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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."
Speaking as a FreeBSD user I don't appreciate it.
Mac OS uses a modified Mach kernel and some of FreeBSD's userland stuff, but that's it.
If you can get Adobe to open source Flash, I'm sure that can be arranged.
In the mean time, the best you can do is to tell web developers to not use Flash, but open alternatives.
A lot of us watch YouTube and other flash video. Heck, some of us even play the odd flash game until a download is finished. If Adobe open sourced Flash, you could make decent cross-platform web applications in a matter of minutes all the while blocking Flash ads.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Well, we could complain that XFCE and Xubuntu isn't getting any help, but since it is based on GTK as well, they'll get some benefits to that work. And obviously anything that goes into X and GL drivers can't hurt any desktop environment.
I think Adobe already gets paid
if KDE and gnome join together it'll be a big huge fight considering that gnoem was a GNU project and KDE views are different.
but as long as Mark doesn't make these projects more "ubuntu" I'm all happy
Red Hat has invested a lot of money to improve the Linux desktop experience as well. They've made great strides, but still - they still have a ways to go, at least in the opinion of this user of both OSes. So spending more money does not guarantee they'll reach the goal.
I think, in order for Linux to really break through here, they probably need to have teams of actual designers rather than have the coders do most of the design themselves. They also probably need to "think different" and come up with their own usability/interface ideas, rather than keep mimicking Apple's (which Gnome seems to frequently do, if discussions on the developer email lists are any indication).
In any case this is a good thing, and I hope Linux continues to push forward thanks to this new investment.
#DeleteChrome
I disagree. I seriously hate Gnome.
Gnome is dysfunctional, limits my options, looks like shit (well, that can be themed, but...) and just generally sucks.
If KDE had been chosen instead and as much time had been spent on polishing KDE as Ubuntu has spent on polishing Gnome, we would not have this discussion.... Ubuntu (i.e. Kubuntu) would already rule the desktop.
Sadly, I see more and more development time wasted on supporting / trying to polish Gnome into something functional instead of just throwing the towel into the ring and going with KDE.
Specifically, I thought they were going to unite their libs so that gnome and kde would be cosmetic changes of the overall GUI subsystem sitting atop X.
Some things like DCOM have already been united and shared.. It just takes a few dedicated individuals to do so.
I personally would love united libs that any gui can use while knowing that every "frozen" feature will be as such for any major versions. Let everybody use it, from GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and any other manager.
I had to do that same thing the other day. I'm a Mac user, and I just used Audacity because I know it can do the job and it's free.
What's the official Mac way? Probably QuickTime Pro (which you have to pay for, which has always annoyed me). Or a third party piece of software. Actually I think you can cut bits out with QT (non-pro) but it's a bit unintuitive. I considered using Garage Band (which I'm sure could do it) but that would be overkill.
I've got to say, it was the first time I'd used Audacity in maybe two years. It was just as ugly as ever, unfortunately. It looks almost EXACTLY like the program that came with my SB16 in the Windows 3.1 days. It works, but could really use a little interface TLC, especially on the Mac (where the Linux/Windows style interface just looks even more out of place).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
X? OpenGL? really? Will some of the simpler more annoying stuff that is broken right now be addressed as well? How about we start with some simple stuff like getting Flash with audio not crash Firefox 98% of the time. I don't care that you can fix that by installing Flash 10 beta, or some extra library, the fact is that it does not work out of the box. Not only that, the fix (as explained by the hundreds of other users who had the problem) involves jumping to the command line and apt-get'ing a new version of flash after installing a new unsupported apt source. For me, it's fine, I can deal with it but the general public will not want to jump through those hoops. It is very hard to spread Linux adoption when this is one of the very first things users experience. They will not care that the problem might be on Adobe's end or Mozilla's or some obscure repo. The fact is, the browser shipped with the OS crashes. This makes it all look unpolished, unfinished. A house with squeaky floors. I hope that money is also being used to eliminate these basic problems at whatever the root cause may be. .. and yes bugs have been filed!
[alk]
I disagree enormously. I think what they have in gnome is so perfect for Ubuntu it's almost scary. They're trying to make it so that the end user isn't overwhelmed with options and customizations, and that it just works. They've succeeded phenomenally. My only beef with it right now is that upgrading to the next release is awful, breaks my desktop about half the time, and that flash doesn't work very well. If those two things were fixed, I would never use anything else for a desktop ever again.
That's the rotten thing about debating something as subjective as the preferred UI experience. Frankly I find KDE goes out of its way to emulate everything that's bad about the Windows GUI, even more so. Gnome is minimalist, which I like. The nice about Linux is that I actually have a choice. Heck, if I want to, I can install them both.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It will probably never happen. Plus, the competition probably does both teams a lot of good. But let's look at the specific reasons:
And one could go on for a while regarding why these projects can't just magically join together. It's sort of like the cries of Webkit in Firefox. Read the Ars article on that subject to get a feel for trying to combine projects with similar goals but completely different designs. They just don't mesh.
Which is exactly why it's good that there are two major desktops. You get to use KDE. I get to use Gnome. For me Gnome is superior because it aligns better with the way I work. I don't care that it doesn't have a gazillion options because I'm not going to be twiddling them anyway.
You can twiddle to your hearts content on KDE.
Isn't choice wonderful?
He's just playing the role of venture capitalist to his own venture.
That kind of stuff has almost always been done at the distro level. Sun, Redhat, Novell, Ubuntu, etc. Independant developers tend to stick to their projects at least in the Gnome universe.
I wish Sun, or someone else would do more usability studies like this one. That is exactly the kind of feedback we need. I find it nearly impossible to imagine the noob experience after having used Linux for the past 10 years.
Wow, your post did a wonderful job of proving the grandparent's point!
Yawn. What don't you get? There's choice and everyone has their own opinion on what is best. What makes you any more right than them? And, frankly, what makes you think we give a shit about your two-bit opinion anyway? If Shuttleworth wants to blow his money on GNOME as well as KDE, who are you to criticize?
How we know is more important than what we know.
A life without entertainment isn't worth living.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Yeah, although I'd take it a step further and say this is an extension of what they've always done, and a pretty significant one at that. Given time, Desktop Linux will always catch up to its proprietary brethren, but by then it'll usually be behind current generation in some important areas (to regular users, that is). The only thing capable of changing that is throwing more people at the problem, and being able to pay these skilled projectiles certainly widens the talent pool considerably.
As far as I can tell, the killer app preventing linux from taking over the corporate world is the lack of an outlook replacement. More and more of our work is web based. Evolution has a beta mapi extension for exchange 2007, and exchange 2003 support (via screenscraping OWA). My attempts to get it working with exchange 2007 so far have failed. I'm really perplexed that no one seems to have nailed this down yet.
You sound like a religious fundie, like most raving fanboys in arguments like this. You're stating your zealous opinion on a topic as incontrovertible fact with no supporting evidence or studies. You're spouting off extreme views with obvious heavy doses of emotion and vitriol, and displaying obvious contempt for any reasoning human being that could possibly disagree with you.
Wait, you've gotta be a troll. There's no way in hell you couldn't look at what you're spouting and not realize that it's the ENTIRE FUCKING REASON arguments like Gnome vs. KDE never get solved. Uncompromising, egotistical, arrogant jackasses never get anything useful and collaborative done when they're fighting each other in ridiculous pork sword fights.
Amen to everyone who bashes alsa here, I agree wholeheartly.
I think it's high time for a rewrite, maybe they get it right the third time...
It's really amazing how thoroughly they managed to screw up something so relatively simple (when compared to other areas of the kernel).
Every time my box decides to re-shuffle the order of my soundcards (re-promoting the onboard sound to default), or decides to remain silent for the rest of the session after I plugged/unplugged my USB headset, or requires me to play trial&error with barely documented and obscure config files (asoundrc/openalrc) to *maybe* get sound in a game working it reminds me of why 2008 is probably still not the year of linux on the desktop...
To be fair, yes ALSA "works" most of the time and even out of the box. The distro-hackers managed to beat the hardware-detection into submission so that pretty much any liveCD will give you sound (at least on one of your cards...) right away. Just never try to get fancy, like going beyond adjusting the Master-volume. You're in for a world of pain.
That isn't entirely true. Both GTK and QT have various language bindings which allow you write in a variety of languages.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This last weekend, I had the biggest scare in the last 3 years of using Ubuntu. After downloading and installing the latest XML update for some thing, I rebooted (because I felt like it), and Gnome, my usual windowmanager, absolutely would not boot up. I couldn't even get safe-mode to boot so may uninstall the update, if that were even an option if I did get it to boot. Being that I have about 20 other options for window managers, I began logging in to see which other ones had fried in the process. Luckily, none of the other ones had bzzzt'd.
... until an xml update blew stuff up.
...
Because I've used linux for the last 9 years, 3 years of full-time-no-windows-any-more, I have come to acknowledge the unexpected, irreversible errors that have plagued me and my choices of software in Linux.
I've noticed a move towards lack of backwards compatibility for many apps along the way in the last two years. Luckily, I have only had to rebuild a Ubuntu install once, the rest of the additions have been welcomely handled by fairly painless updates (except when Ubuntu blew up xorg on every one and one couldn't boot back to an actual functioning video screen) [...]
This move away from backwards app compatibility and support was a common trend when RedHat was growing out of its diapers and moving towards being a popular, viable Open Source option. This is some thing that eventually drove me away from using RedHat, due to essentially, cutting their core users off at the most crucial time in order to expand in to a more wide reaching market in enterprise Linux.
To understand what took place on my gnome issue, I know that I trick out the desktop in such a way that any good programmer would look at me, take my machine, and say, 'nope, you are not supposed to do that, mine now'. BUT, it works, and always has
If Ubuntu plans to keep its core supporters, stuff like this just can't happen. It's a pain to have to rebuild an entire usable desktop option so I can go back to editing Astrophotography Images in DS9. For me, it's a few curse words and a lot of time.
On the other hand, consider a fresh-off-the-windows-boat user, had this happened to them, Ubuntu would lose those customers left and right, no questions asked - back to windows - because that just doesn't happen in windows. In the 10 plus years I've actually seriously been messing with computers - again, 9 of which have been Linux (the 80s & 90s don't count), I've never seen this happen with either Windows or Mac - and it better never again, or Ubuntu will be losing a long-time dedicated user because I just can't spend my days rebuilding what some "update" broke due to lack of backwards compatibility - and no subsequent follow-up bug fix has been released
I like Ubuntu due to its simplicity on the front end, yet it comes with every thing that makes Linux good under the hood. Just don't kill it for the those who have supported your efforts.
Ubuntu (i.e. Kubuntu) would already rule the desktop.
I assume you mean the Linux part of the desktop. Because nothing I have seen in the FOSS world approaches even OS X Puma in terms of usability, aesthetics or intuitiveness. There's something fundamental missing from the equation in Gnome and KDE, and that something is artists. I'm not just talking about making pretty desktops with lots of gradients and plasticky buttons. Use any Apple product for five minutes and you instantly realize that some seriously right-brained shit goes into developing these things. There's very little of that going on in the Gnome or KDE camps, and what little there is seems is mostly derivative of something Mac or, worse, Windows, already did. Please understand that I'm not trying to belittle anyone or, in particular, the tens of thousands of hours of donated hard work that has gone into these projects, both of which I use and am impressed with. But it's time we stopped clicking our heels waiting for Linux to "finally" overtake OS X. Why? Because the open source culture of giving away your hard work, so prevalent in the software world, simply has no equivalent in the artistic world. Apropos the post, it appears someone finally realized this and is throwing down some cash to address things like UI design and documentation, but I remain extremely skeptical how worthwhile this will be given Apple's decade-long lead.
Actually, a great example of what I'm talking about will be comparing Android, which I'm guessing was designed by a bunch of CS grads, with the iPhone. If the Gnome or KDE guys had to build a cell phone, they could have built Android. No one except Apple could have made the iPhone.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I didn't say "simple" :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Right. MkLinux + OpenStep! == Fun.
A lot of NeXT source just built on this.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
No you don't really have that choice, unless you could run all your apps using just either (not both) of the two environments.
But if you e.g. are a GNOME user, there comes a much needed application that happens to be made for KDE written in Qt and of which there happens to be no GNOME equivalent, so you have to install the KDE underpinnings and the app stands out like a sore thumb and your whole consistent desktop experience goes down the drain.
That's why fragmentation is not a good thing on the Desktop. If you could make all applications look and behave more or less the same, this inconsistency in visual interfaces, could be dealt with. I think it could be done.
Just look at Java applications on Mac OS X. Yes, they are somewhat fugly, but they look and behave enough like Cocoa apps that you can at least bear using them. Copy & paste works, drag and drop works, the keyboard shortcuts and the rest is rather consistent, too.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
+1
I think what Mark Shuttleworth is doing is EXACTLY what is needed. GNOME and KDE are both evolving, each in their own way. I've been a long time KDE user, but I now find myself able to use GNOME too and appreciate its approach. I also love the fact that I can switch between these two widely different approaches and still feel at home - they're both doing something right.
I would like to think/hope that Shuttleworth is accelarating this process by funding these projects. They are both beautiful and what we really need is for both of them to be completely usable to a newbie that chooses either.
I guess I'm just hoping that Shuttleworth is able to do for both these desktops what Nintendo did for console gaming with the Wii - make newbies feel at home. That's what we need now - more newbies using Linux. We need input from the non-techies to give us a straight opinion about what they like and what they don't. We need newbies who like it enough to want to contribute in ways that other newbies will appreciate.
We already have solid teams working on these projects. We now need a nice welcome mat for the disgruntled/curious Windows user.
Mark, if you're reading this, THANK YOU.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
And thank Christ, to be honest. Linux is notorious for having terrible, clunky UI, and programmers doing it for the love of it aren't really inclined to improve the UI for people who don't love their computers and simply aren't experts. This is exactly the sort of thing Linux needs to be a truly professional alternative to the focus-tested to buggery OS X and Windows.
I keep wondering when Gnome and KDE will ever join forces
Never.
KDE developers aren't interested on working on something like GNOME. If they were, they would. If KDE didn't exist, they'd create it or do something entirely different.
Ditto GNOME developers. I mentioned KDE developers first, because I'm in their camp. I like C++, I like OO and I like the elaborate, ultra-flexible coolness you can build with them, and the simplicity inherent in the complexity. GNOME developers read that last phrase and say "Huh? WTF is he smoking?". To KDE developers GNOME is tedious and boring. To GNOME developers, KDE is arcane and weird.
The environments are written in different languages, with radically different design philosophies, both internally and externally. They just attract different sorts of folks.
Having both doesn't mean that the community's efforts are divided, it means that the community's efforts are DOUBLED, because twice as many developers find something they'd like to work on. And they don't fight one another at all -- quite the contrary, they work together quite well on defining common desktop standards so that they can interoperate smoothly. Not only that, but they pick up each others' good ideas and incorporate them, making them better.
Having both KDE and GNOME is good for open source. Enjoy it.
(I'm generally a KDE user as well as a sometime KDE developer, but at the moment I'm using GNOME on Ubuntu and quite enjoying its polished simplicity. In a week or two I'll get tired of its limitations and switch back to KDE. This happens every year or so. When I go back, I always end up finding a few GNOMEisms that I try to see if I can get in KDE. It's all good.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I personally think the future lies in the advancement of Javascript compilation. Sure right now things are slow but when browsers catch up and likewise their javascript engines (which google is trying to push) we will see more things previously done with Flash will be able to utilize nice open ECMAscript. I am not so sure about video however but I do hope there will be a better non-flash way to view videos efficiently on the web. The problem with closed source doesn't have to do with anyone being an open source zealot (not all the time anyway) but it is the "take it or leave it" mentality of adobe. Gnash is probably always going to be 27 years behind but it would be nice to have an adobe independent Flash player at the very least that could focus on improving things without having to depend on Adobe to care. This is most prevalent in Linux Flash but there are many times Windows flash does suck as well.
If Javascript could ever be fast enough to render low grade video, it would be great to mass adoption.
I've always had a strong suspicion Miguel is a Microsoft mole who has been doing a really awesome job of insuring Linux will never be any good on the desktop by poisoning it from within.
This really does Miguel a disservice. I certainly don't agree with everything he does (possibly not even many things that he does). But before Miguel the best spreadsheet application we had was Oleo. When Miguel wrote Gnumeric it made *huge* strides for free software on the desktop.
At the time I remember people saying, "Free software can never work on the desktop because writing a good spreadsheet application is just too boring". Miguel showed that there *were* people interested in writing decent office applications for free software.
Sometimes it's hard to remember the contribution that people made so long ago. But we need to remember our history and respect those people who brought us here.
An implementation of export look and feel could dramatically change things: Most Linux people spend a lot of time configuring their desktops, changing wallpapers, appearance settings, icons, metacity themes, compiz settings, skydomes, and god knows what else. Some people make their systems look like a mac, some make it look like vista, some make it look unique. I think it would be a significant leap if we could make a SINGLE (large) file container, with everything involved in the desktop settings, and send it to other users. The community could share beautifully tuned desktops, and we all could experiment with numerous desktops really rapidly. If we improve productivity in this arena, then everyone on windows would see amazing desktops, all changeable, and that's an important step towards solving bug#1. A large file could have all associated settings, parameters, needed files, and command sequences to configure the desktop in ONE click. Most newbies don't have the know how or the patience to learn how to really transform a desktop... we could give them a little instant gratification, as this is something that no mac or windows user can do.