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Is Canonical the Next Apple?

Posted by Soulskill on from the three-years-to-success-six-years-to-evil-empire dept.

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."

60 of 511 comments (clear)

  1. No. by Desler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No.

    1. Re:No. by jsvendsen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Do you even know what Ubuntu is? Have you ever used it?

      Linux, and by extension Ubuntu, don't care about the UX.

      What? Ubuntu has always been about streamlining user experience as compared to other distributions. With varying degrees of success, sure, but that's always been their mission statement.

      The only success Linux has had is with integrated applications where the UX is designed completely from scratch by a third party private company.

      You mean like exactly what Ubuntu is doing with Unity? I almost hope you're a troll. "UX"..., sigh.

    2. Re:No. by Dunbal · · Score: 2

      Are oranges the next banana?

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    3. Re:No. by clang_jangle · · Score: 2, Informative

      It works just fine on my Thinkpad running gentoo. Yes, there are chipsets with little or no acpi support in Linux -- so if you like using Linux don't buy those. You *did* check your choices against the lists of supported hardware before spending, right? 'Cause that usually works pretty well over here... :)

      --
      Caveat Utilitor
    4. Re:No. by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      I dunno. I always found power management just annoying. On Windows machines it always seems to take more time to recover from hibernation than it would take for a complete restart. Also, power management tends to kick in at random and very inconvenient times. Modern Linux can boot up fast enough that not powering of the machine completely (even to the point of disconnecting from mains) is less and less meaningful.

      Also, I switched to Ubuntu because it gave me the "Mac style laptop experience" that some of these fanboys like to crow about.l

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    5. Re:No. by mellon · · Score: 2

      Wow, thanks for clearing that up!

      Of course, the first thing that popped into my head when I read the line in the article where it says "Canonical doesn't make hardware" was "damn, I wish they would—we need an open source computing platform that's designed that way from the ground up instead if being designed to be locked down, and then hacked open."

    6. Re:No. by MrHanky · · Score: 2

      No, really. Power management is one thing Apple does very well, whereas under Linux it's mixed. For instance, my desktop won't always return from sleep with the proprietary ATI drivers. It will when using the open driver, but with that driver, the GPU runs 20 degrees warmer.

      Of course, if you use third-party hardware and drivers under OS X, you run into the same kind of problem. Using a RaLink networking card on my old Powerbook would consistently crash it when putting it to sleep.

    7. Re:No. by stilldead · · Score: 2

      I will answer that. I use Ubuntu as a repository that is fairly current and debugged and nothing else. I used Debian for years, but Testing is always way out of date and I got real tired of debugging someones broken Perl script to get my system working again in Unstable. Ubuntu is a fairly current but debugged Unstable. I use Fluxbox as my Desktop (I even still login at a terminal and type startx when I want X), WICD for managing my wifi, and whatever else I want. Ubuntu is what you want it to be. I have all of the Debian package management tools and none of the Unstable branch headaches.

      BTW I still very much love Debian, use it regularly for when I want a highly stable server that doesn't need to be uber current, and am eternally grateful for the awesome things they do!!! Without Debian there is no Ubuntu. They are a cause worth supporting with your donations if you have some extra coin. http://www.debian.org/donations.

      --
      You are lucky, Ed Gruberman. Few novices experience so much of Ti Kwan Leep so soon.
  2. problem is, Unity is a disaster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You missed the memo. We have to keep dumbing down Linux desktops until every last thing has been squeezed out. If you tailor your UI for the complete novice, as Gnome and Unity have been doing, that's great for like the first 2 days you use it. But that same philosophy causes problems for more advanced users because the features they want have been ripped out.

      Also, they tend to do these "usability studies" where they conclude feature X was only used by 5% of the users, and feature Y by 3%, so it must be OK to sacrifice them on the altar of simplicity. But everyone has a different X or Y they use, so eventually this hurts _everybody_.

      Please, Linux desktop people, STOP DUMBING IT DOWN! The world has other OSs out there for that kind of experience, We don't need to do that to every last Linux DE as well.

    2. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by 0123456 · · Score: 2

      Note that 11.04 also includes Gnome 2, so Unity is the default but optional. When 11.10 removes Gnome 2, then we'll see whether people actually want a dumbed-down UI.

    3. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by supersloshy · · Score: 2

      "If I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'." -Henry Ford

      I agree that Unity isn't exactly a step forward, more like a side-step, but you can't blame them for trying to innovate. If "The Year of the Linux Desktop" is ever going to come around, it won't come around by imitating the competition, but trying to be better than the competition. It might take a while to get there, but every competing effort helps.

      Also, Arch Linux is a distribution full of tweakers and minimalists; the type of people you'd expect to dislike GNOME 3. Well, here's a forum thread on the Arch BBS asking for first impressions of GNOME 3, and the average opinion is very positive. Of course some users have complaints and gripes, but that's to be expected. Quite a few of the people that don't like GNOME 3 are either trolls (as evidenced in the thread) or have very, very precise workflows and can't fit them into GNOME 3. Seriously, try it for a week with an open mind, read the documentation and tip guides, etc. and you might like it! I know I do :)

      --
      "Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
    4. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by RDW · · Score: 2

      'There's a perfectly good UI paradigm for the desktop that's been around since the 80's...With Windows, some things change sure, but the basic metaphor...has been perfectly good for years and people are used to it.'

      I agree, but it looks like MS doesn't:

      http://www.withinwindows.com/2011/04/02/windows-8-secrets-windows-explorer-ribbon/

      So, with the dreaded Ribbon coming to Windows 8, the dumbed-down Gnome 3 or KDE4 desktop shipped as the default on a Linux distribution near you, and the awful Unity on Ubuntu, have we reached the stage where mainstream user interfaces have actually started to regress? The Xfce guys must be loving this! Meanwhile, imagine the interface hell we'll have when LibreOffice is inevitably ribbonized and Ubuntu ships it as the default suite under Unity...

    5. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by Yaddoshi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Unity forces a cell phone UI on the desktop, and people hate it."

      I'm probably a weirdo (actually I know I am), but I actually don't mind this release of Unity, and find that this version is significantly improved over the last one that shipped with Ubuntu Netbook Maverick Meerkat (10.10). The sidebar launcher automatically gets out of your way when you full-screen an app or drag a window to the side. It comes back when you mouse over the left side of your screen as needed. It's pretty easy to remove or add new icons (similar to how Windows 7 handles icons). It takes up a bit more space than I think it needs to, but for people who like big icons that's a plus. If you know the name of the app you want to launch, you can click the Ubuntu logo and type it into the search box, press enter, and it will launch (again similar to Windows 7).

      I think the real problem people have with Unity is that they don't like change. What everyone needs to remember is that Ubuntu does not forbid you from downloading and installing your preferred window manager and customizing it to your taste. You can also download one of several flavors already configured with alternative popular window managers, and as pointed out elsewhere the default Gnome window manager can be selected during login and will remain the default until it is changed again. So think of Unity more as a default option. If you don't like it, you still have your power of choice, and there's still a lot of customization potential out there. At some point when I have free time to tinker I will likely set up FVWM with a neat custom retro layout. Until then I will be happy to continue using Unity.

      Ubuntu is still LINUX. Anyone can set up their own distro, provided they have the time, resources and stamina to do so. That's what makes it so great.

    6. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by Eponymous+Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      For the record, I am a user who likes Unity. Sounds like I'm the only one though.

    7. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by Vegemeister · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm up in arms about the OSX user experience. What dumbass could possibly think it a good idea to put the application menus in the far top left of the screen, no matter how many applications are open, how large their windows are, or where they are located? Apple has managed to build a machine with a 2560x1440 pixel screen and a user interface that breaks down in any other use case than 'single application, maximzed'.

      I'd think it was funny if Canonical wasn't trying to imitate it.

    8. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by Zebedeu · · Score: 2

      Exactly. I upgraded yesterday, and after a few hours of "giving it a fair chance" I just had to go back to Gnome.

      Gnome may not be ideal, but Unity just feels unfinished. Who the hell thought it was a good idea not to have a decent easily accessible menu with all your applications?

      I'm hoping that before the next version comes out, a "Gnome spin" will have been created. Unfortunately Gnome seems to be going in the same direction, and I'm not very fond of KDE.

    9. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by ArcCoyote · · Score: 4, Informative

      log out
      select your account
      select "Ubuntu Classic" from the session menu at the bottom,
      log back in.

      Problem Solved.

    10. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by mixmasta · · Score: 2

      No need to move, just pick Classic from the menu at login time.

      --
      #6495ED - cornflower blue
    11. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by Vegemeister · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Consider the following: six terminal emulator windows will fit on a 1920x1200 pixel monitor. A user wants to change the title of one of them. Which makes more sense?

      1) User moves their mouse toward the window they want to affect, opens the terminal menu, hits 'set title', and enters the title they want for that window.

      2) User moves their mouse to a distant and totally unrelated part of the screen, opens the terminal menu, hits 'set title', and enters the title they want for that window. Which actually became the title of another terminal window, which the user did not want to change, because that window had focus at the time.

      Skinflinting on screen real estate at the expense of intuitive placement and behavior only makes sense on 4 inch 800x480 pixel screen.

    12. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by christurkel · · Score: 2

      I like Unity. Its very slick and well thought out. It hides the complexity and just gets out of the way. Gnome 3 is way too busy. I prefer the simplicty of Unity. Unity is the reason Ubuntu in years.

      --

      CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
    13. Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster by psydeshow · · Score: 2

      What is wrong with these guys? Do I have to write the damn thing myself?

      I think we all know the answer to those questions, unfortunately: they aren't you, and yes.

      The worst part of writing great software is knowing that you could build a better mousetrap, for any value of mousetrap, and at the same time realizing just how mind-numbingly long it will take you to do so. This is why good coders eventually give up and go into management.

  3. First thing they need to do by Moryath · · Score: 5, Funny

    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'...
     

    1. Re:First thing they need to do by Moryath · · Score: 2

      Ok I know you're just flaming, but what the hell.

      Which would you rather name your sports team:

      The "Wolverines?"

      Or the "Dippy Dogs?"

      Think carefully. The same principle applies to selling an operating system. Or we can make it a car analogy - you'll sell more of the same car by naming it the "Mustang" instead of the "Cute Cuddly Kitten."

    2. Re:First thing they need to do by xouumalperxe · · Score: 2

      Actually, I'd call their naming strategy a success. In discussions about Ubuntu, I mostly see versions being referred to by the adjective part of the Adjectivated Animal pattern, rather than attempting to refer to the actual version name. People comparing Jaunty to Karmic seems to work remarkably well, unlike comparing 9.04 to 9.10, but like comparing Tiger to Leopard. Plus, ever since Breezy, they've been sticking to incrementing the initials of the name with every version, which is a damned handy mnemonic.

    3. Re:First thing they need to do by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, the Ubuntu names are much easier to search for because they are less common. I always figured that this was their motive for choosing them. For example, you can type "natty virtualbox" or "lucid virtualbox" and get relevant results quickly and easily, that are zeroed in on what you are looking for.

    4. Re:First thing they need to do by jo42 · · Score: 3, Funny

      "Gracious Goatse".

    5. Re:First thing they need to do by Moryath · · Score: 3, Informative

      Howso? I'm not a Mac person nor am I a Linuxhead. But I can tell you that most non-Mac people can name at least one of the Apple release titles, probably more, whereas mentioning Ubuntu will get you that blank stare.

      The Ubuntu guys suck at marketing. Most of the Linux world sucks at marketing. One of the biggest reasons it's so hard for them to get any appreciable marketshare in the desktop world is that despite giving away what is very serviceable, functional product for free, they suck at marketing.

      And without marketshare, how are you going to get the rest of the ecosystem to port over to you? Answer is, you aren't. Without a certain amount of marketshare, you can't get games ported, you can't get office applications ported, you can't even convince many of the makers to hire someone to make sure they are interoperable. And "Open Standards Open Standards Whee" as chanted by 4-year-old wannabe cheerleaders doesn't do crap for you when you're trying to sell adoption to someone and they have to interact with their clients, who all just-so-happen to use OSX or Windows with some form of MS Office (now with .DOCX so that OpenOffice is no longer interoperable... not that it ever rendered anything more than basic Excel docs correctly anyways) installed.

    6. Re:First thing they need to do by mangu · · Score: 4, Funny

      I think you mean "Gaping Goatse".

  4. Canonical doesn't sell computers by newcastlejon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Canonical doesn't sell computers by drb226 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Strong agree.

      Canonical doesn't sell computers

      Also, Canonical doesn't sell their OS. Canonical therefore has a completely different business model than Apple.

  5. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  6. We've been bitten by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:We've been bitten by scharkalvin · · Score: 2

      "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."
      Linux Mint, Debian edition.

    2. Re:We've been bitten by maxwell+demon · · Score: 2

      If you don't like unity so much, install GNOME/KDE/Whatever on it. Its a very simple process.

      Or switch to *ubuntu. (Kubuntu,Xubuntu or whatever)

      Much easier than trying to configure Debian...

      So I guess we will now also get Gubuntu, for those who prefer Gnome to Unity?

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    3. Re:We've been bitten by killmenow · · Score: 2

      A brief story about my history with Linux distros:

      Once upon a time, I was a slacker. And it was good. Then a shadowy figure wearing a Red Hat appeared. And I was no longer a slacker. Eventually, an African concept helped me realize I am who I am because of who we all are. But then who we all are became less and less for the people and that shadowy figure wearing a Fedora turned 14. And I became a convert once again.

      All along, I kept in mind how important freedom is. So I frequented a strange land called Debia. Because they truly are who they are because we all are who we all are. It's not just their marketing.

    4. Re:We've been bitten by maxwell+demon · · Score: 2

      Weather Unity

      Is that the version for meteorologists? :-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    5. Re:We've been bitten by Short+Circuit · · Score: 3, Insightful

      when you can just set it up the way you like.

      Except that anything that's not part of the primary feature set or user interaction path on Ubuntu tends to see bitrot, more so than in distros that don't try to tie everything together.

      The reason is obvious; Ubuntu devs try very hard to create a unified and convenient experience (and they do, for a large class of users), and that work leads to the creation of code and features that sees a large amount of testing and use for the general case. They don't see a lot of testing for people who don't use the general case. For example, I was forced to switch away from 'wmii' when I discovered that key Ubuntu features didn't function well (or at all) if one didn't have a FreeDesktop.org tray for interacting with some Ubuntu core control mechanisms, and there were no discoverable command-line-driven accessors to those control mechanisms. This general class of problems has hit me every time Ubuntu saw a new six-month-release cycle.

      The first response is usually "try an LTS release." LTS releases are nice for fire-and-don't-quite-forget systems and servers, where one can run apt-get update && apt-get-upgrade, but not need to install new packages often, if ever. On a desktop or workstation, or anything where any kind of development needs to be done, even Ubuntu's 3yr release cycle (which kicked Debian's butt when first adhered to) is slow. Proprietary vendors tend to release packages for the latest 6mo release, and the latest LTS if you're lucky.

      The second response is usually "check the forums." The forums are (and always have been) a mess whenever one wanted to try something not-really-bleeding edge; often enough one would come across a thread four years out of date after seeing more recent threads referring queries to the "established" thread. In that time, APIs change, and even entire toolchains get deprecated and replaced.

      The third response is usually "file bug reports!" or "contribute some changes!" ... I've got friends who are Ubuntu devs or dedicated advocates, and I sometimes hear this from them, too. I don't have the time. Really, I don't. I managed to file three bugs this year. Two against Ekiga, and one against LibreOffice. That's a record for me. I didn't have time to follow up on questions around the Ekiga bugs, and I was fortunate someone else was able to reproduce the LibreOffice bug.

      I'm not saying Ubuntu is inherently horrible; at times, it's the best tool for the job. However, I don't think the claim that getting back to tried-and-true is "only a few clicks away" exhibits an awareness of how rapidly non-default configurations on Ubuntu undergo bitrot.

      I use Ubuntu only when I need something up and running fast. I use Debian or Gentoo when I need it up and running right. (Often Ubuntu server can stand in for Debian in server circumstances. It depends on whose LTS release has the package/version pairs I need)

      --
      tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
    6. Re:We've been bitten by Risen888 · · Score: 2

      The second response is usually "check the forums."

      Yep, that old saw. I'm not trying to talk trash about the Ubuntu forums, but they're obviously geared toward n00bs. I don't say that in any deprecating sense, that's a good thing, that's their user base, that's their market, and that's fine. But getting any assistance on any sort of remotely advanced topic is pretty much impossible. It's just not what they do.

      --
      Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
  7. Re:Cash Flow... by Desler · · Score: 2

    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.

  8. Re:Hardware? by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Canonical may be forcing people to use PCs like they use cellphones, but people don't like this.

    You may not like this (I don't either), but people in general like a computer that is an appliance. This is the reason that the iPad (and other applie products) has caught on so well in the past few years. People never liked dealing with drivers, compatibility, registry editors, getting apps from reliable sources, or system configuration. They want a device that just does what they need, and they don't care if it's highly configurable, so long as it turns on and works every time they go to use it.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  9. Yup, marketing by DesScorp · · Score: 2

    ...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
    1. Re:Yup, marketing by bennomatic · · Score: 2

      Seriously! Who thought "Ogg Vorbis" was a good name for anything? Sounds like a denture cream!

      --
      The CB App. What's your 20?
    2. Re:Yup, marketing by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Are you countertrolling? Because I. Will. Bite. That really is an embarrassing name. I think people should have a sense of humor too, but for the love of all that is open, consider the impact naming has on adoption.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  10. Good by MonsterTrimble · · Score: 3, Funny

    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'
    1. Re:Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That will not happen at least in the next 10 years, and likely never. I have my wife using the last Long Term Support version of Ubuntu (Lucid) and after a few months of working fine it now locks up and freezes--requiring a power-off reboot--several times a day. I have reinstalled it fresh and it occasionally still does it. It's 2011, this is just completely unacceptable.

      And then when you go to Ubuntu Forums to try to figure out how to fix it, you find 163 pages of suggested incantations to put into the terminal to "see if maybe that will work". Forget it. Windows 7 just works.

  11. Re:Hardware? by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 2

    If Canonical DID start selling computers, it would force the last vestiges of Hardware bits to make an effort to write good drivers for Linux. The biggest problem, to this day, is drivers. The last time I had a laptop and tried to get wireless LAN working on it in Linux, it was painful. Had to install a wrapper to finally get it to work. Sorry, but that just doesn't cut it. And lets not talk about Video drivers either or you'll really get depressed.

    Look, I'm a geek. I can fiddle with settings, google problems, tweak conf files and whatnot to get shit to work. BUT I shouldn't have to. IF Canonical did start making hardware for Ubuntu, this could propel the hardware company to actually start paying attention to Linux.

    Yeah, I'm crazy.

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  12. So, UX then by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:So, UX then by Desler · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But it can't be due to that! It has to be because he's a part of the Apple cult or he was taken in by the Job's Reality Distortion Field or he's some ignorant hipster! Apple can't possibly provide a better quality product that just doesn't fit into the Apple hater's universe of possibilities!

    2. Re:So, UX then by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      ...after 10 years of using Linux he switches to Apple because it "just works"?

      Stuff "just worked" on Mandrake and that came along less than 10 years after the beginning of Linux.

      MacOS is less transparent, tends to castrate the usefulness of interfaces, tends to make dealing with legacy and alien data harder and tends to give you these all encompassing uber-apps that are like the exact opposite of the Unix approach to building tools.

      Macs are very much like Windows machines in that you probably want to avoid the OS vendor apps as much as you can.

      Strangely enough, Ubuntu is kind of the same way. You probably want to avoid the apps they champion. Unity is a great example of this.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    3. Re:So, UX then by grumbel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Nuts and bolts are an essential part of user experience, long before we get to the graphics/design stage

      Very true and that is exactly why Unity is bullshit. It improves little to nothing, yet introduces a whole swoop of new bugs in incompatibles for no other reason then looking a little more hip and more like OSX. I would much prefer it when they would focus on making what they already have work proper.

      The simple truth is that the whole "desktop experience" hasn't really changed a whole lot in the last 20 years, you click icons to start stuff, you push icons around to move files, etc. Its how Windows does it, its how MacOSX does it, its how the Amiga did it an pretty much everybody else. Small improvements here and there are nice and good, but what matters most is simply that what you have works properly and works for the tasks at hand, not just sometimes, but always and Ubuntu simply doesn't. On numerous upgrades the OpenGL driver killed itself, subpixel rendering is currently broken for me, network configuration also leaves a lot to be desired and multi monitor support while tolerable, but anything but great.

      The forced Unity UI was easily the worst upgrade experience I had in Linux for quite some years, probably even worse then the switch from Gnome1 to Gnome2. Only thing that makes it somewhat tolerable is that so far it can be completely switched off, but it still seems to be an extremely stupid choice to force the UI on users via a dist-upgrade.

  13. Can Canonical get the attention of other big guys? by alispguru · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  14. From an admin's perspective by Torodung · · Score: 2

    No, because I actually care about what happens to people using Canonical's products. ;^)

    --
    Toro

    Glad he doesn't have an iPhone

  15. No by geekoid · · Score: 2

    Don't be stupid.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  16. Yet another pointless speculation article... by supersloshy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  17. Re:Rather unlikely! by geekoid · · Score: 2

    Not a bunch of wins, just some wins. Apple has a long line of cast of products, market failure, and money spent on things that never made it to light. All of which is normal process for getting good products and RnD technologies.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  18. Re:uhm by jedidiah · · Score: 2

    No. Polish and features requires discipline.

    They have to be willing to let a date slip and do things right. This isn't about money, it's about having discipline with regards to how you approach your work.

    They can't take the "but we can patch it after we shove it out" approach to development.

    Although to be fair, this is by no means limited to the likes of Canonical.

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  19. Oh wait, you're serious by davidbrit2 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Let me laugh even harder.

  20. Also... by ischorr · · Score: 2

    2011 will be the year of Desktop Linux.

  21. Maybe learning from smartphone UIs is a good idea by FoolishOwl · · Score: 2

    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.