Ubuntu Heads To Smartphones, and Tablets

First time accepted submitter GuerillaRadio writes "Mark Shuttleworth is to announce that Canonical will be taking Ubuntu Linux to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, FL starting today. Shuttleworth said, 'This is a natural expansion of our idea as Ubuntu as Linux for human beings. As people have moved from desktop to new form factors for computing, it's important for us to reach out to our community on these platforms. So, we'll embrace the challenge of how to use Ubuntu on smartphones, tablets and smart-screens.'"

Comments

Good

[masternerdguy]

Having a tablet oriented linux distro is going to open up the linux market. Ubuntu has a reputation for working out of the box, let's see if they can keep it with such unusual hardware.

Re:Good

[Chrisq]

Having a tablet oriented linux distro is going to open up the linux market. Ubuntu has a reputation for working out of the box, let's see if they can keep it with such unusual hardware.

So we can look forward to the "year of Linux on the Tablet" just after the "year of Linux on the Desktop"?

Re:Good

[0123456]

So we can look forward to the "year of Linux on the Tablet" just after the "year of Linux on the Desktop"?

Unix already owns the tablet market, and Android is Linux with a non-standard user space. I'm not entirely sure how Ubuntu think they'll compete with Android when it's already free*, though.

* - assuming you don't pay the Microsoft tax.

Re:Good

[tepples]

Perhaps that's exactly it: Unlike Android, Ubuntu has never been subject to a Microsoft tax.

Re:Good

[the linux geek]

Android isn't free if you want your device to access the Market - which most smart OEM's do.

Re:Good

[tomhudson]

I'm not entirely sure how Ubuntu think they'll compete with Android when it's already free*, though.

The same way they "competed" with Vista on the desktop with the Walmart $200 Ubuntu PC. Too many returns.
The same way they "competed" with Windows with those Dell consumer laptops running Ubuntu ... 30% return rates suck. Ended up being replaced by the aging XP.
The same way they "compete" with Amazon's cloud service (hint - they don't - they use Amazon's EC2 cloud service).
The same way they "compete" with Apple and Microsoft right now - oh wait - they can't even GIVE it away.
Ubuntu is shuttleworth-speak for "make a big announcement, then nothing much happens, then move on to the next Oh shiny!"

The TV and blu-ray manufacturers already have their own customized distros. Nobody's going to switch from Android to a distro that has a history of breaking something important on every update.

Re:Good

[slim]

It's... complicated.

In a practical sense, you can run a free Android distro on your smartphone, install the non-free Google app bundle, and have access to the market.

What makes this OK, I'd like to understand. Perhaps that the handset vendor has already paid the license? Or that Google is turning a blind eye?

Re:Good

[Chrisq]

It's... complicated.

In a practical sense, you can run a free Android distro on your smartphone, install the non-free Google app bundle, and have access to the market.

What makes this OK, I'd like to understand. Perhaps that the handset vendor has already paid the license? Or that Google is turning a blind eye?

I think that google turns a blind eye to individual users

Re:Good

[Kjella]

The same way they "competed" with Windows with those Dell consumer laptops running Ubuntu ... 30% return rates suck. Ended up being replaced by the aging XP.

Do you have a source that actually says what you claim, unlike the one you linked to? It said return rates were 4 times higher, but I really doubt 30%/4 = 7.5% of all their laptops are returned. That seems to me an absurdly high number.

Re:Good

[Luckyo]

Well, linux actually has a shot here, and a good one. We have intel with meego, ubuntu with... umm, community(?) and android is technically linux (not really, it's just embedded OS but still).

I suppose with a bit of stretching of the facts you can say that linux is very well off in tablet world.

Re:Good

[anonymov]

Well, with MS going after manufacturers, not Google and asserting patents like

â Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;

â Enable display of a webpageâ(TM)s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;

â Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;

â Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and

â Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.

I wouldn't be surprised if they started harassing Ubuntu phones producers if/when it becomes popular enough to threaten wp8.

Re:Good

[davetv]

Thinking here : Is Canonical approaching an "Ubuntu Market" concept. I can't see why not. Free software (read FREE as in GNU) + any mix of non-free apps. Canonical is already playing with a cloud computing "user space" - how might this evolve and come into play over time. Canonical has a small revenue stream compared to user-base so attaching a user-base in the tablet/smartphone market might just be the catalyst to push the company forward into much higher revenue streams. I think good move for Canonical as a company myself - not unexpected.

Re:Good

[tomhudson]

Look around - it's been mentioned elsewhere. One retailer reported 20% ... and at that point, not all returns had come back ... and it doesn't include people who were upgraded for a fee to XP to resolve their complaints (and if you check around, many users did the upgrade themselves rather than fight with the vendor).

This was happening at the same time as Ubuntu was falsely claiming that return rates were in line with netbooks with XP installed.

As for overall netbook returns, they ARE high. People get disappointed, realize that for $100 or so more they can get a real laptop, and bring it back within the 2 week return period. Or they figure it's not worth the hassle, and "gift" the netbook to someone in the family. It's one reason why the netbook market started its' collapse - prices of laptops dropped by more than half in just a couple of years. Now it continues to collapse because tablets and smartphones are much more capable than a crapbook.

Re:Good

[CalcProgrammer1]

We already have that, Android has been selling competitively with Apple for a while now, and it is built around Linux. Having a standard GNOME userspace on top of Linux would be awesome though. I just don't trust Ubuntu to create new UI's anymore after what happened with 11.10.

Re:Good

[Synerg1y]

Not to point out the obvious, but Android is Linux based, so what that means is on a lot of tablets, Linux is already an option, just not for your average computer newb,
http://androlinux.com/android-ubuntu-development/how-to-install-ubuntu-on-android/ . I know it's a phone, but same concept. Here's a more direct one...
http://www.technologyquestions.com/technology/windows-xp-tablet-pc/912-running-linux-tablet-pc.html

On windows 7 tablets, this is as easy as hooking up a cd drive. I can run backtrack off mine with no problem off the live cd.

I think what they want to accomplish is to either make the switch not so f'in time consuming / hard or to ship with tablets already pre-packaged with ubuntu. But Linux on a tablet is old news to us sitting in IT.

Re:Good

[Puzzles]

The Linux return rate is clearly people assuming computer equals Windows. It's hard to deny most people expect to use a computer the way they've been accustomed to doing so.

But you can't use that defense with tablets and smart-phones. The way Apple has been able to keep Flash from its iOS devices is clearly evidence that people don't have the same expectations for these "new" devices. You expect a desktop/laptop to be able to run Flash. It's obvious that the manufacturer and consumer base acknowledges that the market does not have to be a mono-platform environment. So, Linux certainly has the opportunity to at least heavily compete with Windows mobile.

Re:Good

[HarrySquatter]

We have intel with meego

Sure if we ignore the fact that they abandoned it back in September.

Re:Good

[tomhudson]

So, Linux certainly has the opportunity to at least heavily compete with Windows mobile.

Competing for last spot? Even if you win, you're still a loser.

Anyone who wants to run linux just roots their phone. There's simply no demand - and especially none for perennial scr*w-up-something-critical-on-every-update Canonical - to be the installed-by-the-OEM OS on any device without it being hidden from the end user in layer after layer of "insulation" and customizations.

And for that, they already have Android and their own custom derivatives, so why bother?

This will die, same as their last forays into mobile devices (netbooks) and retail PCs (Wallyworld $200 Ubuntu PC) died. Or just as pointless as "Ubuntu Cloud" (rebranded Amazon EC2).

Canonical - the company that doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up.

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

Not until they fix some of the fundamental flaws they won't. For example who in the hell thought making the bar go up and down on the left side with no easy peasy way to change it was a good idea? Even tablets are widescreen ratio, yes? There for you will have the LEAST room vertically and the MOST room horizontally. or do they think that nobody will want to have more than 3 or 4 apps ready to go? As someone that has been using docks since 2002 I find that it doesn't take long before you get hooked on them and they start growing, I'm currently up to 15 apps and folders i have in my dock.

And why isn't there a "fix drivers" button? Or a roll back drivers button? something that will help an average user if an upgrade bones a critical driver so they can fix it WITHOUT doing the Google dance, because if that critical driver is wireless or Ethernet how will they Google? this is one area where taking a page from the MSFT playbook would be a GOOD idea. Hell with everything coming from a single source it shouldn't be THAT hard to do right?

And finally why is there no "help me!" button? something that would connect a noob to a volunteer something like what was suggested here by me two years ago? With Windows 7 you can take control of a PC via an invitation in under 3 minutes if someone is in trouble as long as they have functional net access, and something similar should be implemented so LUGs and other volunteers can have a "help me!" button on the desktop for new users to help them get up and running.

Linux has some good goals and ideas but their idea of helping new users is throwing them off a bridge into rapids and calling it a swimming lesson! Despite the "we're user friendly" facade there is a LOT of geekiness under the hood that unless one is familiar with the Unix way of doing things they can easily get frustrated and give up. If you want to gain share you are gonna have to do a LOT more hand holding and help the new users get up to speed, which I believe with a little thought and a few changes COULD be done, the only question is if you can run off the "Go back to windblowz LOL Noobs!" trolls that seem to infect forums today like the clap.

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

Actually I'm having quite good luck with my customers and the new AMD APUs, they all just love it. I think the problem with the netbook market is in the race to the bottom too many chose Atom and as a CPU Atom is just a really bad joke. without Nvidia (which intel slit their own throats and killed their Atom market by cutting off Nvidia from further chipsets) boosting the Atom with ION frankly even 720p on those is just painful and anything more than web surfing is a skippy mess. With the Brazos chips, which i was impressed enough I sold my Athlon X2 MSI wind and got one, the CPU is powerful enough the machine feels snappy and the GPU lets you even run HDMI into a TV and do full 1080p without dropping frames.

But what killed Linux on netbooks is something that too many in the community brag about which is frankly insane instability and constant changes in the entire OS from the kernel on up which causes Dell to have to run their own repos and pay their own distro team, which i'm sure is a not inconsiderable cost, just to keep the OS running. Run the default repo? the drivers shit themselves and die hard. You can't have a product that you can't even update without it killing itself, it makes you look like a Mickey Mouse operation, it pisses the customers off when they find their laptop is broken, and you end up with egg on your face and a shitload of returns.

That is why one of two things need to happen if Linux is gonna gain REAL share. 1.-The crazy kernel and release schedule will have to be abandoned for an OEM friendly 5 year release cycle with ALL the OS and software sticking to that schedule and for business use 10 years would be more like it, or 2.-Torvalds has to go and a kernel ABI (which is currently used by Apple, MSFT, BSD, Solaris, even OS/2) is deployed so frankly it doesn't matter what happens in the kernel or userland, the underlying drivers "just work" so the user frankly doesn't notice and some kernel which fixes a race condition or security issue doesn't take a big wet dump on their wireless.

Because lets be brutally honest folks: The users out there couldn't give a crap about 'free as in freedom' and sure as hell aren't gonna jump through any hoops or deal with any grievances just to have it, for proof one just has to look at the Apple bottom line and the lines around the block when a new iShiny is released. Folks want simple, they want easy, they want hand holding, they want ALL GUI, NO CLI, and they want it to "just work".

And while strides have been made in that area frankly there is a long way to go and those further strides will have to be made while actively fighting the "STFU Noobs and go back to windblowz LOL!" trolls that seem to have infested too much of the community who consider it their sacred duty to run off those that don't do things "the Linux way". But as Tom pointed out while the Linux way has been successful in server and embedded markets that success simply hasn't carried over to the consumer market, and that is because that is a whole different ball game with different rules and needs. trying to force the Linux way of doing things on that market simply ends in failure, which is why so far the ONLY success of Linux in that arena has been by Google who are killing themselves (last i heard development was nearly a billion a year) to make Linux as UN-Linux-like as possible.

Re:Good

[Patch86]

Like MeeGo (/Maemo/Moblin) you mean?

Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased with this news and eager to see if Canonical can get it off the ground, but it's not ground breaking. And the biggest challenge will be getting a hardware partner to actually make the devices; Canonical can "make" a smartphone distro if they like, but it won't do anyone any good if it only works on a handful of dev devices and VMs. Crikey, I'm not even sure what's going to happen to the MeeGo project (thriving community and all) now Nokia is dropping it.

Re:Good

[thenewt]

Gotta love all the "it'll never have market share comparable to current incumbent x, y or z" comments. You obviously haven't been following the last 20 years' worth of developments in the software industry.

Re:Good

[tomhudson]

Want to know what's REALLY funny about this announcement? Look at the intended release date - April 2014.

That's right - the same month that XP is being EOL'd, instead of releasing a Linux OS that can replace it and run legacy apps, they're going after a pie-in-the-sky mobile market that will be competing with the iPhone6, iPad4, and Win9Mobile.

Here you have a 30-month window of opportunity, a business community that would do a Bernanke and drop helicopter-loads of money on you if you can even half-way deliver, and nobody is going after it.

Who does Shuttleworth think he's fooling? In 2-1/2 years, there will be a billion smart devices running Android and iOS, and even a few running Win9Mobile. Somebody should buy him a black turtleneck so he can pretend his RDF is working.

Besides, anyone who really wants to run Linux just has to buy a r00table Android device. No need to wait 30 more months for Ubuntu.

Re:Good

[Luckyo]

I think you're talking about nokia?

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

Oh I've been saying that since i wrote that article for Linux Insider back in 09 right before the EOL of Win2K, there is a HELL of a big market both in allowing the user to keep their old hardware (because lets face it what XP ran on was actually quite powerful for web surfing and basic office work, here in the shop I'm seeing late model P4s and Pentium Ds along with Athlon X2s, more than powerful enough for most office and home tasks) and in allowing an easy migration path to Linux while letting legacy apps still be used.

The real bitch is the parts are all there but there is too much "We're leet! Do it OUR way!" elitist bullshit and chasing saturated markets like you pointed out for anyone to see the forest for the trees! hell you wouldn't even have to have Win32 support, instead shoot for something like a hardware accelerated "XP Mode" that would let them take their old license, or even better the install that is on the drive, and make it a VM that has icons on the desktop that allow them to launch the VM and have it behave like a native app. That way there wouldn't be the pain of trying to find apps to do the tasks their now EOL software was used for as they could just use what they have and have Linux for new applications.

But I agree that Canonical doesn't seem to have any clue where they are going, its just one pie in the sky idea after another, and of course by getting most of the hype it makes the whole community look directionless and flailing. There is gonna be MULTIPLE gifts given to the community but nobody will capitalize. you have Win 8 which i'm predicting will be another Vista, you have all these frankly more than powerful enough desktops and laptops losing support, you have an economy in the crapper so folks and businesses are wanting to save money and delay hardware purchases, and you have all these people doing more than ever online. Hell many of my customers don't even use their PCs for anything offline anymore.

This sadly though is ignoring what i truly believe to be the heart of the matter, and that is this: Just as the political parties have been taken over by the fringe too much of the Linux community has been taken over by the "We're leet, go back to windblowz!" crowd. As I've said repeatedly ask for a simple solution to a problem on any forum and ask for it to NOT be CLI, and watch what happens. You will see the seething hatred just come boiling forth, with you being called every filthy name in the book.

Sadly somewhere along the way the community forgot what the personal computer and FOSS was all about, forgot how its supposed to make the users life EASIER and allow them to get their work done with a minimum of fuss. Instead they have taken being obtuse and fiddly as badges of honor, as trials to "Weed out the noobs!" like turning people away is a good thing and something to community should be striving for. When i point out the hellish time I'm having with a driver that worked before and just get "Yeah well, Linux does that, what you need to do is" followed by a good page and a half of esoteric workarounds? something is SERIOUSLY wrong. Hell "use esoteric workarounds" has become a meme and if you click on some of the links below that page some of the examples are truly Rube Goldbergesque in their complexity.

Ultimately I think FOSS is a wonderful idea, its the execution of that idea that has gone all askew. instead of asking "What are we doing wrong that our competitors are doing right?" and making things easier its one step forward and two steps back. And as you pointed out by the time shuttleworth gets his latest scheme off the ground he is gonna be dealing with competition vastly more advanced and ahead of the game. Maybe we should call Canonical the Duke Nukem Forever of OS companies?

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because the market share of Ubuntu is still near 0, and so there is not enough money to be worthwhile ?

If Microsoft really wanted to target someone, they would have gone to Red hat, Novell, IBM or others companies really making money, not against those that make so few money they need to steal it from Gnome project.

Canonical is not profitable, or Mark Shuttleworth would have said so. The spend a insane amount of money for each UDS ( because a good hotel for more than 150 people during 2 weeks ( 1 week of internal conference, and 1 week of UDS ), plus travel expenses ( for the 150 employee ), plus meal can quickly add up to 500 000 euros. There is 400 employees, see how much it cost to mozilla who have roughly the same size ( and who provides account, unlike Canonical ). They rent 1 floor on Millibank tower, and that's likely not cheap either, according to Wikipedia.

And now, try to find where they find enough money for that. Ubuntu One subscriptions when dropbox forced them to reduce their price ? Amazon refferal ? Magnatune deal ( around 3000 euros in one year ) ? Consulting, after being rejected by Google for ChromeOs, and given there is lots of competitor on their own product and given their involvement upstream on the stack is near zero ? Landscape, a tool to manage your server, but who was hosted outside of your firewall until last year ? Selling goodies to mindless users ?

Canonical is not yet profitable according to the last information we have. Maybe they will announce it soon. Maybe they will not. And once they will be able to survive without being helped by Mark like they did since 6 years, they will still face a tough competition.

Canonical tried the desktop market, without success. They wanted to go on server management ( landscape ), they failed. They wanted to go on the service for consumer ( ie ubuntuone ), they failed. And despites trying to innovate with Unity, they alinated a rather vocal portion of their user base, thus starting to ruin their best asset. And so now, their focus is the cloud, with the current manager fudding like if there was no tomorow on his blog ( http://undacuvabrutha.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/ubuntu-is-the-os-for-the-cloud-and-heres-why/ ), planning to carpet bomb the world with news about their cloud ( https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-ensemble-get-involved-campaigns , https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-increase-cloudportal-traffic ). Ironically, their own cloud without any interopperability due to their usage of ubuntu specific repositories in the official charm/recipes of juju/ensemble.

So Canonical will also fail wit this plan, especially now that Suse is getting a step on Openstack, as well as Red Hat. Red hat who have also decided to address the interoprability problem with Deltacloud and others tools.

And for the so called arm servers plan of Canonical, maybe they didn't get the memo about current arm CPU being 32 bits and thus a little bit limited in term of memory. Arm servers could be nice, but without lots of memory, it is just cheaper to get a regular server and use vrtualisation. Only specific consumers and hobbyists would be interested by current arm servers , and unfortunately for canonical, that's not on the road for money. In fact, there is already lots of NAS for that.

Thankfully, ARM CEO changed his mind ( http://www.pcworld.com/article/218794/arm_ceo_no_rush_to_design_a_64bit_server_chip.html ), and maybe in 2 years, we will see ARM 64 bits (

Re:Good

[syousef]

Having a tablet oriented linux distro is going to open up the linux market. Ubuntu has a reputation for working out of the box, let's see if they can keep it with such unusual hardware.

So we can look forward to the "year of Linux on the Tablet" just after the "year of Linux on the Desktop"?

We all know that's just code for smartphones with a hideous colour scheme.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Big announces like :
- the wayland/unity stuff, 1 year ago ( http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 ), still nothing despites "this should be ready in one year".
- the android compatibility, 2 year and half ago ( http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/canonical-developers-aim-to-make-android-apps-run-on-ubuntu.ars )

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly somewhere along the way the community forgot what the personal computer and FOSS was all about, forgot how its supposed to make the users life EASIER and allow them to get their work done with a minimum of fuss.

I think you misunderstood FOSS with rampant consumerism. Show me where the free software definition say "make the life of users easier", and maybe I will start to see you as worthwhile of my time.

Re:Good

[tomhudson]

I think you misunderstood FOSS with rampant consumerism. Show me where the free software definition say "make the life of users easier", and maybe I will start to see you as worthwhile of my time.

I think you already lost that one, since you have already replied :-)

And the devs who have made $2 billion and counting off of Apple's App Store show that F/LOSS copyleft can't compete economically, because anyone can just take your code for the asking.

Programmers have to eat. F/LOSS licensing that requires copyleft doesn't do it for the vast majority of programmers, and is becoming more and more irrelevant.

Re:Good

[wrook]

We already have Linux on the Tablet. It's called Android.

What we don't have is GNU on the Tablet.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully, some day, Hurd will be avilable on a tablet. Put Gnome3.2 on top of it, and the result, while horrendous for laptops, would be okay for tablets.

Of course, 200,000 Free (as in freedom) apps - with source code all included - is another story.

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

He does actually make a perfect example of the "I'm leet, go back to windblowz!" attitude I was talking about earlier. Notice how he equates something as simple and logical as making F/LOSS more useful for the masses as "rampant consumerism" and a betrayal of "the cause"?

The community has ended up trapped in this black is white world where ANYTHING that makes lives easier or F/LOSS more acceptable is "bad "and anything that makes it more difficult, fiddly, and obtuse is "good". It is like F/LOSS has become this "club" where only fat loser nerds are allowed and the goal is no longer empowering people to have choice but to run off as many as you can so the ones that are left can be "worthy" of being in the club.

Sadly this is why I think F/LOSS is doomed to relative failure along with your observation that ultimately i can just take anyone's code and profit from it in the app stores while they get nothing. We are seeing more and more of this BTW, especially in the games dept. But a wise man once said "if you aren't busy growing you're busy dying" and frankly the community has stagnated, with the "we're leet!" crazy wing taking over the platform and trying their damnedest to run as many folks off as they can. I mean where is a new user gonna turn if they need help? The forums, and what will they find? They'll be told to use esoteric workarounds that are frankly over their head and when they ask for something simpler they get "RTFM or go back to windblowz noob LOL!".

Meanwhile Apple and MSFT just keep on coming, they keep investing in R&D and advertising and focus groups and unlike the "We're leet!" trolls they are actively busting their asses to make things easier for the masses so as another poster here put it "They'll exercise their free choice alright, they'll choose to ignore the irritation and mess and just go back to Windows or Mac OSX" and no truer words have been spoken.

Kinda sad really, that such a great idea and all that work will in the end be ruined by poo flinging trolls and a license that thinks a communist utopia is still possible while ignoring that if someone can profit from someone's work without paying them often they WILL do just that. My next prediction is that Google will slowly lock up Android. With GPL V2 they can TiVo it easy with code signing and while there are many benefits to locking to down the downsides frankly don't exist. The "we're leet!" have made sure that too few use F/LOSS or give a damn and the masses simply won't care, and by locking it down they get more revenue by ensuring their search and apps are always included and they may even try to monetize the code, since their only competition will be MSFT in mobile OSes and the Nokia deal has the other OEMs scared.

Re:Good

[tomhudson]

Not So Fun Fact: 24 years after Microsoft started the "DOS is Dead" campaign, there are more businesses running DOS apps in a window or full-screen under Windows, or via middleware, than there are business Linux desktops.

That's the sort of "failure to thrive" that really hurts.

When you can't even compete with a long-dead product, you have to ask "what went wrong?" It's not just marketing ... the "copyleft" model simply doesn't allow for businesses (or individual developers) to sell software as their core business.

Nobody's going to invest $25 to $100 million to develop a *real*+secure Windows ABI for linux kernels if they can't sell it over and over again to recoup their investment.

Re:Good

[exomondo]

So, Linux certainly has the opportunity to at least heavily compete with Windows mobile.

It already does, in the form of Android. How many general consumers are going to say 'well i like linux but i just don't like the android userland so i'm going to switch to ubuntu instead.'?

If they want to compete they need to offer something that differentiates them from the competition, a feature that consumers will want, i don't see such a thing in the 'press release', same as ubuntu on the desktop doesn't really offer much to the average consumer. Just to clarify though, im not saying in any way that Ubuntu is a bad OS, it's great but it doesn't offer end users a compelling reason to change.

Re:Good

[exomondo]

Gotta love all the "it'll never have market share comparable to current incumbent x, y or z" comments.

I'd say they are likely based on the fact that there is no specific standout feature, no thing that says to the average end user 'this is why we are better than the competition, choose us over the existing products'.

Re:Good

[thenewt]

I'd say they are likely based on the fact that there is no specific standout feature, no thing that says to the average end user 'this is why we are better than the competition, choose us over the existing products'.

Ubuntu's standout feature, IMO, is that it's not incumbent Xoogle, Ycrosoft or Zapple ;)

Re:Good

[exomondo]

Unfortunately that's not going to appeal to the masses, I really am genuinely interested in what exactly they have in mind to differentiate that will give them traction in the market.

Re:Good

[znerk]

you wouldn't even have to have Win32 support, instead shoot for something like a hardware accelerated "XP Mode" that would let them take their old license, or even better the install that is on the drive, and make it a VM that has icons on the desktop that allow them to launch the VM and have it behave like a native app. That way there wouldn't be the pain of trying to find apps to do the tasks their now EOL software was used for as they could just use what they have and have Linux for new applications.

Man, I wish it were that easy. Windows will cheerfully blue-screen you all day if you change its hardware. That's one of the things I love about Linux, you can upgrade the whole box, swap the drive from your old rig, turn it on, and it Just Works. Windows, on the other hand, is security-locked to your hardware - for example, I had to call Microsoft 4 times in 3 months because my wife's machine was dying and kept killing video cards. That's right, the only component that changed was the video card, and Windows wanted reactivated. Every time. Complete with the implication that I was pirating the stupid thing, despite me having to read them the key off the sticker on the back of the machine. Every time.

That being said, having a virtual machine for "XP Mode" is a great idea, even if you had to reinstall the OS to make it happen... except it's probably already patented by Microsoft (Vista/7 have an "XP Mode" that is nothing more than MS VirtualPC with a downloaded XP appliance that asks for your Vista/7 Key when you "install" it).

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

Oh don't bring up DOS, I've been thre and had to do that. I had a guy come into the shop I was working at in 2005 practically in tears and said "Can you PLEASE sell me a machine that will run this? I've been everywhere and I'll gladly pay" and the boss looks and says "Is that an ISA card? WTH? Man I could order you something that could be here in a week but NOBODY has those slots in PCs anymore, sorry" and I thought the guy was gonna faint when I popped my head over the wall and said "I think I got a couple of running PCs with ISA slots in my shed at home".

It turned out the kid had been put in charge of the lumber factory while dad took his first vacation in 20 years and the C&C for the lathe naturally took a big shit and he HAD to have these custom columns done by the end of the week! And of course we are talking about a machine that cost over $100K and whose manufacturer had been out of business since 1992. So I had to dig the HDD out of this dead machine that was practically buried in sawdust, clone the DOS 3 onto my old gamer rigs so he'd have a spare, seal up the boxes so the dust couldn't get in, and do ALL of that in a single day. I stayed up all night and was about to drop but the guy gave me a $300 bonus PLUS $150 each for boxes that weren't worth $40 by then PLUS ended up having us do the complete rollout for the lumber mill. All because that stupid thing wouldn't run on anything but DOS 3.

But as for why F/LOSS is failing to thrive I think my little story is a good example. When I set it up I ran it through its paces and frankly a 5 year old could have run that lathe. It was all GUI and pictures and with the basic shapes you could cut any kind of column you wanted and have it crank out 1 or 1000. in other words it was SIMPLE, it got out of your way, it was EASY, and it let you get your work done with a bare minimum of fuss.

But look at the poster I was originally responding to, who took ANY attempt to make things easier as some sort of an attack. it is THIS, this right here, that has infected F/LOSS like a cancer. they don't treat it as an OS, they treat it as a religion which you have to show your "devotion" to by learning esoteric workarounds to prove your "worthy" of being in the club. Like I said ask for a Non CLI solution to a problem, don't be ugly, just say you have poor eyesight (I was given an esoteric workaround for making the fonts huge in bash) or that you have trouble typing (I was told to use a pencil eraser side down) and if you are lucky after the insults you'll get one guy who will come on and say "uhhhh...you can't really fix that without CLI, sorry".

The sad and terrible truth, the truth that nobody will admit, much less fix, is that it isn't marketing, it isn't some new bling that is keeping F/LOSS so low in the polls, it is this simple fact: In its current form Linux IS Windows 98 no more, no less. Like Win98 you have a GUI on top of a CLI OS and like early Win98 most of what your GUI actually does (if it works) is send commands to the CLI underneath. If you remove CLI from 2K/XP/Vista/7, or from any variant of OSX it WILL continue to function just fine. but if you remove the shell from Linux, just like trying to remove DOS from win98 it WILL fail.

Ultimately I think the community is gonna have to sit down and decide "Do we want to win, or do we want to be a club?" because as you've pointed out if you want to win there has to be SOME way for those doing the work to profit from their labor. as you pointed out who is gonna write a 100 million dollar GPL program? right now, whether by services or selling CDs, it ALL comes down to charity. The developers are holding out a tin cup and hoping they get enough nickels to pay their bills. that just won't do, you can't plan long term if you don't even know if the bills are gonna be paid.

So that has to be dealt with an the "We're leet!" brigade has to be dealt with, because the world isn't gonna sit around learning esoteric workarounds or memorizing bash commands. There is a reason why

Unity's table look and feel

[kkruecke]

No we know why Unity looks the way it does.

Re:Unity's table look and feel

[MrHanky]

I thought it was just a half-assed imitation of OS X with the dock moved over to the left side and inconsistent application menus. Unlike Gnome3, it doesn't seem like something that would work on a tablet (nor anywhere else). I'd like a Gnome3 version of the Asus Eeee Pad Transformer.

Re:Unity's table look and feel

[lee n. field]

No we know why Unity looks the way it does.

Absolutely. Big mushy buttons, lots of clicks (or finger mashing) to get to anything not on the launch bar.

From what I've seen, ditto for Gnome 3. My first thought on getting that up was "this is made for a tablet".

I actually do work with my Linux box. I'm disinclined migrate to someone else's idea of how I ought to work with my computer, every six months.

Re:Unity's table look and feel

[HiThere]

Yeah. Gnome3's no winner either. Both appear to be designed for tablets, and phones, and ONLY for tablets and phones.

Re:Unity's table look and feel

[tomhudson]

No (sic) we know why Unity looks the way it does.

Learn how to type you moron.

Please go easy on them - they obviously typed that using Unity.

Re:Unity's table look and feel

[pmontra]

Or the modern reduced height 13" laptop screens.

Re:Unity's table look and feel

[Anonymous Coward]

BE AWARE: The user cyborg_monkey is a well know old school troll, of the geekazoid variety. Is a pro-MS shill.

Re:Unity's table look and feel

[rasmusbr]

This is a nitpick post, but Unity actually uses Gnome 3. You're probably thinking of Gnome Shell, which is the standard UI in Gnome 3.

I just deleted something a long rant from this post. Here's the TL;DR version:

Gnome Shell is a cool tech demo/alpha which shows a lot of promise and might become something great in a couple of year's time. It's so cool that I can't bring myself to dislike it as much as I probably should.

The lack of development for Gnome 2 made me switch to Windows 7. Since I'm not doing serious work in Ubuntu nowadays, I've stopped posting helpful advice and solutions at the Ubuntu forums. All things considered it's probably a net loss to the community and I don't know if future versions of Gnome Shell will make up for it. Keep in mind that Windows 8 and Mac OSX are moving targets and it's not clear that Gnome Shell will ever catch up.

Re:Unity's table look and feel

[ttong]

And not a single fuck was given.

Re:Unity's table look and feel

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh noes, one forum poster less. Things will grind to a complete stop now!

Re:Unity's table look and feel

[saint0192]

I have the same feel from Gnome 3. It would make a slick, beautiful, minimalist tablet interface. I like it... Windows take the whole screen without the clunky Unity dockbar in the way whenever you move the cursor too close...

Re:Unity's table look and feel

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome shell was made to take in account tablet, that's part of the design document ( http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design ). They never said otherwise. Now, unlike unity, that's rather usable on a laptop. I do use it daily and the uncluttered interface is rather nice, even if I still do not like the way windows are switched on keyboard.

spread the pain

[sproketboy]

to other platforms. Good.

Re:spread the pain

[mvar]

Smartphones & tablets? Oh they better have good lawyers

Re:spread the pain

[saint0192]

That doesn't mean they are gonna give up on Linux. They are gonna keep on adding stupid crap and make it more "Windowsy", right? 'Cuz that's just what Linux needs...

Re:spread the pain

[znerk]

That doesn't mean they are gonna give up on Linux. They are gonna keep on adding stupid crap and make it more "Windowsy", right? 'Cuz that's just what Linux needs...

I get the feeling you intended this to be a trollish post, but if you think about it for a moment, looking and feeling similar to Windows is exactly what a popular Linux distro needs. Back in '08, when Ubuntu's popularity took off, and Ubuntu was ripping Microsoft users out of their comfortable little worlds in droves, the main difference between Windows and Ubuntu was that Ubuntu installed in half the time that windows did, and the "Start Menu" was on the top-left instead of the bottom-left.

Now that Ubuntu has decided to force Unity on everyone (and a desktop GUI, that P.O.S. is not), people are running screaming away from Ubuntu. I myself am considering other distros for over a dozen machines, after cheerfully using Ubuntu on all of them since 2008.

Canonical has lost touch with their users, and is chasing after a pie-in-the-sky instead of going for a sure-fire win. The release date for this supposed iPad-killer is the same month as Windows XP's End-Of-Life; seems to me they should be going for an XP clone to be released the month before (or even the year before... 12.04 would be a wonderful time to see it), and scoop all those users who suddenly stop getting updates from Microsoft... perhaps with another YouTube-based viral video campaign touting all the benefits and showing off the eyecandy.

A use for Unity

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, a use for Unity!

Perhaps they should also try a system for Desktops where the system is usable with a keyboard too? :-)

In all seriousness, this sounds quite interesting and hopefully will help shove down the prices of hardware. Not sure how it would, but here's hoping!

Re:A use for Unity

[Anonymous Coward]

hopefully will help shove down the prices of hardware

Not going to happen. Microsoft will make sure of that with their FUD-patents extortion racket.

This is clearly what he was always planning...

[JustNiz]

...since Unity has made Ubuntu completely suck on anything with a mouse and keyboard.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[0123456]

...since Unity has made Ubuntu completely suck on anything with a mouse and keyboard.

It's not bad on a netbook where you don't have much screen space to waste. It does suck on a laptop or desktop with a big screen, though.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[SuricouRaven]

Much like Microsoft and Metro. Tablet and PC interfaces just arn't the same - what works on one is painful on the other. Apple hasn't even tried to make the iOS and OSX interfaces look similar.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly.

But one can install KUbuntu instead. KDE 4.7 is slick, the best mouse/keyboard oriented desktop I've seen so far.

It's too bad that Unity is the bloody *default* thing people get on desktops. It should be the default on mobile devices. The desktop default should not be Unity or Gnome3 or other mobile-oriented environments.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[watermark]

Not to mention dual monitors....

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[AdamJS]

Metro doesn't violate fundamental human-computer interaction concepts, though. It seems like it was used/tested by actual human beings, unlike Unity.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Bill Hayden]

Apple hasn't even tried to make the iOS and OSX interfaces look similar.

I have to assume that was a joke, or else you haven't used Lion yet.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually have really enjoyed Xubuntu. It is super quick and pretty much like an old Gnome 2.0 desktop. It looks drab out of the box, but you can make panels partially transparent, turn the bottom panel into a pretty functional launcher/dock by adding app shortcuts and so on. It does not have too many bugs - the only thing I have noticed so far is that the bottom launcher stops auto-hiding when I use it to mount usb drives. However, since Unity seems to stop auto-hiding/dogging on a frequent and random basis, I can live with that, and like the old killall gnome-panel you can do a quick killall xfce4-panel to fix it unlike with unity which requires waiting a LONG time for a reset.

I actually liked Unity on 11.04. It worked pretty well for me, and I thought the fuss was overdone. I have to say, however, that 11.10 has been too buggy for me to get regular work done. Maybe it is because I upgraded rather than doing a fresh install, but there are bugs in the dash stacking so that it is hidden behind open apps sometimes when you try and open it; the snap-to-grid function is buggy and creates random outlines for window resizing without a window having been selected; sometimes the launcher freezes and either you click on an application and it doesn't open, or you right-click and the menu to quit the applications freezes, etc.

I think that the concept of Unity is okay, but the implementation is lacking and that this is a major issue that threatens to turn people away from Linux.

I just don't have time to be a beta tester for Canonical - I use my linux machine as a workstation. However, Xubuntu is almost like my Macbook for functionality, and there is no hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing. It's sweet, and just a sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop away...

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[AdamJS]

I want a desktop environment that plays well with multiple monitors and several open applications (each of which having multiple windows that I will want on screen at the same time, and selectable from a central location in the fewest clicks possible, with the task of exact identification handled without needing a click on most instances). You know, what Gnome 2 did quite well and what MS/Explorer has handled fine enough for over a decade.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. It sucks on a netbook too.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the thought of delivering it in 2014... crap...

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I can't figure out why Unity exists. For all the inevitable bitching and moaning, Gnome 3 has worked really well (for me, of course). The whole left edge of the screen is safe, with just the top left corner being hot. I get immediate typing filters there an a launcher that scales in a sane way. Most important, window and workspace management is the best I've ever seen... which is a big deal to me.

But then you have Unity, which is like an intentionally shitty hack of gnome 3. I just don't understand why they did it.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[HopefulIntern]

I am trying to understand what people miss from KDE, Gnome 2 or other DEs that Unity doesn't have

Familiarity.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Anonymous Coward]

To put a positive spin on it, maybe now we'll find a good use for Unity.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[ChrisMP1]

I've always just used fast, small WMs on netbooks. Currently mine runs IceWM. I've happily used Fluxbox and a fairly stripped-down GNOME 2 on it as well. Just make the panel nice and small (I fucking hate autohide...) and you're set.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Luckyo]

Which doesn't make it any better unfortunately. Metro's sole purpose is to streamline phone and PC interface, so that MS can market "exactly same interface for both smartphones and desktop, you don't have to learn new interface!".

Marketing-wise it's a genius move. As a PC power user though, it's going to be shit for me because I don't want a forced tablet interface (start menu at least), hell I don't even like wizard menus of 7. And there is no option to downgrade to XP/classic 95 style menus even in 7 without installing third party stuff like classic shell.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[somersault]

Agree. The non-configurable key bindings completely screwed up my workflow. I installed Mint instead. I know I could have chosen a Gnome session rather than Unity, but whatever. Mint looks better, and doesn't force a crappy non-configurable launcher. I'm currently quite liking the Gnome DockBarX plugin.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[0123456]

If I have to use one non hotkeyed application, I just hit super key and start typing either description or name, and after 2-3 letters it's the first pick on the launcher..

When your answer to 'launching applications sucks with your GUI' is 'you just have to type the name of the application', you're doing something wrong.

If I want to start applications by typing the name, I can use the command-line. If I use a GUI, it's because I don't want to have to use a poorly-implemented copy of a command-line interface to start applications.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[AdamJS]

You don't have to use Metro EXCEPT on the portables/tablets/phones, which is expected. You can switch back to the fully supported and upgraded 7/classic explorer-style desktop in just a couple of clicks, and there will likely be a way to choose to sign into it in the first place. You don't need to download or install anything - though, of course, if you want the good old gray menu you'll have to do a bit of work, but it's the same as 7 in that regard. What I was talking about is things like "x amount of clicks for common task Y" and "amount of switching between tasks and mental operators/operations required to do so" and "distance needed for mouse movement to do common process Q" and things like that. A lot of it is common sense and MS seems to follow it (which should be expected) but Unity is outright hostile towards the idea of making the user experience painless.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Rockoon]

Which doesn't make it any better unfortunately. Metro's sole purpose is to streamline phone and PC interface, so that MS can market "exactly same interface for both smartphones and desktop, you don't have to learn new interface!".

Come on guys.. this isnt rocket science.. the strategy is plain as day, but you dont seem to have a clue what it is.
Metro's only purpose is to populate Microsofts app store with lots of apps so that their mobile offering dont lack the one thing that mobile users require.. a well-stocked app store.

geeesh...

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[gclef]

My personal rants against Unity:
  1) I hate the concept of tearing an application's menus out of the application's windows and putting them on the top bar. I find that very counter-intuitive and confusing. The really frustrating part about that feature is that you can turn it off, but only for the entire box. If I'm sharing a system with a girlfriend/spouse, etc, we now have to agree on how this system does that, rather than being able to do it individually according to our tastes.
  2) Unity seems to assume that all applications will run full-screen, even when I don't want them to. It has a very frustrating feature where any app that launches at greater than (I think) 80% screen size will auto-maximize. I don't want that. I want the windows of an application to stay the size I made them last time, even if that is 85% of the screen real estate. Unity doesn't allow that...it forces full-screen above a certain size, and I couldn't find a way to turn that off.
  3) its performance on multi-screen setups is just weird. The dock auto-minimizing in the middle of the two screens is simply broken...but that's really just a bug that highlights a bigger problem: you can't change the dock's location. It's on the left side of the "primary" screen. Period.

These three together point me to an attitude from Unity that runs counter to what I feel linux is about (choice & control). The cognitive dissonance of that feeling from Unity makes me want to uninstall it as fast as I can. Having the dock (or any other setting) have a *default* of what the Ubuntu team feels works best is fine. Making those settings *mandatory* does nothing but piss me off & makes me want to abandon Unity.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[HiThere]

KDE4.7 is vastly improved, but it's still not as good as Gnome2...and FAR short of KDE3.5.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Lumpy]

try using it on a laptop with a synaptics touchpad.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Lumpy]

Multiple monitor support that is not horribly broken.
Ability to put apps in folders of my choosing.
disable the stupid pop up quick menu and go directly to my list of apps.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[CalcProgrammer1]

Except it will still suck, Unity pretty much requires a keyboard to navigate more than one page of icons by typing the application name in the search bar. If you're going to do touch interfaces, at least do it right, and also note that most of the userbase DOESN'T use touchscreens. This applies to the Windows 8 developers as well, who also have a screen hogging touchscreen Start menu that is useless to most users.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[0123456]

This applies to the Windows 8 developers as well, who also have a screen hogging touchscreen Start menu that is useless to most users.

But it's SO SHINY!

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Luckyo]

Err, how are you going to make x86 software work on ARM platform? That's the problem, not the interface.

Or did you refer to something else?

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Luckyo]

Unfortunately this has been clarified to be false. Metro start menu is going to be mandatory, period. Microsoft confirmed it quite a while ago, and a google search will bring you a boatload of arguments for and against the issue.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[tomhudson]

Err, how are you going to make x86 software work on ARM platform? That's the problem, not the interface.
Or did you refer to something else?

Windows8 will run on ARM. Windows Metro Apps are html5+javascript, which is CPU-agnostic.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not the same, but desktop PC sales are falling in Europe, the US, and Canada as people move increasingly to mobile devices. The only thing keeping desktop PC sales afloat are (a) businesses and (b) developing countries.

It's clear the trend is to mobile, and that's where companies are focusing their efforts now. They see the writing on the wall.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Vegemeister]

You never go aptitude full-upgrade!

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[HarrySquatter]

Windows Metro Apps are html5+javascript,

Wrong. Metro apps can be in a variety of languages.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Anonymous Coward]

If only they'd make it so that the Windows, sorry Meta key could be assigned to open the start, sorry k-menu...

For the uninitiated: This cannot be done easily because Qt handles meta keys(ctrl, alt, shift, meta) different than normal keys.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[tomhudson]

They're also html5+javascript, unlike apps in the competing Android and Apple App stores. So stop with the "wrong" already. Microsoft has already gone on record as saying this will be the predominant / favoured method for the MetroUI.

Even the chart you point to makes that point.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[thetoadwarrior]

Yeah I hate it when all 600 distros aren't exactly the same. That's going to make it much harder for me to some like a pompous windbag who claims to be able to use hundreds of operating systems. How can I deal with that?

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I use Linux on my netbook, and hated their new interface. I find it a lot clunkier, cramped, harder to efficiently navigate and a lot slower responding than other interfaces. Switched back to XFCE. Might try some others.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Pentagram]

switcher as well,

If you mean the workspace switcher, I think it's a train wreck. Instead of one click to change workspaces, it's two (one double click). And why is there no visual indication of which workspace you're on, like in the Gnome 2 switcher? Come on! That's surely not hard to program. I assumed this was a bug that would get fixed in 11.10 but apparently not. Fine, someone made a really stupid UI decision but THEN you can't even remove the switcher because someone decided that I wasn't allowed to do that in case I confused myself. Aargh! A minor thing, but a good summary of Unity: bad UI decisions which are then locked down so you're not allowed to change them.

What do people who constantly rag on Unity want?

A taskbar. I've tried Gnome 3 and Unity for a few weeks each and the fact is that I'm significantly more productive with a taskbar. It's just the way my brain works, it doesn't like "modal" applications like the unity Dash/sidebar or the Gnome 3 thingy (I don't like vi either).

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[iceaxe]

Darn, I didn't realize that Unity was making my Ubuntu suck, even though I don't use Unity. You mean I've been experiencing suckage all this time and didn't even know it?

Wait, can you explain to me how Unity makes my Ubuntu suck when I'm using Xfce? I don't get it.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Anonymous Coward]

uninformed much?

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[MichaelSmith]

I am fairly happy with unity but it does have bugs and I think this is a result of it being a fairly new application. Gnome2 was more mature and development was slower, so it had fewer bugs. The best bug I saw in the 11.04 version of unity was when it got confused between the top and bottom Y coordinates of my terminal window and rendered it upside down, hanging from the top of my laptop screen, instead of the right way up at the bottom of my external monitor. Many lulz were had on that day.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[arose]

Triple digit click working out of the box is rather nice, I have to agree. But I think you are implying that I should be having problems. If that's the case, explain.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Kagetsuki]

I actually have not used Lion yet, and after reading your post I looked up some images... I'm sorry but that looks even less appealing on the desktop than Unity. I don't get the appeal of a big screen full of random icons and a non-keyboard oriented interface for something with a keyboard.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[JustNiz]

Try upgrading to 11.10 then try and convince it to NOT keep defaulting back to unity every time you log in.
You'll see what I mean.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[Phil Urich]

I want a desktop environment that plays well with multiple monitors and several open applications (each of which having multiple windows that I will want on screen at the same time, and selectable from a central location in the fewest clicks possible, with the task of exact identification handled without needing a click on most instances). You know, what Gnome 2 did quite well and what MS/Explorer has handled fine enough for over a decade.

KDE 4 does this perfectly fine (KDE 3.5 did too, and KDE 4.0->~4.3 had some issues, but modern KDE 4 does all this easily with multiple monitors (which is good for me, since of the three main computers I use, all three have at least two monitors; it's what made me hold on to KDE 3.5 as long as I did).

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[znerk]

What do people who constantly rag on Unity want? I can understand they might be frustrated with some bugs, but latest release is very stable (at least for me). I am trying to understand what people miss from KDE, Gnome 2 or other DEs that Unity doesn't have or that it has implemented in a really bad way.

I want a menu full of programs that I can browse through when I'm looking for that thing that does the stuff with those picture things - not a "search for it" box that requires me to know the first few letters of the commandline - if I knew the name of the program, I wouldn't have to search for it.

I want a panel application that displays my system resources in a manner similar to the way System Monitor worked when it was docked in the panel.

For that matter, I want my panels back.

I want the option to use what I'm used to using, instead of being forced into a Fisher-Price "My First Tablet" interface on my $1200 PC.

I want an interface that makes it easy to launch the tasks that I want to perform, then gets out of my way.

Unity is "made of fail" for a desktop. Desktop sales may be down due to tablets and smartphones, but the mobile "fad" isn't a permanent state of affairs. Keyboards are way too useful to abandon desktops forever.

On the other hand, I'll be the first to admit - you give me a GNU/GPL OS on a hardware-accelerated interface, with a proper programming environment (say, a full Eclipse IDE) and the ability to run native Linux apps on my phone, through an HDMI cable to my 23" monitor, with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard that have batteries that last longer than 3 days... and the only thing I'm likely to complain about is that SD cards only go up to 32GB.

Anyone who has played CyberPunk or ShadowRun knows what a cyberdeck is, and we're all just waiting for the chance to install the plugs in our brains...

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[znerk]

The really frustrating part about that feature is that you can turn it off, but only for the entire box.

... and one of the things I have always loved about Linux was that all the configuration was per-user.

This new system is not only counter-intuitive, but if it were an American governmental decision it would be deemed unconstitutional.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[AdamJS]

Yes, as does Xfce and LXDE, at least to some extent. There's tons of viable options and if an OS is trying to be Tablet-oriented on PC while its current install base is traditional desktop users, they should be including an option at install time for a 'normal' interface/DE. Even under some "Advanced" filtered set of options. Support for said environment would also be an issue. Although if Ubuntu did have such an option, then I guess I missed it.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[jc79]

Sounds like Gnome 3 (on Fedora) would fit your needs. One mouse movement or keyboard tap gives you an overview of all your windows, (like OS X Expose). Click on the one you want. You get thumbnails of all your workspaces. Multiple monitors are handled smoothly (including hot-plugging just fine) Notifications are handled well without interrupting your workflow. Gnome-shell gets out of your way and just lets you get on with what you want, without dislocating menus from their windows. I found the lack of customisability hard to deal with at first, coming from Gnome 2, but after a week or so I realised that it doesn't need to be customised. It just works the way it is. (Bar needing to install one extension so I don't have to hold down Alt just to turn off my computer). Gnome 3.2 (Fedora 16) is even nicer, with many of the wrinkles ironed out.

I've been using it now for 6 months and find going to a Windows-like desktop clunkier each time. Gnome 3 is everything Unity should have been but isn't.

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[AdamJS]

Nah. Gnome 2 (upgraded derivatives, of course), most certainly. It was great. Gnome 3 is just a pain in the ass while doing regular browsing or doing actual work.

YMMV, but I fined Gnome 3 also suffers from "Unity Syndrome".

Re:This is clearly what he was always planning...

[jc79]

I find myself more productive with Gnome 3 than 2 (less clutter, fewer distracting applets telling me things that aren't actually too important). There are some frustrations, like having to use gsettings/dconf-editor/gconf-editor for a lot of configuration options - but the only default I've actually changed is from click-to-focus to focus-follows-mouse now that it's fixed in 3.2. That and adding the alternative-status-menu extension.

Unity and Gnome 3 do seem to have a lot of similar thinking going into their design, but IMO Gnome 3 has handled the implementation of those design choices better.

Each to their own! That's the great thing about Linux/GNU as a platform - noone's forcing you to use one DE or another, you can pick an choose to suit your preference. "Power users" whining about Ubuntu using Unity as a default clearly aren't "powerful" enough to type apt-get install xfce-desktop (or whatever the package is called).

Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware...

[jkrise]

Google has taken Linus and modified it to suit their aims and goals, rather than using the power of community Linux. Canonical will give the smartphone world the power of Linux minus the controls and restrictions imposed by Google. Customers will be the biggest winners here.

The Difference

[masternerdguy]

Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly there. That's the big difference. They're competing mainly with Apple/Google, and I think they can take them on.

Re:The Difference

[Chrisq]

Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly there. That's the big difference. They're competing mainly with Apple/Google, and I think they can take them on.

You might be right, but Apple has proved to be as unscrupulous as Microsoft. Expect all the ridiculous patents (e.g looks like a tablet) that they have used against Android to be used against Ubuntu.

Re:The Difference

[Kjella]

Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly there. That's the big difference. They're competing mainly with Apple/Google, and I think they can take them on.

No, only:
- A long history of locked down devices
- A lot of custom hardware on each phone/tablet
- No tradition for dual boot
- Covered by a ton of silly software patents

Just look at how many problems Linux has had, and still to some degree has, with basic functionality even on fairly standard desktop gear. Like sound, network, wifi, suspend/resume, bluetooth, power management and so on. Now try this in the phone/tablet world where a lot of the hardware is used exactly once in one generation and there's lots of magic values and toggles. I predict the YotLT is even further away than the YotLD.

Re:The Difference

[tripleevenfall]

Linux doesn't have a history of competing with any corporation in any consumer market.

Re:The Difference

[Anonymous Coward]

Likewise they aren't dealing with the inertia people exhibit around the operating systems they believe they've already learned to use.

Re:The Difference

[Lumpy]

I dont.

It's not the OS that drives Tablet popularity and sales figures. IT's the Apps available.
Honestly a Ubuntu tablet will be a failure. Unless they can crank out 200,000+ free useful apps overnight.

Re:The Difference

[ColdWetDog]

Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly there. That's the big difference. They're competing mainly with Apple/Google, and I think they can take them on.

You might be right, but Apple has proved to be as unscrupulous as Microsoft. Expect all the ridiculous patents (e.g looks like a tablet) that they have used against Android to be used against Ubuntu.

Do you think we can let this meme just drop off into the sludge pit of dumb rants? Apple is going after Samsung using design patents this is a slightly different concept that the 'standard' patent for an 'invention'. The Apple / Samsung case is about quite a bit more than a rounded rectangle. It IS a dumb thing, rather like Pepsi making a glass bottle that looked like the canonical (and patented) Coke Bottle but with sharper flutes or whatever but Apple DIDN'T patent rounded rectangles. Apple didn't patent tablets.

Channel your AppleHate(TM) somewhere else. /end rant

Re:The Difference

[Tarlus]

Well, Apple can wail fruitlessly on Samsung all they like but they're not trying to push their OS through every tablet manufacturer known to man. Give Microsoft some more time and they'll start to try to push Windows 8 out onto every tablet manufacturer just as aggressively as they do with every PC manufacturer. Then we'll have the same scrupulosity (or lack thereof) in the microcosmic smartphone and tablet worlds.

Re:The Difference

[GPLHost-Thomas]

200 000+ stupid useless apps, maybe not. But more than 30 000 Debian packages (and counting), yes, OVERNIGHT!

If I can install Debian on a tablet and run real useful software on it, then I may think about buying one.
If there's a phone that runs directly a plain Debian, then I'll buy one immediately (note: I already have a n900, with Maemo, but it's not really a plain Debian... just a derivative).

But so far, has Ubuntu contributed to the freesmartphone.org project?

Re:The Difference

[NortySpock]

" I predict the YotLT is even further away"
Android : forked Linux
webOS: forked Linux
iOS : forked BSD/Mach

Re:The Difference

[vakuona]

:Facepalm:

This is why slashdot geeks should never run corps. Debian, seriously?

I mean, geeks are meant to be smart. If you think that Debian will entice regular people to a tablet, then you are hopelessly deluded.

Re:The Difference

[pmontra]

This is a site for geeks and a Debian tablet is definitely geekier than an iOS or an Android one.

Re:The Difference

[interkin3tic]

Apple is going after Samsung using design patents [wikimedia.org] this is a slightly different concept that the 'standard' patent for an 'invention'.

See, I didn't BEAT the victim up for owing me money. I tasered him. Beating for owed money implies I hit him with blunt objects to hurt him because he didn't give me money. Not the case at all. I used electricity to coax him to pay me what I was owed.

There wasn't any apple-bashing going on there. Apple, like most other tech companies, is using lawyers to stifle competition. With samsung, the most logical weapon were the design patents. That doesn't mean they're going to say "Okay, ubuntu mobile doesn't have rounded corners or a home button, so we're just going to try to compete by making a better product rather than trying to shut them down with lawyers."

Re:The Difference

[sarhjinian]

200 000+ stupid useless apps, maybe not. But more than 30 000 Debian packages (and counting), yes, OVERNIGHT!

How many of those applications are suited to use on a keyboardless, mouseless capacitive touchscreen?

I mean, really, how are you going to use XEmacs on a tablet? I mean, unless some hardware OEM adds escape, meta, alt, ctrl and shift keys---two of each, for preference---to the bezel.

Re:The Difference

[recoiledsnake]

Huh what? Apple is using all kinds of patents against Android. See http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/242334/itc_deals_htc_setback_in_apple_patent_war.html

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/16/apple-vs-google-inside-an-android-patent-violation/

Take your Apple Love(TM) to RoughlyDrafted(not even linking that crap).

Re:The Difference

[lennier1]

Apples and oranges.
While Apple seems just as bad, they have a far better PR department to spin the whole media coverage in their favor.

Re:The Difference

[armanox]

so use vim instead? *ducks*

Re:The Difference

[zuperduperman]

Do you think we can let this meme just drop off into the sludge pit of dumb rants? Apple is going after Samsung using design patents [wikimedia.org] this is a slightly different concept that the 'standard' patent for an 'invention'.

Utter rubbish. Apple is using every kind of patent imaginable from how to make a touch screen to how a scrolling list should bounce. You'd have to be pro-every-kind-of-possible-patent to agree with what Apple are doing.

Re:The Difference

[GPLHost-Thomas]

If you think that Debian will entice regular people to a tablet

No, I don't think that way. I have *never* claimed that it would be a successful product. I just wrote I would love to have one.

Re:The Difference

[GPLHost-Thomas]

I mean, really, how are you going to use XEmacs on a tablet?

I don't expect to do the same things in a tablet that I do on my laptop. I also do expect the environment to be different, and adapted to the use in a tablet. I don't want a Debian gnome 2 desktop for example. Hildon desktop on the n900 is ok-ish on such device, but I'm sure it is possible to do better.

Re:The Difference

[Lumpy]

Oh boy, I know my neighbor will relish in running Python on his phone.
30,000 Debian packages.. of which 0 will have any interest to anyone running a cellphone.

Try again.

Re:The Difference

[GPLHost-Thomas]

Ah? You don't care browsing the web (firefox, chromium, etc.), reading emails (many clients), watching videos (VLC, mplayer), listening to mp3, chatting with friends (pidgin, telepathy, irc, etc.), using SIP (many apps), transfering files (ftp, scp, etc.) with clients proven to be good? Plus all the shell tools exactly like in your workstation, that's quite a cool thing to have in your pocket. Maybe you also don't care reading attached PDF or word/openoffice document with a decent reader?

Re:The Difference

[Lumpy]

Nope, because NONE of those apps will work with a touchscreen.
Nice try at trolling, but I've been there with a linux tablet several times. 1st time in 1999 with a fujistu stylistic and redhat. Epic fail in useability because desktop apps designed for keyboard and mouse fail completely in a touchscreen setup.

2nd time in 2004 again on a newer Fujitsu (they are the only company making real tablets instead of the toys you buy now) it's a little better but again, email apps and web-browsing sucks.. the on screen keyboard was better if it kept focus.

3rd time was 6 months ago... Ubuntu and it's unity. the desktop works great but again, firefox was an epic fail because the on screen keyboard is no a part of unity and holds focus in a transparent mode over the screen.

Linux has ZERO apps that will work on a phone or tablet, they ALL need to be re-written. It's why windows 7 is a epic fail on a tablet and why ipad and androidpad kick the crap out of it in useability because the OS and apps were written specifically for a toucscreen environment.

Re:The Difference

[GPLHost-Thomas]

Nope, because NONE of those apps will work with a touchscreen.

This must be a joke, just try a n900 and see by yourself. Having mobile phone apps and tablet apps available in Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) would also rox (because easy to get the sources, modify, etc.). And by the way, I wonder why you guys always associate "phone" with "virtual keyboard". It's been years I'm only having phones with REAL keyboard, and the worst hardware keyboard you'll find will be light-years ahead of any virtual keyboards, and when I think phone, I always think small hardware keyboard. I don't think I'll ever buy a phone where it's so difficult to type an email. It's already a pain with the size of my hardware keyboard that I often give-up ...

Linux has ZERO apps that will work on a phone or tablet, they ALL need to be re-written.

You mean maybe adapted which roughly means arrange things for less space. That's really not a lot of work compared to a full rewrite.

There's tons of apps in Linux that I use every day on my phone. Like for a start on the shell: scp, ssh, xterm, mtr, joe (I don't like vim), host, nmap, and various other networking tools, mplayer. Then as GUI: openvpn, gpodder (to listen to podcasts in the car), vlc (all of them had very minor GUI rewrite).

Again, I'm not saying it's an approach for the majority, it might not even be good for YOU, but I DO like it, and I DO want such phone. You can say you wouldn't like it, but please don't say "zero apps" or "linux isn't adapted", because for some (like me), IT IS, and I really don't care the fuck about the 200000 apps with 99% of them being useless. The n900 repo is also bloated with so many crappy stupid apps, backgrounds, themes, etc. which are on the way to serious software/packages and its more a nuisance than anything else to ME (eg: I can understand it might fit others).

Re:The Difference

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly there. That's the big difference. They're competing mainly with Apple/Google, and I think they can take them on.

Apple has a monopoly here, they have the biggest player in the device market and it ties directly to their music/video/books and application stores. You really think Ubuntu can compete against Apple?

Re:The Difference

[znerk]

Two words: Bluetooth Keyboard.

Waitaminute

[Anonymous Coward]

If he is going to announce it, but the news is already out beforehand, then....isn't it already announced? What's the point of the Orlando, FL presentation now?

Re:Waitaminute

[tepples]

As I understand it, "is to announce" refers to the distinction between an informal announcement and a formal presentation.

Re:Waitaminute

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what is the distinction between an informal and informal announcement? The information is already conveyed. It seems like thumb twiddling to me, with some extra flashy stuff.

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[Yvan256]

They modified Linus? What did they do to him? I bet he's pretty angry about that!

I'm shocked, absolutely shocked!

[Kjella]

*Looks at Unity*

Well, maybe not that shocked...

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[Anonymous Coward]

Customers will be the winners? Customers won't know.

Unity on cell phones or tablets won't be seen by more than a handful of nerd types. The general public will have *no idea whatsoever* that it even exists.

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[SuricouRaven]

Possible, but also consider that the handset manufacturers are the ones imposing most of those controls and restrictions. They benefit from the ability to bundle un-uninstallable sponsored apps (including spyware) and can more easily ensure obsolescence and thus future handset sales if they have means to prevent software upgrades. Even if they did use ubuntu, they would probably have to find some means to lock it down. Maybe they'll use a bootloader that only loads signed OS images. They certainly won't be letting the user have root access - that would be a technical support nightmare. Even Android doesn't do that.

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[plunderscratch]

Don't worry, it wasn't the real Linus, they forked him first.

Can you dual boot a phone?

[Oswald McWeany]

I'm holding my breath for a manufacturer to ship a phone with ubuntu on it.

[gasping] OK... now I'm not.

Interesting- but for the near future at least, I can't see phone manufacturers shipping phones with Ubuntu on them- If you want Ubuntu on your phone you'll need to remove an existing operating system.

How many people will actually remove iOS or Android to get Ubuntu?

Can you dual boot a phone?

Re:Can you dual boot a phone?

[slim]

Can you dual boot a phone?

Yes. The basic way of installing Cyanogenmod (etc.) puts a recovery bootloader on your phone, such that you can select what OS to boot.

Re:Can you dual boot a phone?

[Microlith]

How many people will actually remove iOS or Android to get Ubuntu?

If I could remove Android and install more standard Linux platform and not lose any functionality, I'd do so.

It's one of those things that I hoped would have come with this massive advancement in mobile technology. Unfortunately I am seeing the opposite, with phones being deliberately abandoned with old OSes that are incompatible with revisions in its own line, much less the wider Linux world, and set up in such ways as to fight you.

Re:Can you dual boot a phone?

[Spirilis]

Ask how Motorola did it, I own the Droid Bionic and its "WebTop" feature is a running Ubuntu on the phone that exports its display via HDMI. Not entirely sure how it works (I don't have the hdmi adapter to use it, either) but I know it runs Ubuntu.

Re:Can you dual boot a phone?

[colsandurz45]

I dual boot my n900 with Maemo and Android

Re:Can you dual boot a phone?

[GPLHost-Thomas]

Yes. https://elektranox.org/n900/
The only problem with Debian on a phone is that you don't have much applications for the phone itself (eg: make phone calls, use sms, etc.), and the real work to be done is there.

Re:Can you dual boot a phone?

[pmontra]

I don't think I'll need to dual boot it.

I'd love to carry my main machine with me in a smartphone form factor: my phone weights 116 g vs the 2.7 kg of my laptop and 1.1 kg of my netbook. I can already attach a mouse, a keyboard and USB pen drive to my phone, a Samsung Galaxy S2, and it can output full HD video. Unfortunately it runs Android and not Ubuntu which is the OS I use to work. If anybody fixes that it would already be much better than my netbook. With a better CPU, more RAM (1 GB now) and more storage (it ceils to 32 GB now) I will run Android apps in a VM. Maybe we'll even get hackintoshes for iOS (keep an eye on these guys). It won't take a long time for the top level smartphone CPUs to be as powerful as the one in my laptop, a Core 2 Duo T7200 from 2006. We're already heading to quad core 2 GHz processors. Storage and RAM could grow as well.

Anyway, what we'll need is dual-UI, one UI to use on the small touchscreen of the device, one to use on large external screens. At the moment the only Linux based UI that works well on a small screen is the Android one. Unity IMHO is fine only between 9" and 13", I'm not using it on my 15" laptop.

Overall I feel fairly optimistic but I don't expect to be able to get one of those machines in 5 years. The main hurdles are not technical but commercial: which company is going to sell us real computers when they can sell us smart phones with the same form factor and we're going to buy them anyway? I've got a laptop, a netbook and a smartphone instead of only one device: I made at least 3 companies happy instead of one. I bet on the force of competition :-)

Re:Can you dual boot a phone?

[znerk]

I have the Atrix 4G, which was the first to have the WebTop enabled, and also has a shiny laptop-shaped dock that does nothing more than give a bigger screen, keyboard, and touchpad (along with a bigger battery that actually charges your phone while it's docked).

The crippled monstrosity that you're describing as Ubuntu is not at all a usable desktop environment, unless by "usable desktop environment" you mean a realtime display of what the phone is already showing, with the ability to run Firefox next to it and use any web-app you have a URL for.

I rooted my phone to enable the webtop functionality without having to buy the dock (since I now have a BlueTooth keyboard), and was so underwhelmed that I'm about to undo those changes because it didn't add anything to the experience.

As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the mobile movement is going to slow down, and slim laptops or beefy desktops will go back to being king for anyone who actually wants to accomplish "work" with their computing device.

Holy cow!

[AdamJS]

I bet the two people that weren't expecting this are totally freaking out! Seriously though, let's all hope it stays there. The idea of a "unified experience" between two fundamentally different control schemes/types of computing is silly and prone to eventually pissing one side off, and Unity has drove this point home quite perfectly.

For use on smartphones

[Zibodiz]

As long as it's simple to install on a variety of easy-to-obtain unlocked smartphones, I'll be happy. The whole reason I don't have a smartphone yet is because I'm nervous about entering anyone's walled garden. This has been a long time coming, and I'm thrilled that it's finally here.

This makes me

[Anonymous Coward]

Happy

They should shut up until it ships.

[Animats]

Canonical previously announced that their distro was being preloaded on three ASUS netbooks. That was in August. Didn't happen.

Canonical issued that Linux press release, but Asus never said they were going to ship those machines with Linux. Canonical has no credibility.

Re:They should shut up until it ships.

[Anonymous Coward]

They are shipping, though perhaps not in your market.

Re:They should shut up until it ships.

[tildeslash]

Asus build for Dell, canonical is shipping Linux on Dell in China.

Re:They should shut up until it ships.

[stub667]

They have shipped in a number of European countries and are selling well... too well, causing supply issues.

My G1 is talking here...

[prodigel]

As long as they avoid the Android style fragmentation / lack of support for the older phones I'm waiting for more news on this!

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[IrquiM]

Good news? You must be joking!

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[anonymov]

Canonical will give the Linux smartphone world further fragmentation.

With Android and iOS going strong and new MS and Blackberry upcoming, will there be enough incentive for developers to support yet another new mobile platform? Well, unless supporting is made as easy as minor changes to build process and codebase.

U.S. carriers are still in control

[tepples]

The whole reason I don't have a smartphone yet is because I'm nervous about entering anyone's walled garden.

U.S. carriers are still in control of the U.S. cell phone market, and Ubuntu won't help you break that. First, any phone that comes with Ubuntu isn't going to be available on subsidy from a U.S. carrier. And if you don't take a subsidized phone, carriers will still build the subsidy into the monthly bill as if you had taken a subsidized phone. Second, even Ubuntu on a smartphone won't help you work around U.S. carriers' policy of charging you extra if you try to "tether" (use a phone as a proxy for your laptop so that you can use up the rest of your data plan's allocated megabytes), and it doesn't magically get U.S. carriers to start offering low-minute smartphone plans (still have to pay $39.99 per month for 450 minutes per month, even if you'll probably never use even 60).

(Not in the U.S.? If not, sorry.)

know your market

[t2t10]

Ubuntu's traditional market niche is the technical and professional market, people who used to use UNIX workstations. Unfortunately, with 11.10 and the upcoming move away from X11, Ubuntu is hell-bent on leaving that market: Unity is already nearly useless for power users (it doesn't work well at all on large or multi-screen setups), tools like Synaptic are becoming non-standard, etc.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't have a chance in the tablet and smartphone market either. That market is already well service by Android and iOS. Ubuntu has virtually no mobile developers. And if it manages against all odds to even get a small market share, Ubuntu will face the kind of patent feeding frenzy that Android is being subjected to.

Too bad Shuttleworth couldn't leave good enough alone. He's going to kill Ubuntu and seriously hurt Linux as a whole.

Re:know your market

[LWATCDR]

X11 is not going away it is just getting shifted to a different level. X11 will run on top of Wayland just as X11 on the mac runs on top of the Mac Graphics system. I hope that Wayland and Unity can flatten the modle a bit for most Linux users. You now have a display manger running on top of Gnome or KDE running on top of GTK or QT running on top of X, Or do yu have Gnome or KDE running on top of a Display manager running on top of QT or GTK, running on top of X?
X11 has tried to keep up but the fact display is separate from audio and printing is a real issue and will be for some time to come. Those three areas should be closely tied together and they are not.

Re:know your market

[TheSpoom]

Yep. I'm one of those users. I'm currently in limbo (having found a userspace app called tint2 to give me a taskbar in Unity) while I decide on which other distribution I'm going to try. It sucks, too, because the time I invested into Ubuntu means more time making sure I back everything up before installing something else over top. I'm looking at either straight Debian or Mint.

Re:know your market

[aquabats]

Im picturing more of a cyanogenmod then a android pre installed deal. Ubuntu comes preinstalled on very few devices, why change that model. id root my phone for ubuntu to give it a try...

Re:know your market

[t2t10]

The fact is that Wayland creates a new, incompatible set of APIs in addition to X11. X11 apps won't have all the same functionality and desktop integration available to them as Wayland apps. That's exactly the situation on OS X and it sucks.

So, realistically, all the engineering and scientific apps need to be rewritten to use native Wayland APIs and desktop integration. But the problem with that is that the Wayland developers have their sights set on the consumer and tablet market, so Wayland isn't going to address professional needs very well (and if you have any doubt that they don't give a damn, just look at Unity).

So, Ubuntu is doing the same thing Apple and Microsoft have been doing: targeting the consumer market, with the professional market as an afterthought. The difference is that Apple and Microsoft have consumer market share, while Ubuntu has next to none.

Re:know your market

[CalcProgrammer1]

Yeah, Ubuntu's users were typically new Linux users, but often they were still experienced PC users with other OS (Windows/Mac) knowledge. Ubuntu is trying to impress users who have zero knowledge of how PC's work and make it super intuitive for those who haven't used any other OS, but these people aren't ever going to install Ubuntu in the first place. Meanwhile, Ubuntu's maturing userbase has finally decided to ditch the training wheels and move to another distribution after the horrendous 11.10 release. What were they thinking!?! I have Debian on my Archos 43 4.3" tablet. With GNOME2 and Bluetooth mini-keyboard. It's awesome. I seriously would rather have a classic interface even on a tablet, if you have a stylus you don't need obnoxiously wasteful buttons that take up 2-3 times the space they need to, and fitting more stuff on the screen gives more functionality (compare LibreOffice to tablet office apps and you'll see a big difference in the number of features provided).

Re:know your market

[CalcProgrammer1]

I switched to Mint Debian but ultimately went to pure Debian. Mint has some issues with Firefox (they customize Google and it sucks, it's hard to remove, and if you install a new version your changes are reverted). Debian is awesome if you're coming from classic Ubuntu as it has pretty much the exact same interface. You may have to configure some system policies to your liking (it asks for password too much in my opinion, but I disabled the prompts). If you don't want to deal with problems, use Debian Stable (Squeeze). The testing version (Wheezy) is what Mint Debian is built off of and I had a bug with the nVidia driver that lagged the computer really bad.

Re:know your market

[steevven1]

Try out Xubuntu! I switched as soon as Unity came to Ubuntu, and I'm not looking back!

Re:know your market

[fnj]

Wayland can go to hell. There is absolutely no reason to couple the display, audio, and printing. None. There is nothing whatsoever in common between display and audio, and only a broad connection between display and printing (they both produce something you can see, but printing is STATIC, and printing is already handled just fine by CUPS. Hell, Apple DEVELOPED cups for OSX and linux and bsd picked it up because it made sense and solved a real problem).

Just because you already have layers running on layers (that are intelligently designed, and each having a purpose), is no reason to add another layer which has no basis for existing. In OSX, X11 programs are already stepchildren that don't integrate properly with the rest of the system, because the system is "too good for them" (in the royal sense, not the true sense).

I will not run X11 on top of another layer as long as I am able to choose not to. If that means deserting one linux distro for another, or even deserting linux in favor of bsd, so be it. I may even be forced to eat Wayland if everybody adopts it and I can't avoid it. But it won't be willingly, and it will be with the realization that I've been force fed crap.

Now if you want to reverse this insanity and run this Wayland crap on top of a proper X11, I have no problem with that. I will just bloody well ignore it.

Re:know your market

[Anonymous Coward]

Try kubuntu. If you're a power desktop user, you cannot beat KDE. It's *hugely* configurable to suit your needs.

Re:know your market

[Anonymous Coward]

It does work well on large screens as well as on multi-screen setups. Might I suggest you try using it for a few weeks?

Re:know your market

[evandrofisico]

Hell, Apple DEVELOPED cups for OSX and linux and bsd picked it up because it made sense and solved a real problem).

No, cups was developed independently starting on 1997, and on 2007, after many years being the default printing system on OSX and many linux distributions it was acquired by Apple.

Re:know your market

[LWATCDR]

Really Audio and Display have nothing in common? I guess you never watch video on your computer.
A pure X app already misses out some what on desktop integration on Linux. Does anyone write new code using X11 any longer or do they all use GTK or QT?
So Cups was a good idea because it solved a problem. Well guess what sound on Linux is a problem. Hardware accelerated video playback on Linux is a problem.

What is worse is that you are already betting that X11 on top of Wayland will be an issue before you even see it.
No get off my lawn you dang kid.
Really give Ubuntu some credit for seeing an problem and trying to fix it. It may fail in the end but they are trying to move forward with new ideas. Before curseing them you should see what they develop and give them feed back. In the end it may be better.

Re:know your market

[MindCrusher]

For the best part of this year I've been waiting for a tablet with linux. A cross between a notebook and a tablet is the best of the two worlds. Imagine being able to run all Linux programs from your tablet. I figure there would be a decrease in the battery time, but with ARM processors you can have better power management. So count me in as a potential customer.

Re:know your market

[t2t10]

Every Android tablet and laptop is also a Linux laptop. You can drop down into the shell. If you like, you can get root on it and install tons of packages.

The difference between Android and Ubuntu has traditionally been that Ubuntu runs a standard X11-based Linux desktop. But I don't see much of an advantage of a Wayland/Unity-based Ubuntu device over an Android device.

Re:know your market

[IGnatius T Foobar]

You are absolutely correct. Unity may be Shuttleworth's pet project but it alienates existing users so badly, that Ubuntu has essentially jumped the shark. After five happy years with Ubuntu I've bailed out and switched to regular Debian. They may be a slow moving train but at least they don't alienate their users.

Re:know your market

[KiloByte]

Debian's new default is GNOME3, which is worse than Unity could ever hope to be. GNOME2 is dropped. XFCE requires you to dig around to do things even as simple as taking a screenshot or setting the compose key.

I agree about the stylus as well. Have you compared N900's touchscreen to those much-vaunted multitouch ones on iPhone/droids? If you want to point precisely, you can use a fingernail, but it's nowhere as precise as the stylus.

But sadly, designers follow some "usability studies" which have as much common with usability as Department of X with X (for most values of X).

Re:know your market

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I like Ubuntu. It saves me the time of screwing around all kinds of settings to get a nice looking system up. Plus, someone else upkeeps the whole thing. This is great because it me to focus on actual work instead of system administration.

I think this new direction from Canonical is not good.

Mark Shuttleworth, do whatever the hell you want with targetting niche markets and trying out different things, but please please please make sure that the Ubuntu (an easy-to-use, efficient, professional Linux) DESKTOP is not destroyed in the progress.

Haven't tried a new Debian in a few years now, maybe it's soon time to give it a shot again.

Re:know your market

[CalcProgrammer1]

True about the touchscreens, my A43 has a resistive screen and got a lot of negative reviews for it, but I love being able to use a stylus for precise control. Sure, you can buy a fancy expensive stylus for multitouch capacitive screens, but I'm not sure how precise it actually is. I've been following some threads on the GNOME 2 fork called "Mate" and it seems to be nearing release. Hopefully a PPA will be up soon so I can try it out on Ubuntu. I think GNOME 3 still has some potential, but the mindset in the GNOME department is all wrong right now. Either way, it isn't ready for mainstream use and having a GNOME 2-based fallback to use would be useful. I really don't want to switch to XFCE or anything else, I tried XFCE and it just isn't the same, nor is GNOME 3's horribly implemented "fallback interface". I hate how the popular opinion always affects technology. Just because the majority of novice users like a dumbed down interface doesn't mean it is the best interface ever, it means you made it shiny to please the masses. This type of "design" is terrible, especially when companies ignore their power users to focus on selling a shiny brick to people who just want to check Facebook and Twitter with it.

Re:know your market

[fnj]

1) Yes, I watch video on linux, and you know what? It works fine, just the way it is. I don't believe there is a problem with sound on linux.
2) Nobody much writes to the X API directly, but guess what, GTK and QT end up going to X, and X is doing the job just fine.
3) You're probably right, with today's megadeath overkill computer hardware, likely another layer getting in the way of the display is not going to be too bad a performance hit. I'm still against the idea on the pointlessness of it.
4) I do realize that a single API for both display and printing, a la Windows GDI, theoretically simplifies things, but when you think about it, paging vs scrolling represents such a fundamental difference in paradigm between the two media that you're going to end up with a lot of parallel code anyway. I pretty much never print to anything except a PDF file, so I tend to minimize the whole issue of printing in my mind. The correct way to combine the two would have been to use Postscript for both. Gee, NeXT got that right. With today's hardware it would work fine.
5) You're right, maybe I will get over it all in time, but jeeze, what a waste when there are much more pressing issues.

Re:know your market

[fnj]

I suspect I am anticipating the answer to this, but then why does the CUPS homepage/ say "CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system developed by Apple Inc. for Mac OS® X and other UNIX®-like operating systems."

Re:know your market

[evandrofisico]

Because Apple acquired rights over the source code and hired it's main (and possibly, at the time, only) developer, continuing to develop it, but it was already widely used on Linux and BSD (and OSX) for around 10 years before it's acquisition.

Re:know your market

[IANAAC]

True about the touchscreens, my A43 has a resistive screen and got a lot of negative reviews for it, but I love being able to use a stylus for precise control.

My cheap-as-stale-donuts Android tablet (flytouch, sold as an apad) has a resistive screen and frankly, I think I prefer it to capacitive. The resistive screen is good enough to use my finger to scroll, etc., but really precise using a stylus. I take a lot of notes using Genial Writing and a stylus, though, so YMMV. If you haven't checked out that app, I highly recommend it.

Re:know your market

[Anonymous Coward]

See the bug reports if you don't believe me. Putting the launcher on the leftmost screen of a three monitor setup is ridiculous.

That's not even talking about all the usability issues, like the title/menu bar merging.

Unity may make sense for netbooks and tablets, but on the desktop, it is a joke from a usability point of view.

Re:know your market

[MichaelSmith]

Technical people aren't going to pay Canonical for support. Ubuntu has to be targeted at a market which will spend money on an operating system.

Re:know your market

[LWATCDR]

1. You are in the minority if you think sound is not an issue on Linux including the lack of network transport.
2. So there is no problem with it going right to wayland and not bother with X.
3. Not pointless since few programs don't us X anymore you might as well make it an option and move the graphics to a more modernation.
4. So their we agree.
5. What do you consider a more pressing issue. Power management is one that I can think of but that is the good thing about FOSS. People work on what interests them Frankly Compwiz to me is just about useless eye candy but others like it so..

The big thing you left out is hardware acceleration which is also an issue.

Re:know your market

[chrb]

Ubuntu's traditional market niche is the technical and professional market, people who used to use UNIX workstations.

A business person will tell you that your main area of potential expansion is not your existing market - it is the new customers that you haven't attracted yet. And that means opening up to new markets.

Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't have a chance in the tablet and smartphone market either. That market is already well service by Android and iOS.

I disagree. Android and iOS certainly have the advantage at the moment, but they are inherently limited by the nature of their distributions - being originally created for cellphones with limited hardware capabilities meant compromises. The new Galaxy Tab is supposed to have a dual-core 1.4 GHz CPU with 1GB of memory. Within a few years we'll have tablets with quad-cores and 4GB memory. With that kind of hardware, there is no need to accept the Android limitations - it is capable of running a full Linux distribution with proper C library and everything else. The problem is that Linux GUI apps haven't been created or optimised for touch screens, and so that is where Canonical is heading. I also expect that at some point Apple will get OS X running on the iPad. I wouldn't be surprised to see Chrome OS for tablets either.

Re:know your market

[Anonymous Coward]

The "move away from X11" doesn't mean anything. Wayland will be running X11 when needed for apps.

Re:know your market

[znerk]

Display and printing are actually fairly tightly coupled already - most printing methods (drivers, whatever you want to call them) require a display system in order to have a canvas to paint on before sending it to the printer device, regardless of whether there is actually a "Print Preview" available to the end user. The printing system needs to assemble the object you are trying to print so that it can decide how to convey that information to the printer.

Re:know your market

[znerk]

Capacitive touch screens are incompatible with a stylus.

Having said that, I hate Unity and am leaning towards run-of-the-mill Debian for my next upgrade cycle. It seems Canonical has forgotten that the majority of their user base is using a PC, not a "mobile device".

Re:know your market

[znerk]

A business person will tell you that your main area of potential expansion is not your existing market - it is the new customers that you haven't attracted yet. And that means opening up to new markets.

... and a business person who is successful will tell you that alienating your existing customer base will not only lose you the customers you worked so hard to get, but word-of-mouth will lose you the ones you broke everything in an effort to obtain, as well.

You see, Ubuntu had this really good desktop interface, on a rock-solid OS that Just Worked; even the IT "pros" were impressed, and people switched to Ubuntu in droves.

Now Canonical has decided to break everything in an attempt to get the chumps... and the guys who tell their companies what to buy will be ditching Ubuntu in favor of a distro that hasn't suddenly become retarded and broken.

Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, Debian derivatives have been running on mobile devices for years (Maemo on Nokia devices and various distros on OpenMoko devices).

Debian is finally getting into the mobile game too, I guess Unity will become one of the mobile UIs added to Debian:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/09/msg00126.html
http://bugs.debian.org/643678

I guess KDE's Plasma Active will be in there too.

Ubuntu making deals with OEMs will hopefully mean more open drivers, making it easier for folks to use Debian on mobile devices.

Re:Debian

[CalcProgrammer1]

I have Debian Stable running on my Archos 43 tablet (4.3" resistive touchscreen, 1GHz ARM, 256 RAM). The GUI is easy enough to read and easy enough to touch click with a stylus. There is decent amount of screen area for the application (the screen is 480x854/854x480 depending on orientation which can be set at boot). The real issue is that there is no room for a good on screen keyboard without wiping the whole screen, so I use a Bluetooth keyboard instead. I don't get how Unity improves the tablet experience other than it makes it easier to punch buttons with fat fingers, it doesn't actually solve any real tablet problems like on-screen keyboard integration or automatic orientation switching or scrolling applications larger than the screen.

Re:Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Please come join us on the #debian-mobile IRC channel on OFTC.

Seems logical

[Anonymous Coward]

They fucked up the desktop with Unity, now it's time to see what they can do with smartphones and tablets.

Repost on TABLET PCs

[Anonymous Coward]

The future of computing is TABLET PCs. Having a touch screen tablet that can flip out a keyboard to become a laptop will become the most popular thing once they are marketed right. People buying ipads today are simply wasting their money.

Ubuntu needs to keep both the Gnome and Unity desktop. Unity is awesome during TABLET mode, but I much prefer Gnome during my LAPTOP mode.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn3m09zkcbo

Re:Repost on TABLET PCs

[shutdown -p now]

The problem with tablet PCs was not the marketing. It was the price ($1000+ for a decent one), weight (~2 lbs - too heavy for one hand), and sucky battery life (nowhere near iPad).

What will work is tablets that are roughly the same form factor as what we have today - i.e. 10", ~1.3lbs weight - and which run on ARM and get good battery life; but that can alo be easily converted to a netbook by using a keyboard dock - think Asus Transformer or Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet. The trick is putting the OS that can handle both usage scenarios well on those things (Android, right now, isn't quite it). And yes, Linux actually has a chance there, but it has to work fast to realize it. Otherwise, it may well end up being Win8.

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[Anonymous Coward]

LibreLinus?

Canonical? I seem to vaguely remember them...

[bornagainpenguin]

Hmm....where have I heard that name before? OH! They're that company that seemed to have a pretty stellar Linux distro based around the Gnome desktop, but for whatever reason the founder of the company decided it was HIS distro and so he didn't have to listen to the people using HIS distro and only HE could design THE ONE TRUE DESKTOP (TM)...

Lost a lot of users after that. Funny thing, never saw a company quite that intent on pissing off all their users until they leave...

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah they forked him HARD!!!! ;-)

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[Sloppy]

I guess "fragmentation" is a synonym for "competition." If you want the best stuff to exist (heh, but with everyone disagreeing about what is best), then you're in favor of it. If you want the world to unify to support something that maybe isn't as good, you're against it. I guess it all depends on what you want.

Yes, you can make a case for unity. People have been preaching that for (literally!) thousands of years. And yet, not everyone is sold on the idea.

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[rtaylor]

Step 1 was to remove his anger component.

I'd love an Ubuntu smartphone, but...

[FridayBob]

... I have to remember that I'm not really a customer -- only a subscriber. The telcos are the actual customers in this equation, and so far they've not taken a liking to operating systems that are too open (think Openmoko and Maemo/Moblin/MeeGo). So, although I wish Mark all the luck in the world with his new strategy, I suspect the odds are stacked against him regarding the phones.

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[Errtu76]

modprobe -r anger

problem solved

If their netbook releases are any indicator...

[czehp]

then I don't think Canonical will provide any significant competition any time soon. I've used their preinstalled images on my decently powered Pandaboard and the performance just blows. Best of luck though, it'd be really nice to have a portable device with a touchscreen AND ssh enabled right out of the box.

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[Anonymous Coward]

He never asked for this.

Re:Canonical? I seem to vaguely remember them...

[smbarbour]

Yeah, because Canonical strayed oh so far from GNOME... Have you seen GNOME 3? It looks like Unity.

What was that? You can still use GNOME anyway (or KDE, XFCE, Enlightenment, or whatever else floats your boat)?

Are you aware that GNOME's website is hosted by Canonical?

Unity hell

[Rattking]

now they are trying to put Unity on my phone and t.v.? no just no.

Freedom of choice.

[Anonymous Coward]

So we can look forward to the "year of Linux on the Tablet" just after the "year of Linux on the Desktop"?

What's great about open source is choice. Users can have as much source code as they want, and in as many versions as they want. There are apps to do everything. With just a little more tweaking, everything can work.

Several versions of xBSD, each in several distros. Dozens of distros of Linux, each with several versions. And millions of apps, which will work on one of these OS's.

It's very similar to politics. There are two big main choices which are for rent for a time, and will do a few jobs, or favors. Outside those, there's millions of options.

Could this finally be my Debian phone?

[jabjoe]

chroot Debian on my Android was never satisfactory. I want a standard Linux phone, ideally Debian based. Yes I know, the N900, but it is too old and a dead end. I'm no fan of Unity and modern Ubuntu, but maybe on a phone, it'll win me over. Very interesting. Also, more competition is always good. :-)

Re:Could this finally be my Debian phone?

[Shadowmist]

chroot Debian on my Android was never satisfactory. I want a standard Linux phone, ideally Debian based. Yes I know, the N900, but it is too old and a dead end. I'm no fan of Unity and modern Ubuntu, but maybe on a phone, it'll win me over. Very interesting. Also, more competition is always good. :-)

So you're looking to dial by command line then?

Re:Could this finally be my Debian phone?

[Anonymous Coward]

you've never written a chat script before?

Re:Could this finally be my Debian phone?

[shutdown -p now]

A full-fledged Linux distro on the phone is not very enticing - it'll be damn inconvenient to use. A tablet is a different matter.

Re:Could this finally be my Debian phone?

[oik]

As an owner of the N900 I have to disagree. [Puts on fanboi hat] It's really the best phone I've had. Ever.

Re:Could this finally be my Debian phone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, how about N9 then?

Re:Could this finally be my Debian phone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Old? Dead end? Hmm. I can triple boot my N900 (Power Kernel, Meego and Android) currently. Show me a newer phone that can do that and I will accept that it is a dead end phone.
PS: I have the N950 too but it does not come close to what I can do with the N900 yet.

Re:Could this finally be my Debian phone?

[znerk]

ppp-up, baby.

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[anonymov]

If simply existing in the same market would mean "competition", then desktop linux would skyrocket the innovation - after all, there are so many competing distros! Instead, it's mostly about Ubuntu, with Fedora and Debian getting a bit of attention now and then.

To compete, you need to attract the user with something others don't have - in desktop Ubuntu's case it's "being free and open, most newbie-friendly among Linuxes and caring for design" (with latter a bit controversial lately), but what can they bring to the mobile?

Only few will care for openness, as long as a) Angry Birds are available in the app store/market, b) changing mobile OS doesn't become as simple as changing desktop OS.

Design and noob friendliness is already there in competing platforms.

What can be there in mobile Ubuntu for Joe Average Consumer/Joe Average Developer?

Mint XFCE

[CimmerianX]

After looking at Gnome3 with the 11.10 upgrade, I was really taken aback. Even after loading in the "revert to classic" add-on for Gnome3, it didn't feel the same as what I had been using. I prefer a nice, clean, and quick desktop. I tried Kubuntu but found it to laggy, I did settle on Mint running XFCE. Very clean and quick interface. I like it as a Ubuntu replacement for now.

Re:Mint XFCE

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is better? XFCE or XKCD? I can't decide.

Why all the hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't understand why people are including negative comments towards Ubuntu all the time - like "spreading the pain" and "Unity sucks." I personally have moved on to other more stable distros like CentOS and Slackware. I'll admit Unity isn't my favorite, but Ubuntu is still open source and free - so stop complaining about it. If people are so uneasy about the direction of Canonical, switch to a different distro or fork it and do something about it.

To me, Linux is so great because of its diverse nature. Voicing negative comments without ideas for a "better direction" just get in the way of the evolutionary process. Ubuntu is just one unique way Linux can evolve. It's an extreme difference from some distros but it's interesting to watch.

The last thing my phone needs...

[Anonymous Coward]

... is PulseAudio. It's craptastically cumbersome and buggy on the desktop, and would be a downright nightmare to troubleshoot on a phone.

On a related note, it's interesting that Canonical is thinking of putting Ubuntu on mobile devices now that it's grown so bloated on the desktop. So many Gnome and other bundled apps that we never use, etc. I still think that Ubuntu is the best desktop Linux available today, but it needs to grow slimmer versus fatter.

Re:The last thing my phone needs...

[znerk]

You do have to admit, though, that it's not that bloated... the LiveCD is still a CD, not a DVD.

Android ubuntu package

[Anonymous Coward]

On my Asus Pad Transformer I change root to debian. I mostly do stuff in the terminal. But from time to time I start an vncserver and use an android vnc client to connect to that. Then I have a complete X session, I use xfce4, but I could use every other wm. There is a project on github to implement an xserver on android (see android-xserver).

The question might be why? Well it's pretty simple content creation! Android is great on the tablet when just using it to play media, browse the net or read a pdf. But when I want to do some real stuff, say write a paper, create a demo or even write a program, you want all the tools that linux has[*]. Debian has them, ubuntu has them, other distro's have them. So it is a great mix, android and some linux distro on the side.

Why don't they create one good app that automates everything. They could put it in the market, call it ubuntu, and make it so that the first time a user starts it, it creates the changeroot and the next time the user starts it, it logs in. Only problem is the root requirement. But if they are working with the OEM, they could rock!

[*] next to linux, you also want the keyboard dock that is available with the transformer!

Consumer is King!

[Anonymous Coward]

Great News. Tablets are the future & Glad to see Ubuntu there.

And what about the bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say this. Fix the f...rikin bugs first! Ubuntu and pretty much every Linux distribution for desktop simply... sucks. And guess what? It's not going away. It's a soup of buggy software.

kubuntu GUI is better

[hideouspenguinboy]

I ended up installing them after the recent upgrade. They provide a simple adjustable GUI similar to the 'ubuntu classic' but with the OS tie ins that the straight gnome packages don't provide. Making a user go through crap like that just to get to something that isn't painful to use is the kind of thing I used to praise Ubuntu for not doing. I commend them for putting together a tablet interface - good forward thinking. Forcing it on the PC is unnecessary and smacks of the kind of hardline control that irritates me about apple products. I've spent years with Ubuntu now and I thought my days of distro hopping were over - now I'm not sure. Thanks for alienating me Ubuntu - job well done.

Re:kubuntu GUI is better

[hideouspenguinboy]

Link to some quick alternatives. I'm suddenly unsure if I ended up on kubuntu or Xubuntu. http://www.techdrivein.com/2011/05/top-4-lightweight-official-ubuntu-based.html

Re:Canonical? I seem to vaguely remember them...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lost a lot of users after that.[citation needed]

I've only seen arseholes like you complain without mentioning anything. Look, you don't like Unity, good. But you're the one hurting Linux on the desktop. If you give a non-Linux user a chance to try it out (without saying anything, he will probably like it. So stfu and do something instead of complaining.

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[tomhudson]

Canonical will give the smartphone world the power of Linux minus the controls and restrictions imposed by Google

Safe prediction, based entirely on past performance. It. Will. Never. Happen.

Canonical can't even give linux away to "the world" after 7 years of trying. Hint - Apple sold more than 20 million iPhones and 9 million iPads in the second quarter - that's way more than the total Ubuntu userbase world-wide after 7 years.

And Samsung is now cleaning Apple's clock.

Neither of the market leaders is going to worry about Ubuntu - it has a long history of big announcements that go nowhere.

Perhaps it's a good idea to move to mobile devices

[Foxhoundz]

They effectively lost the desktop market with Unity.

Hate Unity? Use Kubuntu ...

[kbahey]

Do you hate Unity? Then use Kubuntu and be done with it. Works well.

Also, stay with the latest LTS (10.04 at present), and you don't have to upgrade for 3 years. Less headache.

Re:Hate Unity? Use Kubuntu ...

[mister_playboy]

Kubuntu 10.04 is easily the buggiest version of Ubuntu I have ever used. I highly recommend Kubuntu 11.10 instead.

Having the system supported for longer is little use when the system runs like crap. :)

Re:Hate Unity? Use Kubuntu ...

[kbahey]

Totally disagree.

I am typing this from a Kubuntu 10.04 laptop that is my only desktop, and it has been very stable.

My wife uses it too, as well as my daughter.

No problems.

We had lots of problems with the non-LTS versions that had KDE 4.x in them, when it first came out. Terrible experience, to the extent that I wanted to got Xubuntu. But the LTS came out decent and we stayed on that.

yes and no

[lister king of smeg]

Linux has ousted home grown os's in the embedded market, dumbphones, tv's, thermostats, cars, toys, gps's, etc.
android/Linux is is the process of of displacing or at least co-dominating with apple in the smartphone-tablet world.
i know it isn't a consumer market but it has nearly completely dominated the it world, nearly killing commercial Unix's, bsds, openvms etc. and it rules the cloud, both as and/or part of the host, and as the guest system (Linux+xen, Linux+kvm, Vmware[as the boot-loader and controller for the vmware kernel.], oracle unbreakable Linux+oracle cloud, and amazon e2 cloud is rum on Linux with many of the guest OS being Linux.
really the only place it hasn't dominated is in the fat client home and business desktop. So i wouldn't count ubuntu out yet.

Teh Lunix, always a day late and a dollar short

[Anonymous Coward]

If Ubunghole wanted to get on the smartphone and tablet bandwagon, they should have moved in that direction YEARS ago. Instead they kept focusing on "Maybe THIS will be teh year of teh lunix on teh desktop!!!"

Is this Ubunghole FINALLY admitting teh Lunix will never, ever beat Windows? But now, by the time Ubunghole Moble (or whatever they'll call it) gets ready for market, it's going to be competing in a VERY crowded field... and now, against Microsoft's always-superior software. And an even bigger threat will be Apple's strategy to win in the courts rather than the marketplace: there isn't much money to defend free software from a lawsuit, especially seeing how 99.999% of all Lunix "innovations" are "borrowed" from other sources.

Necessary evolution because of Microsoft

[Misagon]

I read a lot of critizism against Ubuntu for taking this route, but I think that it is necessary if Ubuntu is going to keep up with the hardware and not fall behind.

Face it. Practically no hardware vendor builds end-user hardware specifically to run Ubuntu. Most PCs that run Ubuntu now were designed to run Microsoft Windows, and that is how it is going to be for a considerable time.
And what is the future direction of Microsoft Windows? ... Towards touch-based devices. At Microsoft's "Build" developer conference last month, they even referred to tablets as "tablet PCs".
It isn't just tablets. Microsoft is pushing hardware vendors to make all screens touch screens: even 24" desktop screens.
In the future, people are not going to be as willing to switch from Windows to Ubuntu if it means that they are going to loose that much capability.

Personally. I would really like a tablet that runs a real Linux distro, is fast and has a high resolution IPS screen. I have been dreaming and yearning for one for fifteen years now, albeit I envisioned it with a stylus.
But fuck Unity! I still run Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (with Gnome and Window Maker) so that I would not have to stand for that crap, and that is what I installed on my newly purchased netbook also.

Re:Necessary evolution because of Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

"It isn't just tablets. Microsoft is pushing hardware vendors to make all screens touch screens: even 24" desktop screens."

So that, instead of resting my arm on the desk, I have to hold it up in the air all day long. Has everyone gone nuts?

What about computers?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Shuttleworth has not only disregarded the community's complaints about Unity, but now his blog is actively deleting and censoring any further criticism. Pleas for them to offer a desktop that actually looks and works like a desktop, if not as a replacement for Unity then at least an offering with an equal amount of support, are being treated with a "we know best, go away you silly peon" response. Sorry Mark, you are not Steve Jobs, you can't get away with that routine. Unity is a disaster, and when you have Linux luminaries like Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond switching their desktops to Xfce, you know you're heading in the wrong direction.

I myself have also made the switch to Xfce, and after doing so, and even after having been a loyal Ubuntu user for five years, I'm wondering what's the point of staying with Ubuntu at all if not for what used to be a gorgeous desktop. I did a little research and found that aside from the formerly gorgeous desktop, all of the things that I loved about Ubuntu were actually things about Debian. Now that Unity has replaced the good desktop, the only advantage Ubuntu has over Debian is a better installer.

Yes, Unity will probably be more at home on a device that has no keyboard and mouse, such as smartphones and tablets. But competing with Android (not to mention Apple) is going to be a tough sell there. So why are they blowing it all by alienating their existing installed base?

Re:What about computers?

[MindCrusher]

Don't blame the Gnome3 fiasco on Shuttleworth too. I agree Unity is not a success, but Shuttleworth saw people would move away from Gnome and thought to try and reinvent the desktop. IMHO he failed, but don't associate him with Gnome.

Re:What about computers?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Yes, you are correct in that Linus was complaining about GNOME 3, not Unity. The real problem here is that all of the big desktops (including and especially Apple and Microsoft) are moving towards a very ugly trend of trying to turn the computer desktop into an overgrown smartphone. Users who have a choice (i.e. Linux desktop users who know how to switch) are generally responding by telling them to piss off and then installing something like Xfce that still looks like a computer.

Re:What about computers?

[MichaelSmith]

You can install any desktop you want on ubuntu. I have fvwm available along side unity and I am sure xfce, etc, would work fine.

Re:What about computers?

[neminem]

Meh. Unity's dumb, but I didn't really like old-Gnome either. Or KDE. I tried LXDE recently and it seems far nicer (read: useable, and less bloated). Still, its default file manager is still a mess and missing all kinds of basic features, and I haven't yet found a single replacement Linux file manager I would actually enjoy using. Yes, I know, people would probably tell me "then fix it yourself", but... that isn't really my area of expertise. Or they might say "just use the cli", which I actually probably would sometimes, but there are some things you just want a decent GUI for.

Crazily enough, if there were just one good file manager, I might actually try the experiment of switching to Lubuntu on my primary home computer for a bit, instead of the current experiment, which just involves setting up a personal server. Yes, I do still want a desktop environment on it. Shut up.

That said, Win7's file manager is a piece of garbage, too... if only explorer^2 was multiplatform. Not that explorer^2 doesn't have bugs, also, but at least they're mostly minor ones. Yes, I'm picky.

openmoko

[m1ndcrash]

I wish them best of luck. I played around with various linux distrs on my openmoko phone. Those are supported by the community and still require a lot of work. However ubuntu phone will be fun.

Re:Canonical? I seem to vaguely remember them...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lost a lot of users after that. Funny thing, never saw a company quite that intent on pissing off all their users until they leave...

Except maybe Netflix.

Re:Canonical? I seem to vaguely remember them...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Netflix...?

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[Dunega]

Was it good for him?

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[someSnarkyBastard]

FATAL: module anger is in use

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has taken Linus and modified it to suit their aims and goals, rather than using the power of community Linux. Canonical will give the smartphone world the power of Linux minus the controls and restrictions imposed by Google. Customers will be the biggest winners here.

Google tried to use the power of the community, but was shut down by a bunch of morons that didn't understand the reality of the problems Google was trying to solve. They then proposed a bunch of "alternatives" and claimed to have fixed the problem without actually addressing squat. As a result, there is now an entirely unused power management system that nobody wants. Linus recently admitted the community screwed up handling that, and should just take Google's patches and then try to improve the code if need be, since Android is shipping and not taking the code isn't causing Google to lose any sleep.

I assume you're referring to wake locks, anyway, as that's largely the only thing Google hasn't upstreamed back to the Linux kernel.

Standardize this mess already

[FyberOptic]

While I'm all for an open-source Linux-based OS on handheld devices, the fact remains that it's not exactly the most battery and CPU-efficient operating system. When you start putting virtual machines and high-level languages on these devices to run cross-architecture applications, you only further diminish the device's capabilities. This has become commonplace now, focusing on ease of development over efficiency, and it's really rather disappointing considering the raw power available in these kinds of devices.

What needs to happen for phones, handhelds, and tablets is what happened with PCs: a single open architecture which allows anyone to develop software that will run on any other manufacturer's device. And the obvious choice is basing it around ARM. Then you develop the operating system to run solely and efficiently on that platform. At that point, applications can be developed in native code, and interface with the hardware through an API, which can then use drivers to deal with different types of hardware in the device (from display to wifi and whatever else).

Unless that ever happens, we're just going to continue to stifle the potential of devices, wasting so much battery power in the process, with companies focusing on throwing more hardware specs at it rather than fixing the core issue. Putting Ubuntu on handhelds doesn't fix any of this. In fact, considering how it's already layer after layer of code even on the desktop edition, it's only going to make the problem worse.

There is absolutely no excuse for a 500+mhz device to ever run sluggishly when attempting the same basic tasks that still run fine on aging desktop computers.

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet that made him REALLY angry. Was he done yet?

No thanks

[Staticharge]

This article should have read "Mark Shuttleworth continues his campaign to clone Apple products as closely as possible."

Sorry, but am I the only one who doesn't think we need another OSX-like operating system on a tablet? Ubuntu is ruining what Linux worked towards for years by trying to lure in users with pretty colors and big icons. That's not what Linux is about. We're not Apple users. We don't care about that shit. We want a system that works, and works efficiently. Cloning OSX is counter-productive to that goal, since it's certainly not the most productive operating system out there.

The dock is one of the worst task-management devices ever conceived. You have no information about how many windows of a particular application are open, nor what those individual windows are displaying. The single file menu bar along the top is an inefficient window design forcing you to completely switch windows before you can access the menu for a different application. A large icon-based application launcher results in more scrolling and digging for what you want to run as opposed to a basic cascading menu of categories. Window controls at the top left, and dialog buttons with the most important button on the right, are completely counter-intuitive to how people read and process information.

The entire design is taking us back 30 years to when the Mac OS first launched, when computers were hardly capable of running more than one application at a time. Microsoft nailed it and created the most productive desktop OS interface with Windows 95 onward. Apple, on the other hand, remained stagnant and has never changed its interface other than adding a dock. So why the heck is Shuttleworth trying to copy it? Ubuntu created a huge userbase, and finally gave Linux a single platform to rally around and focus development in a single direction, but now they're trying to shove a poorly developed interface onto everyone in the name of "innovation."

Yes I know you can simply switch back to Classic, but that doesn't automatically fix the other initial problems of backwards window controls or dialog buttons. It also doesn't change the fact that that's not what people are going to see and use by default. And the default is, quite frankly, a mess. Let's not teach people to use computers like this, before people start getting used to it.

It will never work.

[pclminion]

And the reason why it will never work will be the absolute inability of open source developers to A) agree on a standard for gestures and B) actually adhere to the standard. Everybody will think they have some critically important reason why they can't use the same gestures everyone else is using, nobody will be able to figure out how to use the applications, and the whole thing will look like an amateurish piece of shit. Just my prediction.

HTC HD2

[Anonymous Coward]

Htc hd2 runs ubuntu natively quite well, and can dualboot android, windows mobile, windows phone 7 and meego...

Ubuntu is not bad on the phone but its no replacement for android, I look forward to seeing what they do with the ui and it will be good competition for android :)

Check out xda-developers

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I heard they really did a "git branch".

Dumb Dumb Dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the best selling points of unix is the philosophy of doing one thing and doing it right. They should relentlessly focus on the desk top market until they have at least %80 before thinking of anything else. Then if they do target new markets use a new product like android. So depressing to see these kind of dumb moves from the only half way decent linux desktop.

My Wifi don't work

[qualityassurancedept]

So, once they have ubuntu for smartphones half the posts on the Ubuntu forums will be "My wifi don't work" and the other half will be "My phone's battery only lasts 29 minutes."

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[saint0192]

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. 0x4007fc13 in _IO_getline_info () from /linus/proc/anger

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[Anonymous Coward]

Haircut and shave.

Re:Canonical? I seem to vaguely remember them...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in the mood for streaming some Netflix on my Ubuntu machine. Oh, wait, I can't.

Slippery Slope...

[saint0192]

And then to stop the fracturing of the operating system, Canonical will hold back release of source code...

Don't forget

[saint0192]

Don't forget about the new users lounge, where the most active topic is "I chmod 777 my home directory and now I can't unlock my phone. Even when it's ringing..."

yes no it

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu Jihad Hacka! It is all eye need...

or Xubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better (IMHO).

Sharp Netwalker

[Kagetsuki]

Sharp released a small Ubuntu based tablet called the Netwalker years ago - I own both the tablet and pocket computer versions. They are both pocket sized, so not exactly comparable with "tablets" like the iPad. There are some input issues on the tablet because the input software (made by Motorola) is buggy but other than that I get significantly more functionality out of it than I do my Android phone - simply because it runs a lot of software that "should" only be on the desktop and it runs it just fine - and it's easy to just apt-get install whatever rather than digging through the market. On top of that I can compile whatever I want and run it right there, I don't need to statically package things in a big blob and export them.

Of course anyone who just read that and though "wow, that IS great!" should take a step back and realize the general tablet market doesn't do any of that.

Re:Sharp Netwalker

[znerk]

Wow, that is great!

I wish android had been more like that (as it was kinda hyped to be). Being able to apt-get install (app name here) is exactly what my phone is missing... well, that and the ability to run the same app on my phone that I do on my PC, at the very least for those apps where the task at hand is identical.

Re:Sharp Netwalker

[Kagetsuki]

It really is nice and the form factor of the clamshell model is excellent. It fits in my pocket with my phone, and I can pop it open, write some code, compile it, or actually write a document without having to mess with touch screen input. Unfortunately Android got really popular really quickly and they released what is basically an Android version called the IS01, then that didn't sell well and the whole thing kind of disappeared. I'm hoping they release a new version at some point, maybe with a multi-core ARM processor, but I'm not holding my breath.

Now if I could dual boot a phone or had just a straight Ubuntu phone option with a stylus and writing recognition (and a little pocket bluetooth keyboard) I'd be very, very happy.

Re:Sharp Netwalker

[Shadowmist]

Of course anyone who just read that and though "wow, that IS great!" should take a step back and realize the general tablet market doesn't do any of that.

Or even more importantly there was no such thing as a general tablet market before the iPad, just a collection of Windows devices that for the most part, gathered dust unsold on the shelves of CompUSA.

Re:Canonical? I seem to vaguely remember them...

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing, this sounds a lot like Mozilla, too. What a shame.

10 inches is way too small

[Anonymous Coward]

10 inches is way too small for full penetration into the market (no innuendo). Agreed, the weight and pricing is not ideal at the moment, but in time, I think that will improve. Once they make a thin, light weight version of, say, the Dell XT3, with a screen large enough to display a full A4 sheet of paper, I'm certain you'll see these devices as the main product in any store.

Re:10 inches is way too small

[shutdown -p now]

I single out 10" because that's what the current netbooks are, and they are extremely popular. Sure, for some tasks you need more, but I'd argue that for "serious work" you'd want 14" at least, and at that point it's probably not worth making it a tablet in the first place.

Re:10 inches is way too small

[znerk]

I'd rather have a 7" tablet, to be honest. Feels better in my hand than a ten-incher tucked into the crook of my arm, and is more appropriately sized for reading an ebook or surfing while on the move.

That is, of course, assuming I need to be mobile. When I'm home, I want a 23" screen, quadrophonic sound, and a keyboard/mouse input system.

Similarly, I can see how Unity would be decent on a mobile device... but I have a half-dozen PCs in my living room (admittedly two of them are for professional purposes), and only one phone in my pocket. Dumbing down the desktop was a dumb move, and locking it down will lock Canonical out of my systems.

Re:It's not bad on a netbook where you don't have

[Anonymous Coward]

When Ubuntu 11.4 arrived I quickly decided to fall back to the Gnome "classic" GUI. But I decided to give Unity a new try after the update to 11.10. And it is still there. I actually like it. I have a 21" wide screen and, like many developers, have a huge amount of windows open at all times. The new Unity handles it at least as good as the Cairo dock I was using until now. I recommend skeptics to give it a try (again). Take 20 minutes to explore the features. I think Canonical's main error was releasing Unity too quickly.

moving at glacial speed

[Anonymous Coward]

again, canonical is comical

Re:Good news - Android minus Google's crippleware.

[znerk]

You may refer to this unit as TorLinus of Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.