Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret

Rewrite of <a href="http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1200" rel="nofollow">http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1200</a> written and submitted by one of five Ziff Davis (ExtremeTech.com, Geek.com and PCMag.com) employees that spam HN.<p>Their other employees/accounts include:<p>- <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a</a><p>- <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm</a><p>- <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82</a> (their social media manager)<p>- <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly</a><p>Then there's also maxko87 and evo_9 but I haven't figured out what their connection is yet, maxko87 autosubmits extremetech articles and evo_9's usage mirrors ukdm's who submits ~50% geek.com + ~50% a small group of other sites, but for extremetech.

<i>Shuttleworth is sick of Ubuntu features being torn apart by critics before they’re ready.</i><p><pre><code> &#60;snark&#62; </code></pre> Well maybe if Shuttleworth didn't require a crap interface and built in ads on the desktop and making smartass comments when challenged about it, they wouldn't be torn apart by critics.<p><pre><code> &#60;/snark&#62;</code></pre>

Canonical has gone mad. More and more it seems like this company is the worst thing that could happen to linux. Seems like embrace and extinguish to me. Make a distro the best among others, so novices can tentatively take their first steps in it. Now botch it, kill it and burn them so badly they would never come back to linux again.Sigh!

IMO, Mr. Shuttleworth is a douche.<p>This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and design decisions they did not want. The decisions made by Shuttleworth have nothing to do with FOSS or the users. His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind. Mr. Shuttleworth desired a single code base for Ubuntu. That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the portable device version of Ubuntu. Mouse and keyboard do not function well on portable devices so...enter Unity.<p>All of these things would be fine, if Mr. Shuttleworth did not claim that all of this was to provide his users with a superior experience. We already had a wonderful experience. Now, not so much.<p>I will now be replacing all of my machines', and our corporate machines' Ubuntu installs with an alternate flavor of Linux. I was willing to live with the Unity change, I was willing to live with the Grub change. I am not willing to live with this.<p>FOSS is not built upon secret sauce Mr. Shuttleworth. For shame!

I can see how Shuttleworth is drawing inspiration from Apple and MS Surface, but normally, you don't announce that X will be developed in secret, you develop X in secret, and then announce it!!

Blame Ubuntu or Shuttleworth but Ubuntu is the only Linux distro with any direction and actively expressing itself. You can never satisfy 100% of your customers.

(Honest question) Is there any user-friendly alternative to Ubuntu?<p>I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet-annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is barely half a pixel thin.

That seems awfully thin-skinned. Having written a couple books for programmers, hate mail is just part of the landscape, and the more your own tastes and opinions come into play, the more there is for people to disagree about. Sticks and stones, etc.<p>Ultimately it's not crucially important. But it's also unnecessary. And if you don't have Google's resources behind your behind-closed-doors development, you could be missing out on community contributions.

I don't think they should <i>develop</i> in secret, but they most definitely shouldn't <i>release</i> until things are polished.<p>Much of the criticism Unity and various other features received was well-deserved, because Canonical released essentially alpha software. Then when the criticism comes in, the defense is, "hey take it easy guys, we weren't done yet!" Well if you're not done--don't release!<p>There's a middle ground here: develop and design in public, but don't release until you're truly ready. Everyone says that sticking to LTS is the only way to guarantee a stable system, but that's just not practical in the milestone-distro world, where an important update to one piece of software you find critical requires an update to the entire system.

If they code some "secret" features and then release the code... why does it matter it was coded in secret? This seems to be such a non-issue. In fact, Shuttleworth's mistake here was talking about it at all.<p>He is paying to have code developed to help improve Ubuntu and he happens to want to get somewhat polished versions of it before they release to public. Why is this bad? Sometimes people release early/often and that works for them. In this case Shuttleworth and by extension Canonical believe that releasing at the polished stage is beneficial.<p>Plus its not like there is some uber-secret group in a dark chamber coding this stuff up -- you just have to be an ubuntu developer with a little bit of traction to be part of it.

Marketing-wise this would absolutely be an effective strategy, but you have to take a page from Apple's book and spin your motivation to be positive. You can't say "I'm sick of critics dissing features before they're ready" because that sounds <i>whiny</i>.<p>Instead, you have to express that you are working on some really kick-ass features and you want them to really "pop" when they debut. You have to focus on the positives and pretend that the critics don't exist. (Publicly, that is; internally, you had better listen to the critics).

Is developing from within a "glass house" a stressful downside to FOSS?

I'm not exactly sure how can you develop a popular and polished interface without a lot of user testing. From the bugs I reported it seems like they don't have enough testers in Canonical itself, or maybe their qa its just not going deep enough. Either way... I don't think that cutting off early beta testers will be good for the project.

I predict the secret whiz-bang features will be even more half-baked than normal for new Ubuntu features - on their six-month release schedule, new stuff generally isn't stable and full-featured for about three releases (which is a bit of a pain).

"[...] and you get your name in lights." ...and the prize for the greatest attention whore of the OS BDFLs club goes to...