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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Thats right.
Ubuntu works fine.
Firefox works fine.
Gnome/X works fine.
Compiz works fine.
Pretty much every app works fine.
Bugs are addressed quickly on ubuntu's website.
ADOBE makes a crap version of Flash for Linux.
It's Ubuntu's fault Flash crashes. Nuh-huh
Try: The proprietary software dealer.
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?
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.
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.
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.
We can fix the open source stuff if it was at fault.
We could even fix Flash if it was Open Source.
But the cold hard truth is Flash is closed source and proprietary means ONLY the creator can make changes that would increase stability. That's also the same reason why kernel debuggers wont touch a listing from a tainted kernel.
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.
There are, what, a few thousand programmers who understand Linux systems programming well enough to debug GUI programs and post patches? It's not trivial for those programmers to fix Flash because Adobe won't let them see the source code. How is that Ubuntu's fault?
how to invest, a novice's guide
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.
I didn't say "simple" :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."