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

Adoption Stories and Influences

[eldavojohn]

Every so often I see an adoption story about so and so taking up some open source solution and sometimes I think "Wow, French government? Now it's really going to take off. This is it. It's time." And then I wait. And wait.

Are these stories at all positive for the project? I mean, you would think with states and governments using Ubuntu or Red Hat that it would catch on like wildfire if the savings are there so why isn't that happening? I know Microsoft sends out a lot of Wormtongues to stick in the ears of important people, do you plan on targeting governments in a similar manner? Does/will Canonical work on making a presence in things like the EU Commissions where we've seen corporations collecting members in their pockets?

Re:Adoption Stories and Influences

[HungryHobo]

I like linux, I like programming on a linux machine, I like learning on a linux machine but I can't really game on a linux machine and that's a big thing in the home PC market.

What are the plans to induce game makers to port their games to linux?
What moves are being made to try to encourage graphics chip companies to create good drivers for linux?

Your Version of Their Vision

[eldavojohn]

Late last year, you heralded some moves by Shuttleworth and you said:

This, I believe, is an opportunity for Canonical to tighten its focus. While Shuttleworth suggests that Silber's appointment "doesn't mark a change of direction," perhaps it should. With over 300 employees and products that span mobile, Netbooks and other personal computers, cloud computing, enterprise servers, and more, Canonical has its fingers in a lot of pots.

As COO, what are you going to do to improve the products you highlighted above? I'm not looking for a soft answer like "I'm going to promote Ubuntu on netbooks" but more so an itemized list of measurable goals, with milestones, dates and areas of focus (for instance, power minded ARM distributions). Is there anything about their vision you intend to change or influence the most?

General answer

[Anonymous Coward]

because your an idiot.

Enterprise Versus Desktop Emphasis

[eldavojohn]

You used to write a lot about desktop Linux distributions but now that you're COO of Canonical, the revenue comes most from enterprise support. Do you plan on trying to change that or maintain any value in pleasing the at home Ubuntu user? Your blog post talks about your kids achieving basic tasks with Ubuntu, will you still keep them in mind despite the fact your new employer doesn't see a dime from them? Any plans to make it more user friendly or make it more mainstream and less server room?

Ubuntu and KDE

[Enderandrew]

Will Ubuntu continue to treat KDE as a second-class citizen?

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?

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.

Quality Control

[davidm2005]

I have been using Ubuntu as a software developer for the past several years. I have been extremely disappointed with the most recent release of Ubuntu, 9.10, as it has been extremely buggy and seems like a step backwards to me. The conclusion of this review http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ubuntu-karmic-koala,2484-13.html also expresses a lot of my thoughts about Ubuntu 9.10. I had so many problems in using 9.10, that did NOT exist in 9.04, that I switched one of the two computers I use at work to Windows 7, for stability (yes, these are crazy days). Do you have any plans to increase quality control in Ubuntu, even if it comes at the cost of delaying the every six month release schedule?

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.

Revenue

[Enderandrew]

Shuttleworth is still funding Canonical. At some point however, this needs to turn into a protibable vendure to endure. How does Canonical create lasting revenue streams, and will those decisions come at the cost of usability and freedom in the distro, such as the recent decision to use Yahoo search (powered by Bing) as the default)?

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?

The GNOME community is fragmenting.

[Anonymous Coward]

More importantly, we see GNOME falling further and further behind KDE. We need to know exactly when Matt will be pushing for GNOME to be deprecated in favor of KDE (or even XFCE). He really doesn't have a choice; GNOME needs to go, and it needs to go very soon.

Even if it wasn't as great as everyone was expecting, at least KDE managed to get their 4.0 release out the door quickly, and have been making great improvements on it since then. We see them innovating, and creating a desktop environment that keeps getting better and better. Their underlying toolkit, Qt, keeps improving rapidly thanks to the efforts of Nokia and others.

GNOME, on the other hand, has been spinning its wheels for years. It has no real leadership, and we aren't seeing any innovation out of them. GTK+ is basically in maintenance mode.

We're seeing the GNOME community fragmenting, and quite badly. Some people still advocate using C, others are saying that Mono is the way to go. And yet others are pushing for Vala. Frankly, the internal strife will tear the GNOME project apart, much like happened to XFree86. I, for one, sure hope that Ubuntu has moved away from GNOME far before then.

KDE & LXDE

[MonsterTrimble]

I have a few questions as a loyal *buntu user:

1) Do you feel Kubuntu's 'Operation Timelord' is a step in the right direction for the distribution? If so, why do you feel it was allowed to slip far enough to warrant a complete overhaul?
2) Do you see Kubuntu & Xubuntu becoming purely community-supported distros with Canonical focusing solely on Ubuntu desktop & server?
3) With Xubuntu's memory & CPU requirements being on par with Ubuntu's and Mark Shuttleworth's invite 'to become a self-maintained project in the Ubuntu community' (according to lxde.org), does this signal an end to Xubuntu as a whole or at the very least the 'lightweight' *buntu distribution?

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?

Debian

[syousef]

Everyone knows Ubuntu is an ancient African word for "I can't configure Debian". How come you can't configure Debian but were able to create a whole other distro?

Freedom, second?

[TheModelEskimo]

Matt, you were intensely criticized by members of the Free Software community for your critical stance facing "vague concepts" like software freedom and "no vendor lock-in." Reading your blog, it seems to me like you are still a fan of focusing on "high quality software at a compelling price" rather than these other concepts. How will this position affect your work with Canonical and more specifically, its relationship with freedom-first software advocates?

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.