Ubuntu To Pay for Upgrades To the Free Software User Experience

jcatcw writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, is using his millions to improve the Linux user experience, hiring people to work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE. He had doubted that desktop Linux could ever equal the smooth, graceful integration of the Mac OS. Now, between the driving pace of open-source development, and Shuttleworth's millions, it might be happening. Why not? After all, Mac OS itself is based on FreeBSD. Desktop Linux's future is starting to look brighter."

Comments

Re:Gnome + KDE

[pugdk]

I've used windows since 3.1 (and even tried Vista heh) and used OS X for some time as well.

I've also been using Linux for more than 10 years, trying all kind of different window managers.

The one that was the most unusable, the most annoying, the most illogical one I ever tried, was Gnome (and believe me, I've tried... I've really tried to like Gnome, tried it multiple times, both in Debian and in several releases of Ubuntu. After several weeks, sometimes a few months, I just get fed up and install KDE instead).

Yes, I feel annoyed when the best bet on bringing Linux to the desktop in my eyes are wasting their time and development funding on crap.

I say this as a *USER* of said software, *NOT* as a developer.

I really WANT to like Gnome, but no matter what I do I end up hating it after a while.

The fact that *I* believe this means Ubuntu will fail on the desktop aggravates me to no end.

Re:Flash content

[ThePhilips]

Try bugging Mozilla/FireFox people. Many proposals (patches included) were thrown on table - none accepted. To make things worse, Mozilla remade the code in Fx3 making all previous patches obsolete and the method used before by the extensions isn't supported anymore. Security reasons were cited.

I was always under impression that the people behind many projects do not really understand what kind of things normal end users are doing with computers. FireFox is not exception. Whole Ubuntu/GNOME is build around concept that user is an idiot who doesn't know why he has just forked $$$ for the PC.

I'm for example literally every month is called by some new Linux user who asks how to exchange files effectively between Linux boxes. In Windows there is "Windows Network." But in Linux - in most advanced desktop distro Ubuntu - the easiest method ... right - e-mail. Sending from one PC to another, hooked over LAN, through some servers thousands miles away. Why not? [/sarcasm] Setting up (not installed by default) FTPd/OpenSSH/Avahi - is not something I can advise to end users to install setup by default. And the [censored] over there in Ubuntu really have no clue, writing off everything on "security via obscurity". As if sending confidential data over 3rd party is safer than sending them over LAN...