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The Burning Bridges of Ubuntu

Posted by Soulskill on from the cry-havoc-and-let-slip-the-forks-of-war dept.

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?"

3 of 346 comments (clear)

  1. So we should ditch Ubuntu and then by bobstreo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's back to Debian?

    1. Re:So we should ditch Ubuntu and then by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Re:Canonical Needs to Make Money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!