Has Ubuntu lost it?

<i>Unfortunately, the learning curve was too great for most people, and users elected to put the buttons back in their rightful place with gconf-edit.&quot;</i><p>Some users did. The vast majority did not. The target market for Ubuntu doesn&#x27;t even want to be using gconf-edit.<p><i>&quot;Even today a Google search for &#x27;window buttons on right&#x27; brings up a guide to fixing Ubuntu - and this is for a design change made two and a half years ago</i><p>Yes, it&#x27;s called the internet and it&#x27;s a fantastic resource for looking up old information that people have archived.<p>The entire premise of the article appears to be &quot;Ubuntu is opinionated. Here are the controversial decisions they made&quot;. I don&#x27;t see any bearing on whether they&#x27;ve &quot;lost it&quot;.

I think it&#x27;s funny when people complain about unity and how users hate it. The only users that even know what it is are the hardcore linux geeks. I used ubuntu back in the day (2006-ish) and moved off Linux because it was too much of a pain in the butt to use for everyday use... even my standalone email server I just gave up on eventually because it was too much of a hassle running linux.<p>I just started using Ubuntu again last year and... I couldn&#x27;t figure out what this Unity thing was that people kept complaining about. I guess it&#x27;s the menubar that appears at the top? And the transparent start menu thingy that pops up when you click the button at the top of the launchbar on the left? Is that what people are complaining about? Seriously? I didn&#x27;t even notice that it was something that was supposed to be different after the first 2-3 times I saw what it did. Maybe because I&#x27;m not a hardcore linux guy? Maybe because it doesn&#x27;t really look that different from Windows 7 &#x2F; 8 stuff?<p>So... from a Windows user&#x27;s point of view, I think Ubuntu is doing well. It&#x27;s easy for me to use (it does take a lot of getting used to for the windows buttons to be on the left).. and honestly, for most people, we&#x27;re in a post-desktop-OS world. Nothing matters outside the browser. I install Chrome and log into Chrome sync, and my world is the same across all desktops.... because the browser is everything. That, more than anything else has made my transition back to Ubuntu easy... because the OS doesn&#x27;t matter anymore for day to day things. For dev, sure, you need your dev tools, and the environment matters a lot.

&quot;the Upstart init daemon (which pointlessly duplicated much of the work done in SystemD)&quot;<p>I think this chronological confusion sums up the insight that can be found from the article.

Why we can thank Canonical:<p><i>&quot;To innovate is to get a chance to define the future, but it comes with the risk of alienating your current users. The unique advantage desktop Linux has is that we can do both. Ubuntu can innovate while Mint, OpenSUSE, and all the others play it safe.<p>That&#x27;s the advantage of the open source ecosystem that we&#x27;ve built up over the years. But we only have that advantage if people are willing to take risks. Mark Shuttleworth is taking a tremendous gamble. If it pays off, then the whole Linux community benefits.&quot;</i>

Summary: Ubuntu has become Windows. It&#x27;s pursuing devices and fragmenting the ecosystem.<p>The problem with Ubuntu, by and large, seems to be a Metro style revolt against Unity although Unity achieved suckdom first. Things broke with change... often this was unnecessary change. But you know what? The nice thing about Linux is that there&#x27;s so many more distros to choose from.<p>Linux Mint (<a href="http://linuxmint.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;linuxmint.com</a>) for example is actually quite nice. Don&#x27;t like Ubuntu? Don&#x27;t use it for crying out loud! It&#x27;s not like Windows; a whole &#x27;nother platform. The same software you know and love will still work.<p>Best of all, it&#x27;s got a bloody start button!

Hardcore Ubuntu user here. I come from a Windows background. I mean like for 15 years almost, I was running on Windows. When I first got introduced to Ubuntu (5 years ago), it was a breath of fresh air. I loved the terminal and I loved the freedom of choice and the fact that nothing was thrusted into my throat. It was really nice. Until they introduced Unity. It was one of the poorest User experience designed, ever. Suddenly the OS I was in love with became so alien.<p>Of course I could switch back to the original normal GUI with a few command line entries and a few option entries. But it was already too late. The flexibility I had in 10.xx was gone in 12.xx. 12.xx become so clunky, heavy and painful to use, that I had to abandon it altogether. I can back up my statements too - Try comparing boot&#x2F;shut down times of 10.xx and 12.xx, you&#x27;ll know.<p>Meanwhile, on Windows, the start button just disappeared. And I DID get used to it, but the fact that Ubuntu&#x27;s Unity had become synonymous to Microsoft pushing their Metro UI into my throat was a nail in the coffin.<p>Now I run dual boot - Mac OS X along with Windows 8.1. I&#x27;m using the Mac OS for about a year or two now and it&#x27;s really good at what it does. Almost feels like Ubuntu&#x27;s 10.xx w.r.t boot times. And I never will be looking back.<p>Ubuntu is a perfect example of &quot;Don&#x27;t fix something if it ain&#x27;t broke.&quot;

No.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge&#x27;s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Betteridge&#x27;s_law_of_headlines</a>

Whenever I see a headline with a leading question in its title my automatic response is &quot;no&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s lazy writing and tries to colour my opinion before even presenting the facts.

Does anyone know if commits &#x27;offered&#x27; is tracked? One of the issues Google always had was they would submit their changes back to the community but then the community would reject them for one reason or another (a lot of the container stuff seemed to start out that way).

i don&#x27;t know, but opensuse continues to be awesome and more american users should try it out. i have to use a variety of linux distros for work, and i use opensuse on my own machines where i get the choice. it&#x27;s so frustrating that such a polished, easy to use but powerful system gets so little love :o(

Ubuntu could have gone much further focusing on helping people learn to love the Unix CLI than trying to chase and reimplement GUI trends over and over for the last decade.

<i>&gt; of the 100,000 kernel patches made in the preceding five years, only 100 of these came from Canonical</i><p>Still better than 0, and that&#x27;s not counting all the fixes they do to other system components and tools that other distros benefit from.<p>I think it&#x27;s great that Ubuntu is using Canonical&#x27;s resources to go in wild directions. I prefer Cinnamon as my desktop environment, but I&#x27;m glad Unity is being worked on too. It&#x27;s awesome they want to be on phones and TVs, you never know where great ideas can sprout from.<p>That being said, I plan to give OpenSuse and Fedora a try soon just to see what I&#x27;ve been missing out on the past few years.

It looks like Canonical, as well as Microsoft, think that something in the form factor of a MS Surface is the way things are going. If you are going to have a desktop&#x2F;tablet, you need a touch driven UI.<p>Five years ago, when Samsung Q1 UMPCs were exciting [1], I&#x27;d have agreed, but it turns out that tablets (with tiny their screens even when you plug in a keyboard), are crap for creation. People don&#x27;t just want to be passive consumers.<p>Hence, this unified Tablet&#x2F;PC idea is a bad one. I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;ll fly eventually, just like mice over trackerballs, but that doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s better. Dedicated devices that are good at creation and consumption respectively (PC, Laptop, TV, Tablet) are better. Unified Tablet&#x2F;PCs yield interfaces that are bad for everything, and extra RSI from the touchscreen.<p>But it&#x27;s the way of the future, so Linux had better be ready. Because soon it&#x27;ll be hard to buy a laptop that isn&#x27;t a tablet. And can you think of a better Desktop Environment for touch screen than Canonicals?<p>[1]<a href="http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Samsung-Q1-UMPC.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mobiletechreview.com&#x2F;notebooks&#x2F;Samsung-Q1-UMPC.ht...</a>

What Ubuntu got popular off of was it&#x27;s ease of setup. They now seem to be using that validation to justify their decisions in UI and everything else, which has nothing to do with what people liked about Ubuntu in the first place. I feel like their PR takes a &quot;we know better than you&quot; attitude for their decisions, but they never proved themselves to be competent at any of the things they&#x27;re pushing for.

<i>In a speech at the Linux Plumbers Convention in 2008 he criticised Ubuntu for not contributing more to the Linux kernel, saying that, of the 100,000 kernel patches made in the preceding five years, only 100 of these came from Canonical, creating the strange situation whereby the world&#x27;s most popular Linux distribution contributed only 0.1 per cent of the work needed to keep the kernel going.</i><p><i>Four years later, in 2012, Kroah-Hartman complained that &quot;Canonical uses me as a gatekeeper of what bugs get fixed in their kernel package and sent to their customers. There&#x27;s so much wrong with this, I don&#x27;t know where to start...&quot;</i><p>If the Linux kernel maintainers are that upset about this then they should have used a licence that forced Canonical to contribute (code or financially), but they didn&#x27;t, they made the Linux kernel &#x27;Free Software&#x27;, and that means Canonical can do what they want with it (freedom 2 in this case), so long as they are not restricting the freedom of others. Either change the licence or shut up.

Lost what? Sorry, lump me into the camp of linux die-hards who don&#x27;t much care for Ubuntu. I grudgingly use it at OSI[1] because it&#x27;s our standard, but I much prefer Fedora or CentOS. Although, once I muster up the time and energy to switch this Ubuntu box to KDE, I&#x27;ll probably like it a lot more.<p>Anyway, having used Ubuntu on my work desktop for the past year and a half, I don&#x27;t see what all the hype is about. It isn&#x27;t &quot;better&quot; than Fedora in any way that is particularly noticeable to me, and the much vaunted &quot;apt-get&quot; seems to do exactly what yum does for me on Fedora. If it&#x27;s better, it&#x27;s such an incremental level of &quot;better&quot; that I find it hardly distinguishable.<p>But Unity... uuugggghhhhhh....<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.osintegrators.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.osintegrators.com</a>

Any &quot;open&quot; community that has to publicly state that it will only work with those that have established credibility in its own community has &quot;lost it&quot;<p>I&#x27;ll politely withhold my comments about the disasters of Unity and now Ubuntu mobile.

It seems sort of unfair to compare kernel contributions from Canonical to a company like Red Hat simply because of the time-frame during Linux&#x27;s development that Red Hat was a part of. Isn&#x27;t is possible that Red Hat helped out more because it was around closer to the start of the Linux project?<p>Also, Canonical&#x27;s and Ubuntu&#x27;s strengths may not lay in kernel development, but instead pushing the boundaries in what can be done on the UI. I certainly don&#x27;t remember Red Hat or SUSE doing the sort of risky things with their UI that Canonical is willing to try.

Never. When i saw the unity interface on couple of years ago, its truel impressive and new kind of UI. People would change M$ to Ubuntu its quite useful( unity UI).. I realy love the interface... Most of the hardcore linux geeks doesn&#x27;t like that environment.in future it would be occupied any other interface..

I personally find it interesting that they bothered to mention Ubuntu TV. That project hasn&#x27;t seen a code commit in months, and by the looks of it there have been little effort to transition away from the deprecated Unity-2d base it&#x27;s built on.

I don&#x27;t normally complain about articles. The content is valid. I&#x27;m having a hard time parsing over the ads though!

Is nobody going to mention that atrocity of a pie chart rendered at an angle?

Ubuntu lost it 5 years ago.

I actually think all this ambivalence is Ubuntus bigest problem. Now it has become apparent that all along they wanted to go down the path of only using the kernel, and then build a whole new software-stack on top of it, just like Android.<p>But they have not communicated this to the community, all the community has seen is half-hearted attempts to contribute (to projects that they where going to get rid of anyways) and sporadic design changes that went to far away from the vanilla experience of gnome (making it feel fragmented), and then ultimately replacing fully functional software (with software that&#x27;s full of bugs and obviously not stable yet).<p>Now, in the normal Linux community world, everything above seems like total madness, unless as stated in the first paragraph your endgame was all along to replace everything to make a unified product. If they only communicated this, I think they would have gotten alot of support and understandig instead of alienating them selves.

Once again, I feel that I&#x27;m the only one who knows it&#x27;s possible to run non-Unity UIs on Ubuntu.<p>Window Maker. It works. I run it. Have for years. I can&#x27;t be the only one, because it&#x27;s still right there in the repos.