since actual systems people who kn
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Ubuntu is the system of choice for devs with packages on RHEL being ancient, ancient Perl/Python/Java/Bash poor libraries, etc. In no small part it is the poor support for all the snazzy latest and greatest toys for automations/devops.
Shops embracing all the latest toys are moving to Ubuntu or SUSE. RHEL actually seems to be fading. I'm not saying they're right and personally I think while these new tools are cool they are actually a ton of work to build and maintain and they are highly buggy and unstable.
Re:It needs to die (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, it would be very unfair to say that without also pointing that Red Hat has been, and probably continues to be, been one of the biggest contributors to and popularizers Linux in the world, so... I dunno. Live by the corporate sponsored developers, die by the corporate sponsored developers.
One other devil's advocate thing I have to say about RHAT ruining Linux: it wouldn't have been as bad if the graybeards hadn't been contrarians about the whole thing. There's a god damned reason why systemd became a thing and most distros adopted it. It's because it was actually solving real problems (and surprise surprise, frequently those problems were ones facing distro builders.) The haters have a point, of course they have several hugely good points about systemd being evil and wrong. But can't see beyond their own use-cases, they refuse to acknowledge that the old way needed improvement at all. So for the most part we have people flocking to Devaun and other legacy init based distros / BSD distros, instead of doing the correct thing which would be to throw weight behind a project like OpenRC that would actually do much of the good things systemd does, but in a much more lightweight, less un-unixy, less draconian way.
What was I saying? Oh, Ubuntu. Eh. They popularized. Gateway drug for Debian and all that. Really I think they did good. It's a damned shame to look at their NIH shit that wasn't revolutionary enough to be worth the effort, at all that wasted potential, but I don't think they degraded the user experience. I really, really wish they'd backed QT/KDE instead of giving in to GNOME, though. GNOME is such a cesspit of quasi-Apple ("the customer is always wrong") ideology. It would've been lovely to have a big name directly backing KDE or perhaps another QT-based desktop instead of the shrugworthy Unity. Ah well. Bottom line, I can't say they hurt very much; they just repeatedly failed to provide durable, worthy alternatives to what RHAT churned out.
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I used KDE 4 distros for a few years after it matured and it was fine other than one of the desktop decorations that was unstable. (It was a total joke for the first year after it came out; I can't argue with you ther
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The worst of the setbacks for Linux always came out of Red Hat (Systemd, GNOME, other pseudo-Apple anti-user crap from the likes of Poettering and Havoc Pennington )
You mean the pro-user functionality provided by the packages which have not had the least bit of negative impact on Linux and has seen Linux continue to rise to it's all time highest install base ever? That anti-user crap? Shit man if that is anti-user I can't wait to see what is pro user, I mean anti-user is finally providing users the bare minimum expected from a modern OS, I guess pro-user will usher a new era of cloud based VR buzzword centric collaboration!
And no I'm not being funny. It's quite insane
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(This was some years back and I can't find a link right now.)
They used to have a feature that allowed you to easily change what closing the lid did from the GUI. They purposefully removed it. Then when a couple guys popped up complainin
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Granted, I haven't used GNOME 3 in eons so I can't testify firsthand. But I'm sorry, their defaults were not "right". I NEVER wan
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It's actually more and more like Apple the more I think about it. Apple will remove something for some horrible reason (3.5mm jack) and their hardcore fans (not all of their users, to be sure) will do backflips figuring out retr
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I agree. I first used Ubuntu with 5.04. At the time I thought we had really got to a point where Linux on the desktop finally reached the baseline of what a general purpose end user oriented OS should be. There were issues sure, WiFi and graphics drivers were awful and there were essentially no games. But none of that was Canonical's fault. The drivers were the hardware OEM's fault and games rely on a critical mass of userbase. Surely all of that would be fixed in due time because Ubuntu 5.04 made Windows X
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> One other devil's advocate thing I have to say about RHAT ruining Linux: it wouldn't have been as bad if the graybeards hadn't been contrarians about the whole thing. There's a GD reason why systemd became a thing and most distros adopted it. It's because it was actually solving real problems (and surprise surprise, frequently those problems were ones facing distro builders.) The haters have a point, of course they have several hugely good points about systemd being evil and wrong. But can't see beyond
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I really, really wish they'd backed QT/KDE instead of giving in to GNOME, though. GNOME is such a cesspit of quasi-Apple ("the customer is always wrong") ideology. It would've been lovely to have a big name directly backing KDE or perhaps another QT-based desktop instead of the shrugworthy Unity.
They actually tried this. Unity 8.0 was a rewrite from Gnome to Qt [github.com], but then Canonical decided to nix their phone OS project which also ended up abandoning Unity. It's a shame -- the only reason GTK was created was
LXQt did finally succeed LXDE in Lubuntu (Score:2)
Well, speaking of Qt desktops, last month I did glance over and notice that LXQt is *finally* deemed ready for primetime after years of delays. I'm not certain I'm motivated enough to rush out and tinker with
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Last time I checked, there were like 3 Lisp WMs, if I recall correctly: Sawfish (the most "normal" / user friendly), CLFSWM (no frills, with a nested window paradigm, a sort of generalization of tabs you could say), and StumpWM (Common Lisp rewrite of Ratpoison. Keyboa
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Yes, it's a mystery why they couldn't just back Flatpak instead of introducing their own Snappy format. They're creating more trouble for both users and developers by creating a new, entirely redundant package format.
I'm not sure Canonical needs to die, but they certainty need reforming to act more in the interest of the community.
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If what you say is true, then the users will stop using it. What are you worried about?
It's called "a TTY"; it's called "a command line". (Score:1, Insightful)
Most computing of note is not performed via a GUI.