The Burning Bridges of Ubuntu

jammag writes "According to this article, 'Whether Ubuntu is declining is still debatable. However, in the last couple of months, one thing is clear: internally and externally, its commercial arm Canonical appears to be throwing the idea of community overboard as though it was ballast in a balloon about to crash.' The author points out instances of community discontent and apparent ham-handedness on Mark Shuttleworth's part. Yet isn't this just routine kvetching in the open source community?"

Comments

So we should ditch Ubuntu and then

[bobstreo]

It's back to Debian?

Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then

[future assassin]

No we should all go to Linux Mint which will then make a minty fresh Debian version of what Ubuntu Desktop should have been by now,

Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the obvious "backward" step (and I don't mean that in a negative way, retreating from the dark alleyways [Mark Shuttleworth] has led [Ubuntu] down is a good thing), but most of the people I know who actually liked [Ubuntu] have moved sideways to Mint.

Mod Parent Up.

When I first found Ubuntu, I was evangelizing it like crazy to friends and family.
There it was, the first Linux that I could recommend to one of those "I don't want to understand it, I just want it to work" Windows XP users.
Sometimes people didn't want to abandon their famliar Windows XP environment.
Others were happy that their computer was now pratically immune to malware.

I continued this up until Ubuntu released Unity as the default desktop.
My mother clicked the button to do a distribution upgrade (I always instructed her to install the updates ASAP), and she called to say "everything changed around on me".
From that point, I decided that Ubuntu had finally jumped the shark.
Now that my mom couldn't use it, I could no longer recommend it to anyone.
I evacuated her data to an external drive, reinstalled the previous Ubuntu, restored her data, and instructed her not to install any updates.

I had her continue this holding pattern until I discovered Linux Mint on DistroWatch. It was at the top of the page hit ranking, so I gave it a try.
Here it was again! The new Linux that I could recommend to the "I don't want to understand it, I just want it to work" Windows XP users.
Even better, since Microsoft totally rearranged everything in Vista / Win 7, nobody was afraid to lose their environment.
In fact, they loved the fact that Linux Mint was close to the Windows XP they loved and far from the unfamiliar Vista / Win 7.
That "don't want to change my computer" has only grown with the release of Windows 8.
Nobody that I know wants to use Windows 8, and everybody to whom I show Mint desperately wants to keep it.

Now Linux Mint is on my mother's computer, my brother's computer, my best friend's computer, my best friend's boyfriend's computer, my girlfriend's laptop, my girlfriend's daughter's laptop, my work laptop, and my home laptop.
I'm not sure who else all those people may have sold on Linux Mint, but they love to show it off (especially my girlfriend, to her friends at college).

I'm sure my story is not unique. Parent is right.
Those of us who liked the old Ubuntu have moved to Mint.
And we've taken our friends and family with us.

Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then

[petermgreen]

Sure in the trivial cases it's the same.

It's the nontrivial cases that get you. Where you have to learn how to hammer the package manager into doing what you want. Once you have learnt that for one system it's painful to re-learn it for another.

Last time I used fedora (which admittedly was several releases ago) dependency changes in updates lead to me accidently removing gdm. I installed it again but afterwards it refused to start for no obvious reason. Did I do something wrong? was there a fault in the packages? I don't know but either way it seriously put me off fedora.

Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then

[ilsaloving]

I don't think the number of slashdot readers who know how to do that have decreased. What I think HAS decreased, is the number of slashdot readers who actually care enough to do it.

You get to a point where, even as a born and bred high-level techie, you just want shit to work because you have more important things to do. I am one of those people. That's why I switched to Mac. All the power of linux, but also with support for commercial apps, it works exactly as I expect it to, and I don't worry about some errant update blowing everything out of the water.

I tried setting up an HTPC in my living room. It was a complete joke. I tried like, 5 or so different distributions, and not a single one had the ability to easily manage multiple monitors AND correctly route audio through SPDIF without me having to go through command-line contortions.
So I abandoned the whole thing and am using an old macbook that I had. With a couple clicks I can switch between mirrored or extended display, and spdif audio kicked in as soon as I plugged in the cable. Done.

I don't understand why linux people are so obsessed with reinventing the wheel 50 billion times. No one is ever satisfied, and none of the implementations shape up into something decent. It is, quite frankly, embarrassing.

Not every company can act like Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Cannonical is another failing company with Steve Jobs/Apple's attitude of "We will tell you what you like, and will like it." Everything from putting the window close button on the left hand side of the panel, to Unity, enabled by default Amazon search lens, and now Mir have been completely unilateral moves with no input from the community whether that decision meets the users wants or needs.

Unpopular decisions

[tuppe666]

Lets be honest this is more about Mir and Unity(and maybe Amazon integration for a few of us), being promoted over *Alternatives* and both have been discussed on and off topic to death. Whatever you personally think of these choices, users currently have a choice of Desktop(and I am still not going to choose Unity), and Mir is still a twinkle Shuttleworth's eye. I am personally using the very polished Xubuntu(promoted by the Cinnamon split from Gmone), which smooths over the clash between GTK2/3, and other than a stupid oversight with the volume indicator. Has been the best desktop I have ever used...and yes I do miss a few Gnome features, but it has its own to love, and I am in love with Gmusicbrowser.

The bottom line it is still is the no brainer Linux install...unless you are wedded to (the still wonderful) Cinnamon (personally I am keeping my eye on Cut http://cut.debian.net/ ), I wish Canonical all the luck with their phone, If they can wed themselves to decent Chinese manufacturer that can produce low cost phones. It may be my next phone.

Re:bad @ biz

[0123456]

what's an example of a profitable linux distro company?

Red Hat are profitable, aren't they?

Canonical could have built a 'just works' Linux distro that people would have paid for, but they felt the need to go all Jobs on their users' asses instead. So most moved to Mint. Guess they'll have to move to the Debian version of Mint when Ubuntu goes away.

Re:I switched to CentOS and never looked back

[Billly Gates]

Yeah so evil.

So evil for a company to provide jobs, QA, have someone answer calls, assist corporate users, and do things like the above where volunteers can not.

There is a reason people use CentOS and Redhat. They work and are guaranteed to work where I would be fired if something went down. Redhat works with OEMs and hardware makers and creates a stable environment to test and optimize so my server I buy will work guaranteed. Sorry but the college frat boys working on this junior level class making a GNU driver for fun and credits wont count if my boss needs something to work.

I find it laughable that those who say corporations are evil work for one. Try not working for one and contributing back and see how far you get ahead in life?

Debatable decline?

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea that Ubuntu is in decline, at least from the point of view of number of users, is not debatable, it is false. Ubuntu's numbers are up and steadily climbing. They may or may not be ignoring the community (I would argue they aren't given all of the community initiatives and offerings from Canonical of late) but whatever the Ubuntu team is doing is working for them. Their installation numbers are up.

Re:Canonical Needs to Make Money

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I feel so locked in, what with my choices of Ubuntu, or Ubuntu Gnome, or Kubuntu, or Lubuntu, or Xubuntu, or any of the many derivatives of Ubuntu that's out there. And it's all just an "sudo apt-get install" away from appearing on my machine. It's smothering, I tell you!

Elementary OS

[sydsavage]

I hadn't heard about Elementary OS until this Wired write up yesterday. Out of curiosity, I tried it out in VirtualBox just to have a look at it. And yup, it's pretty, and simple, and it's not Unity. I considering giving it a try for real on my workstation, but it kind of barfed on my nfs shared home directory, so I think I'll pass for now. That has been my most current pet peeve; distributions that do not respect the 'Unix Way' of doing things, like having a network mounted home directory, so all my files and preferences go with me to which ever machine I log into on the network. I had just wrestled with Shotwell refusing to import some photos in my nfs home, and since the article talked up EOS's tight integration with all things Yorba, the authors of Shotwell, I didn't really want to go down that road. I did try out Yorba's email client, and liked it enough to install it on my Ubuntu machine. And it seems to work just fine so far with my networked home.

Anyhow, if you want to see what Wired is calling the Apple of Linux OSes, take a gander at Elementary OS. I can appreciate them striving for the 'Just Works' mantra, but it needs to 'Just Work' with the tried and true ways of doing things that Unix and friends have enjoyed for decades now.

And I'm not saying that it completely fails at an nfs mounted home directory, but it was competing with Ubuntu's settings (where that home directory mounts on my real machine) for simple things like the desktop wallpaper. I imagine it can be made to play nice, but I wasn't looking to spend time tweaking yet another distro to get things to work the way I want them to.

Re:Canonical Needs to Make Money

[Anonymous Coward]

I never said I wanted to move away from Ubuntu, but if I did it's very easy to switch. No distros I've used in the previous five years have even come close to the polish that Ubuntu provides. The stability of a Debian distro coupled with the desire to release a free operating system that could rival the ease of use and polish of a system from Apple is what drew me to Ubuntu in the first place. Hits and misses have occurred within the project, but there's nothing out there I've seen that convinces me to switch.

Re:bad @ biz

[AdamWill]

It's not charity, it's a perfectly reasonable business arrangement. Firefox still has a good 30% or so of all web users. _All web users_. That's a massive number of people. Being Firefox's default search engine is worth a significant amount of money to Google, and Google pays a significant amount of money for it. If Google didn't, I'm sure Yahoo or Microsoft would.

Re: Manjaro rolling release

[module0000]

Have you tried dealing with major transitions in a rolling release? e.g. sysvinit to systemd or upstart? Non-SELinux to SELinux? Rolling releases do not(or historically have failed) to manage this gracefully. Remember when Arch switched to systemd? Fun times....

I get it though; glad it's working for you. I love rolling releases as well [at home], and it beats the grind of a major version upgrade - hoping your /home plays nicely. It's also appropriate you mentioned "non-enterprise". You can imagine it's difficult for a software company to say "we will support product X on distribution Y for N years" when Y is changing with a rolling release cycle.