Shuttleworth To Step Down As Canonical CEO In 2010

LinuxScribe writes "In a blog announcement today, Canonical Founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth revealed he will be stepping down from his CEO role to be replaced by current COO Jane Silber. Both execs do not see major strategic changes on the horizon. Silber's official blog and Linux.com each have more details on how the change will be implemented."

Comments

Thanks Mark

[Abreu]

Linux operating systems are better thanks to you and your contributions.

Re:Thanks Mark

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet everything but Ubuntu sucks even worse. I mean, if you're looking for something that doesn't require manual configuration of everything. Gentoo and its ilk are the best thing around if you 1) know what you're doing, and 2) have time to read docs and fiddle with things. If you just want a fucking OS that gets out of the way and lets you do your work...well, my recent experience with OpenSUSE and Fedora has been that they're horrendously broken. Debian's package manager is incredibly annoying if you've used something nice like Portage or Paludis. Ubuntu typically works, does WiFi networking the way it fucking obviously should be done, and allows easy addition of third-party package repositories.

There are plenty of idiot devs and stupid decisions to go around in all major open source projects, but Ubuntu has managed to scrape together something that I can install on my laptop and quickly set up as a platform for Android development. Which, sadly, is a hell of a lot more than you can say about other distros.

Re:Thanks Mark

[jim_v2000]

> I mean, if you're looking for something that doesn't require manual configuration of everything.

OpenSUSE? Mandriva? PCLinuxOS?

Re:Thanks Mark

[Anonymous Coward]

typical Linux elitism. ooohhh good for you, you run a distro thats 4x harder to install and keep running, especially for noobz. Ubuntu is the best hope for Linux to make a dent in the home market. just cause youre super cool and run gentoo doesnt mean that Ubuntu is shit.

Re:Thanks Mark

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the problems would go away if they just ditched GNOME.

KDE 4.x has matured quite a bit by now. After being a staunch GNOME supporter for many years, I installed KDE 4.3.4 recently, and am very glad that I did! It's a much nicer environment than GNOME currently is.

The integration between the apps is really good. It's almost better than Windows and Mac OS X, and is a lot better than GNOME. The KDE apps all work seamlessly with one another.

It feels really responsive, too. I think this has to do with Qt. It's just a better toolkit than GTK+ is.

After using KDE for a couple of weeks, I don't think that I can go back to GNOME again. GNOME just has too many bugs, not enough integration between the apps, and just plain feels sloppy these days.

Re:Thanks Mark

[ChrisMP1]

No, the secure repos are to make sure the packages are coming from where you think they are from. Ubuntu is still an operating system - it operates. If the user tells it to do something, such as download from an alternate repository, it can and should.

Re:Thanks Mark

[clang_jangle]

I wouldn't be so fast to cry "elitism". Those of us who already know our way around *nix and have tried Ubuntu (or openSuse, PCBSD, etc) have been struck by how crappy our fave OS is once it gets dumbed down with automatic everything. Perhaps it's unavoidable.
I'd rather see my non-geek associates using dumbed-down, buggy ubuntu than windows, but let's face it -- those of us who use and love Debian, FreeBSD, etc just can't help but feel disappointed by the fact that we can't share our experience of vastly superior performance via these distros aimed at non-geeks. And it's a shame that for a lot of users there is no compelling argument to switch from windows. From their perspective, "it ain't broke, why fix it?".

I know, I know... "-1, Uncomfortable Truth"

Re:Thanks Mark

[HarrySquatter]

And it's a shame that for a lot of users there is no compelling argument to switch from windows. From their perspective, "it ain't broke, why fix it?".

Why is that a shame? Why can't they just use the OS they want rather than being told that they must use something else?

Re:Thanks Mark

[armanox]

Guess you should thank Red Hat and Feodra for that WiFi manager, they wrote it afterall....

Re:Thanks Mark

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. They're not "fine", they're lazy and arrogant. They learned all they ever plan to learn years ago and now if their sorry little bag of tricks doesn't work it's "the damn computer is acting up again", and "where's that damn IT dork when I need him?" We are the janitors of the white collar world, and making us deal with windows is just adding insult to injury. Yet most of us truly love working with computers, so like battered women we stick with it.

Re:Thanks Mark

[hughperkins]

You can do that using wpa_supplicant. It's less scary than it sounds. Get rid of the existing wpa_supplicant process from /usr/share/dbus-1/services, then run:

wpa_supplicant -D wext -i ra0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf ... where ra0 is your wifi interface, and wext is invariant.

Add your networks to wpa_supplicant.conf ('man wpa_supplicant.conf').

You can control it and see what it's doing using:

wpa_cli -i ra0 status

I do agree with you though. Here are my thoughs on commandline vs gnome: Windows vs linux 'everything in linux can be scripted -> not really'

Not using an Ubuntu logo?

[WinterSolstice]

Why a Debian logo instead of the Ubuntu logo?

Re:Not using an Ubuntu logo?

[mister_playboy]

it's a lame attempt at being retro-cool, just like the retention of the Gates Borg icon for Microsoft.

They can screw with the slow-as-molasses Web 2.0 Javascript on a weekly basis, but downloading a icon from Wikipedia to use for Ubuntu would be too much work.

tag: giveubuntuanicon

Re:Not using an Ubuntu logo?

[Blakey Rat]

Slashdot hasn't made a new icon since like 2004. Even when they did the redesign a couple years ago, one of the requirements was to be compatible with all their existing (read: shitty) icons, because they were too fucking lazy to make new ones, and they don't care enough to hire someone to.

If you ever have a question about anything relating to Slashdot, just imagine what the laziest person on Earth would do and you'll have your answer.

Re:Maybe Jane will understand

[ZosX]

Why not just run debian? I don't think a production server needs to be on the bleeding edge.....

Re:Good

[pinkushun]

Remember, Mark injected the 'usability' factor while the development community kept focus on technical issues. You can't scapegoat a prominent individual in a community project, because it's everyone involved that counts, even if they don't have a face on a blog somewhere.

Take for example the various Karmic regressions that left many users upset...
Me: "Sadly proprietary drivers make it hard for developers to create solid GNU/Linux drivers. Did you test your hardware on the beta? User feedback helps squashing bugs, before the final release."
User: "Um... No, why should I? It should just work."

That's not Mark's fault, or lack of decision on his part, but a real-world technical problem FOSS faces in the fight against, well, Free Open Source Software.

That will only happen when we shift from "Who's fault is it" to "What can I do to help?".