Mark Shuttleworth Reveals Ubuntu Netbook Remix

Glyn Moody writes "In an interview with the Guardian today, Mark Shuttleworth talks about the upcoming Ubuntu Netbook Remix, a tailored version for ultraportables, produced in collaboration with Intel." The new version of Ubuntu is barely mentioned in this interview, but it's tantalizing -- SUSE looks nice on the HP Mininotes, but for people who are used to and enjoy Ubuntu, it's an option to look forward to.

Comments

Re:What is it with Ubuntu

[moosesocks]

I think you're missing the forest for the trees.

Miniminalism does not necessarily imply functionality or utilitarianism.

Even in spite of the bare-bones design, Debian's site fails to organize things in a logical or comprehensable manner.

In all, the site's design feels very indicative of the GNU project in general. There's far too much space devoted to things that people simply don't care about.

The first item on the sidebar? Debian's social contract. The majority of the text in the welcome message is a paraphrasing of Stallman's GNU/Linux naming rant. Most users are interested in an operating system, not an ideology. Linux has gotten good enough that it can drop this crutch entirely.

The battle is over, and we won... not because the public woke up and realized that closed-source software is evil. F/OSS gained acceptance because the software actually became better than its commercial counterparts. Relying on ideology is a terrible marketing strategy, and implies some pretty huge weaknesses.

A better introduction would be: "Debian is a fast, reliable, and secure operating system available for several platforms. It is provided free of charge to all users, and is developed by a team of volunteers." Short, to-the-point, and pays homage to the F/OSS philosophy without forcing it down the users' throats.

The rest of that paragraph is useless. Unless you stumbled across the page by accident, you probably know what an operating system is. Nobody cares about the number of packages in the repository.

Actually attempting to download the distro is a chore as well. First the user must pick the release, then the branch, then the installation method, and finally their architecture. Most users aren't going to know what any of these things mean.

It's fine to offer a high degree of flexibility. However, when 99% of your users are going to be downloading an ISO for the most recent stable x86 build, it makes the most sense to put that option right up front.

Anyone with the need for one of the more exotic builds should be knowledgable enough to figure out where to look. A simple hyperlink to "Other Builds" that leads to a table of all the available releases would be perfectly sufficient.

I'm not even going to bother elaborating about the color scheme, inconsistent margins, or excessively linearized page flow (for both remaining Lynx users!). There are enough competent web designers out there that the crappy design of Debian's site must actually have been a conscious choice of the project's management. It achieves the impossible goal of being both condescending and incomprehensable all at the same time.