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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?"
It's back to Debian?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Trackball users will be first against the wall.