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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."
Since the summary mentioned it first, I've always been curious as to the logistics behind having OS X released as a desktop environment. *shrug* who knows, might be interesting.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
How about paying someone to fix Flash? It's what made me go back to Windows.
As anyone with half a brain knows, Mac OS X is based on the Xnu kernel, not the FreeBSD one. Xnu is a combination of Mach combined with various bits lifted from FreeBSD 5.x (but is not itself the FreeBSD kernel). OS X is an updated NeXT, not a GUI-fied FreeBSD.
I can't believe the editors let such a blatant slip-up onto the front page. Wait, it's slashdot --practically speaking, we have no editors. ;_;
Maybe you should point people here when making that statement.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
Shuttleworth paying out of pocket to help the ubuntu experience is nothing new. He's always done this. The printed CD's of ubuntu have always been free to whomever requested them. That's cost out of pocket for canonical. Don't get me wrong, this is great; but it's something they've always been doing.
X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE
Frankly, that's a considerable amount of work he's planning on hiring up for. This intrigues me greatly, to be honest. And, with any luck, this all comes back to the community so that not-Ubuntu users can get in on it, too.
Though I give it five minutes before we hear complaints that they're not helping out some obscure toolkit or DE. :-)
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
"Why not? After all, Mac OS itself is based on FreeBSD. Desktop Linux's future is starting to look brighter."
As long as you have people literally in stand-offs against each other based on QT vs. GTK, Gnome vs. KDE, and the merits of this distro over that, then no. It won't become as seemless. Why? Because a lot of good programmers are tied up in projects that simply don't move the ship forward. They only decorate a room on the ship. Hey, I love Linux. Adore it! Maybe the problem is until Linux geeks get laid more, they simply won't bother to take time to smell the flowers: i.e. pay any attention to the end-user's experience.
Um...HELLO? Your link backs up what the OP said. It's not FreeBSD.
It contains BSD code --but so did the NT networking stack at one point. You gonna say that XP is based off FreeBSD next?
for all that it mattered. BSD was free and worked, in 1986. That's why Jobs - when he solicited his engineer's choice - was told to use BSD 4.
MacOS is "based" on NeXT - which was derived from extending the Smalltalk-like model of Objective C to a whole series of desktop and application frameworks.
You see, Jobs and his guys were SO blown away by the GUI at PARC, that they missed the object revolution, used to create it. They were all determined to do this again, the 'right' way, without saddling Mac/Lisa compatibility to the horse.
That got engineered on later ;-)
You want further illustration of this argument? Try managing an OSX workgroup from the network with existing BSD and opensource. You effectively manage the POSIXy parts of the system, while having almost no policy or configuration management of the Finder/Application experienc through which much of the Mac user interacts. You could - in theory, with the sources available, swap a modern Linux distro under there instead of the hybrid BSD. Almost no one would notice.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I keep wondering when Gnome and KDE will ever join forces and do some real damage. But every time I wonder that out loud somebody smacks me down, as though I'm asking the English and German to join forces against tooth decay. I guess it's smack-down time again.
This must be proof that 2009 will be the year of the Linux desktop!
As an audio software developer, I have tried several times to make and port programs to Linux.
Basically, you never dare to request anything other than the default config from an alsa driver. Trying different sample rates, formats or channel configs can cause anything from an unhelpful error code to a segfault (I kid you not).
So it's hard to take Linux seriously in this context.
ALSA is a roadblock, due to being "good enough", but it's nowhere near good.
"Macs were interesting because 1) they weren't Intel and 2) they weren't Unix, now they're both. Oh well."
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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
while this is useful admirable-- if I had millions, I would consider setting up a program to pay a limited number of folks $100 for installing Linux on a desktop machine used 8+ hours a week and using it for a few months. A weekly (at least) intelligent posting to the forums would be required. You would have to apply for the program - show some of your writing on the internet (slashdot posts) as someone who really exists and can actually communicate.
Meanwhile, paid staff would facilitate a way to solve problems (watching forums, suggesting fixes, adding to a wiki) -- perhaps the organization could also offer bounties for FOSS developers to improve certain areas which are most annoying.
This guy is way ahead of me, I'm still waiting for the millions.
Sorry, I couldn't help it:
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is growing
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Windows community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has risen yet again, now up to more than 30 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has gained more market share , this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is sending other OSes into complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by topping the charts in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Daemon to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a long and prosperous future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Windows Server because *BSD is growing. Things are looking very good for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to gain market share. Red ink flows from Redmond like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most loved of them all, having gained 93% more core developers. The sudden and pleasant release of the long developed 5.0 only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is growing.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 70000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 70000/5 = 14000 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 7000 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (70000+14000+7000)*4 = 364000 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the release of OSX, cool new technologies and so on, FreeBSD is expanding into more desktops than ever. FreeBSD has become more than the sum of its parts.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily gained in market share. *BSD is very powerful and its long term survival prospects are very bright. If Windows is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to improve. The progress achieved is nothing short of a miracle. For all practical purposes, *BSD is alive and kicking.
Fact: *BSD will kick your ass
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]
Yep, I know :) It wasn't an argument.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
Not all comments are an argument, ya know. Sometimes people are agreeing, or even giving more information to back up the OP. Shocking, that people on the internet can sometimes have a cordial conversation, no?
WTF is Lunix???? Doesn't exist, according to distrowatch.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
the uberGeek. We should all aspire to be like that guy, he's worth millions but he chooses to give back to the community by paying for FOSS development out of his own pocket. Sure, Canonical is a business and I'm sure the publicity and improvements he's paying for will help get some more license fees, but the geek points he's scoring are worth so much more
**Geek points not redeemable for any cash value.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
It's slow, crashy and overcomplicated.
Your first two arguments are unprovable flamebait, and the last is a matter of opinion. There are lots of people who think it's fast, stable, and just complicated enough.
It's got an ugly, messy desktop environment and it doesn't come with any decent usable software.
Again, the first is a matter of opinion, and I would think you could at least realize that you're in the minority. Lots of people think the desktop is pretty and well-organized. The last is, again, flamebait. It may not come with as much as your typical Linux distribution, but Safari, Pages, Mail, iTunes, Xcode, DVD Player, and the various iLife apps, among others, are far from unusuable or indecent. And, despite the fact that it doesn't come with as much as your typical Linux distribution, there are many thousands of free and open source programs that you can install.
It's got this weird browser that doesn't render stuff, doesn't have AdBlock and which usually gets replaced with Firefox.
"Doesn't render stuff" is, again, unproveable flamebait. Safari does just fine in rendering tests. You're also showing off your ignorance, as it does have AdBlock. Come on, that's the first link in Google.
It can't play back most videos or music files without expensive shareware.
This is just wrong and uninformed. Those are just examples off the top of my head that I like, there are plenty of other free and open source players out there.
It doesn't even have a usable text editor!
What about TextEdit and Pages is not usable?
If those are too flashy for you, just install vim or emacs. They work fine.
It's utter crap. Ubuntu is already better than Mac OSX. Please don't try to make another crappy OSX Aqua-looky-likey clone thing.
You clearly do not even know what you're talking about. Please spend some time using OS X or at least do a bit of research before you try to troll again.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
This is easy to answer - he sold Thawte for $575 million.
Do you not have the internets where you are? Wikipedia, geezus.
-knewter
I've done a lot of work on audio on Linux, not for the audio itself, but because I work with satellite telemetry that's frequency-modulated in the audio band. I hate ALSA. It broke completely with the Unix philosophy.
Before ALSA, one would open audio devices just like files, acquire audio data just like reading files, play audio just like writing files. ALSA went the Redmond way, one different API for each different type of data.
You clearly do not even know what you're talking about. Please spend some time using OS X or at least do a bit of research before you try to troll again.
He probably would if he didn't have to commit 100% and buy a bloody mac to spend some time using it.
That is -my- only complaint about OSX, I don't like the hardware. I'm not talking about the 'value' or the price, I just straight up don't like it. I want a Core 2 Quad in a mini tower that will take a couple hard drives, video card upgrades, and some PCI/PCI-express cards as needed.
I don't want an overkill Xeon or two. I don't want an all-in-one imac.
On the laptop front, I want a tablet, or maybe an ultraportable like the macbook air. The modbook is too much money (given that you have to buy a macbook and then frankenstein it) and its not functional enough. I'm also interested in GPS and cellular data support as optional built-ins which apple doesn't offer, and definitely more usb ports than the air sports (ie more than ONE).
On the pricing front, apple's store is ridiculous for the 'upgrade' pricing, ridiculous to the point of obscene. Sure I buy the base model upgrade it myself, and sell off the spare parts, but I shouldn't have to.
Bottom line, I'd be a potential OSX customer, but their hardware just doesn't line up with my requirements. I'd consider a hackintosh... or a psystar... but I'm just not that desperate to run OSX. I had an old G4 tower that I quite liked, and G3's before that in beige tower and desktop boxes that I was very happy with, and I had an original ibook when I was in university... but now I don't have a single mac, not that I don't want OSX, but just just don't want their hardware.
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.
There's no reason Shuttleworth can't deliver something on par with OS X. All he needs to do is concentrate on functionaliy, usability, and marketability, and not worry that much about ideology. I.e., the same things Apple worries about.
The market does not care how software is writen, it just cares about what it does and how it looks.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Do you ever even read any posts? Rliegh stated clearly that the kernel is XNU which is... fuck it read it yourself.
There ain't no FreeBSD kernel in OS X. Got it? It's the userland, process model, the networks stack and the virtual file system that was taken from BSD, but the kernel and drivers are heavily influenced by Mach.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
In that line of argument, the Linux kernel is GNU HURD, because it ended up being a replacement for the then never delivered GNU HURD kernel, for the GNU OS.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
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.
Yes, the only difference is that it has a radically different architecture. Apart from that, and most of the code, it's the same.
They better hurry up they have just three months left to make it happen :-P
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
This is not a troll.
It's *not* that great. It's slow, crashy and overcomplicated. It's got an ugly, messy desktop environment and it doesn't come with any decent usable software. It's got this weird browser that doesn't render stuff, doesn't have AdBlock and which usually gets replaced with Firefox. It can't play back most videos or music files without expensive shareware. It doesn't even have a usable text editor!
It's utter crap. Ubuntu is already better than Mac OSX. Please don't try to make another crappy OSX Aqua-looky-likey clone thing.
Yes. 100% agree. Almost. I also find it slow, crashy and overcomplicated.
The DVD player crashes on bad DVDs easily, often locking up the GUI. Worse if you put a DVD in from the wrong region.
The GUI is horrible at arranging large numbers of windows. It works (ish) for macos style, but really badly if you work in X11 a lot. A proper window manager (ed fvwm2) does a much better job. I hear the latest version finally got virtual desktops...
And yes, the text editor stinks. Pretty much any modern Linux comes with vim of some sort installed by default.
Media files are a right pain. On linux, it's just an "mplayer" away from working. On OSX, not so. Unless you use mplayer. Except it doesn't sync video right and you get tearing.
I agree that ubuntu is already better than OSX. I would take an ubuntu install any day over an OSX install. Not that ubuntu isn't collecting brokenness in interesting ways, but I agree. Don't make anothe macos clone. I know how and where to get the original one and I don't want it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.