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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?
That much has become clear for quite a while now. What's also become clear is they don't know how to do it, what direction they're in and they're unusual recent behaviour is just a bunch of initial death throes.
...it'll fork, and life will go on.
What's the big deal?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I don't fancy unity or ubuntu as such - there's just so many *better* alternatives, so I don't particularly care. What I want to know is, even if the Ubuntu are burning bridges, why should we care? Or was this aimed at Ubuntu users? Somehow I got the feeling that the users like Mark/Canonicals decisions... otherwise they'd not be users, no?
... a lot of people are way too vocal on what one should or not do with it.
kvetching
There you go. Dismiss it. Let us know how that goes for you.
Shame really. Upstart is nice. I've landed on systemd systems because of Shuttleworth, however.
Good will is more important than your vision, Mark. You're killing your own, platform. And I can't figure out why. You're years past your own deadline for profitability, yet here you are, beating this horse to death while people evacuate. WTF??
The stability of CentOS is great. I don't get all the fancy features but I don't want those anyway as they just get in the way. At work when we need something supported we just use RedHat and pay for the support. Moving development between CentOS and RedHat is totally transparent to me.
Slackware forever.
Did Novell buy it and fuck it up? Or...?
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.
right
my question: Has any Linux distro ever been clear that they *do* know how to Make Money?
I think Ubuntu and Canonical could *certainly* have made a profit, but that's my opinion. I think **I** could make them profitable if they were my companies...maybe something similar to a Mozilla model w/ my own twist of course ;)
what I'm asking is about the general consensus...is there a way that is common knowledge that these companies like cannonical ignore or is it more abstract than that?
what's an example of a profitable linux distro company?
Thank you Dave Raggett
It's easy to see why Linux Mint has been increasingly blazing their own separate trail. I tried Ubuntu 13.10 and liked it in some ways, but got extremely turned off when I spent an hour trying to customize the executed command on a Unity launcher to no avail. Making the interface simple to use is great, but that should never come at the cost of functionality, and there is no reason for it to.
The 'linux communities' have all devolved into petty little fiefdoms of some degree.
It's no wonder the masses don't want to get into that mess.
They just want an OS. Not a lifestyle or even try to keep up.
Ubuntu took a perfectly good Debian and fucks it up.
Ubuntu took a perfectly good Ubuntu and fucked it up. Luckily, there are distros like Xubuntu - which take the good parts, and leave off the bad parts (aka Unity).
Older, more mature, and runs everything guaranteed.
Kind of like XP is too some of the die hards who refuse to upgrade. I started to like Windows 7 again after Gnome 3/Unity and realized it really is not a bad OS anymore.
I also fell in love with CentOS again too and run it on a VM with FreeBSD if I want some hacking with things like smtp trace and ipf for my virtual networks.
RPM is not bad folks! Many of us in the 1990s had nightmares trying to get gnome 1 working with 1 million plus RPMs and therefore refuse to touch that POS AGAIN!! I was one of them, but my AMD hardware does not work well with debian distros. They work fine with redhat kernels. RPM > DEB. With Yum it is like apt-get and that was the last hurdle. .Debs leave crap all over your system when you uninstall. RPMs remove cleanly and I like the admin tools better. With yum there is no rpm hell like before.
http://saveie6.com/
The 'linux communities' have all devolved into petty little fiefdoms of some degree.
Except its a lie, As both a Gentoo and a Ubuntu user. I have enjoyed massive support both though chat and forums, and bug reports. In fact on a whole most OS communities are pretty helpful including those of Windows/Mac. People on the whole like to help.
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.
intent only on making a fortune, says the greedy businessman as he tries to make his fortune.
Moral: Never place too much trust or respect in a CEO of a private company.
Except most here are pretty happy with Ubuntu wanting to make money. The (recent) direction Ubuntu is taken is a unified ecosystem across platforms, and some of us think that result is not pretty...but the stable;cutting edge; pretty desktop we loved. Personally I always thought they should have got their store and by extension games sorted before Humble/Bundle and Steam got themselves together, and their approach to Music has been uninspired.
Pursuit of Money should not only be considered healthy buy encouraged.
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.
"Interactive Post Install Configuration"
"most Microsoft Haters apparently assume their stance largely as a rebellion. They seem to take their identity from their opposition. And, in extreme cases, could be described as conspiracy theorists" link
..
And straight from the mother ship
“I’m thinking of hitting the OEMs harder than in the past with anti-Linux they should do a delicate dance”, Joachim Kempin, Microsoft
No, RPM is not bad, it's pure EVIL, have you ever gone through the RPM documentation? It's a nightmarish twisty maze of implicit dependencies and inflexible as hell
Just having Yum sitting on top of it obscuring the RPM 'dependency from hell' cycle, doesn't mean that it's ok. If .deb packages leave cruft behind, that means the pre/post install of the particular package needs some work. Nothing to do with the package manager itself.
Using RHEL at the moment, but would drop it in a second if there was a serious contender for Redhat who would do Debian enterprise support.
There is a point of light though, someone is rebuilding RPM from the ground up, which seems to address the issues that plague the current version of RPM
http://rpm5.org/
Nihil in publicum sputa.
Mozilla may depend on google.com alot for contributions but that doesn't mean it is not a success or sustainable company.
Most startups (including my favorite imgur.com) generate alot of revenue from small contributions from donors.
I'm not saying I'd use the donor model for Cannonical/Ubuntu
I'd probably have the 'Ubuntu Foundation' and use it to release a free OS *and* do things like the Electronic Frontier Foundation only targeted mostly on OS issues. Rootkits for example. We'd lobby for net neutrality and the like.
So the thing that releases Ubuntu is a non-profit
I'd have the actual profit company then own something the non-profit leases....like computer equipment, building space, etc...
then I'd have my for-profit company, in this case Cannonical, fork Drupal & make a FOSS wordpress/drupal kind of system...yes this is *TWO* FOSS projects, one from a non-profit, one from the for-profit company
profit comes from **consulting**
we could consult for general IT network setup for small to enterprise level business
'intranet' consulting on an Enterprise-level "content management system" based off our FOSS fork of the drupal core
web design - we'd use our 'in house' Drupal fork with all the bells and whistles to do websites for things like msnbc.com (just had a redesign....cost in the millions $$$ cha ching) or whitehouse.gov or...hell...**healthcare.gov**
software development consulting
domain name registration...why not offer it?
the best part is, all the business units and all the FOSS stuff **drive each other**
gotta add another dimension to make FOSS profitable long term
Thank you Dave Raggett
Just change to: Arch Linux or Manjaro... They work good "like a rolling stone"... If you want to learn Linux start using Arch now. If you want to work and be free Manjaro (hopefully, there will be a version 1 release soon) is the word. Using at work: ubuntu (3), mint (0, changed to Manjaro), debian (+6) --- 3 words: "All Works Fine".
No Mr. Gates, trying to make Linux users downgrade to the most perpetually outdated distro in existence won't make them switch to Windows 8 next. :-D
I've always been mysteriously partial to Kubuntu (mysterious as in, I can't really say why I keep installing it, other than I like KDE...)
And yet at the end of the day. All the millions of computer users don't want to deal with choices on such a vast scale peppered with landmines and dickheads.
They are not interested in learning for several years just to choose an os.
They want to install it. And go do the stuff they actually wanted to do. Something windows and ios does very well. You install this. And run the stuff you wanted to do in the first place.
It's a full time job just to even try to keep up with all the flavors and distros and forks and multitude of choices. And anyone who is not willing to do that. Is instantly marginalized.
Once upon a time i was a unix user, well on my way to poweruser.
But i got tired of trying to keep up and wading thru all the bullshit and petty squabbles. I didn't want to spend my time managing an os. I wanted to go play games, run programs, create content, DO stuff. And i gave up and just ended up on windows, because it lets you do that. Easily. Where i don't give a fuck about what flavor it is. It runs the crap i want to run.
Now i couldn't even tell you where to start on choosing a *nix today. And would despise even trying to find out given the giant mess it has all become.
Sometimes the 800 pound gorilla is the best choice as he will take away most of your option overload.
So since I've been using Kubuntu for years now, am I supporting Canonical or Blue Systems ??? I'm confused. I'd think Blue Systems as it's KDE and will have wayland soon ?
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.
Then I realized the only part about the UI that bothered me was Dash. Adding classicmenu fixed that.
Between Dash being a mess and its online integration, these two things account for the lions' share of dissatisfaction with Ubuntu's direction, IMO. The rest of the changes they're making remind me of the good parts of OS X and I welcome the effort Canonical is putting into them.
OTOH my limited time with Mint places it little better in terms of smooth operation than Fedora or Debian. I do NOT like my screen contents flashed for 3 sec when waking from sleep, and I do NOT like having security updates held back.
... is exactly what Mark Shuttleworth has been doing for almost a decade now. If that amount of effort hasn't helped the Ubuntu team initiate some drastic changes in otherwise community-run projects, then I very much understand why he's fed up and wants things to Just Work (TM).
This is irrespective of who did what, and whether they did the right thing, by the way. There's always multiple people at fault in any conflict. I'm talking purely about the desire to stop wasting time and money on something for which there is overwhelming evidence it doesn't work. If I had been in his position, I would have started my own Ubuntu-run competitor projects a lot earlier, but then I'm not a patient man.
So more power to him, I say.
Yes, and instead of doing that, Shuttleworth seems bent on either trying to change Ubuntu to fight with/compete against Android, or, failing that, say screw it and ditch everything including the community. Ubuntu has a great place, and if it got along with Android, then it would grow significantly. Shuttleworth's failure to see the opportunity is like the guy who failed to sell CP/M to IBM in 1984. (IBM bought DOS from microsoft instead --which had just recently purchased QDOS (quick and dirty operating system) from Seattle Computer Products,-- but then this 'microsoft' was never heard from again.)
People just forget the past so quickly. Sure, we can argue simple things like if "upstart" is a good runlevel daemon and all that, but think about all the improvements Ubuntu has brought to the Linux world over time. The high quality of other distros these days is due to Ubuntu pushing the bar higher.
Hardware detection: Ubuntu made all your devices "just work" without manual module configuration and kernel recompilation. Unity: good-looking, well-specced desktop that anyone can use. The community and documentation are great. Media playback works easily, printing works great. Nice and clean system configuration file structure. Ubuntu Software Center introduces newbies to high-quality picks of open source software without having to do random poking in the repositories. Ubuntu was stable enough platform to provide the base for Steam. And remember how Ubuntu made enabling non-free drivers easy: you just have that little PCI card tray icon, and from the pop-up dialog you select your device. Ubuntu comes with LibreOffice preinstalled, rivaling the MS Office monopoly from the start.
I mean, are you sure you would want a Linux world without all these improvements?
Let's not forget all the little things that Ubuntu has improved -- the things which we take for granted today.
RPM is great, at least it's documented very well (where are DPKG docs? it took 18 years to write this bullshit i see?), refreshed, growing, adding functionality, improving usability etc
Yum is not sitting on top of it and it doesn't mother. There is PackageKit, which does anything middleware interface must do - it supports rpm, dpkg, apt, yum etc - that's what is important for you, because YOU ARE loser. You never use dpkg, never building any packages, you just can't compare RPM and dpkg, so, what's your problem? Use GUI and relax.
So far RPM made many HUGE improvements, including deltas, macro improvements, build-dependency automation, format changes, compression, metadata, language bindings, dependency awesomeness, middleware, it's classy and MUCH better than dpkg from technical point of view. Need user point of view? Use GUI and shut up.
So I don't think you have ever gone through RPM or dpkg docs.
"It feels like I'm at the Zoo when reading this thread - I'm frightened, but it's interesting" (c)
Ignoring LSB is evil. RPM is LSB-aware.
"It feels like I'm at the Zoo when reading this thread - I'm frightened, but it's interesting" (c)
Mere mortals use interface, they like ubuntu because some ubuntu-only options and free cd's, because it's popular, not because it's opensource or just "good".
So, it's time to think about middleware, improve everything that is common for all distros and improve standard, force every distro to be visually interoperable. Nobody cares about dpkg or rpm, kernel version or canonical. Users care about what they use. They use desktop. They like Gnome? Improve it, make it same everywhere.
Why should I care about Ubuntu or Opensuse if I use Gnome on both? Where's the difference? That's the issue community should resolve and it's going on and on for last 5 years - we've got middleware everywhere - in packaging, sound, KDE, Gnome etc.
I guess Canonical realizes, that one time usability war will come to the end and this time has come. Not it must create something that will force it's old users to use new versions. That's why they are so crazy about Mir and pushing Ubuntu-only software. That's the reason.
"It feels like I'm at the Zoo when reading this thread - I'm frightened, but it's interesting" (c)
Try Netrunner, it comes from the company that supports kubuntu, is based on kubuntu but is more polished and complete.
Thanks. I've been using Kubuntu for years and the whole family uses it now. I wonder if Ubuntu fades away what it will mean for Kubuntu...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Why is it that the linux kernel, as an open source project, doesn't seem to receive this scorn, whereas so many other open-source projects do - i.e. gnome, kde, ubuntu ?
Is it because the linux kernel generally doesn't complete revamp things. Linus proudly announced that there would be nothing exciting in the 3.0 kernel.
Or is it because the linux kernel is more of a community thing? It sounds like Linus doesn't do much 'directing' - he simply agrees or disagrees with patches. The linux kernel is like a sandcastle built up very slowly by millions of ants, with no large interventions, such as a spade. Whereas other opensource projects seem to get razed and re-built on a regular basis.
On the other hand, when linus got frustrated with the version control system, he did entirely build his own one. But this isn't a fair comparison because the system they were using was not open-source.
If a desktop GUI took the kernel model of development - i.e. lots of very small incremental changes - would we want to use it? Is this xfce's development model?
On a slight red-herring, a lot of people here mention centos and red hat. What is Red Hat going to do for a desktop GUI? They can't seriously be thinking of going to gnome 3? MATE is probably not stable enough.
D
I agree with your idea, but you got it a bit wrong: Xubuntu it still Ubuntu. I think many people hate Unity (I don't; I just treat it as an "early beta" of an idea that one day might work), but don't realize that things like Xubuntu and Kubuntu are very much still Ubuntu.
The desktop interface is a *very tiny* part of the OS, really. But it's the first thing most users see, and is crucial for PR.
I love Xubuntu. Hence, I also love Ubuntu (if not the Unity package) and the great work done by everyone involved.
Ubuntu should follow the openSUSE way: when you install it, it asks you which desktop you want. There's no realy need for separate distros, IMO.
Maybe it is the new era of the industry - the likes of Steve Jobs forcing their will not only on the customers but on partners, subcontractors and even Apple board members, it seems that business leaders have recently got new hopes of being able to rule without having to listen to anyone. It's the grand decline of open source - as we now have closed source golden boys like Spotify, Android, Instagram, and whole app markets full of more or less polished apps, it seems that in many knowledgeable peoples eyes, open source has lost the battle. By virtue of demonstration, anyone can see that open source not always brings about the best product in desired time frame. So maybe Mark Shuttleworth had an epiphany ala Henry Ford - "F*ck users - what do they know anyway?! The forums are full of whineys, and Steve Jobs was maybe cruel but he made the apple golden again. F*ck users - Ima do it my way and show all of them how it is done." Whether he is the type to actually pull it off, remains to be seen.
Maybe the rest of us like Unity? I think it's fine. I click on stuff and it works. I have multiple workspaces. There's a clock. I'm European and I can't get the calendar to start on Monday but past that it's smooth sailing.
Leave the rest of us alone. We have an OS we like - Ubuntu. Go back to Windows!
Playing the devil's advocate, but when the "open source community" says that "you are burning bridges" most of the time they actually mean "you are not doing things the way we want". If Canonical wants to contribute to Mir instead of Wayland, it's their choice. You can't blame them for writing foss software.
The difference between the power user and the programmer is that for the latter the entire graphical system of the computer can be considered to some degree optional. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the perspective of the "gnu/linux power users"; the concerns are not aesthetic. The principle that graphics are optional is not a secondary function of Unix either, but a core tenet. To whatever degree that the goals of the graphical user interface and the textual interface conflict, the TUI will pretty much always win, in Linux.
These Unix principles are as much as anything else agreements between developers, that computer systems should be designed along certain lines. Compliance with any standard is more or less optional, and compliance with open source licenses, while not optional in the strictest legal sense, are as often 'honored in the breach as the observance'. It can be hard to detect when a license has been violated; refer also to the issue of public code lacking an explicit license. Generally though, if you agree to play nice with others, they will let you use their code without any financial consideration whatsoever. Linux is merely one example of the fruits of these agreements.
Bear with me here: because of the inability to simultaneously optimize for both TUI and GUI, making Unix palatable to the masses involves in some fundamental ways making it not Unix. Apple has been very successful with this strategy -- would you imagine that iPods and iTunes don't even have their own scripting language? -- and Canonical has been only a moderate success. The difference between the two is that no one would ever think to interact with an Apple machine exclusively by way of the command line.
On the one hand, Canonical needs Linux to serve as the basis for Ubuntu. On the other hand, they need Ubuntu to be different from Linux/Unix, because Unix isn't really built for normal people to find it usable. You can make it into something like that, but the more you do, the less Unixy it is. Also in doing so, you're going to end up violating Linux standards, and particularly where concerns the GUI. You may rely upon this generating ill will.
My opinion is that at some point, Ubuntu will be better served by describing itself as a Linux-compatible OS, rather than a Linux distribution per se. The Moblin/Meego/Sailfish fiasco seems to have resulted in precisely that animal, I'm afraid, and SteamOS never pretended to be anything different. Canonical needs to divorce Linux, but it needs to keep living in the same house for as long as possible.
P.S.
On an unfortunate persona note I must add that you seem to be under the idea that you are in the group of users for which Linux is primarily intended to be useful, or that your use case is to some large degree compatible, and I regret to say that such is unlikely to be the case.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I'm just a Linux dabbler who put Ubuntu on an old Pentium PC to see what all the fuss was about. It seems to work fine (much snappier than Windows XP). Should I care about all this?
You have the right idea, big time. But IMHO you didn't go quite far enough.
Ubuntu should follow the openSUSE way: when you install it, it asks you which desktop you want.
The screen server and all its friends get restarted when your session is launched at log in. There's no reason the system can't run the desktop of each user's current preference, and give him the opportunity to change that preference - for the session or persistently - every time he logs in.
IMHO It should be a drop-down menu opton on the login, with a well-documented and easy way both for the user to edit his settings and for an admin (or even the user, in his own account) to add more desktop software.
The install - actually, the new-account create - would just ask about the acconts' initial preference.
Heck: It REALLY should ALSO be an item on the background pulldown menu, or equivalent, of every windowng system to switch mid-session. But there are a lot more worms in that can, starting with convincing the developers of all the windowing systems to provide a hook for users to drop their baby and adopt children of their rivals.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yes I am sure of this. Every single commercial version of Linux and Unix designed to offer a desktop to the user use either SHM or DRI. Without these there would be no hardware acceleration of the desktop, kind of a corner stone for the modern desktop.
Neither SHM nor DRI work over the network. If you grab any Linux distro freshly downloaded right now and export the display to another machine what you get is a rendered bitmap (because that's how everything X works nowadays) sent over the network.If you're really lucky your implimentation may even support some form of compression and the remote X implementation may even be as fast (hahahah) as VNC.
This has been true since even before the days of X-org
Have you tried dealing with major transitions in a rolling release? e.g. sysvinit to systemd or upstart?
As a Sabayon user who just went through this, it was fairly trivial. `eselect sysvinit set systemd` to change, `eselect sysvinit set sysvinit` to change back.
SystemD is the default on new installs, but existing ones remain on OpenRC, which is still supported.
The trick to major transitions like these is to not force them; the users should have the choice to keep using the old version until it's unsupported. (It doesn't hurt that all major versions of most packages are still available in Portage.)
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Linux Mint already has multiple distros without Ubuntu (but Debian based). Therefore, Dcnjoe60 engages in fallacy.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
There is a good case for Linux needing two different approaches, the no-frills but extremely flexible and powerful image of Arch Linux, a shell, no GUI, and lots of tools that are hard for novices to learn and use, but are close to the metal, the computer science metal, and something that is more suited for the novice and casual user. I am concerned that Shuttleworth's vision to make a main-market Linux is like any other products that appeal to "average" people, stripped of features and dumbed down. When he was talking about dropping XOrg, I was very worried that the legacy was going to go with it, and why, so he could realize his ego's dream of making a sexy Linux derivative that Grandma would wnat but not care about the depth of detail beneath.
Operating systems are quite different from other products, say the automobile. Each new technology goes from a geeky adopter mode where buyers worry about the internals, and as the product matures and the technology gets better the details become invisible to consumers. It is going to be a long time before computer operating systems become as transparent, and maybe never, so to want to take away that access to the depths of them for some kind of mass appeal, is premature. That should hopefully be the lesson of Windows, that Microsoft had to give its users access to some internals, at least to write them decent error messages and logs rather than continuing to try to hide complexity from users.
Operating systems are not mature enough that they can be handled by normal sales and marketing strategy alone, and that is why we cannot trust Mark Shutleworth's decisions. He was forced to retreat somewhat from Unity being the inclusive model for Ubuntu's GUI because even though he may be right in the long run that tablets and touch may represent a future for his product, that giving less priority to the wishes of desktop users was rash and egocentric.
If anything it is the fact that Shuttleworth seems to be of that ecocentric and arrogant stamp of many a business leader, that his leverage is his net worth, that worries me as concerns Linux, which should retain all of its legacy, its roots, and then go for broader appeal, not sacrifice its complexity to get mass appeal, then it is no different from Windows. I would much rather Microsoft have 85% of the personal computer market than sacrifice Linux's rich details for mass appeal. I think that one can get at techniques from computer science if one wants to the the shell and commands, or not. I am not saying that Linux cannot do both, it can, but I don't necessarily think that the tact chosen by Ubuntu is the right way to do it.
I half agree with you, but things like this
as the product matures and the technology gets better the details become invisible to consumers. It is going to be a long time before computer operating systems become as transparent, and maybe never, so to want to take away that access to the depths of them for some kind of mass appeal, is premature.
Operating systems have been shielding consumers from the depths of their computers since the late 80. If their car breaks, the average person will take it to a garage to get fixed. Same with a computer. People are shielded from things. You might complain that Ubuntu is harder for a techie to get into the underpinnings to fix things, but it's probably fine for consumers who just want something to "work". For "power user" types who want to be able to configure their interface (ie most traditional Linux users), it's not really a nice interface (well, it's not to me). But you can actually still get into everything, remove the parts you don't want, install parts you do, etc.. so I don't really agree with you about it being any more or less transparent than other distros yet. When they get rid of X it will cause more issues, but you can still install it again yourself. That's the beauty of Linux, and why we already have distros that cater to both of the user types that you mention, as well as many others.
I studied Computer Science myself, but in day to day work and life, I'm not usually looking for "close to the metal". I think you're getting a bit confused and basically suggesting something along the lines that the ideal way for someone to eat their breakfast cereal is with a hammer and screwdriver..
which is totally what she said
A few weeks ago I acquired an old PC that that had Win XP on it and could not have run later Windows releases. I installed Knoppix 7.2 and Debian 7 on it. I am very pleased with the former and have given up on the latter, oh by the way, I tested Arch Linux on that system as well, but give up on it for another reason. My main desktop runs Ubuntu 12.04. I had been updating or installing Ubuntu on that system since U. 8.10. I was a Solaris system admin. and have developer experience, so I am familiar with the shell. I couldn't get through the Arch install because the font was way too small for my disabled eyes. Debian sort of worked but it was unconfigured and I couldn't find which packages I needed to get wireless working, which Knoppix gave me out of the box.
I liked Ubuntu but I don't trust Mark Shuttleworth, in particular, to preserve legacy, and not try to make it into his captive market. I will dump the distro in a heartbeat if I think he has done that. It isn't that I don't like conveinince, but the difference between Linux and Windows is that you can dig into the innards of Linux because it preserves legacy and standards in a well documented way, something Windows doesn't do well, but you can keep it simple if that is all you want, and Ubuntu in those earlier releases was reliable for that. I am worried about that now.