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Canonical Founder Criticizes Free Software Developers Who 'Hate On Whatever's Mainstream' (google.com)
Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth said Saturday that "I came to be disgusted with the hate" on Canonical's display server Mir, saying it "changed my opinion of the free software community." After announcing his company was abandoning Unity for GNOME, Shuttleworth posted a gracious thank-you note to the Unity community Friday on Google Plus. But on Saturday, he added a sharper comment:
"I used to think that it was a privilege to serve people who also loved the idea of service, but now I think many members of the free software community are just deeply anti-social types who love to hate on whatever is mainstream. When Windows was mainstream they hated on it. Rationally, Windows does many things well and deserves respect for those. And when Canonical went mainstream, it became the focus of irrational hatred too. The very same muppets would write about how terrible it was that IOS/Android had no competition and then how terrible it was that Canonical was investing in (free software!) compositing and convergence. Fuck that shit."
The comment begins by saying "The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind - it's free software that does something invisible really well. It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control, where being on one side or the other was a sign of tribal allegiance. We have a problem in the community when people choose to hate free software instead of loving that someone cares enough to take their life's work and make it freely available."
The comment begins by saying "The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind - it's free software that does something invisible really well. It became a political topic as irrational as climate change or gun control, where being on one side or the other was a sign of tribal allegiance. We have a problem in the community when people choose to hate free software instead of loving that someone cares enough to take their life's work and make it freely available."
I'll hate it!
Interesting it took him this long to figure out that its common human nature to find a scapegoat and kick it endlessly.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Never understood the Ubuntu hate,
particularly for Mir.
Just seemed to be a lot of idiots jumping on the bandwagon.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
The best reason anyone could come up with was (para-phrasing) "it'll mean closed-source graphics drivers will have to support 2 display servers, and they may not want to do that"
I guess Python 3 finally went mainstream. A Python 2 asshat took me to task because I only have Python 3 installed on my system, all my Python code is in Python 3, and, when I couldn't find an easy to use automation tool in Python 3, I used Ant (Java) instead.
I saw it as a good sign Canonical might've realized they made a mistake for once.
I guess it's too much to think they'd accept responsibility rather than trying to point fingers.
There are plenty of bad apples in any community, but sinking to their level in emotional insecurity just causes more issues here.
That's not why they hated Mir. Canonical had committed to helping flesh out Wayland, and then suddenly abandoned that effort and developed Mir instead, despite Wayland being much further ahead and doing everything Mir wanted to do, better. Wayland is essentially finished and ready for the masses now, but it could have been at this point *years* ago if Canonical hadn't backpedaled and switch to a worthless piece of trash instead. Also calling it open source when they surround it with licence agreements is rather farcical. They wanted to monetize it hard if Ubuntu phone kicked off, this abandoning of it only happened because they realized they had completely failed that effort.
Literate people hate your post.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I don't think he recognizes the issue people had - when Canonical became successful they began acting like they were the 800-lb gorilla in the room and that they could do whatever they wanted and everyone else would fall into line. Classic not invented here syndrome, then expecting others to write & maintain support for Canonical's custom software.
Sending user searches to Amazon doesn't help either - the Linux community is much more privacy minded then the general community using public.
As a moderate conservative, I hate the stupidity that has become the Republican Party.
Which one do you mean?
* Pulse Audio?
* Systemd?
* Unity/Gnome 3/KDE 4?
* Windows 8/10?
It's not that people hate something that's mainstream. The problem is that mainstream is often a polished turd which companies or alternatively gifted individuals try to sell you as something which is better and novel, while being in an order of magnitude less usable and having tons of bugs.
Java Model Railroad software is both free and part of my life. Could not have a much fun in my hobby if it was not there. And a dedicated group is keeping it alive with regular updates. Thanks to all who help keep open source viable for the rest of us. Thomas DeSoto, TX
What seems to not be able to enter his thick.. opinions, is that Ubuntu diverged sufficiently from what people loved.
The UI seems to be promoted by whoever couldn't get a job with apple.
The controversial systemD was pushed in although Ubuntu isn't red hat nor uses it the same way.
Mir was the 'yeah devs want to refactor to Wayland, but WE can do it better".
On a on a on.
In retrospect, I have no clue how Mr shuttleworth acquired his wealth (nor can be arsed to Google it), but with Ubuntu, some things from that character are reflected in the failed direction: delusion, inability to scope, inability to judge the market userbase, insensitive to the development culture.
Etc etc.
Of course he isn't seeing this as a failure on his end, but instead : entire *communities* are wrong.
Typical psychopath.
I think I speak for the vast majority of open source developers and users when I say 'what is a Mir'?
While I'm sure whatever project it was was important to Mr. Shuttleworth - I don't think it every had awareness outside of a tiny circle of people, let alone is a source of significant hate, criticism, etc. from open source users and developers.
I don't see it that way. Look at the hits GIMP takes. Look at the hits Python and Perl take. I'm not talking about technical objections; I'm talking about just general hits.
There is some basis for some of the technical hits - for instance, Perl legitimately takes some flack for opposed opinions on its typical readability, and Python legitimately takes some flack for opposed opinions on whitespace. But both take hits as if using them would be the freaking end of the world, and it tends to be way over the top. GIMP is an awesome bit of software. The anti-GIMP diatribes are amazing to read. Etc.
I really do think that people just like to find something they think they have an adequate excuse to kick, and then spend lots and lots of time kicking. It's some kind of perverse instance of self-validation or something.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
while you were fretting over muh ideology, the joos took over this country. just now they have brought us very close to ww3
fuck you cuck
This is why I'm not a Republican anymore.
Hi bitterness here would seem to indicate that he was designing it more for himself than for the community. If he was designing it more for himself then he should not care about what other people think about it. If, however, he was designing it for the community then he should have been more willing to listen to community input and constructive feedback.
If something terrible is not mainstream, I merely dislike it. If something terrible is mainstream, and I'm forced to use it, only then does it merit actual hate.
If something's not terrible, I'll like it regardless of whether it's mainstream or not.
If I were in charge of a company that made FREE software I'd tell the trolls to go fuck themselves. Fucking losers don't have anything better to do.
I don't respond to AC's.
While I think Shuttleworth is right that the software industry in general suffers from profound sociopathy, he doesn't seem to have asked the obvious question, which is why people hated his UI, and Ubuntu in general. Sure, we should be grateful that a group of developers would share the fruits of their labor with the community, for free. Perhaps we should actually pity them for not being able to monetize it worth a damn, while legions of their users profit, directly or indirectly, from their work. To that extent, the economic model of open source is completely broken. That said, I don't consider Ubuntu an asset worth sharing. It's so buggy, so slow, so awkward, so annoying, and so devoid of architectural consistency, that it's just a giant liability masquerading as a "Trusty" OS. I see no commitment to quality assurance, or even a commitment to user engagement. Their project is swamped with a hundred thousand open bugs, most of which having rotted for months on their website. They constantly mix new features (read: annoyances) with bug fixes, so nothing is ever stable. At least when Microsoft created its own dogpile of an OS, its founder reinvested the profits in laudible charitable causes. But Ubuntu has just created more hassle than it relieved, taxing its users in many nonobvious ways including potential privacy compromises, and AFAIK not even making enough money for its creators to be worthwhile. Give up, Mark. Your heart is in the right place, but unfortunately not your head. Acquire Solus Linux. It actually works, and it boots like 10X faster.
Gnome (2) was mainstream. Unity was a totally confusing resource hog peace of shit. In 1998 I installed SuSE with KDE at my friends, still would not give anyone Unity crap in 2017. If Ubuntu would just focus on getting rock solid Linux to the people. But no, they need to tinker with everything and f*ck it up in non standard ways. That is not the way to success, and how you make friends, ...
My 2 € cents, ...
As a liberal, 'hate' is too kind a word for how I feel about the hypocritical bs shown by the Democrats.
You mean like the Senate Democrats giving the Supreme Court nominee a fair committee hearing instead of boycotting the committee hearing as some liberals have advocated?
I prefer government that works. The Senate Democratic did their job. If you think that's hypocritical, then you're part of the problem.
"I used to think that it was a privilege to serve people who also loved the idea of service, but now I think many members of the free software community are just deeply anti-social types who love to hate on whatever is mainstream."
Mr. Shuttleworth has exactly identified why it will NEVER be the "Year of the Linux Desktop".
If you agree with them they are your friend, if you have a differing opinion they hate you.
As the old saying goes, "With friends like these who need enemies."
Summarizing today's news story, wealthy and somewhat benevolent Mark Shuttlesworth doesn't appreciate some of the criticism his projects have received, notwithstanding his mixed generosity. I say mixed because part of the plan was to make money, too (though I think he's donated way more money than he's earned on this Ubuntu thing). His real unhappiness is probably that he feels his generosity is insufficiently appreciated.
I actually agree with Mr Shuttlesworth that much of the criticism was unjustified, but I have two responses: (1) Some of the criticism was merited and (2) What else could they contribute?
Response (1) is about the biggest problem with the big donor model of charity (even if Ubuntu has some non-charitable aspects). Sometimes the big donor makes a mistake. In general the big donors don't just throw in the big money and go away. You can say it's a matter of trust or accountability or whatever, but they stay involved. In the specific case of Ubuntu, the development priorities have sometimes gone a bit astray. Obviously the shell kerfuffles are examples, but the low priority on Japanese language support has actually been the main recommendation barrier in my case. I'd like to encourage people to adopt Ubuntu, but (after using the OS for many years (probably since Dapper Drake in 2006)) I still can't.
Response (2) is really about frustration. At least I don't see what other alternative most of the potential users of Ubuntu have. Some of the top programmers presumably have Mr Shuttlesworth's ear and can influence things, but most of us are on the outside. Way on the outside. I actually think that many of the problems with Ubuntu are ultimately due to programmer-driven decisions. Good programmers want to do fancy things. They want to push the envelope and develop fancy features for fancy hardware. Or maybe it's just my problem that I have other things to do with my time or that I'm too cheap to buy new computers fast enough?
I need to disclaim that I feel some frustration and disappointment with Ubuntu, too. I had hopes that it would become a dominant desktop OS, but it never did. It's not like there weren't major opportunities. For example that Vista fiasco. It's just that Ubuntu never filled any of the big vacuums. However, I mostly didn't care that much, so I never even investigated the details. I just observed the results.
(By the way, I do think there is at least one possible solution. Are you brave enough to ask me about the Charity Share Brokerage for small donors? Hint: Kickstarter and Indiegogo aren't there yet, but maybe that idea could be fixed...)
Anyway, things sometimes turn out for the better, at least when the term is long enough. Turns out the desktop OS doesn't matter that much anymore. Maybe Linux won out after all, but via the backdoor leading to Android smartphones? Still a bit of the big donor problem, but at least the google seems more competent than evil. For now. I recommend Dogfight on the smartphone war, but maybe you have a good book to recommend? (Yeah, I'm sure there are some interesting blogs and webpages, too, but mostly I find them as half-baked as this selfsame noddie.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Thank you Mark, fellow South African
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Some people want to be different, just like the other people that want to be different
love is just extroverted narcissism
What will happen to the government when the weight of "doing their jobs" rests entirely on the minority party?
Play Command HQ online
This guy seems to be unaware of that little fact. Ubuntu is a pretty good example for it though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And down here in the real world, we actually like X11 as it works pretty well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I agree that there are some folks who hate anything mainstream. But seriously, there are some rationale to be negative about Mir. Don't want to beat a dead horse, but there's absolutely no reason but "not invented here" syndrome for the existence of Mir in the first place. Fortunately, it seems like for the cases like this natural selection works quite well. OpenOffice isn't quite dead yet, but it surely smells funny. Xemacs, RIP. My gut feeling is that Mir may end up exactly like those two. I'm sure there are more examples of that. And, while we're at that, someone mentioned Perl vs Python. As a person who had to main large Perl-based system, many years ago, I came to the conclusion that Perl was written by geeks and for geeks, with very little concern for requirements of production environment where maintainability of a code is a key. Perl exists solely so geeks can have fun writing a code no one else can read. And that's exactly why Python is becoming a standard script for the large production system, and I wouldn't care less about the "evil white space".
What will happen to the government when the weight of "doing their jobs" rests entirely on the minority party?
The tail (minority party) gets to wag the dog (majority party).
But you're still apparently clueless if you left the Republican Party over anti-Semitism.
Re-read my original comment. I wrote "stupidity" of the Republican Party. Any party that takes pride in and makes ignorance a virtue is a party not worth voting for.
So what is the correct way to exit the solid black test screen other than adding back functionality that was removed?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Yeah X "works" but the responsiveness hasn't improved since the X11R5 days...
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I'm skeptical, but if true I'm sure the Republicans don't miss a Democratic partisan shithead like you.
Without moderate conservatives in the Congress, the Republicans are going to have a hard time rubbing two nickels together (see healthcare bill).
Ignoring the last 16 years of Schumer and Reid and claiming the Democrats are good guys is proof positive you are a fucking moron.
That's your opinion, not mine.
The GPL also allows criticism, so if you don't like criticism "pipe down and enjoy your slice of GPL freedom"
I don't see it that way. Look at the hits GIMP takes. Look at the hits Python and Perl take. I'm not talking about technical objections; I'm talking about just general hits.
There is some basis for some of the technical hits - for instance, Perl legitimately takes some flack for opposed opinions on its typical readability, and Python legitimately takes some flack for opposed opinions on whitespace. But both take hits as if using them would be the freaking end of the world, and it tends to be way over the top. GIMP is an awesome bit of software. The anti-GIMP diatribes are amazing to read. Etc.
I really do think that people just like to find something they think they have an adequate excuse to kick, and then spend lots and lots of time kicking. It's some kind of perverse instance of self-validation or something.
While you may be correct with those examples, Shuttleworth just comes of as bitter that his pet NIH project failed.
After all, Mir is not, and never was, mainstream.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
As Shuttleworth would have it:
* mainstream, n.
A technology so rooted in public acceptance that it's no longer necessary to communicate up front with the users who will most suffer from the upcoming change cycle.
I didn't leave Ubuntu because of Unity.
I left Ubuntu because no transition plan was put forward to aid me in riding out the early adoption cycle from a safe remove whereby I retained the full use of my extra monitors and the meticulous workflow depending upon these that I had painstakingly adopted over many years.
There's nothing intrinsic to mainstream that I reject, other than how becoming meanstream seems to immediately entitle the proprietor to carpet yank—without even the courtesy of a gruff dentist, who at least mutters reassuringly "this won't hurt a bit".
Why does Canonical hate the main stream, and tend to roll their own instead? Wayland, Unity, Upstart ...
Now I agree with him that a lot of people in OSS do not act like professionals and they make petty arguments that a most always boil down to an emotional attachment to the code that one has written. That really annoys me. However, the lack of support for Mir to me comes down to the fact that it is redundant with Wayland and isn't as big of a technical step forward as Wayland. There is a real cost to needing to implement 3 different display drivers for each GPU instead of 1 or 2 (X11, Wayland, Mir.) So it is entirely understandable to me that there would be some pushback. Once Intel decided to only provide drivers for X11 and Wayland that really should have been the wakeup call to just switch to Wayland and be done with it instead of trying to reinvent absolutely everything.
GIMP criticism is different to some of the other projects. GIMP is trying to make an artists tool and the problem is unless they completely rip off Photoshop's interface they will always face criticism for not being photoshop. Art tools are like religions. There is only one true way, and everyone has a different version of that way. That's why open source art tools are never going to be good enough until they've ripped off Paint shop Pro, Photoshop, 3D Studio MAX, MAYA, Lightwave, Caligari Truespace (my preferred tool), Rhino 3D etc etc. It's never going to be good enough to have one or some of those tools. It has to be all of them.
Nobody claimed there was any violation of the license.
and switched back in 2011/2012.
In 2006 they just fixed the things in debian which were a little bit annoying.
in 2010/2011 they started making the distribution completely unusable (do you remember the first releases with unity?)
Most of their gold-coated crap was badly documented and did not fit into the rest of the distribution.
GIMP criticism is different to some of the other projects. GIMP is trying to make an artists tool and the problem is unless they completely rip off Photoshop's interface they will always face criticism for not being photoshop. Art tools are like religions.
The funny thing with GIMP is not only did they target it as a Photoshop replacement, they targeted it only as a professional tool, and get annoyed when "casual" users are using it. Look on their forum where they get annoyed at users for getting annoyed at their fucked up save menu. Of course much like their application where they fuck things up for no apparent reason, their forum is now fucked up, so I had to resort to archive.org.
It's too bad Paint.NET isn't available as a cross platform free tool. Much more usable than GIMP.
[Core user group activities include] high-end photo manipulation; note the word ‘high-end,’ this is in results that can be achieved with GIMP and workflow it supports; high-end is not mid-or low-end: touching up some holiday photos a couple times a year is not what GIMP is made for;
I was heavy into LTSP back in the Hardy days. Ubuntu was seemingly 100% behind making the project thrive. And then one day, they simply went on to something else. They left our community out in the cold, trying to scavenge for any kind of real long-term support for LTSP networks. It became a real mess. I went (back) to Debian. What a relief that was.
Seems like that's what they're doing the same thing with Unity now. They've lost interest, so they're simply looking at the next new shiny thing. I admittedly know very little about Mir, but I'm not surprised at some of the hate people in the community have for it. Personally it seems like Canonical likes to announce huge projects, push at them for a while, then simply turn around and go push something else.
Also, I don't like how he tries to classify an entire software ecosystem as a monolithic thing. Canonical might be a monolith, but it's one monolith in a billion monoliths in the lith-o-garden. Yep. I just said that.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Coming from the person who opened 'bug 1' as 'microsoft has the top market share'. I agreed with the Shuttleworth of that time, Windows gets a whole lot wrong (of course back in the day, Linux was competing against single-user Windows, which was miles worse, but MS's uneven evolution into a robust operating system has very little to admire, and a whole lot of stuff that isn't so good).
But anyway, generally it's not 'the same people', that's what it feels like when you see criticism on all sides, but generally people are consistent.
On Mir, you had people thinking it was a bit silly given Xorg, and on the other hand you had people thinking (seemingly now accurately) that Mir was a distraction and wasn't realistically going to deliver what Canonical wanted: To mature faster than Wayland, but not have substantially different goals.
Canonical on the phone received skepticism as it came on the heels of repeated varying failed ventures into non-conventional territory (and some of those being exceptionally silly and not baked at all, just a concept to toss out at a conference to fish for interest). Also, the convergence story is something that people have complained about since Windows 8 started getting tested, it was not something that Canonical uniquely got criticized for, just that they got caught up in the converged story and the desktop experience suffers for trying to accommodate scaling down to a phone interface. Those who understand how operating systems work and how similar the design of computing devices get caught up in the assumption that people must be annoyed by things not being cohesive, when in practice it seems people have repeatedly overwhelmingly chosen to have distinct devices that focus exclusively on different usage scenarios.
In terms of Android vs. iPhone and not much alternatives, frankly that market is so casual (even most enthusiasts deal with their mobile device as a casual thing and focus their enthusiast bent on other systems), so people aren't caring that much that there aren't more competitors, simply because they have other things to worry abut.
People didn't rail much against Gnome 2, they railed against Gnome 3, since after giving Gnome 2 pretty much the title of 'de facto' interface, Gnome 3 was so dramatically different, and shoved down everyone's throat by carrying the 'gnome' brand (again, with many HIG changes specifically for Tablets and small screens that didn't really pan out). Rather than trying to float the concept as a different thing to displace, it was called 'gnome 3'.
I guess the short of it is, he is suffering some frustration with the reality that trying to do Ubuntu as a business has failed as his ability to fund it has run out and there's no external investment for a company that never makes money. So now the question should become whether or not Ubuntu can continue as a volunteer effort, particularly with changes in Debian. Ubuntu's exceptional ambitions (Unity, Phone, TV, Music store, amazon integrated into desktop search, etc) will not be missed by many folks, leaving the core original success of a reasonably paced debian derivative with integrated attention to practical things like codecs and drivers even if not 100% libre. Painfully this means that his employee count is not sustainable and a lot of good folks will have to go other ways. Financially he repeatedly pursued potentially interesting, albeit unlikely revenue streams and you can only do that so much without success before it's not feasible to continue.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Come on guys, don't take anything Mark Shuttleworth says too seriously at the moment.
We already know he's just making press releases to line up his company for a buy-out, and needs to make his company look like it's not run by neckbeards.
Nothing more.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
GIMP: I just installed the latest version. The UI seems better now. But before, people didn't like GIMP because of a poor user interface. How much time did you want to spend teaching people how to use software? Especially when those people you were teaching disliked the obviously foolish, unfinished UI?
GIMP has a long history of being limited by its name. A "gimp" is a physically disabled person. If they wanted to be more extreme, they could have named the program "Lung cancer".
Mark Shuttleworth and conflict: It's wonderful that Ubuntu is available. However, I think the development of Ubuntu has been limited by Mark Shuttleworth's lack of ability in dealing with conflicts. I spent about 30 minutes talking with him, and offered help, but he didn't accept.
Yes, "... members of the free software community are just deeply anti-social..." However, it has often happened that Shuttleworth didn't know how to deal with that.
I don't hate "mainstream" per se. I dislike crap. I *HATE* "new and improved" crap that becomes "mainstream" enough to force its way onto my machine.
1) I started using ICEWM on my home machine in January or February 2010. Since then my "desktop" has remained basically unchanged. System configuration on my machine has remained basically similar, with text files in /etc.
At work, before I retired, I went through Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. Every few years, even power users were reduced to noobs who had to go through basic training on the "new and improved" UI. System settings were even worse. It was basically "everything you know is wrong" after each "new and improved" system. Apparently, GNOME and KDE users go through a similar nightmare every year or two. I use my computer to do stuff, not to be constantly learning new interfaces.
2) Firefox *USED TO BE* a great little browser. I used it from day 1, back when I had to build "Phoenix" as a subset of "Mozilla", back around the time of "Mozilla 1.0". Remember how AOL destroyed Netscape by trying to turn it into an abstraction-layer/pseudo-OS that would run on top of Windows or linux? Mozilla foundation similarly destroyed Firefox by turning it into a an emacs-like pseudo-OS... that lacked a lightweight web-browser. WebRTC, Hello, Pocket, etc, etc, were piled on.
The last straw for me was the Atrocious^H^H^H^H^H^H Austraulis interface. I heard rumblings that there was a new interface that many people didn't like. I wasn't concerned, because I always set up a customized version to my liking anyways. I was shocked when it it hit the release version, and I found I could not customize it away. The UI-hipsters knew that people would hate it, so they went out of their way to remove the ability for a regular user to customize it away. For several months, the most popular Firefox extension was a "classic-UI restorer". It accessed stuff deeper down "under the hood" and restored the classic interface. But that was too late. I had left for SeaMonkey, and then eventually Pale Moon when it got a linux version.
3) PulseAudio and systemd may work OK *TODAY*. But they were beta-quality when they were first released. I avoided them, and the pain of being the linux equivalant of a Windows user, acting as a guinea-pig for beta quality software.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Wow, I'm dazzled by your mind reading capabilities. Not to be compared with your screen reading skills. Perhaps you should reread what I actually wrote and clarify how your response is related to my actual words rather than what you think you read directly out of my mind? It's not that I mind going there (though at this point I'd mostly have to guess where you think you're going), but mostly a lack of justification.
Right now I mostly regard your reply as an example of having nothing to say, but insisting on saying it anyway. Then again, my reply is too close for comfort. The proximal problem is that by the time I return again, the entire topic will probably have expired...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
In real production code you pretty much have to check the type "manually" of every argument to every function. And document the type in the comments. This is much more work that just using a strongly typed language in the first place. Python's a fine scripting language, a tier above the likes of Perl and PHP. But it's not for real code.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Amy Schumer often blames her audience for Amy's own failures, usually calling them "haters."
Must we like everything the industry poops out?
Lots of people hated Linux before Linux had a whopping 1% of the desktop. Lots of people hated, and still MacOS, even though MacOS has a small share of the market.
Systemd is only on about 1% of desktops, but lots of people hate it.
People hated Unity, even though it was only on a small percentage of desktops.
No, arrogant nerds who think they are better than other people hate those things.
Normal people? They are happy that they can use the tech. That does not make them worth hating or sneering at.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
So he hates canonical for trying to develop their own desktop environment? In other words trying to move away from mainstream kde/gnome/....
I remember a job fair, waiting in line at a Nothrup-Gruman line. The guy ahead of me steps up and starts talking about what a great VB programmer he was. The recruiter told him they were only looking for C++ and Ada. He then asked what could be done in Ada and C++ that couldn't be done in VB. The recruiter explained that they make military aircraft, and that most modern advancements were in the software that controls them. He says something that aircraft can't do that and walks away. I step up laughing and the recruiter and I share a knowing look. When you are a mainstream button make, or a mainstream paper maker, there is nothing new. But tech changes, and the mainstream always tries to make every problem into a nail. It's especially worse which linux which is highly configurable. Many companies that have become mainstream start getting large heads and start dictating configurations rather then go with the flow, and OSS people tend to be more independent and get ruffled by such actions.
... and buy a Mac; I've never looked back. It was all due to Shuttleworth's hate over GNOME, presumably because it was too mainstream and functional, in preference for Unity, that caused me to ditch Linux entirely. Now he's going back to GNOME?! LOL. Too late, buddy.
Maybe hes butthurt that Ubuntu got too big for its boots and Mint stepped in.
>>>
Why isn't linux on the desktop? Fragmentation.
>>>
Ten years ago it was freedom of choice. Next excuse please.
Yup, Mark Shuttleworth nailed it and it resounds perfectly well with these nut anti-systemd zealots.
I have absolutely no problem with that. Maybe the issue is your window manager and not X?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I like things that are mainstream and more obscure. None of those attributes tend to factor in though. It depends on the problem. Saying that I occasional have a bias in selection for mainstream which is justifiable. Mainstream in Open Source means more tried and tested, more contribution, more community support and a larger talent pool to hire from. It's not always good. Some things get massive contribution, even too much that quality goes out the window and you have a maintenance nightmare. On the whole though, mainstream tends to be alright.
"The whole Mir hate-fest boggled my mind - it's free software that does something invisible really well."
Actually I got really annoyed at this. Not specifically at Mir. At the whole there's always two things to choose from. Wayland/Mir, Systemd/Upstart, MySQL/MariaDB, oi.js/node.js, Electron/nsjw, etc. Choices are always annoying. Node.js managed to fix things. For a lot of things I find myself avoiding being an early adopter and wait to see how those things work out first to see if they merge or there can only be one.
There are two things I really hate. Bandwagoning and the unique/superior obscure tool obsession. You often see spikes in tech use due to bandwagoning that then drops as the language turns out to be too much trouble but then you still have the lingering stench of it because of a bunch of legacy products that used it. Bandwagoning can be linked to the other thing. Often someone will want to learn an obscure and often over complicated language so to not have competition and because they believe a theoretically superior (perhaps potentially than actually materialised) tool will offer them that. It will make them special or something. This can happen with new tools but ironically everyone has the same inclination so you get a burst of them. Then when they all realise that actually this boat is quite crowded they all bugger off to go master a variety of other obscure languages like Haskell, Erlang, Prolog, Lisp, Ada, R, etc. All of them though secretly dream their language will suddenly become famous and that they'll be the master in it or at the forefront. I just stick with what works well for the problem rather than some new fangled technology then adopt something when it becomes mature enough and suits the problem well. If language A is the traditional choice for domain A, then language B comes out claiming to suit domain A better, I can't really know that without a point of reference, such as language A, except when language A has been used in domain A a million times but language B ten times then I know that language A is a pretty safe bet. Don't get roped into being a guinea pig more than is necessary or that you really have the time for.
I think this is part of the problem, the strong desire, masking as need, for relentless modularity and configuration that the vast majority of users don't care about. The result is a tangle of code that needs to be a tangle to keep satisfying a core group of influencers with obscure features that most people don't care about and don't know how to configure.
Meanwhile, people on the Windows side laugh and wonder what the big deal is, they have had a useful GUI forever and Remote Desktop solves remote execution (albeit differently than X), too.
Okay, now I understand your focus, but it was a minor point to me. I regard selling to the makers rather than the actual users to be one of the two major keys to Microsoft's success. The other one was ducking all liability in the EULA. Neither was original, but Microsoft perfected them.
From that perspective, the obvious response would be for Ubuntu to have gone after makers. My suggestion regarding small donors would be unlikely to help there, though I do think that a superior and real-user-driven OS would have some advantages to offer to the makers. Going after the makers needs major marketing with really big donors behind it. Perhaps Mark Shuttleworth should have focused there when he had the chance? However, I admit that I'm not optimistic given how little success the google had with their Chromebooks... (Do they still exist?)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Many may not listen to Shuttleworth, but perhaps they should listen to Yoda:
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
John_Chalisque
So in the end, becoming more popular leads to the issues that you complain about with popular software. The end result being that you will never be happy about anything unless you learn to relax and accept that some things are just inevitable.
Ubuntu is the only Linux distro I've ever used which had auto-updates enabled on a server. Suffice to say that after 1-2 years running smoothly and forgetting about it the thing updated its node.js version, tanking applications which required months to repair (before the package.json aspect was a standard thing to use for NPM packages.) Combine that with overly-complex-impossible-to-secure nonsense like systemd and I can soundly say fuck Ubuntu, never again.
In real production code you pretty much have to check the type "manually" of every argument to every function. And document the type in the comments. This is much more work that just using a strongly typed language in the first place. Python's a fine scripting language, a tier above the likes of Perl and PHP. But it's not for real code.
Yes, of course...because we all know that in "real" production code, the comments are ubiquitous, diligent, and comprehensive :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
>> "Windows does many things well and deserves respect for those."
I promise I'm not intentionally trolling and am asking a sincere question:
Which things are these? I can't think of a single one, at least that is great on their own merit (and not because of monopolistic marketing), and isn't done better by something free in Linux.
It's not about the interface (although gIMPs interface leaves lots to be desired). It's about the feature set. Photoshop is orders of magnitude more powerful than gIMP and has been forever. It's non-destructive ability to layer various kinds of effects and then edit where and how they are applied (because it's non-distructive) are just one of the major features that separate the two. It's on their list to add and has been for years (no sign of it yet) but it's been in Photoshop for ~15 years?
There are open source projects that are closer to parity with features. Blender comes to mind that seems to come close to some of its closed source competition. Maybe Libre Office is another. gIMP is not in that category of being near par with it's closed source competitors.
It's one thing to support DRM and commercial software and quite another to gimp the entire OS in order to bend over backwards for the entertainment industry. Apple has managed to avoid this. There's no reason Linux can't do the same.
I've been running commercial software on Linux longer than some of you have even used it. Oracle goes way back as does gaming even. Even DRM protected entertainment content has long been supported (on both MacOS and Linux) without corrupting the OS to suit one single industry of limited significance.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It's one thing to support DRM and commercial software and quite another to gimp the entire OS in order to bend over backwards for the entertainment industry
Like how my Macbook won't output video (at all) if it detects that it's connected to my HDMI matrix?
Eventually I got around it by grabbing a hardware device, the HDMI Detective, and programming it with the EDID for my projector to trick it into thinking it's connected to a full HDCP chain so it would output video again to the HDMI splitter.
Linux, fortunately, didn't have that problem, and the nvidia driver lets me specify an EDID file so I don't need to use an external piece of hardware just for that.
I agree to your first point. There are a log of pseudo-smart people in software (and certainly in FOSS), that need to mess with things all the time, need to change things that work and have never heard of or understood the KISS principle. These people constantly break things in the name of "progress" and make everything more complex. I suspect all they really want is to leave their mark on things. Not good at all.
I do not agree to your second point, as Windows is plain unusable as soon as you want a good level of customization. Basically you need to do it over with each update. On Linux, I had to update my fvwm-configuration exactly once in 30 years, when they moved to fvwm2. That is it. Same look and feel, fine-tuned for my tastes, for a long, long time and that is how a professional tool should behave. Of course, things like Gnome of KDE do not offer that, but there is no need to use these atrocities.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Krita, when it works as intended, is amazing. I haven't tried it for photo editing but for digital painting it's extremely powerful and has a good interface with a great shortcut system giving photoshop a good run for its money and leaving everything else in the dust.
This is pretty strange. Last week I started doing quite a bit of work on my Ubunuty/Unity desktop. I got pretty miffed when I couldn't create simple desktop launchers. So I checked out some other desktops and decided to use Cinnamon. Unfortunately Ubuntu's Cinnamon is a bit buggy particularly when it goes to sleep and you wake it up again. As such I installed Fedora 25 Cinnamon and It's been great so far. The NEXT DAY I read an article that Ubuntu is discontinuing Unity. Then the DAY AFTER THAT I hear that Ubuntu has been sending my input information to Amazon and possibly others. I wasn't aware of this. I don't recall ever being given the option to OPT-OUT. Whatever the reason, I think Canonical is being just a little dishonest with it's users and the effects are starting to show.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
Casteism
Ouch! $150 just to use your projector? Which I assume wasn't cheap in the first place. There's EDID spoofing software for Windows that I used to get nVidia's 3d software (this was a few years ago before 3d support was builtin to windows) to recognize my 3d TV. I forget how it worked with HDCP though.
No, the open-source programmer does not make a program or a library or a toolkit in order to serve. They do that for pleasure or in order to prove to the world that they can. It is a distributed model (as opposed to a top-down model like Canonical's) that has worked well for decades. It has nothing to do with service. Maybe Shuttleworth should read The Cathedral and the Bazaar before equating open-source with service.
--- Andy West http://andywest.org
> It is Linux mainstream.
I'm into some pretty niche repos, you probably haven't heard of them.
So what party does the "moderate conservative" creimer vote for?
They didn't have the votes to stop a hearing committe.
The one area they did have the votes to be able to obstructe they tried to use (the filibuster) .
Erm... How else does one verify type at function/method invocation in a ducktyped language?
Duck typing basically enforces that rote programming for checking type in the way that languages with less advanced error handling paradigms enforce (or don't if you're insane) enclosing every single function call in an if statement...
Normal people? They are happy that they can use the tech.
Ridiculously unintelligent comment.
Normal people almost always generally hate a reduction in functionality of which they are accustomed to, regardless of what that level was before hand.
My decidedly unarrogant and unnerdy mother is ready to throw away her new TV because it doesn't do a single thing she wants, no matter how many times I tell her she can do it another way.
People become accustomed to a way things are done. Quit thinking your minimalist future is The One True Path, and that everyone who disagrees with you must be somehow less enlightened, you arrogant fuck.
(albeit differently than X)
And much to my consternation as both a Linux desktop (laptop) user, and a sysadmin for a large amount of servers, Windows and Linux-
better.
Don't get me wrong- I love the concept of network transparency in X. I think it's beautiful. The way I can run an X app remotely on my machine almost as if it were native... It's awesome. In practice? Give me an RDP connection to a Windows server any fucking day of the week.
I do not agree to your second point
And I agree with what he said, at least as literally written.
The Windows GUI is by far the most productive GUI layout for me. I don't use Windows... I can't use Windows. I need a GNU or BSD userland... I can't live without it anymore. But the GUI layout- Fuck Unity. Fuck Gnome3. Fuck KDE in spite of its astounding beauty and brilliant customization... it's just too fucking cluttered.
I administrate nearly 200 machines, and design networks and write software on a daily basis. There's one thing I care about for my DE- my productivity. My ability to keep my wasted overhead to a minimum.
The fact that you're using a 30 year old FVWM means you largely agree with that precept, albeit with a different preference in layout. And no matter how you swing it, RDP is simply better in almost every use case unless you're attached to a very low latency network, even in spite of the fact that it's not even a replacement for X network transparency. It's just.... better. In practice.
So what party does the "moderate conservative" creimer vote for?
I usually vote for the best candidate for the job. The party letter next to the name doesn't matter.
I'll take that bet.
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