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Is Canonical the Next Apple?
An anonymous reader writes "With the release of 11.04 Natty Narwhal, Canonical is taking Ubuntu in a new direction, which puts cloud services and content like music at the forefront of the Ubuntu experience. Ubuntu is no longer 'Linux,' or 'desktop' or 'netbook'; it's just Ubuntu for clients and servers. Ubuntu has its own desktop in Unity, app store (Software Center), music service and personal cloud. If Ubuntu takes off, will it make Canonical the next Apple? Of course, Canonical doesn't sell computers, but then again Ubuntu can be used on any computer, even Macs."
No.
People have been moving to other desktops like XFCE in droves because of Unity. Unity forces a cell phone UI on the desktop, and people hate it. There are threads with hundreds, even thousands of responses.
There's a perfectly good UI paradigm for the desktop that's been around since the 80's. Constantly reinventing the wheel is one of the things putting non-computer experts off Linux on the desktop. With Windows, some things change sure, but the basic metaphor (icons on the desktop, a start button to launch programs, a taskbar to show your running programs) has been perfectly good for years and people are used to it.
It's always more "fun" to invent some new half-baked thing than to spend time fixing bugs and problems, so that's what happens.
is start picking better names for their releases.
Compare - Apple side: "Kodiak", "Cheetah", "Puma", "Jaguar", "Panther", "Tiger", "Leopard", "Snow Leopard."
with - Ubuntu side: "Warty Warthog", "Hoary Hedgehog", "Breezy Badger", "Dapper Drake", "Edgy Eft", "Feisty Fawn", "Gutsy Gibbon", "Hardy Heron", "Intrepid Ibex", "Jaunty Jackalope", "Karmic Koala", "Lucid Lynx", "Maverick Meerkat", "Natty Narwhal", "Oneric Ocelot"...
The Apple side is short, and carries images of animals all well-reputed and seen as powerful and respected predators.
The Ubuntu side sounds like the cast list from a crappy saturday morning cartoon show.
Just sayin'...
From TFS. Apple started with hardware and they still sell it. Without the iPod there would be no iTunes, no App Store. Who writes these claptrap headlines?
At least the first post here was succinct - and probably right.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Maybe if you see Apple as a company providing a solution to a wider computing need rather then a hardware and sofware manufacturer, but I would say no.
That said, I do welcome a complete approach, and also taking radical steps on the desktop (despite using Ubuntu on my HTPC and work computer I'm not a huge fan of Gnome or KDE). I tried installing Ubuntu 11.04 on a vmware virtual today and never even managed to get it to boot to the desktop. I guess I would not have managed to test Unity even if I reached the Desktop, so can't really comment on how well thought out the experience will be, but looking at history I don't expect anything as polished as OSX from a usability point of view.
I hope Canonical become a major force. But I hope they never become like Apple.
Where do you guys get these titles? lol, the answer is "No" and wow what a stretch.
Apple was never really a software company at its heart. It was always a hardware company that chose to write its own software.
IMHO, we should all violently protest cloud computing because eventually you will be paying a monthly fee for software and therefore will eventually pay for apps over and over and over ad nauseum until your bank account is empty.
Canonical may be forcing people to use PCs like they use cellphones, but people don't like this.
They will never manufacture hardware as Apple does because it's antithetical to what they are. They will never have the control over compatibility issues that Apple does as a result.
Linux unfortunately has no penetration into consumer computing space, but it's for some very good reasons that aren't going to be overcome by trying to turn people's desktops into iPhones vis-a-vis Unity
Apple is first and foremost a hardware company that uses software and services to give it a competitive advantage selling hardware. Canonical is a services company that uses open source software to advance its services business. App stores, clouds and streaming are not unique to Apple or central to its business.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Is Mahatma Gandhi the next Hitler?
@ubuntu.com'er here.
Canonical has a bit of control of the community, but it has that control *indirectly*.
Canonical hires productive Ubuntu'ers to work on Ubuntu as their job. Sure they might get some assignments, but the changes put forward for Ubuntu happen at the twice-yearly Ubuntu Developer's Summit. Hell, Canonical even flies in Ubuntu hackers who might be doing work next cycle who are not in their employ.
The point is, it's a community. Canonical is funding it, sure, but I take zero orders when I make changes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
At my local electronics society we use Ubuntu. We will not upgrade to 11.04, because of Unity and the abysmal problems we have had in the past with PulseAudio. A few members are currently looking how to configure Debian with all the bells and whistles we like and without the ones that Ubuntu wants to push upon us.
So that is 92 computers that Ubuntu will not be run anymore in the near future.
From advertising.
Apple makes money from selling stuff.
Wow, "millions". Apple just makes a measly $65 billion in revenue and $14 billion in profit a year. I'm sure they are quaking in their boots over the nebelous "millions" that Canonical makes.
Google makes money from advertising. Are they all smucks over there at Google?
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
design is arguably a strength of ubuntu, I think they are getting pretty damn good at it too.
It runs on everything, which is a unique strength compared to others. Eventually, instead of having a different os on every gadget, ubuntu on all.
Its easy enough to use for non-techies (my whole family uses it) while having full linux power under the hood.
They have tons of karma, I would like them to succeed, which hopefully is a common sentiment and will pay off.
When the ad industry collapses, yes, they will be. Or do you somehow think that the web ad bubble is never going to burst?
...is start picking better names for their releases.
I've long said one of the things that hold back open source products from wider acceptance is that the OS/free software communities absolutely suck at marketing. Marketing isn't everything... the product has to be good... but plenty of good products have failed because the marketing effort behind them wasn't up to par. Mindshare is very often won on the ad page. Like it or not, that's reality. This is why companies spend untold millions on marketing. It's important.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Narwhals presumably.
If Ubuntu takes off, will it make Canonical the next Apple?
We can only hope. Unity is GPL, as is the vast majority of the Linux ecosphere. If Ubuntu becomes as big as (i)OSX and Win7 everybody in the linux community will gain a tremendous amount. Drivers, support, money - it will all get exponentially better for us.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Which means a lot of work, a lot of betting and a bunch of wins.
What I've seen so far is changing a default color schema, a "new" font and a new naming schema.
Not even the "new" desktop is really new as
Unity is a shell interface for the GNOME desktop environment
(Very first line in Wikipedia)
Ubuntu, like Unity, is a shell around something else (Debian) with very limited value added.
Just "going to the clouds" (tm) doesn't make a winning company (alo because everyone else is going there).
No, I don't think Canonical will be the next Apple (or even Microsoft). It's more likely it will be the next Mandrakesoft.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I was a Linux desktop user for 10 years and just switched to Mac - not because of some nebulous "experience"[...]but I was sick of waiting for my laptop to reboot all the time, and the MacBook is the first computer I've ever used where power management actually, really works. For me it's all about nuts and bolts.
So, basically, you switched for the user experience.
Why do Slashdotters think that "user experience" means "useless flashy graphics?" That's bullshit. "User experience" means "the machine does not frustrate the user." Nuts and bolts are an essential part of user experience, long before we get to the graphics/design stage. No amount of flashy graphics can cover up things that don't work.
http://www.humblebundle.com/
Scroll down, the average linux user paid almost twice as much as the average mac user, and more then 3 times as much as the average windows user.
Apple went to the major printer manufacturers and said "You should support Rendesvous/Bonjour". And they did it.
Apple went to the music labels and said "You should sell your stuff through iTunes - it's safe with our DRM". They later said "You guys should drop this DRM jazz". Both times they were heard, and Apple got the rights it needed.
Until Canonical can do something similar, they're not an Apple replacement candidate.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
No, because I actually care about what happens to people using Canonical's products. ;^)
--
Toro
Glad he doesn't have an iPhone
Not so much.
In a Guardian interview in May 2008, Mark Shuttleworth said that the Canonical business model was service provision and explained that Canonical was not yet close to profitability.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_Ltd.#Business_plans
Clear, Dark Skies
Don't be stupid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They might be "making millions" but they're certainly not turning a profit.
Clear, Dark Skies
1) Unity is built on top of GNOME. They didn't develop even half of that.
1.5) Unity, IMHO, is much less usable than GNOME 3's default desktop and quite a few people I've seen online agree with me. This is not absolute though and YMMV.
2) Every other distribution (almost) has an "app store"; it's called a freaking package manager and they've been around for a long, long time. Simply having a simple-to-use UI for one doesn't exactly qualify it as an "app store".
3) The music service is just a re-branded 7Digital (which is a great place to buy music btw; they even sell some things in FLAC).
4) The "personal cloud" is just a Dropbox competitor (with syncing for some apps, which is a nice touch).
I have a feeling that these types of articles are only made for advertisement views and nothing more, as I've rarely seen an article like this that actually makes sense. Plus, Ubuntu is overhyped. I used it from 7.10 to 10.04, and after I tried switching to something else I never looked back. The exact same desktop I got in Ubuntu was actually less buggy in Arch Linux, which doesn't patch things nearly as much as Ubuntu does. Honestly, if you disregard the package manager, there's very, very, very little difference between Ubuntu and any of the other popular distributions like Fedora/OpenSUSE (if you're a desktop user that is). The only reason it's still popular, as far as I can figure out, is because it's hyped so much as being "the easiest" and "the most feature-filled" and whatnot, when every other distribution has caught up with and, dare I say, surpassed Ubuntu in usability.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Honestly Unity I had high hopes for until I tried living with it for a week with a RC.
It's great for insulating all the dirtyness of a computer from a user... including keeping all the utilities and configuration apps away from you. changing the power settings ended up a frustrating search and a give up to the Xterminal to do it by hand in a command prompt. It also is badly broken on laptops as it will not return to full brightness after a screen sleep like 10.10 did. I can close the lid and 60% of the time the screen will blank and turn off the backlight, 40% of the time it does not, again 10.10 did not have this problem.
Unity was not fully tested before release, it's a beta release at best.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It might just be my setup (windows on master hd, ubuntu on slave) but when I first installed it, GRUB messed up and wouldn't boot. I had to manually edit the boot loader to make Ubuntu work. Last night I installed 11.04, system reboots and guess what! System won't boot. Another GRUB error. At that point I turned off my computer and said to hell with it.
I'm somewhat computer savvy as well. I build my own desktops, I've installed win98, win2k, winXP and Vista on machines before. If I'm having this much trouble with Linux (my difficulties go well beyond the GRUB problems) then I can only imagine the difficulties someone less techinical would have. Linux is a great server OS, but it's still not ready for desktop use. I love open source as a concept but I find most software developed in this manor to be lacking (GIMP, I'm looking your way).
Really?
I need to tell Oracle and RedHat to sue all their customers as they are not paying for their products. All those linux servers running Oracle are ILLEGAL!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They still haven't fixed the proxy issue, as in "IT DOESN'T WORK BEHIND A PROXY". So unless they do, it means nothing to the many many people working in corporate environments :)
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
It's free, the word free confuses Apple to no end.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Who cares?? Linux is still open source, there IS still an alternative. If Canonical wants to push its own version to something apple-esque then thats their business. At the very least they are providing more variety of choices which is something you DONT get with apple. They are also helping to bring Linux to the mainstream so they must be doing something right. If you dont like it, stop complaining and go with one of the dozens of other distros.
You know you've really overdone it when you've got custom package specs in /sw/fink/dists/local....
(Last night's mini-project: Get fink to build 'sox' with AAC support so it can mess around with ALAC files.)
Having seen the "stable" 11.04 release crash simply upon booting the live-cd and noting that the list of "known issues" is four screen pages long, I'd say they have some distance left to go.
With the requirement on the Nvidia flavor video card to be at least a GeForce 9400, it looks to me like it almost prefers to run on Apple hardware.
A lot of the differences have decreased since the release of Windows 7, but until then, if you put a non-expert Mac, Windows and Linux user in a conference room with their laptops, and asked them to perform a set of common tasks as quickly as possible, the Mac user would win hands-down every time. E.g.: connect a newly purchased printer and print a colour document, connect to a new wireless network and download a file, connect to a video projector and display a presentation with a presenter view on the laptop screen and the slides on the big screen. That's why the Mac became popular again - Apple optimised the things that drive regular users nuts on a daily basis, and they were willing to pay the premium (which, actually, isn't a huge difference compared to the high-end offerings from Sony, Dell, HP etc.)
While I think everyone can be look up Apple for product "just working [out of the box]" I think that's where it ends at Canonical. They must realize that if they continue to push their Ubuntu One and such services too hard, they will lose developers and then after few releases later users to other distributions.
Then again, I have nothing against them for "value-adding options", as long as those are "options" and do not make Ubuntu become the next Nokia Ovi (think about their [Windows] application for a few seconds -- horrible or the fact that most functions on my N8 require or prompt Ovi user account, and that bloody piece of sh*t can't care to remember my password anymore).
I still think that Canonical has had a great and good influence on Linux [distribution] community as whole and their investment on UI and system level innovation and new projects has helped the desktop usage. And I'm not saying this to undermine contributions by for example Red Hat or any single open source developer person -- just that to my knowledge, Canonical has not been around for too long to step into the big influencers/innovators club. Also, the more big names (and directions) we have as long as they are working together as well as possible, it's all good (freedesktop.org, etc.).
I remember when the Television ad bubble burst. There were so many advertisements and people stopped watching TV altogether. They went outside and threw Frisbees to each other. They all got skin cancer and became so deformed by the operations to remove the cancerous skin that they decided to go back inside and watch TV.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
They have application stores, music stores, cloud services, software for desktops and servers. They do not sell computers, but Windows can be used on any computer—even Macs!
Enjoy your paywalled websites I guess?
Since we're obviously speaking in silly stereotypes, we could also say Linux users are supporters of the FSF's ideals and are opposed to all attempts by companies trying to lock them in with DRM and walled gardens like Apple does. Thus, Canonical couldn't turn into Apple because Apple's draconian shenanigans wouldn't work on Linux users.
But silly stereotypes are silly, and I doubt all Linux users are little RMSs or that Linux users don't pay for software. My extensive data from my single-Linux-user dataset tells me that Linux users pay for software, but are also a little like RMS. It's the beard.
Canonical's similarities to Apple on the desktop are rather superficial. Unity is a rather awkward copy of parts of the Mac OS X UI. I do give them a lot of credit for trying, and I think Unity is salvageable, although with some work. As much as I am tempted to go on about how Unity is not really ready for prime time, except for maybe the most basic users, I won't.
While most of the Ubuntu client side stuff is FOSS, the server side stuff specific to Ubuntu One from what I understand mostly is not. This is a big problem in the free software world right now, closed servers. You give up your data to a server without any ability to know what it is running. This denies you of the ability to verify what it is doing, to set up your own alternative servers, or use someone else's alternative server whom you may have a different trust relationship with.
There are many attempts out there trying to rectify this, from distributions like freedombox, to new architecture like unhosted, to distributed networks like diaspora. All of this stuff is kind of early on. I don't blame Cananonical for going with what they know on the server side, but I do think they could do better. It feel like the cloud stuff is all about monetization to them, and not about also pushing and promoting a different approach to technology, which is what free software is all about. In that regards they are behaving like Apple, and really like most companies tend to behave.
Its the "the successful know better than you" attitude that is really pervasive in the world right now, from computers to politics. Free software is more about a participatory democracy, with code given the consent of trust by its users, and that consent can only be given if it is informed and all have equal access. You see it in Unity too, a UI that has almost no configuration options without having to install other tools. It says "we know better than you". I am hoping that Canonical's plan here was to start with it locked down and then take the best mods from the community and work them in. Unity is at least free software, so it has the possibility of the community fixing it. The stuff running on their cloud servers is not so lucky.
I have always liked how Ubuntu "just works", giving a good balance of a lot of competing requirements, realities and philosophies to come up with a pragmatic solution to having a useful Linux with little fuss. I feel they are going in a direction where they could end up getting this balance wrong, and people may end up going elsewhere once someone fills the vacuum they leave.
No no no! Most definately not. It's obvious from just about anything Canonical does that they're simply not able to create an experience that's as polished as the Apple experience. They don't even come close. Much worse is that they turn just about everything upside down with each release. All my perfectly tweaked settings gone with a single click. It's just crap. I'll keep using it and will never succumd to the Apple vendor lock-in, but my god, is Canonical trying to push me to the other side...
0x or or snor perron?!
Read this:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2011-April/032988.html
and then have a good laugh about this whole line of thought. Canonical is an effort to make a more usable default Linux desktop but they have one major problem (and many minor ones): Mark Shuttleworth is a terrible UI designer and either all the designers he employs are terrible as well, nobody at canonical is willing to stand up to him or he's not willing to take feedback from the designers he employs. Making a cargo cult hybrid of OS X and Windows 7 isn't going to do anyone any good.
Even the article doesn't get it, it assumes that Apple is successful because they "dumbed down UNIX".
You're nothing but an Apple shill. I was looking over your other comments and you can't help but to scream that Apple is always better and the areas where you do admit there is a problem with an Apple product you always blame a third party. Go astroturf elsewhere.
Ubuntu's Not Linux = UNL? Or is that suppose to be GNU/UNL?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Kind of reminds me of Linspire/Lindows...
-- http://www.doczayus.com/
in the dreams of mark shuttleworth maybe... What is true, is than lately most of ubuntu users (and im one of them) are starting to talk like mac fan-boys. They kind of worship a leader than thinks for them and decide what's better for their desktop. And they not only doesn't hate it, but they even go mad at you if you just put in their forums things like "unity is a piece of crap", which actually it is...
Why do you think it's a bubble? Advertising on the web is very inexpensive and can be effective. My employer has done quite well with adwords on Google. So much so that we've pretty much dropped all other advertising expenditures (ie ads in magazines). We still do the occasional trade show, but that's mostly about connecting with community rather than advertising / promotion.
The Apple names sound like powerful and respected WWII Nazi tanks.
Funny, I never heard of a Nazi "Macintosh" tank.
Let me laugh even harder.
How did this article make it through to my RSS feed? Is all you need these days to reach the masses produce infantile observations and deliver it with the noun, "Apple", in the heading?
Reading through this article is a genuine pain. The author clearly has no insight in half of his subject, has only limited insight in the other half, lacks journalistic education, is biased, makes wrongful and outdated "observations", and draws parallels where no parallels exist. Just to name a few. It's a class book example of misconclusions - and even that is giving it more credit than it deserves.
The aim here is not to present a subject for discussion (one must sincerely hope, anyway, because in that case, the author is beyond professional salvation), but a cheap trolling trick to mass up clicks and tweets pointing to his site. It's blatantly obvious, and I have to say, "Shame on you, slashdot, for letting this one slip through!"
I don't think AAC support will get you ALAC, two different packages.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I thought APT came about in the late 90s and Synaptic released almost a decade ago. The App Store is only three years old.
Why do you think it's a bubble?
Because ad revenues for TV and newspapers have been plummeting for a couple years now and it's only commonsense to think that the same thing is going to happen with ad revenue on the web? Or are you one of those people who were trying to convince everyone that the dotcom bubble was non-existent or how real estate values could never possible go down?
Win-a, "proxy" doesn't fix that problem for you? ;)
Put identity in the browser.
No, they hit the fast-forward button on their Tivo, switched to Netflix, went off to play videogames and surf the Internet, where the admen have now found them. There wasn't a dramatic "poof" moment, but TV ad revenues as a share of total ad revenues have been on a decline for years.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Is Obama the new jellyfish?
Is toilet paper the new newspaper?
Is 7-Eleven the new Victoria's Secret?
Are public schools the new Wall Street?
Let's discuss this! Oh wait, let's not, because I have no arguments, and my point is retarded. Sorry!
I have one machine running 10.10. As of a few weeks ago Gnome crashes so often that we had to switch to Unity, and Unity crashes any time we close a Firefox window.
I certainly hope 11.04 isn't that bad.
I think there are a lot of companies like the one I work for who have been moving their ad money from print to online. Newspaper ad revenue has been declining as their circulation numbers drop. As far as I know, the internet isn't bleeding users yet.
Google and social sites like Groupon have made it possible for even very small, local companies to advertise effectively. I think that's where a lot of the new ad money is coming from. In other words, money shifting out of local newspapers, cable stations, and yellow pages into online campaigns.
I mean seriously, what are Canonical smoking?
They really expect us to actually use Unity?
Its the biggest pile of crap and largest setback of basic usability I've seen since Vista came out.
Just the pain you have to go through to find an app you want to launch is an exercise i futility and a perfect example of what NOT to do in basic user-interface design.
I can't believe that some reviews of Unity out there are actually positive.
.
You are retarded. Having to install a 3rd party app doesn't mean that something no longer "Just Works".
THAWTELESS, Star City, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04, "Venereal Vista," entred around the Unity desktop, which only 5 out of 11 first-time users managed to crash in final testing two weeks ago.
The Unity desktop is Canonical's response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.
"This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical's vision of the desktop," said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. "So we added a 'minimise' button too."
Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth's roadmap for Unity. "I woke up one day and thought, 'Gosh, I'd really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I'm using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it,' I can't think of a better user experience.' We're not quite there yet, but Unity gets you a lot of the way."
Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. "It'll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called 'phones' and run Android."
Photo: A load of arse.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Another one to add to the list
Because ad revenues for TV and newspapers have been plummeting for a couple years now and it's only commonsense to think that the same thing is going to happen with ad revenue on the web? Or are you one of those people who were trying to convince everyone that the dotcom bubble was non-existent or how real estate values could never possible go down?
The advertising market shifts format, but does not reduce total volume as long as production keeps a certain level. When and if the business model of sites such as Google begins to drain, it'd mean that a new advertising format has emerged.
As a thought experiment, it's not unimaginable that within a few years the movile phones will be one of the most widely chosen platform to deliver advertising along with entertainment content.
So, Google Inc. might survive even if Google.com dies; unlikely in the mid-term, but definitely possible.
I don't think the analogy with the real-state bubble is appropriate.
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
2011 will be the year of Desktop Linux.
That is all.
When I can download Apple's OS for free, and put it on any hardware I want to, we'll talk.
[citation needed]
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
The way I look at this is Canonical/Ubuntu/Unity versus Gnome 3 and the companies and distributions which are issuing Gnome 3 desktops. The best methodology I can come up with to find marketplace penetration is web server logs for major websites. On that basis, Ubuntu currently has more than 13 desktops out there for every 1 of its closest competitor - Fedora. The SuSE's have less then Fedora, Debian less than he SuSE's and so forth.
The result of Canonical's shift is that the majority of non-mobile Linux desktop users were using Gnome 2, and will now be using Unity. They're still using Gnome nuts and bolts though. I am most familiar with the document displayer that both Gnome 3 and Unity use - evince, and the library it uses to render PDFs, poppler. Ubuntu has provided dozens of useful bug reports to these projects, as the large base of users has exposed bugs that people had just not encountered (or reported) before.
I have played with Natty (with Unity) and Gnome 3, and will probably wind up with my main OS on my multi-boot system being Natty running Unity, with a special user on Natty running Gnome 3 compiled from jhbuild (compiled off the latest git commits). A lot of changes on Unity I find less than thrilling such as close window moving to the left side of the window toolbar, and the rest of the window tool bars moving to the top of the screen. For both Unity and Gnome 3, I am unhappy that switching workspaces has gone from a mouse move and a click, to a whole rigmarole of mouse moves and clicks. There's a reason many of these things were the way they were for the last 20 years, or more. I have the command lines and shortcuts to fix some of these things - like shifting left back to right on Unity tool bars - but still.
Unless you are the unlucky few having driver issues (I'm one of the lucky one's )
Chasing Apple on services? Yeah, sorta, if you're talking music and apps. Chasing Google if you mean web based services. Chasing Amazon if you mean cloud computing. Chasing microsoft... heh, just kidding.
But let's not chalk it all up to Apple. Nobody chased Apple into mp3 players, rather, it was the other way around. The same with PDA/Smartphones. Apple is not an innovator, it is a refiner. And if you want to make the point that Ubuntu is moving away from trying to reinvent the wheel into just refining it, then you're absolutely correct.
I just find it hilarious when Apple fanboys talk about chasing Apple. Apple switched to a nix architecture, but now we're going to say Ubuntu is chasing Apple? HAHA! That's like claiming Palm was chasing Apple with its phone. Palm cornered the PDA market. All they did was add a cell radio to the same thing they'd always been doing. Which is why it failed, imho. But Apple was chasing Palm, RIM, and Nokia. But what they really did was refine, and they did it better than anyone else. But chase? I think not. You can't chase a company who always waits at least 1 generation behind cutting edge tech.
Apple is very good at refining. I think Canonical has done well too. I just upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 this morning. At first I had the "WTF!" experience. Then I gave it some time, and realized that for many users, this will be so much better. Once I found my administration programs, and swallowed the vomit that had risen in my throat at finding the WORST features of OSX on my updated desktop, I realized that the positive outweighed the good... and I can still customize what I want.
I8-D
I would love to use Linux. But first and foremost the OS has to be able to do everything Mac OS or Windows can do. That includes licensed content. Currently iTunes won't run on Linux in any realistic way, and there's no real alternative. I doubt that I'm alone. I'm glad someone in the Linux community is working on things like this. I'm also going to need MS Office, as I have to be able to exchange documents with administrators and OpenOffice's compatibility isn't really good enough for that.
The Linux community has slowly understood that if you want to be a mainstream OS real people have to be able to install it. But once they've installed it, it's got to do what they need to do.
For years, I've heard people complain that computer user interfaces are too complex and confusing. Recently, there's an enormous surge of enthusiasm for smartphones and tablets, and people keep saying how great the user interfaces are and how they prefer them to their desktops, despite the small screens with tiny print and the tiny keyboards.
Perhaps smartphone UIs are actually really good UIs, and there are lessons to learn from them. Perhaps users who are used to smartphone UIs would prefer similar UIs on desktops.
One thing I want from a general UI is for it to get the fsck out of the way when I'm using an application. Smartphone UIs are good at this. Unity is good at this.
Orwell getting a malicious app.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Simple things, things that should have never passed QA, and would never get out of the lab at Apple without being fixed.
Take, for instance, the simple matter of resizing a window. You can grab the window border and resize the window horizontally or vertically. This is good, what could be bad about a feature like this, Windows has let you do this for years.
Well, the target to grab, the window border's active draggable area is 2 pixels wide. Paul Fitts would like to say something about that.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Many people think not: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-client/+bug/387308
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Will a New Holland B95B Tractor Loader Backhoe be the next VW Beetle?
My complaint is that it requires a relatively up-to-date video card. I have some older P4 HT machines that won't run it. I always liked Ubuntu because it worked on so many systems. I'd see people posting with systems running on P3s. That's not going to be possible any more. I'll stay with 10.04 (LTS), so I'll be cool for another couple of years. But beyond that, I have to buy new computers if I want to stay with Ubuntu. I don't see 11.04 as a positive move.
This is a good point to ponder especially considering the selection music available in the Ubuntu One music store as well other multi-platform cloud services available from Cononical.