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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.
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. ;_;
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.
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.
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.
I have a thought! Maybe Mark should be paying hookers!? BRILLIANT!
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.
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.
"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
<BENDER>
In fact, forget the development!
</BENDER>
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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.
Link for 64 bit version please?
Adobe don't believe in 64 bit. In fact i think their programmers get confused if you ask them to count to 33
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
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)
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.
A life without entertainment isn't worth living.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, there are a great many things Flash does for which there are no alternatives, open or otherwise.
Let me give you a recent, stupid example: We want to let users upload a bunch of things at once. We have three options:
1: Build something using multiple file upload fields. (This could be done elegantly -- by hiding one as soon as it's set, and generating a new one.) In other words, we force the user to select each file individually, and click browse again -- and the files can't start uploading until they've all been selected.
2: Accept zipfiles. Extra work for us (admittedly not much), and extra work for them.
3: Use Flash. Not only can they select more than one file in the open dialog (ctrl+click, shift+click, ctrl+a, etc), but as soon as they select one, we can start uploading it.
I want to use open alternatives. I hate Flash more than... I'm not a very hateful person, but Flash makes me homicidal. But even something as simple as that, there's an advantage to using Flash.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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
Um, Ubuntu has the exact same kind of networking that Windows has. You can right click on a folder, and select "Share Folder". It pops up a box asking if you want SMB or NSF. SMB IS windows networking. Select it, and one of two things will happen. If you already have Samba installed, it you will have a "Windows" share. If you don't have it installed, Ubuntu will install it, and THEN you will have a "Windows" share. For the client, all you have to do is go to the "Places" pulldown that is always on your task bar, and select "Network". You will see the "Windows" shares, just like on an actual Windows machine.
Seriously, the process to share files under Ubuntu is almost exactly the same as in Windows. You clearly just don't WANT to be able to share files under it.