Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu Asks Users To Pay What They Want
New submitter major_lima sends this excerpt from Ars:
"When a typical user downloads Ubuntu for free and installs it on a computer with a Windows license that the user did pay for, Canonical gets nothing in the form of payment. There's nothing wrong with that — this is the open source world, after all, and many people contribute to Ubuntu with code rather than money. But starting this week, Canonical is presenting desktop OS downloaders with an optional donation form. ... 'Pay what you think it's worth,' and 'Show Ubuntu some love' are among the messages users will see, and downloaders can direct their donations to specific parts of Ubuntu development. ... Once you donate, the Ubuntu desktop starts downloading. Or, you can just skip the donation and download the OS for free, just as you always could. For some reason, the donation page is not presented to Ubuntu Server users."
I wonder how much of this cash will go to the real heroes i.e. upstream people like Debian? Canonical is just a reseller/ISV as they call them in the market.
I use it daily for my work and the kid's machine runs it. I'll drop them some $$$ next time.
In a band? Use WheresTheGig for free.
No need to, you can turn it off anyway, in Privacy settings.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I just hope they don't get discouraged at the number of downloads and installations that don't receive donations. I suspect that a lot of people are like me--they don't mind throwing a few bucks their way (or even a few dozen), but we tend to install, reinstall, set up virtual machines, install yet again, and so on across dozens of machines. I might give a one-off donation, but I'm not going to donate every time I install a copy of Ubuntu.
That's one of the things that's so damn frustrating about Windows and why Ubuntu (or really, any Linux distribution) is so useful. Windows is an awesome OS and I don't mind paying the license fee to run it, but I don't have a few thousand dollars to install it on each of my hobbyist VMs I use for development and testing stuff. Back in the days when I could just use my product code to install it willy-nilly on a few dozen machines, each of which I probably run for a few days and then reinstall for some new reason, it's not that big a deal. But now that everything phones home and nags the hell out of you and denies you service to what you bought, it's not such an appealing option. Hopefully Microsoft will someday realize that they're actively driving people like me away from Windows, but until then, I'll happily cast my lot with Ubuntu instead.
I think you got it wrong: "you should be able to turn it on in the privacy settings". Oh no wait, that's not how it works these days - privacy is opt in!
Personal information is the currency used to buy a lot of products these days. I've never paid Google a dime, but I've gotten many hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of value out of their products and services; in exchange I give them an amount of personal data that they use to present me with ads.
The argument is definitely not moot. Opt-in vs Opt-out are completely different as there are opportunities for the opt in situation to occur before you get a chance to opt-out. Asking the user up front is the best approach (even Microsoft do this with Windows 8).
Yeah because the GNOME people are well-known for collaborating with others and being open to criticism. Oh wait... Why should anyone want to work with a project whose team is filled with a bunch of pigheaded people to whom NIH syndrome is a way of life?
twenty bucks to Mint! :-D
Although Mint is ubu-based, they seem to listen to their users, seemingly unlike post-LucidLynx Ubuntu. To me, Mint is what Ubuntu was before it went Authoritarian Bubble Rubbish -- a pretty fantastic, if not amazing distro. Back in Lucid, I'd not have thought twice about clicking the donation link. However, to pay what I think "it's worth" would probably be unreasonable, since a functional, stable distro is nearly invaluable to me. One could easily think that putting a billionaire behind Linux would be a wonderful thing, but I am not so sure. I also wonder if bubble-people are the sorts that would donate; they might find the process too complex and give up. Maybe Ubu should have an app glued by myriad dependencies that activates upon network-connection and solicits the user with a guided bubble-journey to their bank* account. Maybe they could deprecate Bash for a squeak interface, where users can squeak audible commands to execute various applications; "If you'd like to make a donation, please emit a higher, rather than lower-pitched squeak now.", etc.
Yes, I am slightly bitter; because I remember Ubuntu as something almost inconceivably excellent. The idea of having the freedom of Linux along with out-of-the-box functionality seems almost too good to be true. Thankfully there's Mint for that.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Because Unity is the epitome of cargo cult programming. This is an old comment by Matthew Paul Thomas but it summarizes quite well the usability problems with Unity caused by the cargo cult:
In the April usability test, eight of ten people discovered
the hidden menus. But seven of them discovered the menus by
hovering over the maximized window controls, which in 11.04 were visible all the
time. In 11.10, even those window controls will be hidden by default. So I look forward to seeing whether in 11.10, the fraction of people who learn how to access menus is even smaller, or even slower, or both.
But I don’t think that’s even the primary issue. You write as if learnability (or more specifically, discoverability)
and aesthetics are the only two aspects of usability. They are
important, but so is efficiency.
In the same usability test, whenever one of those seven people needed to use the menus a second time, they didn’t aim directly for the relevant menu. They again moused over the window controls to reveal the menus, and then scooted along to the right. This was, of course, grossly inefficient — especially compared with the speed that a top-of-screen menu bar exists to provide in the first place. In 11.10 the window controls will be hidden too, but the basic efficiency problem will remain: at the moment you’re aiming for the target, you can’t see it.
Every so often, some Ubuntu contributor asks why most of the Unity designers use Mac OS X. The reason, of course, is that those designers are experienced with Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, and other applications that don’t work (or if they do work in Wine, work much less pleasantly) on Ubuntu. And it is precisely those kinds of applications, with their deep feature sets, that use menus most heavily. Anyone who points to Web browsers or mobile OSes as harbingers of a menu-less world is, I think, misguided about what kinds of things people will still use non-mobile OSes for in ten years. It is a small irony that hiding menus by default makes it even less likely that anything like those applications will ever work well on Ubuntu.
I'd recently decided to switch my laptop to Mint.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
goes to Debian, where 90% of the work comes from.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
This is what you get when you have a system where there's no configurability, and everything has to be hard-coded one way only: if you want to do anything slightly different, you have to fork the whole project.
If they had just gone with KDE instead, they could have made their own "plasma" variant or had a different set of configuration options (and even added new features selectable in the configuration options), and the KDE team would have been happy to accept these changes for inclusion.
That argument would have made sense if Ubuntu had switched to another standard system, like KDE, Xfce, or whatever. But they went on making their own. If there's one company who cannot complain to others about NIH syndrome, it's Canonical.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You remind me of the Comic Book Guy:
Comic Book Guy: Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured I was on the Internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.
Bart: Hey, I know it wasn’t great, but what right do you have to complain?
Comic Book Guy: As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.
Bart: For what? They’re giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them.
Comic Book Guy: Worst episode ever.
Believe or not, Mark Shuttle worth does not have a car. He bikes to work. When in London he usually either bikes, takes the tube or, in case of something urgent, a taxi.
Scientia est Potentia
I'd say the most immediate change was the performance. Unity just performed horrifically for me before and I use fairly high end hardware (Intel i7 series processors, Nvidia GPUs, etc). That was a huge turn off.
I also found that the older Unity had all kinds of odd usability oddities and problems (sometimes various window management features didn't work, parts of unity would crash and I'd have to logout or reboot, etc).
So it was essentially a shuddering clusterfuck that actually impeded my work.
So far the new version is fast, just works and most importantly stays out of my way. Most of the time I don't see much OS UI, just my apps (which is how things should be IMO).
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Thanks. It still doesn't seem usable (from my perspective). It wasn't bugs, it was design... I like seeing several apps at once, and I have a large screen to accomodate it... Unitiy just doesn't seem designed for large screens.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
What's actually wrong with Unity? Is there something you can point to, instead of just "ZOMG it's new I don't like it?"
Ok, here goes. A (possibly the) major problem with Unity - and the entire "app-centric" GUI ecosystem from the iDevice and tablet world which it and Windows 8 are aping - is that its focus on applications comes at the expense of documents. This reverses the trend from the 1980s onwards where GUIs were becoming increasingly about the user manipulating rich documents, and puts us right back in the old world of "your data is hard-coded into applications". But that simply isn't the case. Documents transcend applications; the application is just a means to an end.
Why? Two reasons. One, because applications churn faster than data does. For example: my music is a collection of .MP3 and .OGG files. It's over a decade old, and it's not going anywhere. My music player application, however, could be any of Rhythmbox, Banshee, Songbird, VLC. My photograph collection is a bunch of .JPG files. It's also not going to change. The default "photo manager" application (which I'm not sure there's even a need for) in Ubuntu, however, has switched from F-Spot to Shotwell, and then there's the GNOME Viewer if I just want to view them.
Second, there are multiple actions you might want to take with documents, and those different actions may require different applications. If I have a JPG, I *might* want to view it, or I might want to edit it. In that case I'm going to want to open it in GIMP, not Shotwell or Viewer. There's no way the OS can know in advance how I want to work with my data, so it shouldn't attempt to presume that it knows best.
The primary way this broken "applications first" mindset manifests in Unity is with the dock, and the way it groups windows by application rather than document. For instance, if I have two PDF files open, they're two completely separate documents; I want them to appear as two different icons. But no. Dock shows them as one instance of the PDF Viewer, and only once I click on them does it ask me which one I want. That's not at all what the user requires; it's an objective regression in usability (from the document-centric perspective) from even Windows 95's interface. But it's not a bug, it's a design decision, and it's come from inhaling uncritically the iDevice approach of "the app is everything".
I hope this app-focus is just a passing fad in the industry, because it reverses more than thirty years of user interface progress. It's been good news to app developers, as it assures them a privileged industry position and a revenue stream. But it's not good news to the user who wants the ability to sculpt their own document-centric workflow.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
As a counter point, if they found that Gnome was suddenly going in a direction that didn't serve their or their users needs and the Gnome team refused to work with them it makes sense to switch correct?
Now, the same problem they ran into with the Gnome team can easily happen with the above projects, they have little say in how they evolve and in which direction they go and it simply leaves them open to being screwed with again the future. It makes a lot of sense to simply run with your own project.
Amen. I'll give to Mint instead. At least they listen to feedback from users.