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"Giant bloated executable..."

SystemD causes a lot of problems. That makes more money for people who work for companies that do Linux technology support.

Is that a giant conflict of interest? Was SystemD allowed by management of Red Hat because it would make more money?

Mark Shuttleworth said, "Losing graciously". (Feb. 14, 2014} "It will no doubt take time to achieve the stability and coverage that we enjoy today..."

The buttons were moved from the right side of the window to the left side because Ubuntu was planning an amazing new feature called "windicators" ("window indicators") which were going to go on the right side of the window bar. These would show, for example, a progress bar for a background task in an app, online/offline indicator for server connection status, etc. My favorite idea: they were supposed to also provide convenient per-app volume control or mute. (PulseAudio does allow per-app volume controls but there isn't any window chrome for it; you have to go to the audio control panel, find the list of running audio apps, and control from there.)

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/333

Windicators... never happened.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/58466/what-is-the-current-status-of-windicators

This announcement, that the window buttons are going back to the right side, indicates to me that Ubuntu has officially given up on ever implementing "windicators".

Vivid Vervet

Yes, really. Here I provide you a summary of some regular release dates:

Gnome - March (version number increases by .2)
Ubuntu - towards end of April (LTS if this is an even-numbered year)
OpenBSD - May 1st (or, historically and occasionally, May 19th)
GNOME - September (version number increases by .2)
Ubuntu - towards end of October (hence why version numbers end with "10", it is the 10th month)
OpenBSD - November 1st

Firefox: New release every whenever-they-feel-like-it not-very-long
Debian: New release every whenever-they-feel-like-it yes-very-long

I'm sure there are other projects with regular schedules... I'd appreciate any reply comments about other major projects with known regular release dates.

Some notes related to Ubuntu:
Ubuntu has a history of releasing very 6 months. Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical (who releases Ubuntu) has expressed desire to synchronize with other projects:
Mark Shuttleworth: The Art of Release
More recently, he may have drunk some of Mozilla's Kool Aid, though
Mark Shuttleworth: Let's Go Faster...
discusses possibly turning Ubuntu into a "rolling release" cycle.

Anyway, getting back to OpenBSD, Theo seems quite dedicated to releasing the software when it is expected, and describes it as a result of their carefully controlled development process. (Even before their semi-annual release schedule, they had an annual release on December 1st. So, when they did change their schedule to release on November 1st, they were ahead of their old schedule.) So, they have demonstrated that they are carefully able to release on time. Slashdot Article on OpenBSD release process, Discussion on OpenBSD release cycle. Development is also discussed in the video at BSDNow.tv: Doing It de Raadt Way (which interviews de Raadt starting about 8min7sec into the show).

So, they stick to their schedule well. But why a semi-annual schedule? In Kernel Trap interview with Theo, Theo says, "We have a six month cycle for many reasons. First off, and most important to me personally, it is just the right length so that I do not kill myself."

Yes, really. Here I provide you a summary of some regular release dates:

Gnome - March (version number increases by .2)
Ubuntu - towards end of April (LTS if this is an even-numbered year)
OpenBSD - May 1st (or, historically and occasionally, May 19th)
GNOME - September (version number increases by .2)
Ubuntu - towards end of October (hence why version numbers end with "10", it is the 10th month)
OpenBSD - November 1st

Firefox: New release every whenever-they-feel-like-it not-very-long
Debian: New release every whenever-they-feel-like-it yes-very-long

I'm sure there are other projects with regular schedules... I'd appreciate any reply comments about other major projects with known regular release dates.

Some notes related to Ubuntu:
Ubuntu has a history of releasing very 6 months. Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical (who releases Ubuntu) has expressed desire to synchronize with other projects:
Mark Shuttleworth: The Art of Release
More recently, he may have drunk some of Mozilla's Kool Aid, though
Mark Shuttleworth: Let's Go Faster...
discusses possibly turning Ubuntu into a "rolling release" cycle.

Anyway, getting back to OpenBSD, Theo seems quite dedicated to releasing the software when it is expected, and describes it as a result of their carefully controlled development process. (Even before their semi-annual release schedule, they had an annual release on December 1st. So, when they did change their schedule to release on November 1st, they were ahead of their old schedule.) So, they have demonstrated that they are carefully able to release on time. Slashdot Article on OpenBSD release process, Discussion on OpenBSD release cycle. Development is also discussed in the video at BSDNow.tv: Doing It de Raadt Way (which interviews de Raadt starting about 8min7sec into the show).

So, they stick to their schedule well. But why a semi-annual schedule? In Kernel Trap interview with Theo, Theo says, "We have a six month cycle for many reasons. First off, and most important to me personally, it is just the right length so that I do not kill myself."

The irony is that by framing this in Tea Party terms, he's actually alienating a significant proportion of dedicated followers. Like it or not, but libertarians tend to favor F/OSS, and, conversely, a lot of F/OSS developers and users are libertarians. Needless to say, their perspective on Tea Party is considerably different from what Mark seems to espouse, and they will take offense at this comparison. All in all, a very bad PR move.

So in your alternate universe Mark Shuttleworth has a relationship with Gnome that is not only "friendly", but he actually has a say in what they do? Because in this universe, none of that is true.

One of the things that your link quotes Shuttleworth as saying is "Strengthening the LTS point releases".

That would seem to be the opposite of not having them.

Perhaps also have a look at the bit where he says he's not going to have rolling releases.

Microsoft has built an impressive new entrant to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market, and Ubuntu is there for customers who want to run workloads on Azure that are best suited to Linux. Windows Azure was built for the enterprise market, an audience which is increasingly comfortable with Ubuntu as a workhorse for scale-out workloads; in short, it's a good fit for both of us, and it's been interesting to do the work to bring Ubuntu to the platform.

Given that it's normal for us to spin up 2,000-node Hadoop clusters with Juju, it will be very valuable to have a new enterprise-oriented cloud with which to evaluate performance, latency, reliability, scalability and many other key metrics for production deployment scenarios.

As IAAS grows in recognition as a standard part of the enterprise toolkit, it will be important to have a wide range of infrastructures that are addressable, with diverse strengths. In the case of Windows Azure, there is clearly a deep connection between Windows-based IT and the new IAAS. But I think Microsoft has set their sights on a bigger story, which is high-quality enterprise-oriented infrastructure that is generally useful. That's why Ubuntu is important to them, and why it was worthwhile for us to work together despite our differences. Just as we need to ensure that customers can run Ubuntu and Windows together inside their data centre and on the LAN, we want to ensure that cloud workloads play nicely.

The team leading Azure has a sophisticated understanding of Ubuntu and Linux in general. They are taking a pragmatic approach that will raise eyebrows around the Redmond campus, but is exactly what customers want to see. We have taken a similar view. I know there will be members of the free software community that will leap at the chance to berate Microsoft for its very existence, but it's not very Ubuntu to do so: let's argue our perspective, work towards our goals, be open to those who are open to us, and build great stuff. There is nothing proprietary in Ubuntu-for-Azure, and no about-turn from us on long-held values. This is us making sure our audience, and especially the enterprise audience, can benefit from the work our community and Canonical do no matter where they want to do it.

From: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1158

The effective keystroke monitoring in recent Ubuntu monitoring is a _much_ bigger problem. The desktop search result is broadcasting your searches back to the Ubuntu mother company for Amazon search results. Despite Mark's claims, this is not "putting ads in Ubuntu" it is far more than merely adware. By effectively tracking local user searches, by default, it is clearly spyware. Worse, the queries were being sent in clear text, and there was no graceful way to turn it off. Those had to be top level decisions for the new release, and they were terrible decisions.

To quote Mark from his own response to this at http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182 .

> We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root

Mark's claim that "your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query" is nonsensical. Tracking cookies and the sometimes abusive tracking tools of doubleclick.net provide thorough tracking of the search queries and the results, and to automatically be doing This, along with other recent changes, has demonstrated that Mark Shuttleworth and the leadership of the Ubuntu distribution _cannot be trusted_. Having "root" access is not an excuse: it's a reason that Ubuntu should never have even tried this obvious and adware and spyware attempt.

Also note: the queries are not going to be encrypted to protect you, the user. They're going to be encrypted to make them less obvious to network monitoring and tougher to block.

BTW, he's not running Ubuntu on his servers, he's running Ubuntu Server, a different beast.

You seem Ubuntu Server not fit for servers, but it's beating out Redhat, so there's obviously a lot of people that disagree with you. http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1072

Ubuntu Server is a mostly well though-out environment. I like
Upstart. You get a distro with somewhat recent software (much more than RHell), more stable than Fedora, and depending on the Debian flavor, more stable or more recent or just plain "what everybody else is using". The latter means you've got a lot to google from when you hit a problem or need some help.

Also, there's a lot of cloud support. Check out https://juju.ubuntu.com/

There's a little mistake in this article. Mark Shuttleworth stepped down from his CEO position in 2009, to "focus my Canonical energy on product design, partnerships and customers".

Unlike Android, you can be confident that if you turn off the online search, your phone will not send lots of data about you to the world-champion data-miners.

Oh really? Face it, any corporate sponsored endeavor looking to compete with Google is going to resort to some of these tactics to extract profit since their ability to actually charge for the product itself is pretty well tanked. I will say I'm perfectly willing to believe Android can be easily outdone in terms of UI functionality (hell, Palm did it with WebOS). App and manufacturer ecosystem is going to be a severely uphill battle. Canonical's past announcements have left plenty of room to doubt the viability of this announcement (Ubuntu TVs anyone?) so I'm not getting my hopes up that Ubuntu is the one to deliver me from the relatively mediocre android experience.

If you read Shuttleworth's response to criticism, and if you can filter out the mountains of horseshit in his blog post, you'll get the impression that he has no respect for his userbase and that this is only the beginning.

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182

Six years ago I posted some related ideas on your blog about a workshop the Shuttleworth Foundation held: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/26#comment-397
"[Responding to: "Amazing two day workshop on programming and education" where you wrote: "I'm all fired up after two days of the most amazing work bringing together some very remarkable people to talk about a TSF strategy to ensure that we can give the next generation excellent analytical skills despite the global collapse in the supply of maths teaching capacity."] ... So why build software tools oriented towards schools and a compulsory "curriculum" if the real goal is helping kids educate themselves and become productive citizens of the 21st century? Yes, schools could be made a bit less terrible, but why spend rare philanthropic dollars for such a meager outcome? Someone like Mark Shuttleworth has so much potential as an agent of positive change, but it seems like, despite the fact that his effort will do some small good for some school kids, it is mostly a non-starter as far as significant change."

Have your thoughts changed any since then after trying educational reform the old-fashioned school-based way? See also for more background my 2007 essay which grew out of discussion on the Python edusig list related to your workshop and my trying to create some new free software in a constructivist and unschooling direction:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change. ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."

Frankly, it was Mr. Shuttleworth's response to criticism that sealed the deal for me. You can almost taste the horseshit in your mouth as you read it.

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182

- He claims to be trying to make the Home Lens a "find anything anywhere" search engine. So why not let, you know, a real internet search engine handle the general queries, instead of Amazon? Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc would all be better alternatives to finding a product than going through individual sites.

- He claims these aren't advertisements. Multiple times. With what I can only hope is a straight face. I mean, really? They are wasting space on my screen and they want me to buy something. That is a goddamn advertisement. As if to prove his case, he claims "these are not ads because they are not paid placement". Even if that were true, which I doubt, that's still a ridiculous straw man.

- But my favorite bit was this: "Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already. You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update." Wow. Just, wow. Unprofessional and cocky at best. It doesn't take much to look at that attitude and realize that he has no respect for his userbase. This is only the beginning, folks. He's got plans.

Needless to say, I went back to Debian instead of upgrading to the next version.

"It makes perfect sense to integrate Amazon search results in the Dash, because the Home Lens of the Dash should let you find *anything* anywhere"

Seriously? it should "let me find"? You put tons of advertises in user's computers *and* tons of user's data on Amazon servers and you didn't provide it as opt-in feature? And I can't even disable it [until a rushed update came out]?
Good job! You're alienating the most important thing you gained so far, your users. You know, not only it is important to bring Ubuntu in the mainstream: you need to be sure you don't get there alone, you know?

It seems another case of "shut up, we know better than users what users really want".
Do you?

Glad I could help. Actually I made a typo, it's "unity-lens-shopping", which makes more sense anyway. In addition, configuration options will be added, see today's blog post about the Amazon feature by Shuttleworth: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182

It's a bit of a PR disaster that this blog post comes after the feature landed in the Beta. If Shuttleworth had published this in advance, many of the misunderstandings which fueled this Slashdot discussion could have been avoided.

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/site/about/xerox.big.png vs http://www.markshuttleworth.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.png

Try Ubuntu 12.04 with the HUD: that's exactly what it does, allows you to find menu items by typing what you want to do, and it's absolutely brilliant! Introducing the HUD

Given the increasing popularity of Ubuntu on servers, I am sure HP thinks (and rightfully so) it's a good strategic move to test and certify the latest version on their machines.

Shuttleworth gives credit to Enso, Ubiquity, Jeff Raskin, other UI designs, and even the MS ribbon

Yes, it is also helpful for power users, so? Much of the focus of Ubuntu has been on newbs, what is wrong with caring a bit for power users? Though they claim that their user testing shows that it is helpful for both power users and newbs: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/939
If you read the link, you will see that they do not plan to take away a visible menu tree structure. Plus, the search problem you mention can be solved by tagging and fuzzy search, at least for most cases. In Ubuntu's Unity, I can already (in 11.10) type, for example, "presentation" and Libre Office Impress will come up, the presentation program. Other systems have this as well, basically it has been solved for a long time.

The argument that they present for why the HUD is great is exactly the reason why it is a poor replacement for menus.

How good, then, that the HUD does not replace the menus. The search is an additional option. In the future, the menu item tree will be migrated to the HUD as well, but it will stay visible according to http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/939

KDE has had a search function like this for years.

No it hasn't. This HUD idea is not about searching for applications, but for searching for menu items in the currently focused application, from the same location you use to search for everything else.

But regarding the launching of programs ...

Take a simple example of opening a console. We know it is called a console or terminal, or rxvt, or xterm, etc.. however a new user may not think of a term window, they may think "I need a command window" however, typing command windows does not display terminals.

Seems to be quite easily solved by tagging. In Ubuntu's Unity, for example search for "com..." already shows the Terminal launch icon.

Ill admit that this example can be handled with a lot of research using users who have never used linux before and asking them to type stuff.

I believe that the number of reasonable tags is limited, and can be found by normal user testing, which Canonical is currently doing for the new feature. (see link further down)

Personally, I have gone over to using a panel with the most common apps on it and the search for stuff I use less often. However, I still use the menu from time to time to look up stuff that I just can't remember the name of.

And even for the menus this is actually about, all three options are available: the toolbar for pinning (if the toolkit allows), the conventional menu tree in the application (for now, to be migrated to the HUD in the future, but still visible), and now the menu item search.

Shuttleworth blog post: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/939

Sounds like someboby just read The Humane Interface! (which I totally recommend)

Mark Shuttleworth's blog post about HUD:

Our thinking is inspired by many works of science, art and entertainment; from Minority Report to Modern Warfare and Jeff Raskin’s Humane Interface. We hope others will join us and accelerate the shift from pointy-clicky interfaces to natural and efficient ones.

It's not targeted at beginners as such, where did you get that from? Shuttleworth inhis blog post (seems down right now):

This work grows out of observations of new and established / sophisticated users making extensive use of the broader set of capabilities in their applications. We noticed that both groups of users spent a lot of time, relatively speaking, navigating the menus of their applications, either to learn about the capabilities of the app, or to take a specific action.
(...)
The results so far are rather interesting: power users say things like “every GUI app now feels as powerful as VIM”. EMACS users just grunt and nevermind . Another comment was “it works so well that the rare occasions when it can’t read my mind are annoying!”. We’re doing a lot of user testing on heavy multitaskers, developers and all-day-at-the-workstation personas for Unity in 12.04, polishing off loose ends in the experience that frustrated some in this audience in 11.04-10. If that describes you, the results should be delightful. And the HUD should be particularly empowering.

Even casual users find typing faster than mousing. So while there are modes of interaction where it’s nice to sit back and drive around with the mouse, we observe people staying more engaged and more focused on their task when they can keep their hands on the keyboard all the time. Hotkeys are a sort of mental gymnastics, the HUD is a continuation of mental flow

You misunderstood how it is to be implemented, or TFA was wrong. Unfortunately Shuttleworth's blog post. returns only a blank page for me right now. For the current search feature, no app modifications are required, except for apps using certain toolkits, like LibreOffice:

The image is showing Inkscape, but of course it works everywhere the global menu works. No app modifications are needed to get this level of experience.

In the future, they want to include a view of the menu tree, and it seems Ubuntu will try to get support ino the toolkits:

We’ll make sure it’s easy for developers working in any toolkit to take advantage of this and give their users a better experience. And we’ll promote the apps which do it best – it makes apps easier to use, it saves time and screen real-estate for users, and it creates a better impression of the free software platform when it’s done well.

But now we see the strategy of Canonical and why the (at the time) weird decisions were being made

Um duh, it was made for Instant-On web devices, it just so happens that tablets fall into that category nicely.

But let's look at each point individually because not everything you stated relates to Canonical's desire to go to Tablet's, it's more along the lines of, "it just happens to also help them out towards tablets."

1) The nasty split, isn't any more nasty than other things in the Linux world. Canonical wants Canonical stuff in Canonical's distro. GNOME 3 is still used in Unity, but just differently. It's hard for me to explain because I suck at summing things up, but trust me, Unity is GNOME 3 at the core and Unity runs more with how people predicted GNOME3 to be used more as a platform and less like a standard desktop. The main facet is that it removes a lot of upstream push from the GNOME community. Canonical wants their desktop to look the way they want it to look, not what GNOME developers want it to look like. You'll see this type of mentality in a lot of Ubuntu. Also, let's face it GNOME developers are difficult to work with at best. It's very easy to paint the main developers as being the pearly towers (metaphor for someone who dictates how things should happen, but have little to zero real-world experience to back up exactly why that's right.)

2) The choice to use Wayland over X boils down to the same debate that was had on xgl versus aiglx. Mark thinks running direct to the video card is a better method than the way X provides. This has been a common thing that comes up ooo, I'd say every five to six years. Someone comes up with a better way to run direct to the card and someone jumps on the band wagon. Usually there is just too much inertia to make the jump from X to the something else happen and we all go back to using X happily. There's a lot of misconception that Xorg (specifically) and X11 (in general) are bloated, slow, won't run well on older machines. X11 is a pretty hefty "standard," but not everything in it is in every implementation. There are multiple of X11 implementations (I'm given too, Google can help you see more) that target embedded systems that run quite well. Xorg implements a lot of stuff to keep backwards compatibility with older machines. Wayland doesn't. However, don't confuse that because just because it is implemented does not mean that it gets loaded if it is not needed. You aren't going to be using XRender when your video card offers the ability to use OpenGL pixmap to texture. The biggest problem with X is drivers (and that shouldn't surprise anyone) and the low quality those drivers exist in. That problem will not go away with Wayland. The idea is, and to me it's a bad bet, if we make the model more simple (remember the X11 "spec" is a pretty big tome) then vendors will be more incline to write better drivers since the model for those drivers is more simplistic. However, as bets go, that's immaterial to why Canonical wants to go Wayland. It really boils down to the fact that they want to do Window Decorations the way they want to do Window Decora

But now we see the strategy of Canonical and why the (at the time) weird decisions were being made

Um duh, it was made for Instant-On web devices, it just so happens that tablets fall into that category nicely.

But let's look at each point individually because not everything you stated relates to Canonical's desire to go to Tablet's, it's more along the lines of, "it just happens to also help them out towards tablets."

1) The nasty split, isn't any more nasty than other things in the Linux world. Canonical wants Canonical stuff in Canonical's distro. GNOME 3 is still used in Unity, but just differently. It's hard for me to explain because I suck at summing things up, but trust me, Unity is GNOME 3 at the core and Unity runs more with how people predicted GNOME3 to be used more as a platform and less like a standard desktop. The main facet is that it removes a lot of upstream push from the GNOME community. Canonical wants their desktop to look the way they want it to look, not what GNOME developers want it to look like. You'll see this type of mentality in a lot of Ubuntu. Also, let's face it GNOME developers are difficult to work with at best. It's very easy to paint the main developers as being the pearly towers (metaphor for someone who dictates how things should happen, but have little to zero real-world experience to back up exactly why that's right.)

2) The choice to use Wayland over X boils down to the same debate that was had on xgl versus aiglx. Mark thinks running direct to the video card is a better method than the way X provides. This has been a common thing that comes up ooo, I'd say every five to six years. Someone comes up with a better way to run direct to the card and someone jumps on the band wagon. Usually there is just too much inertia to make the jump from X to the something else happen and we all go back to using X happily. There's a lot of misconception that Xorg (specifically) and X11 (in general) are bloated, slow, won't run well on older machines. X11 is a pretty hefty "standard," but not everything in it is in every implementation. There are multiple of X11 implementations (I'm given too, Google can help you see more) that target embedded systems that run quite well. Xorg implements a lot of stuff to keep backwards compatibility with older machines. Wayland doesn't. However, don't confuse that because just because it is implemented does not mean that it gets loaded if it is not needed. You aren't going to be using XRender when your video card offers the ability to use OpenGL pixmap to texture. The biggest problem with X is drivers (and that shouldn't surprise anyone) and the low quality those drivers exist in. That problem will not go away with Wayland. The idea is, and to me it's a bad bet, if we make the model more simple (remember the X11 "spec" is a pretty big tome) then vendors will be more incline to write better drivers since the model for those drivers is more simplistic. However, as bets go, that's immaterial to why Canonical wants to go Wayland. It really boils down to the fact that they want to do Window Decorations the way they want to do Window Decora

Well here is a Linux solution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN4c61ETCWg. If you are patient there is also http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/820. So it would seem there is a whole world of choice shortly to be available for Android phones. So you start with Android but if you want to explore other options in the future that option seems readily available.

I've never used it but usually for servers you would use the server version: http://www.ubuntu.com/business/server/overview

Here is Shuttleworth's blog talking about Ubuntu on tablets.. he wants to add tablets, not move to them:

By 14.04 LTS Ubuntu will power tablets, phones, TVs and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server and the cloud.

Unity, the desktop interface in today’s Ubuntu 11.10, was designed with this specific vision in mind. While the interface for each form factor is shaped appropriately, Unity’s core elements are arranged in exactly the way we need to create coherence across all of those devices. This was the origin of the name Unity – a single core interface framework, that scales across all screens, and supports all toolkits. from: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/820

Big announces like :
- the wayland/unity stuff, 1 year ago ( http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 ), still nothing despites "this should be ready in one year".
- the android compatibility, 2 year and half ago ( http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/canonical-developers-aim-to-make-android-apps-run-on-ubuntu.ars )

Unique names do help in searching for issues relating to a particular release.

Well apparently Shuttleworth considered Perky Penguin. But they coulda come up with a more unique P adjective, and I think it would be easy enough to search for.

See you're not supposed to bring those inconsistencies up.

You're just supposed to pay homage to whatever Mark imposes^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdecides.

Well, if you hate the Gnome and Ubuntu interface changes, here's another. MS(huttleworth) has announced that the next (Natty) version of Ubuntu will have disappearing scrollbars. Basically, the Natty scrollbar will be a moving scroll button that only appears when you need to vertically or horizontally pan a window.

The so-called "overlay" scrollbars will be shipped in a special "liboverlay-scrollbar" package.

To be sure, there will still be a permanent indicator to show relative position within a window. But this narrow indicator, which kind of resembles the tube in an analog thermometer, itself won't be clickable. The blog post includes a video illustrating the concept. It looks cool, but I don't know how it will work in practice (how near must you be to the scroll indicator before the scroll button appears?).

Unless I misunderstand, Ubuntu would like very much to replace X with Wayland.
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

If "retain the ability to run X applications in a compatibility mode" is not considered "dumping" X, well, then alright, maybe it's a semantic difference...

"going into production Ubuntu" says Canonical, .

"+3 insightful" /rolleyes

What Shuttleworth actually wrote: "Timeframes are difficult. I’m sure we could deliver *something* in six months, but I think a year is more realistic for the first images that will be widely useful in our community. I’d love to be proven conservative on that :-) but I suspect it’s more likely to err the other way. It might take four or more years to really move the ecosystem. Progress on Wayland itself is sufficient for me to be confident that no other initiative could outrun it, especially if we deliver things like Unity and uTouch with it. And also if we make an early public statement in support of the project. Which this is!"

      -- http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551

For anyone who is interested, here is what Mark Shuttleworth actually said: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 . In his post he gives his reasoning and alternatives they looked at. Seems pretty well thought out. Ubuntu always gets slapped about not giving back to the community. Well, here they are announcing they are giving back and they still get slapped. It seems as if they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

My only concern is that last time I looked Wayland wasn't ready for primetime, and the intent with Wayland wasn't to be a full replacement for X for most users.

If Mark Shuttleworth was proposing Wayland for prime-time inclusion in Ubuntu 11.04 or even 11.10, I'd be concerned. But if you actually follow this news story to the original source at http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 you would find this:

Timeframes are difficult. I’m sure we could deliver *something* in six months, but I think a year is more realistic for the first images that will be widely useful in our community. I’d love to be proven conservative on that :-) but I suspect it’s more likely to err the other way. It might take four or more years to really move the ecosystem. Progress on Wayland itself is sufficient for me to be confident that no other initiative could outrun it, especially if we deliver things like Unity and uTouch with it. And also if we make an early public statement in support of the project. Which this is!

So the first likely viewing of this would 11.10 and real integration into the entire stack is more likely in the 14.10/15.04 time frame.

So this is a classic storm in a teacup right now. The reality is "promising project will be supported by major Linux player for future inclusion".

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

No.

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/139

We could link to Mark's actual blog post http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/517 instead of linking to some crappy IT World "article."

The IT world link takes you to an interstitial ad, followed by a godawful mishmash of crap.

Here's a link to the original post: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/517

First, I'm very impressed with what Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical have done with Ubuntu and Kubuntu. It is my impression that the effect of Ubuntu has been to encourage everyone to fix a lot of configuration and other problems that were, in the aggregate, creating a barrier to beginning to use Linux.

There was a period of of years in which I would load new versions of Linux from several sources and be amazed at how much a new user was expected to know about configuration.

It doesn't matter if Ubuntu and Canonical did the work; Canonical's leadership caused the job to be done.

You said, "Isn't that what Shuttleworth is trying to assess?"

Assessing, being analytical, is what I think Mark Shuttleworth should do. Instead, he is doing very little assessing or analyzing. He is using a common word, tribalism, apparently to avoid taking an interest in all the steps of a complex social phenomenon.

He apparently hopes someone else will do the analyzing and theorizing about how to handle his problem.

In his article, he has made some useful comments. But calling anger a "playground squabble" shows the lack of depth in his thinking. When he says "playground squabble" he is implying that the people to whom he is talking are acting like children. That's an attempt to shame or intimidate; it's not analysis.

What is happening in actuality? My guess is that the anger comes from trying to work on a complicated project with too little coordination. People are blaming each other rather than the cause of the problem. They do that because they don't feel socially empowered to criticize the lack of true leadership.

Notice that Linux Torvalds gets different results. Although Mr. Torvalds sometimes lacks social elegance, he has provided true leadership, and that leadership has provided an atmosphere in which people work together. I am not saying Mr. Torvalds' leadership has been perfect. It has been amazingly good, however. Who would have thought the world would come together and create the kernel of a good computer operating system for everyone to use?

When we talked at OSCON 2008, Mr. Shuttleworth asked me what I thought about how to handle anger. I've done extensive analysis of anger, and I told him what I think. However, as I said in the former paragraph, I don't think anger is the correct fundamental diagnosis of his present problem. The "tribalism" he describes is in this case just a symptom of the lack of sufficient coordination, I'm guessing.

I gave Mr. Shuttleworth printed copies of a 27-page manual that can be downloaded from my web site that shows part of my ability to understand how sociology and technology interact. I have no evidence that he read it.

My understanding is that Mark Shuttleworth's Canonical has never made a profit. For example, see the November 2, 2008 article Canonical founder will wait for profits. Canonical's biggest shortcoming, in my opinion, is the poor marketing and public relations. The article referenced in this Slashdot story is a good example of poor public relations. It says to the business community, "I don't know how to handle this situation well."

I think that, if Canonical had professional marketing and public relations, it would have no trouble making a profit. Numerous articles say, "You can't make a profit selling a desktop operating system", but I think that is not the problem.

In my opinion, Mr. Shuttleworth is facing a problem that, if solved, could be life-changing for him. If he is willing to encounter the difficulties of personal growth, Canonical will be a success, and his life will be enriched. If he is not willing, Canonical may never make a profit.

Bruce, you are exactly right - especially after you read things like this.

After having read the FAQ on the Linaro web site and a blog entry by Mark Shuttleworth, I get the feeling that this is an initiative coming from Canonical. If they will be driving this forward, with support from the hardware vendors of course, it might not become your garden variety standards organisation. In that case, the key issue will be to keep the commitment from the hardware manufacturers. But I guess it could work out alright considering Canonical isn't a direct competitor to any of them.

A lot of changes happen for a reason. It takes about an hour to get used to this one.

the blog entry you link to says:

We’ve carefully placed all the panel indicators on the right, and we’ve carefully put the window controls and window title on the left. So now we have all this space on the right. As a pattern, it would fit to put the window indicators there.

can you point out to me that part which tells the reason why they moved the window controls to the left. as far as i understand it they just did it because they want useless, irrational change for the sake of change. they could have let the window controls stay where they are and place the new fangled (imo, unnecessary) panel icons at the left. why make the users change their habit?
also, it might have taken an hour for you, but i simply can't get used to it. every time i try to use it, it irritates me to rage.

This is wrong. That's "indicator-applet". If you remove it from the panel, nothing else goes missing.

are you a moron? try and remove the indicator applet. volume, bluetooth, and power are also gone. please try it before sounding off on someone who knows more about the topic.

Right. You call a system which offers several layers of customization (from top to bottom: GUI menus -> configuration files -> interpreted scripts -> recompilable source) less customizable than monolithic windows. Your world seems to be a strange but simple one.

i don't care. i can remove individual icons from the taskbar in any version of windows without changing anything else. i cannot do it in 10.04 ubuntu with the envelope icon. that makes it less customizable.
from your quoted shuttleworth:

There aren't any good reasons for that

enough said.

A lot of changes happen for a reason. It takes about an hour to get used to this one. If you don't want to, it's trivial to revert to the previous setup.

there is also the envelope icon that takes up space on the top bar that you can't remove without also removing volume and bluetooth etc.

This is wrong. That's "indicator-applet". If you remove it from the panel, nothing else goes missing.

windows is more customizable than this.

Right. You call a system which offers several layers of customization (from top to bottom: GUI menus -> configuration files -> interpreted scripts -> recompilable source) less customizable than monolithic windows. Your world seems to be a strange but simple one.

gnome needs to die.

Ah, so you're just trolling?

kde is going in a much better direction

"There is only one right direction. That is to wherever I am. What other users might prefer is irrelevant.

they did not bother to give a single reason for this fucking change.

Mark Shuttleworth comments on the bug report and writes a blog.

shuttleworth and co have shown tremendous disregard for the community

"This is a difference between Ubuntu and several other community distributions. It may feel less democratic, but it's more meritocratic, and most importantly it means (a) we should have the best people making any given decision, and (b) it's worth investing your time to become the best person to make certain decisions, because you should have that competence recognised and rewarded with the freedom to make hard decisions and not get second-guessed all the time.

"It's fair comment that this was a big change, and landed without warning. There aren't any good reasons for that, but it's also true that no amount of warning would produce consensus about a decision like this."

(Shuttleworth, see also 202, 218, 388 and 410)

the notification system is utter crap. for example [...] wtf! [...] it should give you [...]

"Bugs in my OS? Unheard of!"

i have stopped using ubuntu because of irrational, stupid

This part of the sentence is true.

A lot of changes happen for a reason. It takes about an hour to get used to this one. If you don't want to, it's trivial to revert to the previous setup.

there is also the envelope icon that takes up space on the top bar that you can't remove without also removing volume and bluetooth etc.

This is wrong. That's "indicator-applet". If you remove it from the panel, nothing else goes missing.

windows is more customizable than this.

Right. You call a system which offers several layers of customization (from top to bottom: GUI menus -> configuration files -> interpreted scripts -> recompilable source) less customizable than monolithic windows. Your world seems to be a strange but simple one.

gnome needs to die.

Ah, so you're just trolling?

kde is going in a much better direction

"There is only one right direction. That is to wherever I am. What other users might prefer is irrelevant.

they did not bother to give a single reason for this fucking change.

Mark Shuttleworth comments on the bug report and writes a blog.

shuttleworth and co have shown tremendous disregard for the community

"This is a difference between Ubuntu and several other community distributions. It may feel less democratic, but it's more meritocratic, and most importantly it means (a) we should have the best people making any given decision, and (b) it's worth investing your time to become the best person to make certain decisions, because you should have that competence recognised and rewarded with the freedom to make hard decisions and not get second-guessed all the time.

"It's fair comment that this was a big change, and landed without warning. There aren't any good reasons for that, but it's also true that no amount of warning would produce consensus about a decision like this."

(Shuttleworth, see also 202, 218, 388 and 410)

the notification system is utter crap. for example [...] wtf! [...] it should give you [...]

"Bugs in my OS? Unheard of!"

i have stopped using ubuntu because of irrational, stupid

This part of the sentence is true.

A netbook is no more "designed" to run Ubuntu than the Kindle is.

Depends which netbook you get.