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Ubuntu Focusing on Tablets and the Cloud in 2013
sfcrazy writes "Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has shared his plans for 2013. It was clear from the Nexus 7 initiative that Ubuntu is eventually looking into the mobile space more seriously. Google created the cheap device Ubuntu was looking for wider testing and development. The initial builds of Ubuntu for Nexus 7 also showed that, despite popular perception, Unity is far from ready for the mobile devices. In fact quite a lot of 'controversial' technologies introduced in Unity don't fit on a mobile devices such as Global Menus or HUD. So there are many challenges for Mark — redesign Unity for mobile, which may upset users again, get Ubuntu app developers to redesign apps for Ubuntu mobile, get top developers to write apps for Ubuntu... Is it all feasible when companies like RIM or Microsoft are struggling or is Ubuntu becoming a 'me too' company which is not brining anything new to the table and is simply trying to claim a pie?"
Shuttleworth also wants to do something or other with the cloud: "It’s also why we’ll push deeper into the cloud, making it even easier, faster and cost effective to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice, or create clouds for your own consumption and commerce."
As long as we can run our own cloud on our own server at home, I'm all for it. Otherwise, screw it. I don't want to give any company control over my own godamn data.
See, that's the one really nice thing about Ubuntu and Unity. You can walk away from them and not even feel like you've lost something of value.
John
The tablet thing has worked out well for Ballmer and Windows 8, hasn't it?
If you find an element of the KDE interface which does not scale, you should report it as a bug!
But the general point is, I guess, that Mark made a big mistake when he went down the GNOME route: picking the technologically inferior option always comes back to bite you in the opensource world.
This is because when everything is free and you are competing for users and developpers, even network efects cannot win in a universe of open standards and source. The best tech wins in the end. Of course, you can keep the bad tech on life support for as long as you have money :)
Because the desktop is a solved problem, KDE provides an excellent, highly polished desktop experience, which contains a number of innovations -- but remains not-too-different from the desktops of the naughties.
Different devices, with different input capabilities require different interfaces. If you do it the KDE way, the inerface is largely abstracted from the core of the programmes, and you can switch fromone to the other. If you are GNOME, ubuntu of microsoft (or apple), you try to have one interface to rule them all. IMHO, this is a bad idea, but some people seem to like it, so...
What can Ubuntu do on a tablet that Android can't?
Lots of things. Say you have an app built using the LAMP stack; and want to tun it on the tablet. You can't do that on Android since the APM stack is still not good enough in Android. So you either rewrite your app in Android-Java, or run it in a browser, hosted elsewhere on a proper Intel server. But Ubuntu on a tablet would be a better fit in more than 90% use cases.
It's not like tablets are full-fledged PCs
Why not? Like a PC, a tablet has a CPU, RAM, enough storage, and more options for 100% always-on networking than the PC's LAN or WiFi. Many tablets support full USB so keyboards and mice can be connected when required.
Android is just the Linux kernel without GNU; a full fledged GNU/Linux would be a very useful gadget.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
what is the difference between a tablet and a fully fledged PC? My first response would be that it could run raw linux apps without re-codoing them significantly.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Clearly Unity is unsuitable for the desktop, so many of us dumped it. We assumed it was designed with myopic focus on mobile, and made jokes about it being for a one meter tablet to be worked with knees and elbows. But now mobile users are saying it is poorly designed for that space also. Canonical needs to toss their UI rubbish in the can, leave that to those who are gifted at it.
The bad thing is, Ubuntu was something of great value just four years ago. At the time, it was the only version of Linux that you could show someone out of the box and get them excited about using a new operating system. Part of the allure was beryl/compiz, but most of what made it special in the Linux world was that it played nicer with the mandatory binary blobs (like wireless firmware and graphics drivers). It was an acceptable compromise between the GNU way and everyone else.
And a lot of us geeks spread the gospel of Ubuntu to the unwashed masses. Now it's turned out that Ubuntu was a false prophet, so we're having to do a lot of damage control (and further explanations of why Ubuntu's off the deep end).
I'm sure it's more important to you, but what's in it for Canonical? I'm thinking there's very few people who'll spend $1699 (minimum) on a rMBP in the first place. And Linux has around 1% market share, so at best I'm thinking one in hundred of those few people are interested in putting Linux on it. Actually my gut feeling is that the intersection between people willing to buy a very expensive Mac and insisting on putting a $0 operating system on it is even less than that. But yes, let us say it could marginally increase desktop *bunbu market share.
Since we're talking Apple it'd be a cold day in hell before it shipped with *buntu OEM option, so it'd be all self-installs. Does Canonical make any money on the people who download and install it themselves? Well they tried now recently with their Ubuntu lens to great uproar, but I'd say the answer is no. They certainly seem to focus on everything else like smart phones, tablets and smart TVs to make money. Maybe they're getting something from OEM deals like Dell, maybe they're making a bit on desktop support contracts - server support contracts is another thing entirely - but on the whole I doubt getting proper Retina support would contribute anything to Canonical's bottom line. Trying to be a contender to Android has more potential, but honestly they're now far, far behind Google on that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I got an Android tablet last week. It is very frustrating. Half of the stuff does not work if you do not have a Google acount or are not willing to tie your device that closely to an advertising company. The one-app-at-a-time UI is constraining. I would much rather a system like APT to manage installed packages. An Ubuntu distribution on a tablet with a tiling window manager and the ability to run Android apps would be awesome.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
You can port onto phones with comparative ease. But there are both limitations and enhancements.
You can use the phone's sensors, crowd source data, use location info more meaningfully, and interact with the user with whatever touch mechanisms are supported.
But there are severe limitations: storage is small and not getting larger quickly. User space isn't huge. You're limited to 32bit memory models. There aren't serious math co-pros, but ARM does integer math quickly enough. And despite what you've heard, ARM still uses power, and doesn't magically become a Xeon. Even with multiple cores, you don't get multiple work.
That said, the screen IO gets faster, juicier, and more colorful all the time. I'd love to have Debian underneath, rather than Google anything on my phone.
But I think that Shuttleworth doesn't understand cloud. Civilians aren't going to do much with cloud because Shuttleworth overestimates civilians. They don't have time to program, they just want to use this stuff-- that's why they pay others to do the work in the form of program loads and competitive *native* features. They're just not going to create and port a LAMP stack, then do geophysics array curve fitting. Instead: they're going to play games, and not ones they wrote themselves.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
What saddens me is that Canonical's roots are in Africa. A huge place where there is sporadic 3G connection.
I'd really like someone to explain to me how their vision of 'the Cloud' can work when there is no universal 3G data connection available to the majority of the people. Perhaps they have forgotten what Ubuntu originally meant?
Then there is the cost of 3G. Don't even get me started on 4G (EE is a joke) data plans.
Until they become IMHO an order of magnitude cheaper then frankly you can forget universal cloud adoption.
Cloud afficitionados seem to forget (or have a blind spot) this (insignificant in their eyes at least) essential feature.
I run my own private cloud but I am under no illusions about the sort of connectivity I will have to it from the parts of the world where I do most of my business namely, the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Has the definition of cloud changed so much that it can even be done now, with a single server?
The definition of cloud has always been intentionally hazy (pun intended.) Because it's not fixed, it can mean whatever the speaker needs it to mean in the current context. At home, I might define the cloud to be "remote access to my data from whatever device I have at hand". That might mean accessing data stored on my own server, or access to my data stored on other people's servers. At work, many of the app people equate "Software as a Service" with cloud, while our infrastructure guys can use it to mean "scalable on-demand platforms" like EC3.
In the most general terms, the cloud is access to any kind of remote resource via the network. Once upon a time, the old name for it was client/server, but that terminology came from the days of dedicated point-to-point lines between machines, and was too technically correct for the illiterate managers who didn't yet understand that an IP network allowed access to any machine on the network.
Anyway, there is no one precise definition of "cloud". In my experience, anyone who is overly hung up on the word seems to be missing the bigger picture.
John
("coerced" is probably too strong a term -- everyone in the research group uses Macs, so it was more peer pressure. :P)
Still, I don't see how folks are productive with them. I see people holding the "left" arrow key for five seconds in the terminal to scroll to the beginning of the line since Apple doesn't believe in the "home" key, highlighting things and then doing "command-click, choose copy from menu, command-click, choose paste from menu" instead of having proper middle-click-to-paste support, and other such things that seem a great deal harder than on Linux.
Then there's the fact that Apple seems to have merged the concepts of "show me the programs that are on this computer and let me launch them" with "show me the windows that are open and let me switch to them", with the result that figuring out which of 8 terminals is the one I want is more involved than it needs to be. I'm not sure why it does this; is the differentiation between the actions "switch to my Firefox window" and "launch Firefox" really too complicated for the average user?
I can innovate by putting barbecue sauce on peach ice cream. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Ubuntu is doomed. If tablets are Ubuntu's goal, they fucked up already: first off, Unity, which is drek on the desktop is also drek on tablets - so they alienated a large part of the desktop users in favor of nothing (add the local search beamed to Amazon thing for extra bonus points of alienation).
And in the meantime, KDE waltzes in, almost effortlessly creates Plasma and already now there is a distribution, Plasma Active, running on the Nexus 7, and it's actually usable and easy on the eyes.
I should also mention that the tablet marketplace is cutthroat-competitive, and even Microsoft has its work cut out to get in.
Ubuntu should step back from the precipice right fucking now.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
He didn't just go "down the GNOME route". He left it, trying to walk parallel to the route, hoping to keep it in site, but then some brambles got in the way, and then a ravine, a lake, and suddenly, he couldn't even see the GNOME route anymore.
Soon he stumbles across the remains of an old disused railroad track. Shuttleworth stops a moment to catch his breath and survey the area. A few drops of rain patter on the grass amid the chatter of crickets as dusk slowly settles in, and a humid breeze hints at a coming storm. Carefully tip-toeing along the weathered-cracked timbers, he follows the track a short distance and rounds a bend into a grassy clearing. Scattered around here are remnants of industry; broken barrels, wagon wheels, a headless axe handle, white and splintered from age, overgrown by kudzu. Against a cliff wall there is what appears to be the entrance to a really creepy looking old abandoned mine shaft. Boards are haphazardly nailed across the opening and an aged wooden sign with faded letters warns: "all hope abandon, ye who enters here."
Amazon searches? Deriding users who dislike Unity instead of useful dialogue? Now an admission that Unity was about tablets and the cloud after all?
Ubuntu started by offering candy and jewelry, and now it's getting a little controlling. If we don't leave soon, abuse will be the end result.
when someone prefers XFCE to Unity, they are still benefiting from enormous efforts by hundreds of people to make the core Ubuntu platform
I feel truly depressed. A quick look at some Debian packages with apt-get showsrc xfce4-terminal shows 2 uploaders, and the work being done mostly by Yves-Alexis Perez. Then having a look at the Ubuntu package shows that there's almost no work at all from Ubuntu on that package, but the rework of 2 patches, AND THAT'S IT.
So, instead of a self-satisfying self-congratulation, and telling about the "hundreds of people" behind it, Marc should truly thanks the thousands of Debian Developer doing the real work FOR FREE (and the other thousands of maintainers who aren't DD and get their package sponsored). These are the real persons that makes it possible.
If you’ve been arguing over software licenses for the best part of 15 years then you would probably be fine with whatever came before Ubuntu.
If what Marc is saying here is that Ubuntu doesn't care anymore that software should be free (as in Freedom), then yes, it's time that everyone stops using Ubuntu. By the way the recent global search spyware finished to convince more and more people.
Whether you’re building out a big data cluster or a super-scaled storage solution, you’ll get it done faster on Ubuntu than any other platform, thanks to the amazing work of our cloud community.
With all the due respect Marc, I believe my Folsom packages of Openstack, which I'm slowly uploading to Debian experimental (but also available on a non-official repo), are both better and more easy to use than the ones currently in Ubuntu. You'd better stop touching yourself, and remove these lintian warnings which are all over the place on the Ubuntu packaging.
Consider it a gift from all of us at Ubuntu.
That's it, now I want to slap you in the face... We are talking about COMMUNITY SOFTWARE, not Canonical. Neither XFCE or Openstack are (c) Canonical. If you want a list of the top committers in each project to show you are wrong, I can do that, no pb.