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Shuttleworth On Ubuntu Community Drama
In the wake of the Ubuntu Developer Summit, a number of contributors from its community have been speaking out, saying they're uncertain about their role and their future working on Ubuntu. They're concerned about how Canonical is making decisions, and also how (and when) those decisions are being communicated. Now, Mark Shuttleworth has addressed the issue in a blog post. He said,
"The sky is not falling in. Really. Ubuntu is a group of people who get together with common purpose. How we achieve that purpose is up to us, and everyone has a say in what they can and will contribute. Canonical's contribution is massive. It's simply nonsense to say that Canonical gets 'what it wants' more than anybody else. Hell, half the time *I* don't get exactly what I want. It just doesn't work that way: lots of people work hard to the best of their abilities, the result is Ubuntu. The combination of Canonical and community is what makes that amazing. There are lots of pure community distro's. And wow, they are full of politics, spite, frustration, venality and disappointment. Why? Because people are people, and work is hard, and collaboration is even harder. That's nothing to do with Canonical, and everything to do with life. In fact, in most of the pure-community projects I've watched and participated in, the biggest meme is 'if only we had someone that could do the heavy lifting.' Ubuntu has that in Canonical – and the combination of our joint efforts has become the most popular platform for Linux fans. If you've done what you want for Ubuntu, then move on. That's normal – there's no need to poison the well behind you just because you want to try something else. It's also the case that we've shifted gear to leadership rather than integration."
He also had an interesting comment about Ubuntu's target userbase: "I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say."
"I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say."
They should all run plan-9 or Haiku
I can leave my girlfriend at a Gnome 2 machine forever and not get any questions about how anything is supposed to work, because it's functionally very similar to Windows.
Put her in front of a machine running Unity and she's continually asking 'why is this doing this?', 'how do I do this?', 'where did that window go and how can I get it back?', and 'what is this crap anyway?'
So I would say that Canonical has gone out of its way to make Linux hard to use.
This was the core of his rant:
He's side-stepping the issue in that the point is that Canonical wields more power than the average contributor, and thus is in more of an authoritarian relationship.
However, he's hit on a bigger point, which is that in any collaborative software project, someone needs to be the silverback who forces everyone else to focus, or people do only what they want to do and blow off the unfun stuff.
Unfortunately, unfun stuff includes refinements to code to make sure it works well, drivers, documentation, gnarly bug fixes, and the like.
Futurist Traditionalism
It is a false choice to say that pandering to mercantile interests will always go against the FOSS/Server interests. They often can align. Plus, Linux has succeeded despite its desktop and difficulty to install, not because of it. Shuttleworth isn't advocating putting trusted computing in the hands of MS, he just is saying things should be easier on the desktop. And why the hell not?
Z
So why did he force unity down the users' throats? XFCE is much easier to use!
To an extent, I like the distro, but I've had similar complaints about how they have changed user level features in the past without offering any kind of migration path. Now it looks like the same mentality behind Canonical's management and release style has finally reached developers as well.
Well, it isn't the end of the world. There are plenty of other distros. I wouldn't be surprised to see most of the devs just go back to Debian.
Well it's a good thing that IBM, Red Hat, and Microsoft (you know, the people who write so much of the kernel thee days) have no mercantilist interests, then.
"I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say."
The flip side of that coin is that you never go full retard. Microsoft is straddling the line, and it seems Canonical is following suit.
Linux desktop is dead I repeat. LINUX DESKTOP IS DEAD.
After 20 fucking years. First time in my life, I did not try to replace my failed desktop. Just looking around to find way to install a linux distro to my new deadly cheap chinese knock off tablet.
Attach a keyboard and mouse.
Volia.
So what you're saying is you installed a full Linux distro - ie a desktop distribution - on a tablet. And you're saying it's dead? Riiiight...
Shut up Hairyfeet, we know it is you hiding behind that bad English.
+1
The unfun stuff is the killer every time. Either you pay somebody to do that work, or it doesn't generally get done. I have used Ubuntu for several years now, and I have never seen the reason for the wrath some people have toward Unity. That said, there are a few glitches and odd functionalities that, were I a programmer, I would contribute fixes for. But I'm not. And the work required to correct these problems is certainly going to be time-consuming and tedious. Therefore, it probably won't get done.
In total, though, I'd still rather work on Ubuntu than Windows or Mac any day. Windows because it seems to be able to slow down the fastest machine in no time flat, and Mac because despite its reliability I don't like it and I can't change the things I don't like. With Ubuntu I (generally) can.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
Ubuntu has some power to make Linux more known in general crowd, which in turn helps the Linux ecosystem as whole. Thus it might be good to let Ubuntu flourish on the side, even if you are a user of some other distro.
There is also a golden rule in life -- The one with the most gold makes the rules.
Seriously though, Canonical has more "skin in the game" than any other Ubuntu contributor and they are funding the lion's share of the expenses. You'd think this would be justification enough for them to "wield more power than the average contributor". Unlike other "authoritarian" regimes, you are free to leave and start your own fork without fear of being hunted down and shot. You can always go help Mint. I agree with Shuttleworth, if you don't like the conditions at Ubuntu then go somewhere else and try to be grown up and not poison the well when you leave.
I agree. I think Shuttleworth is just voicing his frustration with the very vocal few who dust up drama whenever they feel slighted like the recent announcement that Ubuntu Developer Summits will be held online and happen more frequently.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
I'll be back as an Ubuntu user when they have a reasonable UI again. Unfortunately I have one box xUbuntu won't install on, so I have to run Mint on it (that's my 2nd choice).
fork it! fork it! fork it!
It's that as users we don't understand why we have to either choose the Ubuntu way or the highway. Unity is forward thinking, but it is also single minded and isn't very customizable.
I've sung the praises of the HUD to everyone I know who's moderately interested in computing. It's great. But the fact that I'm stuck into the Ubuntu way of managing my windows and desktop just grates at me. As amazing as HUD and lenses are, I still choose to go with MATE because it gives me an expected, customizable and sane way of managing my desktop that I can't seem to duplicate with Unity.
I hope Ubuntu succeeds, but damned if you aren't ignoring us when we ask for some simple customization.
He also had an interesting comment about Ubuntu's target userbase: "I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say."
Too bad that's the opinion of way too many people on too many Linux forums. In fact, that attitude launched Linux. It wasn't about total computer cost or features. It was about "I'm better than you" and they shut out all the other problems Linux had to pretend it's an ideal OS instead of addressing them to make it more user-friendly.
For a guy so against tribalism this Shuttleworth guy sure seems to be intent on eking out his own tribe, including doing his best to push out members he feels do not share share his 'vision'.
It is what it is. Just be aware that while Ubuntu may be open source and have community governance participation, it's still partially a Canonical-driven project. That's fine, and the partnership has certainly gotten Ubuntu further (in terms of impact on the world in general) than it would have without a direct commercial driver. It's always interesting seeing these things from the Apache perspective (which on the technical side is quite different from linux distros, I admit). Apache projects themselves are required to act independently. But that in no way means that the projects don't have a lot of drivers from commercial interests. It's just that the Apache board is a stop to any one commercial interest being the sole driver. In any case, while personally I'm interested in the ubergeek commentary from Ubuntu insiders and /.ers, I'm professionally interested in communities that can tell a story to the world at large. Someday an linux distro will be something commonplace in the average human's life - and in a way that the human is actually aware of it. Perhaps Android is starting on that front, in terms of the human awareness of it.
Yep those few usually are.
At some point someone has to say that "I can't run this ship by consensus". Now that everyone and their dog have access to the internet it is very visible that whenever something changes, there are people who voice their disagreement with the new thing; and if there's no change, then people will vote with their feet and say that they will choose the most innovative product/company/project.
What is regrettable with all this is that whenever there's news from Ubuntu, there's no shortage of people saying that they moved away to Mint or whatever. If that is the case, why comment Ubuntu stories at all?
There seems to a common denominator in "unfun" stuff as regards coding. It's the bits which rely on libraries, protocols, formats or hardware which haven't been standardized yet. If we all had two image/sound/video formats (lossy and non-lossy), one time format, one type of graphics card and CPU, one file format or data transmission format, one (spoken) language (which we'll all move to eventually given enough centuries), or (horror) one OS or programming language, software would be much more exciting to write, knowing it will stand the test of time.
The tedium is found in writing code multiple times for uncommon formats, CPUs and OSs, increasing code complexity (bugs), and knowing that it will probably be dead one day. Yes, competition and multiple standards is probably a good thing initially, and hardware is certainly changing and improving for a while, but when things finally settle down in a century or two (?), the real productive work will have just started.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
It's not about difficult vs easy when it comes to distributions. Both Fedora and OpenSUSE installs with relative ease these days. But Canonicals insistance of doing everything alone, fragmenting with new upstream projects. There's no rhyme nor reason for Mir, and all it does is cause headaches everywhere. And that's what they've gotten most shit for these past days. Not their ease of use.
-- Linux user #369862
At the end of the day it's his company and if he wants to take Ubuntu in his/their own direction that's up to them.
I used Ubuntu for many years and was really happy with it. I moved on since then and use another distro.
Ubuntu has done a lot of great work for the Linux community and also got a few things wrong (in my humble opinion).
There is no reason to hate them for it. People make the opinions known and it's up to Conanical to take these opinions on board or not.
There is so much choice out there for Linux and if you don't agree with Ubuntu's direction use something else. Ubunutu is open-source so you can roll your own version or use a derivative.
But really all the hate for Ubuntu and Shuttleworth is childish.
Freedom as in speech not beer.
"...How we achieve that purpose is up to us, and everyone has a say in what they can and will contribute." --as long as it falls in line with whatever Shuttleworth wants.
"He's side-stepping the issue in that the point is that Canonical wields more power than the average contributor, and thus is in more of an authoritarian relationship."
well duh.. what average contributor does more than Canonical? I'm sorry but your argument makes no sense to me.
'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say.
He's right, you know,
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
The Linux community is full of egotistical dickheads that like to control the product and then work it when the move on. Miguel De Icaza is a perfect example of this type of characters.
Let's face facts. A good number of Linux developers do it for the power and pride it gives them, not because they want to design a product that serves the needs of a diverse audience. They are the Josef Stalins and Chairman Maos of the Linux world. Totalitarian to the core. Self-serving egomaniacs in essence.
I respect Mark Shuttleworth because he has a vision of a product, and that vision drives his decision process. He's authoritarian in his process, but a slave to his vision and humble in his own status. And that is exactly why he has been successful thus far, and why he will continue to succeed.
Somebody needs to remind him that "ubuntu" is African for "I can't install Debian".
Man, that's funny, considering "debian" is French for "we'll update stable next decade".
no need to use Ubuntu these days: the linux desktop is in good shape now, just use Debian 7 or CentOS 6.4
Ubuntu is obsolete
"He also had an interesting comment about Ubuntu's target userbase: "I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say."
I'm cool with that, as long as it's not used as an excuse to block me from doing what I want to do. Don't take the Apple approach to dumbing tech down please.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Hell, half the time *I* don't get exactly what I want.
he has forgotten that community is the very essence of open source, and that for a business leader as he is be forced to compromise is a fine indication the project is proceeding normally.
people are people, and work is hard, and collaboration is even harder. That's nothing to do with Canonical, and everything to do with life.
stop making excuses for yourself and your company; it cant be helped. your business has been the core concern of many developers and yet youve only now chosen to speak up in defense of your arrogant mailinglist decrees to blame us for being who we are?
in most of the pure-community projects I've watched and participated in, the biggest meme is 'if only we had someone that could do the heavy lifting.'
who the hell do you think you are? if anyone has done the heavy lifting, from wireless to pcmcia to the acpi im sure youre using on your ubuntu laptop, mtp support and bluetooth its been the efforts of hundreds of thousands of community members from other projects. if by 'heavy lifting' you mean commercial branding, syndication, and profit from the sweat of our collective brow then yes. bravo.
I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different.
Linux is about choice, and people can choose to differentiate themselves substantially from one another in the pursuit of the freedom to choose. to say you simply dont care for 'different' is as infuriating as it is disappointing. a fairly evident red flag to most community members that ubuntu will become the 'be different: conform' distribution. if i squint hard enough, i can see the desicated corpse of steve jobs in the canonical logo.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I guess I hoped Ubuntu would succeed because it was good Free Software not in spite of it. It seems like Ubuntu is cooling off on some of the values that make free software great including openness (secret Mir developments), collaboration (going their own way on new infrastructure), respect for privacy (Amazon Dash) etc.
I wish the Ubuntu guys would stop trying to be another Apple, and instead focus on what they and the community can offer than Apple never could.
On the subject does can anyone make a suggestion about where best to go in terms of other distributions. I want to stay in the Debian family. Debian Stable is too behind the curve. Debian Testing seems rather volatile - a friend told me wine disappeard for a while on his install. Mint seems quite ok, but does it try too much to be a windows clone. Really I want something like debian but with some user polish, and a ~6-month release cycle.
I get dreamy thinking about this. It would simply everything. However, I have one thought of caution.
Standardization creates a single point of failure.
Allowing solutions to exist simultaneously, and develop independently, allows there to be no single point of failure and for multiple solutions to be tried at once.
I think there's a reason nature (insert name of deity or deities if you'd prefer; I'm agnosticism agnostic!) chose to go with natural selection. While less efficient on the surface, it works in every situation and eventually, produces a time-tested quality result.
Just food for thought, not a contrarian argument.
Futurist Traditionalism
I definitively agree. Canonical is taking a leadership role and there's nothing wrong with that. It often easy for a few developers to say "hey, let's implement a FOSS version of c#, Java, Windows, SMB, etc." Sure people want these but at the same time, where is our new desktop paradigm, our more efficient file sharing protocol? MIR is an example of getting out of this pattern where we simply FOSS things but actually show some innovation. Obviously there is innovation in the FOSS arena but it need to be more up front.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
It's apparent that Shuttleworth is attempting to channel the late Steve Jobs as far as his vision for Ubuntu is concerned. The problem is, it's almost as hypocritical, scheming, unethical and as-closed minded as Jobs himself was.
Canonical is benefiting from an entire community whose collective goal is the betterment of computing, driven by philosophies founded in liberty and transparency, of openness and spirit of mutual respect and cooperation. Even the name of Canonical's "Ubuntu" is borrowed from African philosophy and is centered of humanity and mutual respect. The hypocrisy arises when, under the guidance of Shuttleworth's vision for this OS, Canonical introduces mainstream concepts that are, in fact, contrary to the philosophies of the open source community, and tarnishes its namesake "Ubuntu". Time and time again, Canonical has pushed scopes and lenses down the community's throat, automatically opting-them-in to whatever deal Shuttleworth has struck with the devil.
I recognize (and this has been argued many-a-time on various forums) that Shuttleworth/Canonical isnâ(TM)t in the business of philanthropy; however, what he is doing is effectively selling-out a community, the same community that helped Canonical and Shuttleworth attain its current status.
While every user has control to un-tick certain boxes, opt-out of these services, or remove said scopes and lenses, there is an inherent violation of permission, a breech in philosophy, and a usurpation of a user's right to inititate these things, to have absolute control and betrays an entire community who have given their time and knowledge to something, someone whom they once believed in.
These actions on Canonical's part are presumptuous. They assume that everyone wants to board the train to the mainstream, but the fact of the matter here is this: many a disillusioned person has left Windows or Apple OSes for these very reasons; the gnu/linux community is inherently different - and Shuttleworth does his best to discard this fact as easily as user's rights to privacy. Canonical (and Shuttworth himself) very much operate on the assumption that anyone and everyone willing to download, install, and utilize Ubuntu shares Shuttleworth's vision of joining the 'mainstream'.
This vision is myopic, impractical, and an embarrassment to an entire community. When a person like Shuttleworth, or a company like Canonical, begins to act with such disregard and blatant impunity toward the people who made them both what they are today, it is a knife in the back. Itâ(TM)s as simple as that.
Actually, the really big problem that he's ducking here is the question the complaining community developers may not have explicitly asked but were probably thinking, which is: "Is Mark Shuttleworth basically just treating us like free labor for Canonical? And if so, why are we bothering to help him?"
However, he's hit on a bigger point, which is that in any collaborative software project, someone needs to be the silverback who forces everyone else to focus, or people do only what they want to do and blow off the unfun stuff.
How that works in a lot of projects is the BDFL: Linus, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, etc. And that seems to work well enough, without being tied into a specific for-profit company's bottom line.
I am officially gone from
"I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say."
There is absolutely no Linux user who wants Linux to be hard. It is very revealing that Shuttleworth needs to defend himself by pointing to non-existent people.
We want a UI that's optimized perfectly for the desktop. An uncustomizable smartphone UI simply doesn't cut it when you've got two 30-inch monitors. We're not "different" and we're not "leet" -- we're Linux desktop users who use it professionally all day every day for productivity.
I wish he would just be honest and admit that he has made a unilateral decision to make Ubunutu a mobile-only distro. We're not stupid -- we can see what he's doing. Shuttleworth deliberately abandoned desktop users, and then he rationalizes it by falsely claiming that we're "different" and "leet" and want to make Linux "hard".
He said he wants nothing to do with the crowd who wants to be diffrent
upstart, now unity, now mir.
Ubuntu is at the forefront of non-standard projects that fracture the GNU/Linux community, with software that generally sucks btw.
Mir has yet to be seen but going by upstart and unity, I don't have much hope.
No, I don't want linux to be exlcusive for experts only, I want it to be easy to use, and I want it to use compatible software as everyone else, so what runs on ubuntu runs on red hat, runs on arch, so we have a shared knowledge base.
This was a reality since glibc became ABI stable.
'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say.
He's right, you know,
Yes, he is. Only he's NOT, because the whole argument is a straw man. I haven't *ever* heard or read someone in the community say anything remotely similar. Except as an straw man, you know.
> I have used Ubuntu for several years now, and I have never seen the reason for the
> wrath some people have toward Unity.
It's funny - I went from Windows to Ubuntu and was happy until Unity came out (didn't work, everything was different and unintuitive, it wasn't anywhere near configurable enough - it was as if the developers didn't want me to configure it so there was One Experience for everyone). I moved to Mint (apparently I wasn't alone) and tried gnome 2,3, kde, lxfe and some other variations on those letters but found that I still have problems with basic functionality like 'setting the background and expecting it to appear after a reboot' and 'when I move files somewhere where there's not enough space, don't continue to attempt to move then, deleting as you go because then I'll lose all my files` and `why can't I see the mp3 tags in the file explorer like I can in windows` (no, I don't want to have to use another app to do this, pasting in the path as I move between folders because it's inefficient, and no, I don't want to use the command line to move 12 out of 88 files from a to b.
I take issue with Shuttleworths' "keep up with Android etc" statement because Ubuntu - Unity or other - is nowhere like as intuitive as Android. Perhaps it's just not possible for a desktop OS to be compared in such a way, as I don't develop on my phone, though.
Both Ubuntu with Unity and Gnome with Gnome 3 ruined their user interfaces and they wonder why their communities are falling apart and hate them!? Microsoft is going through the same thing with Windows 8, rushing something called "Blue" out this summer. The users who use your stuff are all you have. If you alienate them, you're done.
And that's why he keeps breaking long-established UI convention and keeps reinventing the wheel in any shape but round?
"Wanting to be different" is what is destroying Ubuntu.
He try to frame things in a binary fashion. Either you want to have easy stuff on the desktop and then you should not criticize him, or if you are against him, then are against having stuff for everybody. That's just a rhetorical tactic.
In practice, the issue is not that Ubuntu make things easy, because that's a good things to do, it is that Canonical is not respecting the community and do not discuss, because they think time to market ( or cadence, as they explain ) is more important. That's ok to believe that, but you have to be clear. removal of UDS 3 months before without discussing first, lack of respect for those that have bought plan ticket, and took care of accomodation. Not caring about community rules ( ie pushing changes after freeze ), that's the same, not caring about respecting rules for community. Using the Ubuntu name becuase they own the trademark. Not respecting the rules that community should follow.
Of course, Mark never say he is treating people unequally. Or never even try to defend that, he prefer to attack stawman, like the minority of people who think "ubuntu should be kept for elite". I never seen people like this, at most, I have seen people that complain we removed what they used, which is not exactly the same. So yeah, infuriating opponents by using lame tactics is the way he react to that. He did like this for the Amazon issue, he did that for Unity, etc.
The only thing I can say is that he is being too emotional about the project, thus making everybody realize this is *his* pet project, not the one of everybody.
I get the impression that this is offered to placate the frustration that has been vented around Canonical's decision to harvest user data from the dash.
Sadly, Shuttleworth doesn't seem to grasp the core of that issue [or, if he does, this is another attempt at misdirection]. He thinks that people are reluctant to allow the data to go to advertisers for marketing purposes, but in that he's totally wrong. People are unhappy because they know that anything Canonical harvest can be siphoned off and demanded by governments anywhere in the world. Without the users knowing.
The only way to safeguard against this is for users to shorten their "supply chain" and deal directly with those that they want to. Having anyone - no disrespect Mr Shuttleworth - but *anyone* "inserting themselves" into a personal computing space is just wrong. I *do* understand that you're offering an escape clause and I do understand that you'll allow this to be disabled, but it's still wrong.
So tell me again, why the hell should I choose Ubuntu?
He's side-stepping the issue in that the point is that Canonical wields more power than the average contributor, and thus is in more of an authoritarian relationship.
Well duh, are you also going to complain that Red Hat calls most the shots for Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Unless things have changed radically while I wasn't paying attention, Ubuntu is still very much Canonical's product. Working with the community and being run by the community are two entirely different things and Canonical clearly isn't planning to let someone else tell them what to do. This is more of a wagon train, if you want to join up with Canonical because you're going in the same direction you can, but they still set the destination and if you don't like it, well maybe you shouldn't be in it instead of complaining that this not where you'd like to go. There's not really a shortage of other distros to work with if their goals are more similar to your own, is it?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I can think of lots of dumber things a smart person could say.
'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say.
He's right, you know,
Yes, he is. Only he's NOT, because the whole argument is a straw man. I haven't *ever* heard or read someone in the community say anything remotely similar. Except as an straw man, you know.
No, of course nobody says it. They DO, however, imply it heavily, and that's what's being heard. Every time a user interface improvement gets shot down in discussion because it's "not important" or "not worth our time testing", every time documentation gets put off because it's boring, every time a new user is treated condescendingly because they couldn't decipher poorly-written incomplete documentation (or are told to read source code), every Debian user (it's always the Debian users) grumbling over someone writing a GUI to something the for which the neckbeards have only had a CLI for years... THAT'S when it's being said. Not out loud or verbatim, mind you, but it's definitely being said.
If Linux simply focused on being a free replacement for Windows XP, and kept all the fancy bells-and-whistles for 'bolt-on' APIs and optional whizzy 3D shells, it would already have complete dominance. While Linux fights the 'fashion' war and always wants to keep up with the latest 'whiz' from Microsoft and Apple, it is not going to make any real progress.
Operating systems should be about building blocks, not dogma. A mainstream OS needs a solid foundation- it must install easily, and support hardware 'out-of-the-box'. It must be reliable with HIGH performance. It must make sense. It must not push high fashion ideas of the moment- such concepts should be present via optional apps, not the OS itself.
I mention XP precisely because it represents the peak of a work-horse OS from MS. I also mention XP because, under the hood it is creaky and broken- a golden opportunity for anyone who wants to take MS's lunch. A base desktop Linux for users should be like XP, but with a decent memory manager, proper support of multiple processors in the scheduler, and elegant sharing of resources by multiple threads.
MS has so much success, but is terrible at software engineering. No-one at MS has ever cracked open a book on the theories of computer science. Their code is full of hard limits and dreadful fall-back modes for when these limits are exceeded. When the OS is in charge, resource thrashing ALWAYS occurs if 2 or more independent code blocks are accessing the same resources.
The market would kill for an infinitely better engineered XP- an XP where under the hood things were actually coded properly so things like SSD, multiple cores, masses of RAM and other modern facilities were used as more than band-aids.
Why has Linux failed so far? Because of the ATTITUDES of the people behind Linux. No-one would use Microsoft if Linux provided a SANE alternative.
The great hope now is Android, but the great worry there remains Google- a company that has proven over and over that its management is even worse than at Microsoft. One assumes Android will go 'desktop' sometime in the next two years, as mega-powerful mains powered ARM parts start to appear. The worry is the success the horrible ChromeOS has seen via the sales of the very popular Chromebooks.
Yes, as an Android user, I KNOW the desktop is fully supported in concept, with APIs that allow for keyboard/mouse input and windowed output, but this misses the point. Android is NOT currently on desktop systems, and there is no market for desktop apps running under Android.
Linux has another chance with Valve, Steam, and their 'console' designs, but sadly in this case, it is likely Valve needs nothing more than a thin basic OS from which to launch the games or steam. Valve has no incentive to help Linux compete with MS properly on the desktop.
It seems unlikely. Fragmentation is the natural state of things in general. Spoken language constantly changing, fragmenting in new and fun ways. When computers stop fragmenting, it'll be because one group (most likely with government approval) controls the entire chain, and no other groups/people/companies are allowed to contribute to the computer world without approval. If it ever happens, the real productive work will have effectively ended...
I don't know why the truth was modded troll, only on ./ :)
His posting reminds me of a Antebellum planatation owner insisting that his actions are benevolent and noble; that his slaves would be utterly lost without his loving guidance.
--An LMDE convert
I was reading that as a shot to everyone who hates Unity.
You know, Everyone.
no you're doing it wrong - you suck the mint
I have been a user of Ubuntu for many years. Since 2005 or so.
All these debates about Ubuntu, Shuttleworth and Unity do not affect me in the least.
Why?
Because I use KDE Ubuntu (Kubuntu), not Gnome/Unity at all. I also stay with the latest LTS and not upgrade to the twice annual releases.
The same goes for servers. I use Ubuntu Server LTS, which has a longer support cycle of 5 years vs. 3 years for the desktop.
Not affected by any of those ongoing debates or controversies ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
My Grandmother's hard drive died a few years ago and ... I got a cheap 1TB drive to replace it (nothing cheaper available really at the time) and of course the XP restore disk decided she was a filthy pirate and that was that.
After installing Debian and KDE for her, my support requests have become nil, except when any of my younger cousins visit and why does this flash game not work... because Adobe hates your freedom children, that's why. But my Grandmother just readers her email and plays KPatience and it Just Works (tm).
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
By even using Ubuntu, you are enabling the bad, increasingly draconian behaviour of Shuttleworth. The main freaking point of Linux was to no longer be dictated to by the powers on high - a point he is willfully dismissing in his pursuit of money.
It's more than a rhetorical tactic. It's an intellectual fail that was inherited from the GNOME project. The fail goes like this: "We must have a good default UI. Instead of giving advanced users the ability to tweak that interface via an 'Advanced' button, let us just take away their ability to tweak. Because noobs are so noobish they will click on Advanced, screw things up, and then complain to us."
False and Wrong, idiots. And a big fail. There is plenty of software (especially a lot of Apple software, which I hear is quite popular), with preference dialogs that have "Advanced..." buttons, and guess what, noone on the forums is complaining of stuff that was misconfigured. (They are complaining of actual Apple fails, but that is another story).
That one epic fail---that one decision that you can't have both a simple UI, and a button somewhere in the preferences that caters to your advanced users, is the root of all the backlash against GNOME and Ubuntu. Your hubris is costing you dearly.
Put an effing advanced button on all your preferences. And no, gconf-editor or dconf-editor or any of that garbage doesn't cut it. It needs to be COMPREHENSIBLE to be useful.
No, it's a shot to everyone responsible for GNOME still emulating Windows 95 after a decade and a half.
The B is no longer good for Business.
I'm sad to agree with you.
Mark calls anybody who disagrees with his vision (which was never entirely presented to the public, but is instead rolled out in "surprises" like Ubuntu phone and then tablet) a "whiner." Anyone who criticizes a decision is being "selfish" and "childish." (These are all words he uses in interviews, blogs and bug comments on Launchpad.) But you are very right that he is setting up a straw man. Sure, there are a few childish whiners, but a large group of people criticizing the directions of Ubuntu are people heavily invested in free software, and they have an interest in seeing Ubuntu succeed. These critiques are not "selfish," they are all about trying to make Ubuntu succeed.
But Mark avoids any kind of discussion by pretending that he's dealing with "dumb" people.
Mark, it's not a black-and-white world.
Are you sure Canonical spends more money on Free Software development than Red Hat?
There is also a golden rule in life -- The one with the most gold makes the rules.
That always true on community distros though. Influence is power in large community-based distros, moreso than money.
I agree. I think Shuttleworth is just voicing his frustration with the very vocal few who dust up drama whenever they feel slighted like the recent announcement that Ubuntu Developer Summits will be held online and happen more frequently.
This is the conflict. Shuttleworth has a lot of money, but there are others who have a lot of influence. Why is it OK to use money to hire developers to work on one set of priorities, but it is not OK to use influence to get a lot of other developers to work on a different set of priorities? The former just tends to be a lot less visible and doesn't involve making a stink on public lists.
Mark wants to use his money to have Ubuntu achieve one vision, and others want to use their influence to have Ubuntu achieve other visions. Legally Canonical might own the name, but they can't really own the thing most people associate with Ubuntu as it was never really theirs to begin with.
Linux was always a system that required system-level tweaking in order to get and keep a system up and running. Defaults weren't particularly sensible for most use cases, drivers and components were unstable and needed to be replaced/reconfigured/updated/patched in order to achieve a stable, functioning work environment, and so on, and some things weren't "done yet"—drivers still under development years after hardware releases, and so on, with users waiting for them and needing to install/make use of them as soon as they were released.
That's just the nature of the beast when you're talking about a community-driven system with myriad code inputs that bases bunches of code on reverse-engineering.
But so long as Linux was reasonably transparent, anyone that valued free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech software could make the cost-benefit calculation that the amount of extra work and patience required to get and keep a system up and running was justified by the benefits involved.
Already by 2009, however, I felt as though the costs were growing while the benefits were the same as they had always been. An accelerating decrease in the transparency and modularity of desktop Linux distributions led the kinds of tweaking necessary to get and keep a linux system up and running to take longer and longer for me, and the continuous rush of new code and new subsystems that significantly different from the UNIX classics meant a corresponding increase in the need to continue to study and learn how these worked.
But my job wasn't and has never been Linux development, so this extra learning and work didn't contribute to my bottom line. It was just an increasing quantity of valuable time and energy being siphoned away from it, in fact.
There is still a market for a stable, easy-to-use, transparent Linux system with a smooth learning curve from easy-to-use/easy-to-learn through master-tasks/hard-to-learn, one that can open all of the documents, media, and network streams that mass market users need to be able to open and that is also free and open in all senses.
The problem isn't that Canonical is leading, it's the content of the leadership—both in terms of social/political issues, and in terms of the technical result, that aren't encouraging. Maybe one day someone will take up the mantle and finally deliver an easy-to-use, modular, transparent and powerful Linux system that's stable, has sensible defaults, and is both free and open. But to date nobody's come near the target, which is kind of a shame, because everyone's been able to see it for a decade, and it's often seemed as though "just a little bit of leadership" would get Linux there.
But I don't think Canonical is it; they're out to fulfill other goals/purposes, leaving that opportunity to continue to be open.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
"I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive'
This is coming from a guy whose company basically created 'upstart', which is a pure example of someone wishing to be different and making it hard too, for absolutely no reason.
It's great having to edit init files, in year 2013, in order to be able to prevent service from starting up on boot.
I guess that is what he calls "easy", then.
This.
The thing that bothers me most is the breaking of the existing userbase's experience. In software design, the rule of interfaces is not all that hard: you never modify an existing interface. If you need something new or different, you add another interface, but leave the old one in place. Even if the old interface has a flaw, its understood that current consumers are already handling that flaw, and you have to remain bug-compatible to not break their implementations.
Unity came out as the changed interface, and that broke everybody's old dependencies. People are only slightly less rigid than a program, and if they've been used to five or ten years of doing things one way, flipping them overnight is not the easy route to acceptance -- especially when they aren't clamoring for a dramatic change. Look at Windows 8 - it's not a bad touch-screen interface for a new phone or tablet user. But it's a shitty interface for a keyboard and mouse, and worse for anyone who has spent 15+ years with the task bar paradigm, and Microsoft deliberately chose to ignore them all. Canonical seems to be trying to be the Mini-Me of Microsoft.
So way to go, Canonical, you modeled yourselves upon a failure.
I'm sure "the community" loves having their distro turn into a keylogging spyware platform. The mask of community input comes off pretty quickly when money is involved...
Because if you don't change and break the user interface every couple of years, you're behind the times, man!
The Windows 95 style of UI is what got the masses using PCs.
The command line didn't do it.
The old Macintosh UI didn't do it.
I haven't seen a better basic idea since then. Have you?
Oh, and I use KDE (with the Classic menu style).
'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say.
He's right, you know,
Yes, he is. Only he's NOT, because the whole argument is a straw man. I haven't *ever* heard or read someone in the community say anything remotely similar. Except as an straw man, you know.
I hear it all the time. Smart people who say they want to keep the bar-to-entry deliberately high to weed out stupid people. Generally they say this about programming and not about an operating system, but the overall attitude is the same: they like being in their own smart-kids club. Call it revenge of the nerds, or whatever. It's elitism, and it's very real.
The thing is that it's completely not the point. Shuttleworth believes that Unity is easier to use than GNOME, and regardless of whether he's right or wrong, he refuses to believe that he's wrong, he refuses to accept evidence that he's wrong, and he refuses to let anyone compile evidence that he might be wrong. And that's the part that makes him a horrible leader.
John
Microsoft don't really participate in the Linux kernel development, they just send patches to make it compatible with some system of theirs. They don't "use" (officially) Linux so they have no interest in its development. On the other hand, both IBM and Red Hat use Linux, so the changes they need to do are actually real development of the software.
I was given a hp laptop because it was not working. I found that there was a problem with the hard drive. I tried to use the recovery partition to fix it but it would end with a error message telling me it could not recover. I replaced the hard drive and went to reinstall windows 7. I then found that the key had completely warn off. So I installed Ubuntu on it. I took it to a local computer repair shop. I showed it to the person there and she booted it and told me since it was running Ubuntu no one would be interested in it. I have sold several windows computers there in the past. So it is extremely difficult to sell a computer today that is not running a windows operating system even if that is more than 10 year old OS(windows xp).
I do hope that once they do Mir, it's capable of supporting at least the popular DEs - like KDE, Razor-qt, Cinnamon, LXDE and XFCE. And it would be interesting to see how Mir evolves. If they can do that, that would definitely be noteworthy. On TFA, I do agree w/ Shuttleworth, although the Unity experiment shows that their directions are not w/o considerable risk. But I do wish Canonical success in at least some market, so that they don't go under.
Can't poison a well that is mostly poison. They use a d.e. that no one else uses so no code for it is usefull. Now they will be moving to a non binary compatable display server with xorg. Which means 3d relient programs won't be portable, good luck with amd and nvidia supplying drivers for a os display server with less users than bsd.
I expect in a few years they will roll their own kernel.
That's because you're one of the elite. I can switch to a new windows manager. I can modify a program if I don't like how it behaves. My guess is that you have similar capabilities. That puts us in a category of user that Ubuntu isn't really targeting.
To the target user, the idea of fixing their window manager to behave the way they want is something they understand in theory but in practice will never accomplish. They know that somebody else could fix Unity or switch to a different option but they don't know how and have trouble understanding the instructions to make those changes. To them, Unity is something that the elite force on them. Because of the elite, they are forced to deal with things they don't understand.
Unity is hurting the Linux experience for many new users and they feel justifiable frustration and those of us who want Ubuntu to be a welcoming experience for them share that frustration. These days I recommend Mint instead. I've tried it and set it up for people and it really is what Ubuntu used to be: easy. The only downside is that when they have questions, the vast majority of Internet information that might apply has "Ubuntu" on it.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
I've seen the attitude that Linux should be left to the elites plenty of times, but never among Ubuntu users. Ubuntu was built from day one for widespread adoption, the elitists would gravitate towards a version that is harder to install and use. I agree that discussing this is a red herring.
I'm saddened by this development because I did see Ubuntu as the flagship for end user -focused Ubuntu. I prefer to use Linux distributions I can recommend to friends that work outside the tech industry, and this was my go-to choice. I like Linux Mint, but their version upgrade advice is to back up your data and install each new release from DVD or USB. That's fine for a tinkerer like me, but not something I'd suggest for a friend who just wants their computer to work. What should I look at next, for a combination of friendly to newbies and still useful for experienced users? Fedora? OpenSuse? Mageia?
RescueMode in the ramdisk should be on the boot option list for each and every Ubuntu CD, DVD or USB stick. It is beyond me why it has not been the case.
http://xkcd.com/1172/
Mint is great until you want a new version. Then they recommend that you download the next .iso, burn it to disk, back up your files, reboot, and reinstall everything. They've replaced the Ubuntu problem of a less than optimal desktop with the problem of a work-intensive upgrade process.
I think the solution would be something that handles both problems - a good Linux desktop and an easy upgrade process. When I get bored I'll take some of the other relatively popular distributions for a spin to see if any fit the bill - OpenSuse? Fedora? Mageia?
I was reading that as a shot to everyone who hates Unity.
You know, Everyone.
That is complete rubbish there are many of us that love unity, it's time you unity haters got over it, if you don't like it install another desktop.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
Download a new ISO???
Upgrades in debian-derived distros are supposed to be foolproof. Simply edit your sources.list and do an apt-get dist-upgrade.
Instead of giving advanced users the ability to tweak that interface via an 'Advanced' button, let us just take away their ability to tweak.
Every added option / configuration setting increases the test load. Add a boolean (ON/OFF) option - increase the number of possible configurations that you need to test by 2. Not to mention that two configuration options might influence each other (i.e. if option A is switched on, option B must not be switched on).
Ah ah, so there is advanced users, but using dconf-editor and reading doc is too complex for advanced users, seriously ?
You are a fine joke, sire, even if a little bit obvious.
I agree with Shuttleworth, if you don't like the conditions at Ubuntu then go somewhere else
I was just getting used to Ubuntu being a community project, now it's also a place. How long before it becomes a tax?
And thus, spaketh the Shuttleworth to thine lowly devs.. "If you’ve done what you want for Ubuntu, then move on."
Yeah, after pissing all over your user base with Unity and having them all migrate to other distros.. what better way to bookend that, than shatting all over the people, without whom, Canonical wouldn't have a distro.
They used to say it, but the last time I heard it was about 10 - 15 years ago. I think everyone is on the same page now in wanting everyone to use it and stop giving money to microsoft.
Admit it... you're one of the "members of existing communities [who] resent [their] work"... :p
"I haven't *ever* heard or read someone in the community say anything remotely similar."
They think it, they're just not articulate enough to say it. Not that you'd hear what you didn't want to anyway.
What an odd interpretation - surely he was referring to the fact that distros have made it so you don't have to care about what your CPU arch is: whether you're on one of the ARMs, MIPSes, Sparcs, PPC or otherwise. The distro's infrastructure/ecosystem keeps continuous, automated builds and test reports of all packages for all supported CPU architectures, rather than hoping that the author of your favourite text editor has up-to-date binaries for your particular CPU on his blog (which is where now?).
That's because saving on disk space is *entirely* the last reason to argue for shared libraries! If I was asked "why bother with shared libraries", disk/memory usage wouldn't even make the list. But it would have things like:
Contrast with not using shared libs. The author must now stay on top of all dependencies by themselves. And how should it be decided when it's worth cranking out a new release? And perhaps it comes to build day (probably manually, most authors have day jobs after all) and one of the dependencies has a current stable version that's only 2 days old. Now there's a decision about whether to use it or go with the previous version which has had a few months in the wild. Also, what CPU architectures am I going to build for? Do I even have cross-compiler set up for them? Is my build environment at the best version/config to support them? Do I even have an example of the hardware to test on?
What about from the user's perspective - say there's a libpng bug on the loose which enables arbitrary code execution. How do I go about understanding which of my fat-binary-statically-linked executables use libpng, let alone what versions they're running? Okay, let's pretend we have a decent tool which can scan the system and reverse-engineer this. What can I do about it? Nothing, unless you want to uninstall each affected piece of software or hang around hitting 14 separate websites waiting for each one of them to do a new release, which may or may not have a fixed libpng built-in (you are hoping each release manager for each piece of software could be bothered to stay on top of the updates for something as benign, boring and stable as libpng and that they will have bothered to update, test and release with the fixed version).
These are all things distros take care of for you - automated build farms continuously test and build your software on machines and configurations you've never considered, much less have time to actively support.
This is all about sustainability and sharing of maintenance effort, the very reason package management systems were invented in the first place. It's not just the package format, the tool, the assumptions/"visions" they implement - it's the infrastructure, ecosystem, and shared curation. So that we can strive for consistent software quality in a way that scales all the way up and all the way down from the largest and smallest codebases, userbases and development teams.
Which is truly the core of this argument. Dismissing package management systems means dismissing the ecosystems which needed them.
Mark & Others,
Stop whining and do what Google and Apple does, please. A simple branding and marketing move will solve your issue.
Apple doesn't call OS X Unix or a BSD as they have diverged so far away from both it would be misleading customers. Same is with Google, they don't call Android Linux or GNU/Linux as it's not really what to expect those familiar with Linux.
Right, now once you understand the crux of the problem, just stop calling Ubuntu a Linux. Call it Ububtu based on Linux technology like Apple calls OS X based on UNIX technology and that's it.
Ofcourse you can't then so strongly ride on Linux brand, but Ubuntu is already so strong brand that it can stand on by itself.
ac
--
I'd buy a system with Linux on it and no Windows on it in a heartbeat, especially if it didn't have the secure boot crap that Microsoft is trying to push to make systems with its OEM installs hard to use with a second OS. Send me your pre-Windows 8 systems and I'll gladly install Linux, probably Knoppix, on them and I will troubleshoot hardware failures and leave the repair shops to con clueless Windows users.
But, I digress. I just upgraded U 11.10 to U 12.04 and what I notice is that Canonical is not sweating the small stuff, like correct configuration and documentation of its installed base, so they are ripe for eclipsing by any distro that pays attention to detail.
The problem with Canonical is the fat ego of its millionaire owner who really doesn't care about users, and his being in bed with Gnome empire builders and Red Hat hidden agenda. Not only are they seduced with sexy and the lure of tablets, but they can't do very much right. I've used all U releases from 8.10 to U 12.04 and the feature set has broken legacy at each step. Things I liked in U 10.10 are now broken, and like every other commercial tech support operation I've ever been part of or used, the marketing of the new features is more important than maintaining or fixing bugs in the installed base. This makes these dreamers and schemers vulnerable to disciplined competition.
I really hate businessmen in mature markets, and that is what the Linux world has become. When the greedy bastards who first worked at Apple or Microsoft get the idea that Linux is a money maker, they take over and spoil it, or try to. Mature markets bring fat egos and control freaks. It is time to take Linux back and make it more transparent for novices to try out and use. They shouldn't have to worry about installing or partitioning or even what window manager with what features to use. There shouldn't be fights breaking out over the UI, because that reflects the power grab rather than a freedom of choice and reduced complexity. I think Puppy is the right approach, but with a more industrial strength installation.
I've seen some of the smaller distros, tried out many of then, what I.d like to see is something that runs out of archives that live entirely within an NTFS filesystem or a single EXT4 or some other filesystem type where you don't have to manage partitions to install multiple linux ssystems. This is not mere virtualization, or use of disk images. Puppy has already shown with with a Gig or more of ram you can do useful things in RAM and flush changes to dated archives that can exist as revision control and backups that can be reloaded into memory. All the choices about window manager and applications can be reduced to loading a set of archives, along with system configuration, logs, and user files from other archives. Doing away with the install will end much of the nonsense.
My son installed Linux entirely on his own about a week after his 2nd Birthday. I formatted his hard drive, handed him Ubuntu 5.10 install disk and told him to install his OS. No, he couldn't read. No, reading was not necessary. Yes, the hardware was supported. Claims that Linux is difficult to install are claims of stupidity. I'm not buying it. Yes, as his father, I like to think my son is brilliant. Even so, anyone who cannot match wits with (even a brilliant) 2 year old is severely brain damaged.
Linux has not been difficult to install for almost a decade.
I agree. I don't know if 95 is what I would call the pinnacle, but it is the version of Windows that made me sell my Amiga. I actually like a lot of the desktop tweaks that Windows 7 has over 95, but it is still basically the same desktop.
For most Debian derivatives, that's the case. But for Linux Mint, the recommended upgrade path is a fresh install: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 From that page: "In a 'fresh' upgrade you use the liveCD of the new release to perform a new installation and to overwrite your existing partitions. ... This is the recommended way to upgrade Linux Mint". You can do apt-get dist-upgrade, but it's not supported.
I was reading that as a shot to everyone who hates Unity.
You know, Everyone.
I am not going to lie, I don't HATE Unity, but I have my moments with it.
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. - Colonel Henry Walton Jones, Jr., Ph.D.
I agree his suprise roll changes are why I went to linux mint, it shouldn't be about him but about the operating system, Ubuntu has a lot going for it, if the centralized control would lighten up.
Ubuntu was a simple choice to recommend for businesses between 2010 and 2012, but now I recommend Mint (Mate normally). That's all I have to say on this issue, Gnome 3 and then Unity have killed 'classic' Ubuntu distributions for me (even though Mint itself is based off of Ubuntu). I tried xubuntu for a few months, but it has various problems itself, so I had to stop with that.
What worries me about anything that depends on Ubuntu repositories is the desire of Canonical to do away with X11. Ubuntu has had a terrible record of supporting legacy applictions, so if those that depend on X11 are supported in some compatable display monitor and window managers, can you trust Canonical to guarentee a transition? I think not.
From a usability perspective, I like Ubuntu. I prefer Unity and I like the dash.
What I hate is the limited amount of information provided about exactly what is going on behind the scenes. I mean either Ubuntu One is broken, or they are sending and recieving a lot more information from my PC to their servers then I give them permission to. Dropbox sure doesnt take so long just to startup and it never sends files to dropbox unless I tell them too. Ubuntu one takes hours to get going even before I told them I want to send a single file? So what is going on there? Is the service really that crappy? Hard to know exactly what is going on because it is not clearly spelled out in the user documentation. And forget about using it for buying music, because i cannot imaginine ever using something so incredibly slow as a paid service.
Now consider the privacy settings. It says you can "forget" information for the "past hour". Many would think this means that it should not remember anything longer then 1 hour. But it is unclear whether this option is doing that or whether it is simply requesting that the last hour of memory be removed and all other recorded historical information remains.
Then you see an option not to bring up crash reports. But it does not specify whether this turns off sending crashes to Canonical and others or whether this simply removes the prompt from appearing that allows you to decide not to send it.
Then you search the web for information on this, and the answers are vague and many just say "dont worry Canonical wont do anything bad with ur information". It seems to me that they really want to collect too much information from the user and want us all to just look the other way.
Ubuntu is feeling more and more like a bootleg copy of Windows. I mean just because it seems to be free, doesnt mean your actually getting anything of value from them. It seems with every convenience that Ubuntu adds, they are making the product more and more commercial (as in sell-out) and less and less secure and private. Soon Ubuntu is going to feel like a free copy of Windows. This may feel like a great thing for existing windows users, but for those who use and love linux... this is a big let down.
You pretty much entirely misunderstood what I was saying, and argued at length against ideas I already disagree with. And I suspect it's because you have decided that Linux package managers are the only possible way to build the Linux ecosystem:
This is all about sustainability and sharing of maintenance effort, the very reason package management systems were invented in the first place.
And therefore, when someone says something bad about Linux package management, you interpret it as an attack on the only thing which can provide sustainability, sharing of effort, etc. You need to take into account that people might be disagreeing with your axioms instead...
I doubt we'll see consolidation of not only Linux (desktop, server, mobile or otherwise) to the extent necessary to make package management and shared build/testing infrastructure the waste of time you seem to think it is...
You really, really don't get me. I think that, rather than helping, the existing Linux model is actually hindering.
And the reason for that is that when you really look into it, the things you say about how it helps all contain paradoxes which mean they actually hinder. For example, build and test infrastructure isn't actually shared, it's duplicated -- each distro does build and test on its own, because each distro is trying to tweak thousands of applications.
Ingo Molnar makes the arguments better than I can, and speaks from a viewpoint considerably closer to the problems than mine. (Be sure to read both posts, and also there's some good discussion in the comments.)
https://plus.google.com/109922199462633401279/posts/HgdeFDfRzNe
... after misunderstanding the GP yourself
We're having a disagreement, not a brawl. Just because I haven't adopted your point of view based on a few casual, wishful remarks from yourself doesn't mean that I am stubbornly clinging to something for the sheer fun of it. I have responded because it seems like you're trying to say something interesting, I just can't figure out what it is. I certainly can't relate it to any actual experiences in using, supporting, maintaining and developing open source software. So I guess I'm trying to understand if you've arrived at your conclusions based on something real, or did you just like the sound of it?
I got that, but you have to offer some sort of reasoning or justification for this. I completely fail to see that ditching shared libraries wouldn't result in a net increase in burden - I'm trying to imagine this world, it's a forgotten pre-internet era which seems far more tedious for both users and developers alike. How would you address the concerns I raised? Can you address them, or am I supposed to simply accept that your scenario is better?
I just want to use my computer, code, and share my code. I don't want to babysit my computer in every excruciating detail. I wonder if what you actually have an issue with is more abstract - fragmentation from competing ecosystems? Community/contributor organisation? OSS collaboration/release practices? Development priorities? Policies?
And yet, the very things you're saying are hindering us are prominent features in the platforms Ingo wants us to reproduce!
Again, more misunderstanding. Distros do not run build & test infrastructure because they're tweaking applications. Yes, it happens, but the vast majority of packages are completely unmodified, using distro-specific build parameters which are supported by the toolchain and is *not* upstream's concern. In fact (especially in the case of libraries) the human involvement in updating a package with upstream is simply running a tool which automates this!
The reason distros run build & test infra is to confirm that upstream have released something sane and behaves correctly in the distro's environment. Which is exactly what the platforms Ingo advocates do as well - Android, iOS, Windows Mobile.
You haven't shown me any technical challenge yet. And I don't buy that "use of packages or package management systems" equates with "OMFG what a waste of unnecessary extra work for everybody". Nobody is forcing anyone to package anything, and if you look carefully the "too many packages" argument can be re-cast as a "move stuff out of main and into contrib/universe" - or abandon the latter entirely, which is what PPAs or vendor/project-specific repos are all about. Hell, I can't be the only one using Oracle, MongoDB, and other project/vendor-specific repos can I?
I've seen it. Not a lot, but occasionally. Someone saying (seriously, not sarcastically) they don't want a large share of computer users to use Linux. Some say they really like being in a semi-exclusive little community. Others fear the whole Linux experience will get dumbed down to fit lowest common denominator of user, missing the point that FOSS let's anyone who really wants to make the software as simple-to-use or complicated as they want.
Shuttleworth is an arrogant prick who is so up himself. He has done more to damage the LInux community than anybody else has yet his narcissism and plain obnoxiousness have made him oblivious to the destruction around him,
Ubuntu us the Windows of the Linux world and Shuttlecock is its grand poobah.