Ask Matt Asay About Ubuntu and Canonical

A week after the announcement that open source advocate and blogger Matt Asay is leaving Alfresco for Canonical, in the role of COO, Matt has agreed to answer your questions about his role at Canonical, his vision for the future of Ubuntu, or the prospects for open source as we begin to emerge from recession. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply. (Disclaimer: Matt is on the board of advisors for Slashdot's parent company, Geeknet.)

Comments

General answer

[Anonymous Coward]

because your an idiot.

Re:General answer

[commodore64_love]

Anonymous Coward wrote:

because your an idiot.

Yeah! That's the attitude we need to make Linux user friendly!

Nice sarcasm, but you hit the nail on the head. The people who program for Linux have an elitist attitude, such that when a customer encounters a problem, rather than admit the problem exists, they blame the customer as an "idiot".

It's the same business acumen that made Circuit City so successful.

Oh. Wait.

Re:General answer

[Inner_Child]

because your an idiot.

Yeah! That's the attitude we need to make Linux user friendly!

Except there's an actual case to be made that the OP is an idiot, as much of what he considers problematic is hopelessly outdated, even in Windows. RealPlayer? Nesticle? Does Netscape even run a dial-up ISP anymore? Gaming in 640x480? This sounds like a rehashed troll post from 1996, and despite his tacked-on claims to the contrary it should be treated as such.

Re:General answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Having trouble getting things that are not well supported working isn't what makes for an idiot, posting a bunch of random offtopic questions is what makes for an idiot.

A question like "I'm still having trouble with x,y and z, do you see Canonical focusing on improving these areas?" would work just fine, but instead we get a litany of problems, composed of a mix of third party issues, obvious cases of obtuse-user-syndrome, and potential real problems.

(For instance, the first Google result for "Ubuntu task manager" is this page:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-331065.html

I'm not using Linux/Gnome system, so I have no idea if the "System Monitor" mentioned there is a piece of shit or not, but I would bet it works fine, in which case OP really is to blame for not being able to figure it out)

Re:General answer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm even fairly tech savvy - I'm a full-time software developer.

My advice is look over your hardware more carefully as you buy it. I try to make sure every system I build can run both the latest Windows and Linux as close to flawless as possible. Every once in a long while a part will sneak past that isn't compatible, but that's usually because I was careless and just made assumptions that it would work. If you were complaining about a laptop have issues I wouldn't be overly surprised. But with a desktop you really have the option to get parts that are guaranteed to work so its not really Ubuntu's fault that its not working.

Re:General answer

[RobDude]

Without some actual numbers, it's all just speculation.

I remember back when Slackware 7 came out and there were people who just as easily dismissed my install/hardware troubles.

"It works on *my* machine. You must be an idiot or have some crap hardware or something."

Now, looking back, it seems like even the most hardcore Linux fans will agree that there were a ton of issues *in the past*. And that pattern hasn't really changed, IMHO.

Every year, since as far back as I can remember (1998ish), people on the web proclaim that *THIS* is going to be the year of the Linux desktop. Typically, this claim will come with a side-to-side comparison of why Linux is better than Windows (It's easier to install! Four less clicks!) and it'll say how much more software the distro includes compared to windows (but it's not bloat because, well, we like it when Linux does it), and it'll come with admissions that, last year, things weren't as great as we said.

IE: 2003 - 'This is going to be the year for the Linux desktop. In the past, there were network issues, but now it's fixed! Plus it's super easy to use'.

2004 - 'This is going to be the year for the Linux desktop. In the past, there were video driver issues, but we've fixed that. Plus, it's super easy to use.' ....

2009 - 'This is going to be the year for the Linux desktop. In the past, we had problems with wireless networking...but we've fixed that. Plus, it's super easy to use.'

Linux is improving, certainly. I'm a fan, and I do run it. But the initial reaction from the community shouldn't be, 'WoW - you must be an idiot'. At the very least, pull the, 'Yeah well, you need to write the manufacture letters to get them to make a Linux Driver, because any problem you run into in Linux is the result of a bad driver because of the micro$uck paying companies not to make them' card. Or something.

I'm just tired of hearing, 'Oh man this works great....' then I try it and it fails. Then people admit that, okay, yeah, it doesn't actually work.

Example - 'Open Office is great it does everything Excel does, and it will open your old Excel stuff and it works great and it's free!'

I download it. I open my custom made Excel worksheet loaded with VBA code and macros and I go, 'Ummm, it doesn't seem to work for me'.

(2 pages of banter on some forum somewhere)

"Well, yeah, it doesn't support VBA. It has it's own that that is totally different and none of your worksheets that use VBA are going to work - but it's Microsoft's fault for that."

And then I say, 'Okay, that's fine, and this still seems like a great product - but why didn't you just say that, in the beginning, that it doesn't do everything Excel does?'

Example - 'Wireless works great in Linux!'

Many, many hours later, with NDISWRAPER installed and configured and pages on the forums asking for help and following mysterious instructions off the internet (many of which *could* have been malicious)...

'Yeah, it looks like, with your card, you'll only be able to get online if you disable WEP. So, you have to surf without encryption and all of your traffic is available to anyone who wants it....but I mean, OTHER THAN THAT, and the hours it took to setup, it totally just works'.

It just gets tiresome. And the name calling when you point out that something didn't work as advertised is also tiresome.

Re:General answer

[commodore64_love]

>>>what he considers problematic is hopelessly outdated, even in Windows. RealPlayer? Nesticle? Does Netscape even run a dial-up ISP anymore? Gaming in 640x480?
>>>

NESticle == NES emulator. Surely I'm not the only one into classic gaming.
640x480 == Again, classic gaming.
RealPlayer == Needed to view various videos at tvpc.com
Dialup == Needed for use in hotels without highspeed connections. And so on. These aren't outdated problems, but things I've encountered in just the past month.

Re:General answer

[Inner_Child]

I will give you the Dialup and the low resolution, at least provisionally, but if a site requires RealPlayer in this day and age its owners should be shot. Also, NESticle was outpaced years ago by FCE Ultra. Even Mednafen is more compatible. Both make NESticle look quite terrible.

Re:General answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe instead of complaining that Ubuntu doesn't support a closed source, unsupported NES emulator you should look for one with better support?

For fucks sake, it hasn't been updated in 12 years!

Performance Measurements for Ubuntu?

[eldavojohn]

As over watch of operations management, what kind of performance measurements are you going to make to decide which direction Ubuntu development is heading? Number of bugs? Just cash flow? Number of supported packages?

Simply put: what are you going to improve Canonical's operations and how are you plan on measuring it to prove you're making a difference?

Proprietary products

[Enderandrew]

You often praise proprietary, closed-source products on your blog (especially products from Apple and IBM). What is your stance on mixing proprietary and open products?

Re:I know there are skins, but

[zippthorne]

I heard they were making a big switch to mud brown in the next edition. As for looking like a desert wasteland, it also looks like the inside of every trendy coffee shop and Panera Bread, so you know a lot of thought went into its innovation. In fact, that's the very measure of original-ness: is it found in thousands of trendy stores nationwide? Then it's originique!

Re:Quality Control

[bcrowell]

This is an excellent question. I've been using ubuntu since edgy eft, and I'm really dismayed by the quality of jaunty and (especially) karmic. The biggest issue is that sound, which worked for me in edgy through intrepid, started working poorly in jaunty, and is now essentially completely broken for me in karmic. I've spent a lot of time surfing ubuntuforms.org, collecting information, trying to write useful and well documented bug reports, etc. But the upshot is that there have been major, major regressions in sound for me.

Another regression that affected me after the upgrade to karmic was this one. I noticed the problem, and because it was causing me significant inconvenience I dug around in the source code and found it. As described in the bug report, there is a function called temporary_hack_for_initial_fade(). So obviously someone put a kludge in and then the kludge wasn't fixed in time for the release of karmic, so they released it anyway. This doesn't seem to speak well for the quality assurance procedures that go into a release of ubuntu.

Re:Mono

[poetmatt]

along with that question is : "do we really need fspot in the default installation?"

Is there a time to fork?

[nine-times]

Sorry, I know my viewpoint is going to anger and annoy some people, but I've been thinking about the relative lack of success of Linux on the desktop lately. By "relative lack of success" I don't mean to bash the quality of Linux, but only that it doesn't seem to be very widely used in spite of being pretty good for a lot of purposes. So first, my obvious question would be, to what do you attribute the relative lack of success, and what plans do you have, if any, to do something about it.

To be a little more specific (and to answer my own question a little bit) it seems to me that a fair amount of the problem isn't the OS itself, but the associate applications. For example, lots of people have complained about GIMP for reasons ranging from lack of specific functionality to an unconventional UI, and even to the awkward connotations of the name "GIMP". Even having personally gotten some graphic designers to try the GIMP, I have yet to know any professional designers who find it adequate. I'd like to use Linux, but don't find I can come close replicating an equivalent workflow to what I have available using tools like Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, and Sound Forge. (those are the applications I'm personally stuck with, though I'm sure other people have other applications on their personal lists.)

Sorry if this is a vague or offensive question, but I'd really like to know, is there a plan to attack those kinds of issues at any point? I feel like Ubuntu (and other Linux distros) have done a pretty good job in polishing the installation procedures and the "look and feel" aspect of things, but does there come a time when you say, "We need a serious Adobe CS competitor for our OS to be competitive on the desktop, so let's make that happen"? If so, what happens then?

Sorry, I know people are going to tell me that I should just use the GIMP and if it doesn't do what I need, I should rewrite it. Sorry, I don't have the programming skills and and I don't have the money to single-handedly fund development of all the applications that I'd need to switch to Linux. I'd be willing to buy them once they were developed, or even make modest contributions to a project that I thought would actually deliver on what I needed, but I'm not a software developer.

Really, honestly, I'm not trying to be offensive to FOSS developers. I'm just speaking as someone who, for both practical and ideological reasons, would love to switch away from using Windows, but I keep finding that I can't. I use Debian and Ubuntu when I can, and have even contributed money to FOSS projects. So ultimately my question is, does Ubuntu have as one of its goals to enable someone like me to finally make the switch to Linux? If so, what's the plan? What can I do to help?

Re:Is there a time to fork?

[nine-times]

Your post boils down to the usual complaint that application XYZ isn't available on Linux.

I don't see why that anyone should be dismissive about this "usual complaint". People here on Slashdot often misunderstand the complaint and get defensive. The complaint isn't " application XYZ isn't available on Linux," but rather "there isn't an application on Linux that lets me do task ABC as quickly and easily as I can using application XYZ on Windows." If it's true, then it's a valid complaint.

But that's not what my post was about. I wouldn't even say my post was a complaint. I asserted my belief that what was preventing more widespread Linux adoption is no longer deficiencies in the OS or DE, but has more to do with the functionality and friendliness of actual applications. I then asked whether Ubuntu intended to do anything about it, and if so, what?

I really don't want to get into a fight or a flame war or even argue about a particular application. I will say, though, that when both amateurs and professionals are overwhelmingly choosing expensive proprietary options when free alternatives are readily available, it seems awfully counter-productive to stubbornly insist that it's all delusion and "simple UI entrenchment". It seems a bit like trying to win friends by claiming that anyone who doesn't like you is a retarded.

Re:Ubuntu and KDE

[bcrowell]

I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrude people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?

Yep. Coming at this from a slightly different angle, I use fluxbox on ubuntu rather than gnome. One of the big problems in karmic is that I'm being affected by multiple new regressions that seem to arise from the lack of any serious testing on any desktop environment other than gnome. Two examples: (1) Previously, sound used to work fine for me in fluxbox. Now, sound works sometimes in Gnome, never in fluxbox. (2) This bug appears to arise because they decided to implement a new signal from the Gnome desktop to let xsplash know when it was done starting up, but nobody appears to have bothered to check what would happen in desktop environments other than Gnome, which don't implement the signal.

I understand that Gnome is the primary desktop focus of the standard version of ubuntu. But is is really that much to ask that someone at least start up the other desktop environments once to see if they work? Both of the problems above were evident to me within five minutes of upgrading from jaunty to karmic.

Re:Ubuntu and KDE

[Enderandrew]

I think Ubuntu is actively hurting the KDE community by giving it a bad name.

When Canonical works on new features for each Ubuntu release, they work indepdently of the Kubuntu team. Kubuntu is constantly trying to play catch-up on base issues.

Even worse, they put out unstable, buggy, and sometimes flat-out broken KDE packages. Almost every I've talked to that has had really bad experiences with KDE complain about bugs and constant crashes they had when testing KDE packages from Ubuntu.

Read KDE forums, mailing lists, etc. You'll see some serious hate and vitrol from users who blame KDE devs, not realizing that the same packages on other distros work just fine. They don't realize it is their distro that is causing their problems.

I've seen several KDE devs walk away and stop contributing because of all the hate their getting. If Ubuntu wasn't putting out broken packages, it would remove a lot of this backlash.

That is not to say that 100% of KDE backlast is Ubuntu-created. Some people just don't like KDE 4.x. I didn't like the 4.0 release, and was pretty worried about the future direction of KDE at the time. But Ubuntu certainly hasn't done KDE any favors the past two years with the packages they've put out.

Re:What about WINE and Mono?

[rec9140]

NO! These need to be REMOVED from the distro.

mono is tainted from the start, and is nothing but a future huge legal liability.

wine is also just asking for trouble in providing possible hooks for all kinds of malware, it too needs to go.

We do not need anything but native apps on Linux.

Re:What about WINE and Mono?

[aztracker1]

I'm guessing we should remove SAMBA and FAT support while we're at it. Hope you don't like to access those USB drives. Oh yeah, you shouldn't be using h.264, mpeg (of any kind) or a number of other container formats other than Ogg + Vorbis/Theora.

Re:Freedom, second?

[Statecraftsman]

Second. I have to second that this question be asked. Matt seems to want to stay away from the ethical side of free software and just focus on the new hotness factor of "open source". It's kind of funny because I would hear about his posts since he generally included the exact phrase "free software" but when I would read his posts, there was nothing behind it so it seemed like keyword stuffing.

I'm not all that surprised but I am saddened that Canonical who claims to have a "free operating system for your desktop or laptop" seems to be moving away from user freedom as a core value. They have no problem with binary blobs in the kernel and their own service Ubuntu One is proprietary. I would like to hear how Matt sees Ubuntu returning (or not) to a focus on freedom.

Re:Adoption Stories and Influences

[Interoperable]

Porting a game is an enormous undertaking. Writing a game to be cross-platform from the get-go by using openGL might be an option but video drivers aren't the only problem, Linux has big problems regarding consistent audio frameworks across all distributions. Games work well under Windows because Windows is inherently monolithic whereas Linux is inherently modular. The monolithic nature of the Windows API cuts costs by guaranteeing that a game will work on every Windows machine (excepting odd circumstances and anything too old for the current DirectX).

The marvelous thing about Linux is the modularity; complex tasks are handled by simple, effective tools that are appropriately strung together. It's the modularity as much as the openness that defines Linux. It's that modularity leads to very difficult game development. Reducing the ecosystem of tools and configurations to a canonical (ha ha) set might make game development viable on Linux, but would be the antithesis of the Linux philosophy.

Stability of the platform

[Elektroschock]

Linux users are used to a situation where a kernel or distribution or software module update kills their basic hardware support, like sound, graphics etc.

What role do you see for automated testing environments and hardware labs to ensure higher quality?

--

Why are Ubuntu's KDE packages so bad? Why aren't beta versions debug enabled by default?