The future of Ubuntu revealed

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/the-future-of-ubuntu-revealed-1114487

by johnr8201 • 14 years ago

38 76 14 years ago

techradar.com

unimpressive• 14 years ago

"We're very comfortable with where we are. Our revenue is growing at a healthy pace."

I have to ask myself if that's true, or if they're just saying that.

ohwp• 14 years ago

As Ubuntu gets more popular I'm sure they are selling more support to schools, governments and others. In 2009 they had a revenue of $30m which was enough to keep things running. So why not?

meaty2• 14 years ago

Well they pissed off half the users with amazon so I'm not that sure it's true.

ekianjo4• 14 years ago

I am more pissed of by the regressions in compatibility in 12.10 than the Amazon thingy that could be turned off in 3 seconds.

adrianhoward4• 14 years ago

Well they pissed off half the users with amazon so I'm not that sure it's true.

Is that really true? Sure - it annoyed a heck of a lot of folk in the Hn community - and similar tech-focused arenas.

Non techie folk I've seen using 12.10 either a) Don't notice, b) don't care or c) like it.

vidarh3• 14 years ago

I'd expect the number of pissed off users to be more in the 0.1% range if we're going to throw around unsubstantiated numbers.

breakyerself• 14 years ago

It doesn't bother me at all. People do actual work to make the os. They need to pay those people. Since I'm not paying them and they're a for profit company I'm not the least bit surprised or bothered.

ekianjo4• 14 years ago

Hard to know, but at least they are not firing people are still expanding in the scope of their projects, so either they have good financials or strong investors believing in them (on top of Shuttleworth). We know Google is using a custom-made distribution of Ubuntu in their offices, and they are probably a big commercial partner for them, among others.

laumars• 14 years ago

"at least they are not firing people are still expanding in the scope of their projects"

You mean aside their Qt / KDE developer when they dropped Kubuntu as an official 'remix'?

Personally I've never liked Ubuntu, not even in the early days. I think it's one of the worst distributions for consistency. They bring in largely untested components prematurely (Pulse Audio), change the GUI every 6 to 12 months and even propose breaking established standards within the Linux world (eg 'Windicators' : http://www.osnews.com/story/23243/Shuttleworth_Unveils_Windi... ).

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a dumbed down distro for new users, but I really don't think Ubuntu is the best out there. In fact I think it's probably one of the most over hyped.

However what Ubuntu has brought us is a common base (be that via vanilla Ubuntu, one of it's many 'remixes' or even the spin offs / forks like Mint) and better exposure to the Linux platform. Had it not been for Canonical -or more specifically, Mark Shuttleworth- then I'm not convinced that we'd be seeing Steam on Linux.

The beauty of Linux is Ubuntu can co-exist with Gentoo, Slackware, Arch and all the other extremes of the Linux ecosystem. So I can run my 'hands on' distro of choice, and my wife can run her 'hands free' *buntu fork.

thejosh• 14 years ago

Don't they also earn money from landscape etc?

bkor• 14 years ago

He only talked about revenue. Nothing if they're making money (profits).

cfn• 14 years ago

This is only part of the picture but they sure are growing:

http://companycheck.co.uk/company/05055134

ComputerGuru• 14 years ago

I was an Ubuntu fan for a long time, but now I've gone back to Debian. Ubuntu has become far too dumbed down for me.

I've ranted about the dumbing down of UIs previously on HN (re: Windows 8 Metro/WinRT, OS X Launchpad), but none are as terrible as Unity. It's impossible to find what you're looking for with it, it's terribly unintuitive, it hinders productivity more than any of the other offerings, makes it impossible to find out what applications you have (since software store apps and normal apps are held separate), and once Gnome fallback is disabled/no longer ships, will be shoved down users' throats more than WinRT or Launchpad are.

This and a number of other missteps on Canonical's side (cough Amazon cough) have made me a disbeliever.

I've actually spoken at length with some Canonical business representatives out of London on this issue, and when I laid out some of the limitations of Unity to them over the phone, I was surprised to hear them readily agree that it's nowhere near perfect, and in many ways a step back from the tried and tested UX. I can't remember the specific complaints that I voiced at the time (this was a while ago), but they promised to be in touch when the issues have been addressed, but I'm not holding my breath on that happening.

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

Well, I agree with you about Amazon. Your info on Gnome is a month or two inaccurate though. As for Unity, have you used it recently? It's a wildly different thing than it was a year and a half ago.

ekianjo4• 14 years ago

I am currently using Ubuntu 12.10 with Cinnamon and it's much better than the Unity experience. You should give it a try, it feels refreshing.

clark-kent• 14 years ago

Unity has finally caught up. Have you tried Unity in Ubuntu 12.10? I was a big Gnome 2 fan for years and couldn't stand unity until 12.10, Unity has become productive and more than usable for a programmer.

pekk2• 14 years ago

I find that the interface design is fine (comparing like to like with metro, gnome shell) but you do need a fast machine, and laptop power draw is not too hot.

derleth2• 14 years ago

> Ubuntu has become far too dumbed down for me.

You know you can run Ubuntu without Unity, right?

I mean, does anyone on Earth know that?

I can't be the only one running a non-Unity desktop environment on Ubuntu. (Window Maker)

easytiger• 14 years ago

The point is if you run Ubuntu without Unity that it breaks a large amount of functionality. Wireless for instance becomes a complete pain. Lots of stuff like xorg config is now embedded in unity.

vidarh3• 14 years ago

> It's impossible to find what you're looking for with it

Huh? You press the windows key, and start typing in the name of what you want to look for. I find it far easier to find things with Unity than before.

> it hinders productivity more than any of the other offerings

I was planning on installing a tiling window manager when I first installed Ubuntu 12.04, as I really want the desktop environment to not get in my way. I stuck with Ubuntu because contrary to your experience,to me it's the most productive UI I've used in the last 20 years+.

> makes it impossible to find out what applications you have (since software store apps and normal apps are held separate)

"dpkg -l" like in any Debian based system. I find this a ridiculous complaint from someone who has gone back to Debian, though - any way you can find this info in Debian is available to you in Ubuntu.

> once Gnome fallback is disabled/no longer ships, will be shoved down users' throats more than WinRT or Launchpad are.

As long as Debian ships alternatives, going back is fairly easy. But as it stands, there are plenty other alternatives for Ubuntu too, shipped by the community.

Personally, 12.04 with Unity was what truly sold me on Ubuntu, and I suspect the same will be true for far more users than they lose over it.

Surio• 14 years ago

Good addressing of concerns raised.

>> Personally, 12.04 with Unity was what truly sold me on Ubuntu, and I suspect the same will be true for far more users than they lose over it.

This is a correct observation (at least my own anecdata verifies it too).

akurilin• 14 years ago

Haven't had any trouble with replacing Unity with Gnome 2/3. The one time I stuck with Unity for a bit and discovered you could snap windows to the side of the screen (a la Win7), I was instantly sold.

emanuer• 14 years ago

I strongly agree. As an example try to create an Launcher for Eclipse, it is a usability nightmare.

Windows:

  Right click > Pin to Taskbar

Mac:

  Right click > Options > Keep in Dock

Ubuntu:

  gedit ~/.local/share/applications/opt_eclipse.desktop

  [Desktop Entry]
  Type=Application
  Name=Eclipse
  Comment=Eclipse Integrated Development Environment
  Icon=** something like /opt/eclipse/icon.xpm **
  Exec= ** something like /opt/eclipse/eclipse **
  Terminal=false
  Categories=Development;IDE;Java;
  
  nautilus ~/.local/share/applications
  chmod +x ~/.local/share/applications/opt_eclipse.desktop

JohnTh• 14 years ago

In Unity:

1. Open your program of choice. 2. Right-click on the Unity's icon. 3. Check "Keep in Launcher"

Enjoy!

mekoka• 14 years ago

I've used kde and Gnome on ubuntu since 7.04. When Miguel de Icaza wrote his piece on the death of desktop Linux a few months ago, discussions on Unity as the "doom" of Ubuntu crept back up and I got curious about it enough to give it a try and see for myself. My conclusion is that although many people feel the way you do and are pretty vocal about their discontent, they apparently don't represent a majority and some of the comments are increasingly out of touch and are even becoming misinformative.

This is an example. It's been my experience as a full-time user that the launcher does a great job to help you find what you're looking for. Not only can you simply type keywords and suggestions are most of the time pretty accurate, but if for some reasons you don't find what you want, you can use filters.

For example, to find applications the old-fashion way (nowadays, most people just ask what they want and it comes up):

- press super (brings up the launcher)

- click the Applications button (2nd button). The app filter is now on

- click on the second sub-header where it says "Installed" for installed applications. You should see all your apps.

- if you need to further filter by type or other, open the filter and pick one (games, internet, education, etc).

Otherwise, to do like everybody else, to launch firefox:

- super

- type fir[efox] <enter>

- super

- type int[ernet]

- click on firefox icon

I'd like to share this little comment that I found the day I moved to Unity. It reflects pretty much my experience http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=12042350&postcoun...

It's not to say that Unity is perfect, far from it, the thing still needs work, but I think it's more than time for some Unity critics to accept that maybe they're opinions are becoming non-constructive, especially when they don't address the real issues of the desktop.

RyanZAG4• 14 years ago

Canonical (and Microsoft) seem to be pushing heavily for 'design by user testing' which equates pretty closely to 'design by committee'. Interestingly, both iOS and Android Holo are the very opposite of this - 'design by fiat' where one or two people are generally setting the tone for the entire OS design based on their own preferences.

IMHO, iOS and Android are both easier to use and nicer to look at than Windows 8 and Unity - seems like a very clear indicator to me that 'design by user testing' is a very bad approach.

Any way to actually research this? Some kind of simple test of putting 'design by committee' against 'design by fiat' and having a 3rd party group grade the two in a blind side-by-side test of different UI? Seems like research worth pursuing considering how much money MS and Canonical and throwing away on this - and destroying their businesses in the process.

jiggy20119• 14 years ago

I don't understand how doing user testing is necessarily "design by committee". Regardless of how you come up with your ideas you need to test them on actual users in order to benchmark what works and what doesn't.

RyanZAG4• 14 years ago

That sounds correct - but has it actually been proven that you should design around simple indicators from user testing?

The general usage patterns of iOS were never developed with user testing at the core. Same for Android Holo. These designs were created directly from a designers intuition and have since been improved slightly with user feedback and testing. If you read up on publicly available information about the process though, it is clear that user testing was not the central issue.

Meanwhile whenever you read anything regarding Windows 8 or Unity design, the use of user testing was always core to the design process - often toted as the most important part. Just read this article and the main theme of their design discussion is on user testing.

Basically, I think this area needs more research rather than an off the cuff "you need to test them on actual users in order to benchmark what works and what doesn't". Sounds correct, but has anybody actually tested that? Often your test users don't see the big picture and don't really know themselves what they want. They're just answering 'big blocks were easier to click on'. That doesn't mean you must use big blocks - you need to consider the interface and usage as a whole, not simple data points from testing and consider your design done...

jfoster2• 14 years ago

What do you understand user testing to be?

I understand it (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) as being the same as usability testing. In other words, putting users in front of a particular design with a task you want them to complete. You then observe anything they struggle with. You can also measure how long it takes them to complete the task. These things inform you about how good your design is at the same time as making some design flaws very evident. One thing that is sometimes included (but I personally disagree with) is asking the user for an opinion.

RyanZAG4• 14 years ago

However, consider the following:

A UI for creating a shopping cart. We can rank two different variables here:

1) Number of users making a purchase. 2) Number of users returning goods because they didn't actually want it.

If we focus only on the first option in our user testing (as any shopping cart user testing will do), we will generally make the 'fine print' descriptions of items as small as possible. We will make it very easy to buy an item with a single click. This is going to give us the best 'purchase rate', guaranteed.

However, we are going to get increased returns as users will miss important product details. We will get lower 'user happiness' with our store as users will feel a bit cheated and have to turn to external sites for more information. In the long run, users may stop using our store entirely and our purchase rate will fall.

This is a classic example of 'short term' or 'greed' based optimization. I feel nearly all UI testing I've seen does not cater to variable B - only to variable A. Catering to variable B isn't even really possible with a UI or A/B test?

vacri• 14 years ago

iOS and Android(apples)are both easier to use and nicer to look at than Windows 8 and Unity(oranges)

I would absolutely loathe to run my laptop, desktop, or server on a mobile OS.

RyanZAG4• 14 years ago

Point conceded - was just going with current 'talked about' OSes - but you're right in that they probably can't be compared.

I'd still like to see research done using the following - results could be very interesting.

A designer is told to create a screen for some fairly complex feature - something that has at least 10 inputs into some kind of algorithm.

Designer is given free reign to just make up some UI entirely how he thinks it should work.

Another designer is told to make different versions which are then tested by users. Users should be asked what and how they want the UI to work and how the different versions should be changed. Based on popularity of opinions by testers, that design should be changed to match what most testers prefer. Should have at least 3 repetitions of user testing and feedback.

After this, A and B are given to a new unrelated testing group who need to rank the UI from both A and B without being told about either or having anything explained.

Common sense says B should be better, but I don't think it's guaranteed... Anybody in a university position currently in a position to set something like this up? The results should likely be worth a research paper regardless of outcome!

fauigerzigerk• 14 years ago

The alternative is design by an elite group with a strong opinion. I'm very much in favor of that model provided that this elite group is knowledgable about all the tasks that users actually want to perform.

I think that's possible for consumer electronics but not for general purpose computing. No one can design for data center sysadmins, data scientists, financial analysts, architects and mobile salespeople at the same time without making mistakes.

Being opinionated in an area where your opinion is irrelevant is just being stupid.

pajju2• 14 years ago

I love Ubuntu 12.04. Remarkable well thought user experience.

6 months back, I switched completely to Ubuntu 12.04 and is my primary machine now. I'm blown away with their agile methodologies and love every small part of the web-integration + the Ubuntu software market.

Ubuntu Desktop is strongly emerging as perfect web platform with tight integration with web-services. Many Developers have started writing apps for ubuntu software market.

The concept of HUD to search inside webapps and navigate complex menu's is revolutionary! Worth mentioning, webapps are now exactly like native desktop apps, recently used the Gmail webapp, it opens as separate app and we can search inside that app. (They have an API to enable such HUD controls for any webapp). The Ubuntu Software center has tons of good apps and they also give Free 5GB cloud storage.

I'm blown away with all the features, and its worth being part of this big change.

One feature I wished to have - a seamless OS upgrade like iOS.

jiggy20119• 14 years ago

I have to say I haven't found myself using the HUD very much. When I am learning an app I usually want to have discoverability so I will search the menus looking for the stuff I need. Once I am more versed in using it I just memorize the keyboard shortcuts. Not to mention that for some apps (mainly Java etc) HUD doesn't really work at all.

Not seeing much in the software centre either.

pajju2• 14 years ago

HUD is perfect for the power users, adds a lot to productivity.

Here is the HUD demo - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_WW-DHqR3c

HUD for power users - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK2lMCMsios

StavrosK3• 14 years ago

> One feature I wished to have - a seamless OS upgrade like iOS.

What's wrong with the current OS upgrade process?

Adrock• 14 years ago

It has seams for a lot of people.

Personally, every upgrade I've done has resulted in a broken system. I'm not doing anything out of the ordinary. Half the time I'm left with a system that won't even boot and I have to do a fresh install.

josephlord2• 14 years ago

I've had Ubuntu upgrades go pretty smoothly so far.

I would like it if you could run an upgrade process to switch to a 64bit install though. It seems at the moment as if a reinstall is required (or major hacking).

crsilk2• 14 years ago

On a slightly related note. I would really like to see this fixed in Ubuntu for me to really enjoy it as a developer:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/220357/improve-eclipse-user-i...

lepacheco• 14 years ago

going on preferences->appearance and changing the theme from GTK to classic made it much better for me (will look just like previous version). Also, in classic mode, the UI fonts are integrated with the window manager so you can change them, make them smaller, etc...

crsilk2• 14 years ago

The classic look suffers from the same issues. The padding is far too heavy on most of the UI elements.

If you use Eclipse on OSX or Windows with a lot of project folders loaded at once, you will see how much better it is than on Linux.

Maybe this is the issue I'm having when trying to explain the problem I'm facing. A lot of people seem to think that I'm complaining about the new Juno interface when this issue has been around much longer than Juno.

eccp• 14 years ago

I just replied to this on Ask Ubuntu (including screenshots). You can reduce the padding a bit with a .gtkrc file and/or custom GTK themes. This and some font-tweaking on the same file should be good enough.

microwise• 14 years ago

Unlike Windows(as some of you are complaining about), Ubuntu is highly customizable, so ranting about Unity or Amazon is useless for techie guys like us, unless you are talking about the non-techie user who doesn't care that lots of his/her info in Windows/Mac is shared with third parties.

chmike2• 14 years ago

I see so many praises of Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop that I have to limit my comment to negative critics to add value to the discussion. Though I want to stress that I'm mostly very happy about it.

One problem I have is that applications tend to change the location of their windows, especially Thunderbird. This has two nasty consequences. The first one is that the window (editing mail) might be moved to another virtual desktop when switching to another app temporarily. The second one is that the moved window may have its top bar covered by the desktop top menu. So it is not possible to grab the window and move it.

Another nasty UX is that the app menu move to the deskto top bar is sometime covered by the program name or other data and becomes inaccessible.

And finally the worst of all is that NoMachine doesn't work any more because of compiz using the 3D accelerator. The fall back to 2D is only partially working. I would like to be able to use Ubuntu desktop remotely with a secure connection through high latency and slow connections as NoMachine makes it possible. This makes me want to move away from Ubuntu.

jiggy20119• 14 years ago

Another niggle.

If you have 2 monitors and want to run a fullscreen video on one (using Totem or VLC) and do work on the other one.

As soon as you focus on one of the windows on your work monitors it will bring the launcher + dock to the front on both monitors obscuring the video.

chmike2• 14 years ago

I'm replying to my own message to provide some solutions I found to the problems I reported.

First, regarding inaccessible window header bar, one must use the alt-right click magic action to display the window manager menu and select the move window. This works wherever we click in the window. The other menu commands might also be useful. However, my opinion is that it is bad UX and inefficient.

Second, regarding NoMachine, I tested Xubuntu which doesn't depend on 3D accelerator and with some trick it can be used as an ersatz of Ubuntu. For the trick that works see here: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/157817 One widget is not working, but it is not critical.

sciurus• 14 years ago

The work they're doing for the new hardware and software enablement on the LTS is interesting.

"LXF: Looking towards the server, I know recently that you increased your support life cycle to five years…

JS: Our LTS releases used to be three years on the desktop and five on the server, and we made two changes. One was bringing the desktop up to five years, and that was in response to enterprise demand.

And the second change we made was to make a stronger commitment around making those LTS versions available on new hardware as it comes out, so that people can get hardware refreshes and still maintain a stable software platform across the enterprise.

So we'll make the 12.10 kernel work with 12.04 and the 13.04 kernel work with 12.04. So if you need that kernel for hardware support, it will be available.

LXF: Red Hat recently announced it was increasing its server support cycle from, I think it was, seven years to 10 years; does Ubuntu feel any pressure to match that?

JS: We're not seeing that right now. I think the reason is the different use cases in terms of people who use Red Hat and people who use Ubuntu. And, interestingly, we're seeing pressure almost in the opposite direction.

One of the things that's happening in the server world is that everything cloud-related is so fast moving, it's not realistic to think you're going to do something now and want the same tools and software in 10 years. What we see is people wanting the stability of the base OS, but wanting new hardware support for one, and newer software for cloud-related activities.

So, they want the new OpenStack, for example, on a 12.04 LTS base, so that's another thing we've committed to do with 12.04. In six months' time, you'll be able to get the newest OpenStack. 12.04 shipped with OpenStack Essex; but when Folsom comes out, the next version, people are going to want that not just on Ubuntu 12.10, but also on 12.04, which is for stable production."

The future of Ubuntu revealed

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