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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.
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 :)
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).
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.