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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.
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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.
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?
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