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Shuttleworth Calls Ubuntu Performance Art, Calls Out Critics
darthcamaro writes "Mark Shuttleworth has taken a lot of heat for Ubuntu's decision to use Unity, to move away from Wayland and about its stance on the community distros like Kubuntu. In a new interview Shuttleworth shoots back claiming no matter what he does people will always find fault due to...'competitive pressures.'"
I mean, he does have a high-profile Linux distribution he's responsible for. He has the problem that people hate change and he needs to take decisions. The thing is: change can be right too. Unity has many haters, but from the latest LTS release on, it is actually pretty good. I like using it now, and I originally dreaded the switch for my two "normal" users on it, being my mother and mother in law. I expected support calls to no end, when I finally did switch them from 10.04 (Gnome2) to 12.04 (Unity).
Surprisingly, neither had any problems adapting. That shows me that he was right: for normal users it is actually not all that hard. That said: when Unity was released it really did have a lot of rough edges. That's what it gave a bad reputation, IMHO.
Microsoft has the same problem: change is hated by their users. Probably even more so, in the Windows ecosystem.
I'm normally a proponent of "don't fix it if it's not not broken". The problem is that the Gnome guys "broke" Gnome, and thus they said "we can do this better". Whether this "better" is truly "better" lies in the eye of the beholder. My experience is: the common user reacts positively to it. That's a win in my book.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Moved to Mint sinse Unity. Competition in action.
You can't handle the truth.
He has to be the most annoying trollbait in the Linusphere....
I don't know if you've seen/heard much of what Mark Shuttleworth has ever said, but he is clearly very passionate about Linux and open source. I get this feeling that a lot of people are attributing to malace that which can easily be attributed to a differing opinion. He doesn't want to destroy linux, he doesn't see it as a play thing, but he does want to give users a great experience, give administrators/engineers a great platform, *and* make some money out of it. The latter point seems to be what many people have an issue with, which to me is insane! Just take a look at Geary. They've been asking for $100,000 for an email client, yet Canonical are trying their best to give you the best desktop environment for free, while persuing a buck in other ways.
Have you used it recently? It's quite a polished system now.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
...perhaps we would not find him so annoying. Performance art. LMAO.
An interesting contrast: Volkerding does what he does with Slackware with no fuss. Shuttleworth gets all defensive on what he does with Ubuntu.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Yeah, the distro is a regular comedy.
IF Unity and Gnome 3 had taken the time to FIRST fully develop their products while at the same time fixing existing products, maybe they would have been better received. But they didn't do that. Gnome, Linux, Ubuntu are far from perfect. Nautilus for instance is a nightmare with samba shares. None of this has been fixed. If you got a spotty internet connection and connect a 3G modem, there is no easy way anymore to tell Ubuntu to prefer one over the other. Multi-monitor support finally works but you can still only select one wallpaper.
It works... but it could be better.
And then instead of improving, fixing what is there, KDE, Unity and Gnome 3 all decide to instead go for something new and unproven and give us highly buggy versions of it as non-optional replacements... and the users said FUCK NO! It isn't just that the basic core idea is wrong (more on that later) but that we would have prefered to:
A: have existing bugs fixed.
B: Not be forced to change how we use our computers.
C: Not be forced to deal with a whole lot of new bugs, on top of the old bugs.
Windows 8, Unity, Gnome 3 and KDE have taken a fundamentally flawed approach to the desktop. Their unified idea seems to be: The user wants to see his desktop and play with it.
Reality: The desktop is there to put things on, that then obscure the desktop which I never ever see again unless something crashes. In real life, if you can see a users desktop, the user is not doing anything productive. I got a large screen multi-monitor setup and the desktop is barely visible, what you do see instead are the applications I am running because THAT is where my work is being done.
Go back to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop or Enlightenments animated wallpapers. All very nice, very cool and totally and utterly useless on an actively used PC because the moment you start using your PC, the desktop is hidden underneath the application you want to use. A pro has few desktop icons because to reach them, he would first have to close a dozen windows.
An active desktop is like the stock picture in a picture frame, useful to have something on the screen when the PC/frame is in the shop, but essentially useless once actively used. You take the picture frame, open it and put your own picture in front. Bye bye active desktop, won't see you again until my PC crashes and the few seconds between boot and me having opened my applications again.
OSX is just as bad with that gigantic dock at the bottom. Thank you Steve Jobs, just what I wanted, less horizontal pixels for my windows. At least Unity puts it to the side. Screen space is simply not cheap/available enough yet to waste pixels on stuff I don't "need". The only people that like Windows 8 and the likes are people who have toolbars installed in their browser. The rest of us want more SPACE! Not less.
And I be honest, once I had winamp/xmms installed with skins and made room for it in my windows layout. These days my music player lives on the notification bar and is 16 by 16 pixels or so.
Had these new "desktops" launched as optional side extra's (how many of you ever used Active Desktop or the various versions of Widgets), they might have been well received... well, as well received as their ancestors. Which is to say, not at all. Remember, ALL THE PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS AT TURNING THE DESKTOP INTO A GADGET ZONE: FAILED
So, instead of taking the hint, developers thought: "Well we just not going to make it fucking optional anymore!".
"Yah... well I am simply fucking not going to install it then".
With mobile phones the old idea got some new fuel but lets face it, how many of us think of our mobile phone as a marvel of usability? I sure as hell don't. It would be like taking away the mouse form a PC gamer and give him a touchpad instead... NO! It is not that touchpad on laptops are totally unusable but why should I replace the far superior mouse on my desktop with a laptops second rate input method?
The new desktop work slight
When people hear the words "performance art", they imagine a filthy, flea-infested guy with an MFA, fellating an chimp in the middle of times square while his acolytes hand people burning dollar bills and chant about hegemonic paternalism. You don't ever want to compare yourself to that.
Life needs more saving throws.
Unlike Windows 8, where you have no choice at all, it's great that I can totally ignore Ubuntu and Unity. I can also ignore Gnome 3. That's what's great about choice, and why it stinks to have no choice. - (signed) A Happy KDE User
Since Ubuntu 10.10 it has gone downhill and that's a fact.
Ubuntu now misses handy tools like Synaptic, Aptitude (better than Apt-get IMO), GIMP and it has that crap called Unity.
Let's be real here, Unity is the reason most people flew to other distros, being one of them the now popular Mint (which is what Ubuntu should have been from the start). This is so true, even Shuttleworth and Ubuntu are going back and giving the chance to boot the next Ubuntu 13.04 with Gnome Desktop.
Microsoft has the same problem: change is hated by their users. Probably even more so, in the Windows ecosystem.
The biggest gripe that I have to deal with in regards to Windows 8 is that most folks so far bought machines without touch screens.
Windows 8 - with its default interface - is a PITA without a touch screen.
If the OEMs and MS actually planned better - like only computers/laptops with touch screens would have the default interface, everything else gets a "classic" interface - then there wouldn't have been a problem.
Overall, Windows 8 is a good product.
Yes, I like Unity.
Yes, I will leave now because I don't belong. *sniffle*
The effective keystroke monitoring in recent Ubuntu monitoring is a _much_ bigger problem. The desktop search result is broadcasting your searches back to the Ubuntu mother company for Amazon search results. Despite Mark's claims, this is not "putting ads in Ubuntu" it is far more than merely adware. By effectively tracking local user searches, by default, it is clearly spyware. Worse, the queries were being sent in clear text, and there was no graceful way to turn it off. Those had to be top level decisions for the new release, and they were terrible decisions.
To quote Mark from his own response to this at http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182 .
> We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root
Mark's claim that "your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query" is nonsensical. Tracking cookies and the sometimes abusive tracking tools of doubleclick.net provide thorough tracking of the search queries and the results, and to automatically be doing This, along with other recent changes, has demonstrated that Mark Shuttleworth and the leadership of the Ubuntu distribution _cannot be trusted_. Having "root" access is not an excuse: it's a reason that Ubuntu should never have even tried this obvious and adware and spyware attempt.
Also note: the queries are not going to be encrypted to protect you, the user. They're going to be encrypted to make them less obvious to network monitoring and tougher to block.
if it's so good, how come your user retention has gone to shit?
and the performance art thing.. he refers to how he decided to decide in advance when the release is - NO MATTER IF IT'S SHIT you'll still have to release on that day! that's what he meant with it. and it's stupid.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
He'll probably say the same about that Mir abortion.
What's next? Ubuntu Kernel? Or kerneld/lennux-potterix?
to use those linux clones litestep, or some .net based shell managers too.
Who knows, maybe if Unity is really liked, it will be ported to windows.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I can understand normal users hating change, but techies? Come off it... There is nothing constant in tech but change. I, while not liking (or using) Unity, don't dislike it. I prefer KDE or Enlightenment, but whenever a new version of Ubuntu hits the mirrors, I dutifully download it and give it a week before redoing things to suit my tastes.
To those that bash Mark: running a company is no small feat. Running a tech company is a very difficult feat. Running a company with a release deadline every six months and still innovating is a moving target and he and the Ubuntu team do it very well. At least they are trying to innovate and deliver new ideas and functionality.
s/horizontal/vertical/g
Free open source software has the advantage of living in a very darwinistic world. Normally if someone screws up a piece of open source software it will die or someone will fork it to better align with their goals. Mark Shuttleworth is giving away this piece of software for free and everyone has the right to take it or leave it.
That may be the situation up front. But I can't get over this growing sense of betrayel towards the open source community. More and more the communities input is being ignored. It was this very community that for a good period of time was fairly united behind making Ubuntu the definitive spokesperson for linux. I have continously helped as best I can with writing bug reports and providing forum support for no cost. But it is getting harder and harder for a company that is going more and more behind a curtain.
Ubuntu is a southern African ethic or humanist philosophy focusing on people's allegiances and relations with each other. [Wikipedia]
I'm sure he called it Performance Fart.
Can't get Mint installed on sub GB RAM hardware, resource waste is my biggest beef with Unity and Mint doesn't solve it (and it seems only the installer is the bottleneck).
That's odd, considering I'm replying on my 2004-vintage HP Compaq Presario X1000 Pentium M 1.7MHz laptop with 768M RAM, running Mint.
Mint XFCE works just dandy on low-resource early 2000s hardware. I had it happily running on a revitalized homebuilt-in-1999 tower whose last upgrade was in 2002 to a Pentium III 850MHz (from original Pentium II 350), with all of 448MB RAM. Used that one as my primary computer for months at my old place before moving out, nuking the drive, reinstalling it, and leaving it out by the condo dumpster with a note with the password.
On this laptop, I can happily run Firefox and Thunderbird together, while running a VNC client into my other machine, and supporting a VNC server to go the other way, and manage to use LibreOffice or the GIMP at the same time. It streams videos fine, runs jEdit fine for a decent universal code editor. Runs Chrome OK, but just like on Windows, modern Firefox is lower-memory than Chrome once a few tabs and extensions are loaded, so Chrome is non-optimal on this, and was non-optimal on the tower. But Chrome is non-optimal on my wife's Windows 7 netbook with a dual-core N570 Atom and 1GB RAM too. This 768MB laptop even runs IBM Lotus Symphony decently, which I happen to prefer over its LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org relatives due to its tabbed interface and preference panels, especially when doing creative writing or articles where I have lots of research and notes open. (Yes, ducking tomatoes for using non-free-as-in-beer variants, but IBM did give the whole thing to Apache, so now it is.)
If you're trying to use Mint Mate, or Mint Cinnamon, or Mint KDE editions on a sub-GB machine, just don't. You'll be lucky to be able to install, or even boot the Live DVD with those, and if you do, a lot of the window chrome either won't paint, or will paint while you go out to get lunch. But Mint XFCE edition works like a charm. The previous low-resource official versions of Mint that had LXDE also were great on this hardware. I am staying on the Mint 13 Maya Long-Term-Support version, but prior to that I was using Mint 12 Lisa LXDE Edition which was slightly faster. You can always install LXDE but I haven't really seen the need. I think if I still had that tower, which was even lower resource, I might have gone back to LXDE, but I did use the heck out of it with XFCE.
I have to get around to switching the netbook to Mint LXDE one of these days. Everything that my wife and I use is available for Linux. We do switch off using that or the new better laptop (Windows 8 with Start8 login-to-desktop) depending on any given day's respective workload and deadlines. If I upgrade the netbook to Mint, maybe I can get the fast laptop back!
No idea why a dock steals pixels for windows... oh yes, that was eons ago...
Seriously if you want to argue about something make sure you have all your facts 'upgraded' to cater for the modern versions of what software can/can't do. It doesn't help to argue about something that was changed a considerable time ago. Also touchpads are not meant to replace anything. It's merely another option. If you want to connect a mouse you can use bluetooth or USB.
It's the same thing with IPads with no USB. If people are serious about finding alternatives, they will actually see there are 3rd parties making awesome connectors which allow you to use keyboards on macs or even provide USB slots.
Also in the case of the dock, you can autohide it and not show it at all - the same with the Ubuntu one.
I don't like Unity either, but there are ways to remove it - and in worse case - I can use Linux Mint.
For every mistake one vendor makes, you get another which makes it better. If a distro is around, it usually means a few people like it enough to be popular enough to maintain. If you don't like one, believe me there are many others to choose from.
And how is that?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Remember, ALL THE PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS AT TURNING THE DESKTOP INTO A GADGET ZONE: FAILED
This is the single biggest failing of both Gnome and KDE in their default configurations. I really don't see what the problem is with correlating a computer desktop with a physical assembly of timber (or whatever) with a chair in front of it. A desk is a place where I drop things that I am working on.
What is so hard about that? I don't use it as a place to put a post-it note saying "look in such-and-such a place for this activity".
The developers' approach is totally craniorectal, and no-one should be surprised if nobody takes them seriously.
No wonder it's starting to suck. Changes for art's sake usually don't make good changes for usability.
IF Unity and Gnome 3 had taken the time to FIRST fully develop their products while at the same time fixing existing products, maybe they would have been better received.
Let's just set GNOME 3 aside, because they're not trying to please their user base, and they're just doing whatever they think they should be doing because science says so, or whatever. Unity was introduced in Ubuntu 10.10, the release following an LTS release. That means they had two more releases to work on Unity before the next LTS. This is Ubuntu behaving as normal, and as expected. If you expected a new feature introduced in a release following an LTS to be polished, it's your expectations which are the problem.
It works... but it could be better.
I note that you don't even have a name, and even if you did it's unlikely that it would be attached to someone who has produced a better DE than Unity.
And I be honest, once I had winamp/xmms installed with skins and made room for it in my windows layout. These days my music player lives on the notification bar and is 16 by 16 pixels or so.
So you are a substantially unusual user, in either case. Why should we care what you have to say?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not competitive pressures. You've bahaved like a total douchenozzle. Don't be surprised when people start pointing it out to you.
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
Install Ubuntu server and then "apt-get install kdm" and you're good to go with KDE. I realize it's easier to install kubuntu, but then you're not running an "official" release.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
claiming no matter what he does people will always find fault due to...'competitive pressures.'
Again, he just doesn't get it.
He's badly damaged a once-valuable distro, and he seems incapable of seeing that he was the cause of that damage. Instead, he blames others.
His biggest problem isn't competition -- it's the fact that he has badly alienated his user base with that Unity nonsense. We have no need for the desktop to be degraded just for the sake of trying some half-baked theory that the smartphone UI and the desktop UI should be merged together. He needs to focus on repairing that damage, not looking for others to blame.
Nautilus for instance is a nightmare with samba shares
I don't use Unity but I do use Nautilus. What's wrong with SMB shares?
smb://server/share has always worked pretty well for me.
A polished turd is still a piece of shit.
OSX is just as bad with that gigantic dock at the bottom. Thank you Steve Jobs, just what I wanted, less horizontal pixels for my windows. At least Unity puts it to the side. Screen space is simply not cheap/available enough yet to waste pixels on stuff I don't "
This doesn't even make sense.
1 - You can auto-hide docks so the do not affect window size.
2 - You can put the OS X dock on the side if you wish.
Also, I assume you mean vertical pixels, or am I missing something?
Why is it that every time someone official from Canonical speaks or does an interview they come off as an odd combination of whining and arrogance. We are the greatest thing ever. We are changing the world. Why is everyone so mean to poor little us?
Of course they're getting flak. Point to one time in history when someone has really, earnestly tried to change things that matter without being criticized.
All of the spitting contest "they made amazon searching the default, how dare they", "they refuse to ignore the architectural issues with X, how dare they" stuff is to be expected. It's people who aren't actually trying to implement a vision for the future whining about others who are.
Ubuntu is fighting to put Linux and open source at the heart of the device convergence wave, with a unified OS for phone/tablet/desktop; to push into enterprises, with AD integration and a cogent management alternative in Landscape; to push the open cloud mantra with OpenStack integration and robust and open juju charms.
You make bold thrusts like that, people are going to look for opportunities to thrust their toes underfoot, so they can whine about having them stepped on.
I agree with the spirit of what Ubuntu is trying, independent of whether I agree with all their choices. Let's think big, and push for great things. The alternative is a continued landscape of many small technical distros (the Gentoo and Slackwares etc. of the world) serving specific needs in their small ricepot - or larger distros (e.g. SuSE) serving as footholds for corporate interests. Not that that's particularly wrong, each case has to be weighed on its own merits - but neither is the "think big or go home" model.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
for OS X, just move the dock to the side and change it to hidden by default. Or, move it to the side and shrink it as small as possible. You'll barely use any horizontal space.
It's because of this lack of wanting to coexist and agree to one path that MS managed to get a much stronger foothold in the PC market than Linux. Linux has many things going for it but it's community can't agree on a common way of doing. Linux fanatics are the reason Linux was never able to get above water in the consumer market. It took a holder of big money (GOOGLE) to set course and build a Linux distro that would work flawlessly on mobile devices. In Android, the Linux community has no say and it lives with it the same way the MS community lives with Windows.
My 2cents on this rambling!
An average user doesn't use photoshop and most people in the world using the operating systems don't have access to Netflix (or hulu for that matter)... the only learning curve is trying to find out how to open a browser. I've used Windows, OSX and ubuntu with just wmii at some point of time in my life as primary machines (for more than 2-3 years). The UI changes will be yelled at, regardless of the implementation or the OS. I remember people finding gnome1 and windows fancy and useless when it first came. Most of the UI these days don't get in the way of "actual" work.. which is good (apart from Adobe asking me to upgrade the reader :P).. and it definitely doesn't get in the way of any slashdotter.
Have you found windows to crash often? I haven't. Not 8, not 7 and not XP (at least less than ubuntu in XPs case). I really dislike windows and I don't use it (I use Ubuntu), but one thing windows users seem to be missing is the crashstravaganza that is ubuntu/unity/compiz. Oh, you've got like several tasks going, because you know, computers? Let's just crash compiz or completely lock up. LOL. Now spend the next hour saving everything, rebooting and opening everyhing back up. Awesome!
Huh, that's why I recall getting the memo from Mark early on in the Unity adoption cycle that there would be a transition period that would suck donkey balls for power users with dual-head workstations, expressing that while he realized this would highly inconvenience certain user demographics making tough decisions is necessary to future success of Ubuntu.
That's why he so cleverly timed the transition so that the users most inconvenienced could wait out the dual-head donkey-balls fiasco on a LTS release. No wait, neither of things were true. He went to no trouble to help other people accommodate themselves.
From Leading Change by John K. Potter (p.88):
Yes, Mark, I get the necessity message, and I always have. What I don't get is all the condescending bungling around proactively communicating this vision (and perhaps offering better transition options) so that more of us could have remained in the fold.
You mean the tension about whether you communicated the Unity change well enough, soon enough? Bite me. Seriously, I hope Unity grows up to become everything you dreamed it would be. But excuse me if I don't hang around in a neighborhood where roads are demolished before signs are posted.
The most important one that comes to mind is that its vaunted 'network transparency' is decades behind what Windows and OS X are capable of: The only way to have multiple users share one desktop or app (for, you know, one of those weird things called a 'meeting') is to toss around bitmap deltas a-la VNC. Hence, X11 is grossly inefficient for a crucial use case (oops, used a modern concept there).
In fact, even for the X11-supported ability for one user to run an app remotely, X11 still sucks. You have to be on the same LAN for it to work smoothly. Over the Internet, forget it... you have to install and setup NX which is a pain. But its telling that X11 developers never found this Internet-friendly re-work of their protocol interesting enough to change what they were doing.
I could name at least a couple more big drawbacks to X11 that impact users directly. I say put the thing out of its misery; Its certainly caused me enough.
Because the day after or the week after I install a new app, I'd like to be able to find it without having to write its name on a piece of paper beside my computer.
There are some things which I will only use occasionally, even if I do find them very useful. Unity gets in the way of finding such apps.
I don't want to wade through a table of barf that includes almost every odd scrap in the system that happens to have an icon associated with it.
The HURD guys broke which microkernel they wanted to use - first GNU Mach, then L4, then Coyotos, then Viengoos, and finally back to Mach. Someone needs to encourage them to fork Minix3 to a GPLed kernel and put HURD on top of that, then it would be perfect. Heck, they could put it under AGPL, and everything would be hunky dory. Put GNOME 3.whatever on it, and they'll then have a complete & perfect GNU system.
"IF Unity and Gnome 3 had taken the time to FIRST fully develop their products while at the same time fixing existing products"
Why do you think this is a thing that's even possible? So far as I can recall, it has never - *never* - been done.
Windows 1.0 was a bare bones window manager. Even the first widely successful Windows series - 3.x - was pretty crappy in its first incarnation, 3.0, and did not take off until 3.1. The first major revision to the 3.1 interface - 95 - was panned at the time and substantially tweaked in 98. And I don't have to say anything about Windows 8 at this point, I'm sure.
MacOS was constantly revised; I'm not familiar with its early versions but I'm sure they bore little resemblance to later ones. The first release of OS X was heavily criticized and from a UI standpoint incomplete; it was massively tweaked between 10.0 and 10.4.
The first version of Android - same story. Android didn't really start to be a polished interface till 2.x or even 4.x.
iOS, same story again. The first version didn't even allow *apps*, for Pete's sake.
So - name me a single computer UI which actually arrived fully formed in its first version? And if you can't, why on Earth do you think 'somehow make 1.0 the full finished product' is a viable development methodology for computer UIs?
To be fair to Steve, you can put your Dock on either side of the screen instead of the bottom. ;)
If Ubuntu is Performance Art, then Linux Mint is Functional Art. The difference between empty bubbly glossy farty squeaks -- and an actual tool built to please while being used.
Unless you are stuck with 32bit Windows where 3gig + a bit is all you can max, then I will max any other board/laptop up to 8 or 16g. Ram is so cheap, they should just start pre-fab motherboards with built in 8gig ram + 4 sockets. It would only add $20 cost, why isnt anyone doing that?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
ubuntu 12.xx sux. i've been running through the alternatives since xmas, trying to find a replacement. my needs are not great; i just want something that works as well as 10.04.
Look, I've used Ubuntu since 8.10 and am now running 12.04.02 and tested Unity. It isn't that I hate Unity, but it clearly was intended for a tablet and smartphone, much less for the desktop. I have since installed Gnome Classic and I sincerely hope that Ubuntu continues to support legacy, including X11 or at least compatability with it.
The main problems I've had with the changes since 10.10 is the number of legacy applications that are still in the repositories that break in great and small ways because the standards of the core are quicksand. For example I have found that whereas once the menus in the Emacs 23 GTK client worked just fine in U 11.10, that something about the Unity and Gnome Classic transition broke them. That is lost functionality. The little things will kill a distro. Connonical should be far more vigilant that things that worked once don't break and that they had better have a better justification that a Billionaire told me to change it. Besides Shuttleworth's idea of competative advantage is somewhat a problem of his own ego if Linus distros are supposed to be free and opensouce. Who does it belong to anyway? One could argue that since he is obviously the main financer that maybe he has put more effort into hyping Ubuntu and stroking his own ego than he does is making sure that "it just works", it dosen't, And if the issue is that he is competing with Mac, then Apple wins and Shuttleworth's decisions are flawed and hurts acceptance of Linux.
Let me add that I first used UNIX when all you had was the shell. I really respect the shells and have a terminal open most of the time because there are lots of things you can do from the command line better than from a file manager or window manager. Still i like multimedia tools and GUI applications and although Ubuntu is bloat ware I do like that I can try out some very new tools as soon as they appear in the repositories. If I wanted a spartan Linux I'd have many choices that are better than Ubuntu. But I'd love to see the end of Windows domination of the desktop, and without the expensive hardware and elitism of Mac, and I am most critical of Mark Shuttleworth because his actions have hurt the credibility of Linux more than it has helped. We can omly thank Windows 8 from being a bigger disaster than Ubuntu has become.