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."

Comments

No.

[Desler]

No.

Re:No.

[jsvendsen]

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.

problem is, Unity is a disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster

[Yaddoshi]

"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.

Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster

[Eponymous Coward]

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

Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster

[Vegemeister]

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.

Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster

[ArcCoyote]

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

Problem Solved.

Re:problem is, Unity is a disaster

[Vegemeister]

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.

First thing they need to do

[Moryath]

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'...
 

Re:First thing they need to do

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:First thing they need to do

[jo42]

"Gracious Goatse".

Re:First thing they need to do

[Moryath]

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.

Re:First thing they need to do

[mangu]

I think you mean "Gaping Goatse".

Canonical doesn't sell computers

[newcastlejon]

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.

Re:Canonical doesn't sell computers

[drb226]

Strong agree.

Canonical doesn't sell computers

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

Re:Hardware?

[CastrTroy]

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.

Good

[MonsterTrimble]

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.

So, UX then

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:So, UX then

[Desler]

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!

Re:So, UX then

[grumbel]

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.

Can Canonical get the attention of other big guys?

[alispguru]

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.

Yet another pointless speculation article...

[supersloshy]

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.

Re:We've been bitten

[Short Circuit]

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)

Oh wait, you're serious

[davidbrit2]

Let me laugh even harder.