Complete linkbait title, a HN mod should change this. Typical of the Register.<p>It's worthwhile to read the actual post:<p><a href="http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1228" rel="nofollow">http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1228</a><p>On the subject, I started to hear a lot of criticism of Canonical's Ubuntu efforts right around when Unity was first released. I just updated to 12.10 on my laptop a couple of weeks ago, and as one of the 31337 d00ds Mark speaks of, I was pretty confused -- everything was different! I didn't quite understand the point of the whole thing.<p>But I run a tiling window manager on a years-old Thinkpad without even a trackpad (trackpoint!). I'm a freak. And most of us here are.<p>Then the other day I picked up a new Macbook Air for some Mac-centric development work. And Unity completely clicked for me. If you look at the direction of OS X it's clearly converging with iOS. I right-swipe to get notifications! There's all these awesome gestures! My IM client shows my <i>phone's</i> text messages, for god's sake!<p>This is the kind computing experience normal people are expecting over the next several years, and in order for Ubuntu to fully realize its mission it needs to adapt. And it looks like they're doing a really good job. I mean, have you seen the Ubuntu phone videos? It looks really slick.
I found myself agreeing with a lot of the sentiment expressed in Mark's post but ultimately, I lack faith that Shuttleworth and Canonical have what it takes to pull off the stated goal of creating "an experience that could challenge the existing proprietary leaders." For example, I don't find Unity to be better in any meaningful sense than the "community-driven" GNOME 3. Canonical has come up with some interesting ideas, especially with the HUD menu system, but I just haven't seen real progress towards building the kind of consistent user experience I can find on Android, Windows and OS X.<p>I'd love for them to succeed, but every passing day I'm looking more to Android as the future of quasi-open Linuxes.
As someone who has been an active contributor to desktop Linux in the past, and particularly very close to Ubuntu (I was sponsored to attend UDS-O), I have to say that I am happy Shuttleworth is finally taking this much needed stand.<p>I can absolutely understand the blowback to his sentiments, because really, the diversity of use and mindset in the Linux community is one of its defining characteristics. But frankly, he's right -- if Ubuntu isn't the platform you're looking for, either go find the one that is, or start it.<p>I don't see Shuttleworth's stance, or indeed the negative feedback from a vocally inflamed (though not majority) userbase, as a sign of Ubuntu's decline. I see it as Ubuntu finally having the balls to do what no other desktop Linux platform has done before -- move ahead with their grand vision on bringing free software to the masses, not just the ones that demand it the most.
While the community is ready to dismiss anything Canonical does, they also seem to overlook the work Canonical has done. Unity is far from perfect, but it <i>is</i> functional.<p>Also, the whole issue of inclusion of Amazon links could be solved with a single command, "sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping".<p>And it's ridiculous that Canonical gets flak for trying out a new revenue stream (one that can easily be removed if its bothersome), while ChromeOS is championed (which essentially makes revenue off of your web usage, targeting ads, etc.)<p>If the community tried to be a little less abrasive and actually held reasonable level-headed discussions instead of being dismissive we could actually get somewhere.<p>Infact I'd argue that it's Canonical's leadership is helping since it has succeeded in bringing generally non-Linux businesses over to Ubuntu - Valve bringing over Steam, Spotify alpha, Rdio, etc.
<p><pre><code> "By 2009 I was convinced that none of the existing free software communities could create an experience that could challenge the existing proprietary leaders," Shuttleworth wrote, "and so, if we were serious about the dream of a free software norm, we would have to lead."
</code></pre>
If Unity is the outcome of Canonical's lead, then I'm sorry to say that they're doing it wrong. I want you to download Ubuntu 10.04/10.10 and compare it with Ubuntu 12.04/12.10. You will be nothing short of <i>terrified</i> of the experience - They just destroyed every single advantage of Ubuntu - For example:<p>Unity creates a terrible confusion on what is where and how you access or close an open window.<p>Shutdown speed is slower than windows 8 sometimes! (And Windows 8 isn't slow, it's really fast, but Ubuntu 10.x used to be faster)<p>The OS itself feels sluggish at times.<p>I sincerely feel someone should take the 10.04 and spin it off into a new better OS, polish it and give it back to the community - If it's good enough, I won't even mind paying for it!!
This bit annoys me:<p><pre><code> "There are lots of pure community distro's. And wow, they are full of politics, spite,
frustration, venality and disappointment," he wrote.
</code></pre>
They may be full of those things, sure, but at their best they also have quality, usability, flexibility, power, and beauty. I hope Canonical succeeds in making Ubuntu useful to people who would never have used it before, but I'm sad that that success — if it ever comes — requires abandoning and insulting people who helped make Ubuntu as prominent as it has been.
Yeah yeah, we get it. Canonical: "You guys hate Unity but we're really stubborn about it".<p>Keep trumpeting your crap then. Thankfully it's pretty easy for just about anyone to switch window managers (or Distro for that matter)
I think we should take his advice. He says he doesn't want "leet" Linux users and we should go use something else, and many of us have been taking that advice all along.<p>Personally, I'm a Gentoo guy and have been for a while. Here are some great hacker distros that I love to use and contribute to:<p>Gentoo<p>Arch<p>Slackware<p>Debian<p>And for those who want a "user friendly" distro for their mom to try out:<p>Linux Mint<p>Yeah, I said it, I know it's not exactly popular but if you want to convert someone to a Linux user I think Mint is your best bet.<p>In the end, we still have a choice. Thanks Canonical/Ubuntu for bringing more users and development to the community, we'll just steer them towards something better when they're ready.
>Just roll your eyeballs at the 1337 crowd<p>This is not leadership. If Mr. Shuttleworth truly wants to provide leadership for the FOSS community, then blaming people for disagreeing with him is not a good start and "my way or the highway" is not a sustainable model.
Mark Shuttleworth is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The square peg being Steve Jobs' style, the round hole being open source/free software.
>>There are lots of pure community distro's. And wow, they are full of politics, spite, frustration, venality and disappointment.<p>Soo... It is a community distro? Because Ubuntu sure has plenty of that.<p>>>To Shuttleworth, Ubuntu isn't about catering to hobbyists, but about building an open source OS that is so compelling that free software becomes the norm, rather than the exception.<p>There's nothing compelling about implementing advertising directly into the operating system. I was just starting get used to Unity, and then Canonical did something that makes it impossible to trust them about anything.
What I undestand is that he wants people to rise above petty politics and work at making Ubuntu better. Imo he could have just said the latter and let the former lie. Sometimes it is better to do that. A substantial chunk of the community does not like unity and even more hate the amazon integration. Telling them to shut up is not a great idea. You cannot keep everyone happy, not in a project of this scale. Mark is doing this to keep the people at canonical happy and driven. I hope he succeeds, because I would like ubuntu to be better.
Ubuntu used to be one thing, and it was exactly what I wanted.<p>Now they're something else, and that's OK, but it's not what I want, and that's OK too.<p>At the moment I'm hanging on to the parts I want by my fingernails, running the nicely minimal Lubuntu. But I think the writing's on the wall that eventually Ubuntu/Canonical will have no interest in supporting the various Ubuntu derivatives, and I'll need to fall back to something like LXDE on Debian. And that's OK too.<p>Ubuntu used to be one thing. Now they're something else. That's OK. So long, and thanks for all the updates.
I'm not sure what it means for the Linux community that Canonical is doing this, but I do think they are doing the right thing for "Ubuntu" if they want to make it a more mainstream OS, and also an OS that works on mobile hardware, and it's fast and smooth.<p>If that means they have to break clean from a lot of legacy stuff, then so be it. Ultimately, I want a strong mainstream OS alternative to Windows - one that is popular enough and gets support from all major software vendors for apps. If Ubuntu got at least as popular as Mac OS, it would be amazing, and I don't really care what they have to do to get there.<p>I also hope this means they will make it dead-easy for developers, whether paid ones or open source volunteers, to make <i>beautiful</i> apps for Ubuntu/Linux. I <i>hate</i> how ugly and old Linux apps look. Absolutely hate them. And if that's happenig to me, then I can only imagine the reaction of "normal" PC users and how much of a turn off that must be for them, especially now when we're living in a time of iOS, Holo and Metro apps. Most of them would find the majority of Linux apps unacceptable.<p>If Canonical gives developers easy to use set of design resources and tools, then even open source apps for Linux or cross-platform won't have an excuse to not look beautiful anymore.<p>If Canonical manages to get chip makers to make unified drivers for Ubuntu/Linux/Android that would be an amazing feat as well, and something I wish Google tried from the beginning or was already working on. But I haven't seen any hints of that happening, unfortunately. So Canonical might be Android's last hope for that.
Lol. Ubuntu is obviously doomed to fail. What technical genius would want to follow UNPAID another persons "Grand Vision" if that other person isn't an even greater technical genius?
It makes me sad that Canonical is doing so many things to split the community. First they stuck to upstart, after everyone else moved over to systemd. Then, they decided to snub GNOME3 in order to create a new windowing environment called Unity. Now, they're trying to build their own copy of Wayland, codenamed Mir. Ubuntu still uses bzr, when most of the rest of the world uses git.<p>I guess maybe this was inevitable. They wanted to differentiate themselves from Red Hat and similar distros that were using the "normal" stack. But do we really need so many duplicate projects, so many of which seem to be duds?<p>Ultimately, Ubuntu wants to be Android. And it never will be, because Canonical doesn't have Google's engineering or financial resources, or a business model that would support such an undertaking. I understand the idealism, but as they say, "hope is a good breakfast, but a poor supper."<p>I feel like Ubuntu's decision to include adware like the Amazon toolbar is the first of many such decisions.
Ultimately, they have to make a profit, and they're going to have to turn to "traditional methods." The traditional method for PC OEMs to make a profit is-- let's be honest here-- crapware. I fear that this is going to blacken the name of Linux for a lot of people. Already a lot of people think that "Linux" can't do suspend or hibernate properly, because Ubuntu often can't. Soon people are going to think that "Linux" is full of adware and spyware, simply because Ubuntu is. Sigh.
Mark Shuttleworth may have good intentions at the basis, but he may also be overly ambitious. From there he may indeed be misguided in his daring and rather rash decisions. Mark may also be incapable of assessing first-hand what it all means in technical terms. Mark also seems to overestimate the real level of insight of his close technical advisers; who are the guys doing the real thinking for him. Mark also seems to substantially overestimate the true ability and aggregate capacity of his rather small team; which is supposed to make all of it happen. Mediocre results after mediocre results, we can indeed clearly discern in Mark a pattern of over-promising and under-delivering.