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Google Talks About Its Ubuntu Experience
dartttt writes "There was a very interesting session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit by Google developer Thomas Bushnell. He talked about how Ubuntu, its derivatives and Goobuntu (Google's customized Ubuntu based distro) are used by Google developers. He starts by saying 'Precise Rocks,' and that many Google employees use Ubuntu — including managers, software engineers, translators, people who wrote the original Unix, and people who have no clue about Unix. Many developers working on Chrome and Android use Ubuntu. Ubuntu systems at Google are upgraded every LTS release. The entire process of upgrading can take as much as four months, and it is also quite expensive, as one reboot or a small change can cost them as much as a million dollars across the company."
Bushnell also mentions that Google Drive will soon be available for Linux. Other news out of UDS: there was discussion of a GNOME flavor of 12.10, Electronic Arts reaffirmed that they "won't delay their Windows work for Linux," and Unity 2D is likely to disappear in 12.10.
With Linux desktops, it's almost better to reimage them then do a mass roll out of dist-upgrade and pray it works. Even with custom package management, it seems the upgrade scripts can be very buggy.
I hope Unity 2D doesn't go away. The 3D version isn't usable on my systems. I'm growing to like Unity, but performance is only acceptable on my machines when using the 2D environment.
He starts by saying 'Precise Rocks,'
It does, but only if you throw out Unity and install KDE on it.
Otherwise, it's a huge POS apparently aimed at the Facebook crowd who do nothing more sophisticated with their computers than browse the web.
Glad to get that out of the way.
OK, I'm not sure I understand the whole "get rid of Unity 2D" thing. As I understand it, Unity 3D means it's accelerated, but VMware and other virtualization environments don't support GPU acceleration for Ubuntu yet, so that leave people who prefer to run Ubuntu in a VM without a GUI. Where's the logic in that? Not even Windows forces you to have a modern video card for hardware acceleration -- if your hardware can't do Aero Glass, Windows just switches it off.
Breakfast served all day!
is that EA has even noticed Linux. Commercial Linux games died pretty hard after all, and it's hard enough getting 3D working under Windows let alone Linux. Yeah, I know a 100 /.tters will chime saying it just worked for them, but you guys hand pick your hardware, you're in the minority.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The irony for me here is that right now one of the things I'm struggling to get working in Ubuntu 12.04 (64-bit) is the Adwords Editor + Wine; this is *always* a complete pain in the arse, firstly to install, and then later on when you think you've got it working and then it wants to update... and fails.
The worst thing is, isn't Adwords Editor written with XUL? Shouldn't that make it portable or something? At this point, I'd prefer it was written in Java!
Ubuntu/Precise is awesome. It really shows how much effort went into this release. I am extremely happy with how little I needed to customize or fix after installing it on my laptop (suspend/resume, encrypted file systems, unusual hardware drivers ... all the things that usually cause problems worked out of the box).
On the other hand, despite trying to get used to Unity, the new UI just does not work for me. I can even (almost) understand the design choices. It certainly looks shiny and discoverability of most UI features is pretty good. A lot of the UI has been simplified to make it easier to use for casual users.
Unfortunately, almost every single one of these changes really gets in the way of my day to day productivity. I spend so much time every day using my computer, I need a window manager that gets out of the way most of the time. And that defaults to doing the right thing, when I need it to do something for me.
I am sure, as a power user with very specific requirements, I am not in the primary target group for Unity. But fortunately, after installing GNOME Panel and the Awesome window manager, I found a solution for my UI needs. I am now as happy as can be. This is by far the nicest Linux distribution I have used.
What would be really powerful is a way to write apps in one API that can be run on smartphone, or in a browser, or on desktop. Of course they'd manifest differently in different scenarios, but there are a lot of fields that could use smart phones as tools for work, if they integrated easily with desktop solutions. Google should pick a Linux, and cultivate it for this sort of thing for it. People love Android, they see it as cost effective but cool. If that platform were to grow out, I could see it being picked up by a lot of people. Of course to fly, the cloud would have to be an optional enhancement. Its great in certain circumstances, but when the wild eyed guy tries to explain why storing our personal files on his computer a thousand miles away *just makes more sense to keep everything on* than our hard drives attached to our computers in the same room, people start to turn off...
Google employees love to use KDE systems and they will be really happy when their systems are upgraded to Precise as lots of great work has been done on KDE since Lucid was released. However, not many employees like new UI changes meant for consumers and not developers. Some of the Google employees also requested removing Unity and Gnome 3 and using xmonad instead.
ive been a long proponent of linux, since 1997 i have tried to have at least one pc running linux hoping for the day that could leave windows altogether.
well, after the last debacle i had with the upgrade. i am 100% switched off of linux/ubuntu. and solely on windows.
i root my phones and keep swapping ROMS , i triple boot pc's with experimental OS's . so i do take alot of risks with things.
but , when i followed the distro upgrade that was presented to me through update manager, i went right ahead without worry.
then lost my best ever setup of ubuntu with ftp servers that i had setup like a "dropbox" system for my netbooks and android phones.
media center tweaked to be a sweet jukebox. all was blinged out.
then the upgrade killed it.
Ubuntu 12.04 + Cinnamon. Better than Linux Mint 12, though I'm anxious to see what LM13 will look like.
The last update to Ubuntu brought advertising into my desktop. I tried to search for an application and the unity dashboard presented me with music albums from the music store.
Fucking hell.
I understand if they pack rhythmbox chokefull of advertising for their music store. I would hate it but I'd at least understand it. But when the simple task of starting an application, the most basic task of graphical shells, is used as an opportunity to advertise to me, I've had enough.
That's jumping the shark twice.
I already ditched Ubuntu for LinuxMint in my desktop but used Ubuntu in my media center. I'm changing OS next time.
But... the future refused to change.
I recommend not trying Unity. It actually destroys the entire concept of windows. You now only have 1 window for the same application, no matter how many chrome or terminal windows you might have open. That's right. Your usual File menu bar is also at the top of the screen. That's right; not near the actual window. Want to toggle between different applications easily? You can't. Welcome to Alt-tab hell. God its terrible.
I haven't looked back. I pretty much follow Google's model for my primary desktops (home and work) -- I stick with the LTS releases, and transition several months after the new LTS comes out. In the interim, I load up the non-LTS releases in VMs or on secondary machines to try them out and get a feel for what's coming in the next LTS release.
Have to say, I'm not a Unity fan so far. I've been using GNOME up until now, but will likely transition to KDE when I upgrade to 12.04. KDE does seem to be a resource pig, but hey RAM is cheap these days, all my desktops have at least 8GB.
Does anyone know what this alleged show-stopper (for Google) Python 2.7 compatibility issue is?
Just because Google uses it doesn't mean it's any good. I'm not being a troll here - if you'd try a distro other than Ubuntu, you'd find that Ubuntu isy really, really bad, bloated, and slow. Yes, there are other distros that are equally as bad or worse, but there is an abundance of distros that far exceed what Ubuntu provides.
I'd suggest Archlinux myself, or plain old Debian if you want something that's stable and easy. Arch has rolling updates meaning you don't have milestones - packages just get updated as they get changed by their developers, so no real upgrade hell there. Debian is rock solid (more than Ubuntu), and is great for servers and everything in between - it's the right balance of coddling/ease of use and stability, without the bloat and crap.
The real issue with Ubuntu's serious suckage is that it's been made too corporate, and has been hijacked by a corp. While other distros are funded and run by corps, they tend to keep the spirit of open, nonintrusive, non ad-based OS'es going instead of forcing changes, ads, and other BS (like Unity) on their users without any real notice. They also don't make people so unable to fix their own problems by coddling them with a GUI for everything.
This (boring) video says more about Google and its parasitic nature than it does about Ubuntu. You'll probably want to save yourself the time and pass on it. The most noteworthy piece of information I got out of it was this: Google's internal apt repos blacklist certain packages for reasons of privacy. As the speaker mentions, many of these packages phone home, and that's unacceptable to Google. Also, no coredumps/automated bug reports will make it out alive because "who knows what's in them".
And Google has a very, very good reason to have this policy. They know *damn* well the power of data mining. And they sure as hell aren't going to willingly participate in that game. I mean, as a contributor, that is.
Yeah, and Google, instead of telling us how huge you are and that it costs you a megabuck to upgrade your workstations when the latest Ubuntu LTS comes down the pike, you could at least (a) keep your hubris to yourself (it's really, really cheap and tacky), and (b) thank the folks at Debian for their hard work and brilliant distro. (This coming from a die-hard Red Hat user)
and Goobuntu (Google's customized Ubuntu based distro)
I'm not sure you can call it a distro, as it (correct me if I'm wrong) was never distributed. And from the looks of it from videos released by Google, it appeared to be merely Ubuntu with a "Goobuntu" splash screen. So, secondly, I'm not sure changing the boot splash qualifies it as a distinct distro in its own right.
The Admin and the Engineer
Have a separate (huge) partition for /home.
Have multiple OS partitions (about 30GB each, give or take).
Have your Ubuntu on one OS partition.
Install the latest Ubuntu on another OS partition, fresh or over a dd copy of the old one.
Switch among them as desired.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
You know your OS is mainstream when VMware makes it so you can centrally manage the OS instance as a VDI instance in the data center where it runs right next to big iron....
That also means Microsoft Windows x64 versions are such a small percentage that VMware is not wasting any time with them either... I wish our HP thin clients could connect to a broker that served up Ubuntu instances. Some people need accelerated 3D, 2D, USB redirection, smart card authentication and local printers. Right now VMware has a monopoly on getting everything to work. Sun might be able to but you have to do Solaris and All Sun hardware from front to back.
Let me know if I am missing anything here....
Your Average Joe
I had not heard of ads before, nor experienced it myself when traveling the ubuntu upgrade path. Then again, it *is* linux; you can easily eliminate it from your system.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
You mean like if it is a copy-cat Debian?
When I upgraded Ubuntu and encountered Unity, I too was shocked at how bad it was. Instant revulsion. I tried to stick with it for 6 weeks to see if it was just me, but it was bad. I got rid of it and reverted to Gnome, but it had grown so bloated that the responsiveness of the entire system had gone to hell. Thank god I discovered the light-weight windowing environments that have been out there for years, maintained by a small but loyal fan base. I switched to XFCE and hey presto my venerable 600mhz machine was as spry as a young'un. It made me wonder how long I could stretch this machine out, whether or not its physical components would give out before the progressively greater demands of the OS would drive me back to the good ol' CLI for everything...
If not us, who? If not now, when?
I have been using computers for about 15 years now and here are my thoughts concerning OS updates and (to a lesser degree) updates in general:
I try to avoid updates like hell.
More often than not, an upgrade will tend to make the system slower, influence your user experience by changing the way you do stuff (for no apparent reason), and break things. So unless we are talking about an update that adds important functionality that is worth the risk it comes with, it just won't come anywhere near my system(s). Obviously, this way of filtering updates lets (most) security updates pass for machines that are online. I put really important systems on an air-gap network.
The above also means that UI (or similar) updates are straight out. No UI is flawless. No OS comes complete with the functionality you wished for. Once you set up a system and adjust it so that it won't (badly) suck, then chances are that you will be finding ways to add functionality using 3rd party software, learn how to do things someone decided you are not supposed to (also known as "hacks" for you youngsters) and in general bring it to a state that you are more or less happy with.
They why, oh why, do you have to go and mess it up?
I'm not saying that I don't use the new stuff, but usually such new experiences also come with new machines that (in general) get fresh installations of the latest versions of everything that is needed. I found this to minimize the pain and time wasted, and most importantly, it puts you in control. If you perform a casual update and things go awry, then it is highly probable that you will be wasting time on trying to fix it, while you should be paying attention on more important things.
Love the joke at 7:30: they're blocking Ubuntu packages that phone home, since they cannot afford to let work-data leave company premises... however, they CAN use Google Drive.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Why don't they talk about how the incompetent clown known as Sundar Pichai is shutting down the Atlanta office and letting go a bunch of extremely talented engineers, many of them Google employees for 5+ years, just because he is as useless as Vic Gundotra? Those are the things I'm interested in, not in some stupid bastardized version of Ubuntu.
I found this a fascinating talk. I was particularly intrigued by the their "canary" rollouts to small subsets of users.
Traditionally, the companies I worked for developed and tested locked-down images, taking many months to complete the testing. Rollouts were rare, maybe once a year. Only critical updates got rolled out because of the potential for breaking systems.
Google's "canary" approach seems to be a means of radically reducing the testing time for patches and updates, allowing far more frequent updates than the "traditional" approach to desktop image management.
And I agree whole heartedly: Computers will always fail. One of the tenets of real time systems design is to allow for bad signals, unexpected inputs, and failures of the components you're talking to. Google seems to have simply expanded that philosophy to cover their entire infrastructure.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Much of the graphical "interface" debris is completely pointless. No one *CARES* if your terminal windows have fuzzy, 3D rounded edges and a hundred applications icons cleverly listed in a featureful manner that *no one ever tested on anyone but the developer who wrote it*.
So I continue to use "twm" as my basic window manager. I can run a file browser to find applications, but lord, my graphical interface is so much faster than Ubuntu, Debian's, SuSE's, or Fedora's overloaded pieces of overdressed eye candy that I'm actively earning more than my colleagues for faster, better work.
"The entire process of upgrading can take as much as four months, and it is also quite expensive, as one reboot or a small change can cost them as much as a million dollars across the company."
As opposed to Windows, which has built-in upgrade tools, allowing upgrades to be done within a boot cycle.
Even funnier is how you look at the epic failures of places like Munich, which tried and miserably failed at being "zero Microsoft" shops.
I couldn't decide between fast and lightweight distros so I tried Debian as a temp solution. I've had Debian squeze on my Thinkpad for the last 1,5 year, and it really is an out-of-the-box great experience.
I installed the nvidia driver, chrome,
java and AssaultCube and was ready to go.
For me it provides the safe harbor when slackware distros demand human sacrifice to work. I dual-boot to Haiku-OS as the fast web browser OS.
No one is amazed at the looks. But they would be if they tried it!
Defining Statistics and Social Research
People may actually listen to your points, except you outed yourself with "a shithole full of dumb tribal niggers". Sorry, but racism is clear evidence of imbalanced thought processes and makes your entire argument suspect.
> Unity 2D is likely to disappear in 12.10
No. I don't need compositing to edit a spreadsheet, thanks.