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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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The latest version opensuse actually is the best linux I have ever run, and that counts for a lot having run every major distribution since when the kernel was in the .9x timefame. That also includes all the recent versions of Ubuntu/mint/etc. It falls closer to the "it just works" mantra than any previous version (of course a few things still have hickups).
No one talks about Suse because we are off talking about more exciting things. That is the problem with having a stable sensible distribution that actually works.... Its doesn't have the latest $sexy to ignite peoples fires, or the latest $sucky to piss everyone off.
Personally, I suspect a fair number of people drop suse when they thought KDE jumped the shark a few years back. Now that it turns out its Gnome that jumped the shark no one remembers the one remaining major KDE based distribution.
Finally, there is SLES which is all the goodness of opensuse combined with long term vendor support as good as what is provided by redhat.
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.
Hahahahahahaha, what the actual fuck.
-- Linux user #369862
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.
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.
I don't think that's his main target. Shuttleworth is one of the few people (Newell may be another) willing to make fundamental changes to gnu/linux desktop computer to bring it to masses as opposed to just opinionated geekdom. This non-traditional desktop experience is bound to annoy traditional gnu/linux power users who feel their vision is being ignored. What they fail to see is that their vision is not attractive enough for average people.
I for one welcome canonical's changes. For me, the more they deviate from 'traditional gnu/linux desktop', the better. I want to see how far they can push it and how many fresh ideas they can bring. KDE desktop has looked pretty much the same for the last 10 years. Gnome is getting uglier and less useful with each new version (but I do like that they're starting anew). Windows 8's interface, despite its questionable usability, is fresh and people who have used it for more than 10 minutes in a shop, like it.
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.