Ubuntu in 2013

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1221

by zimbatm • 14 years ago

42 66 14 years ago

zimbatm2• 14 years ago

This blog-post refers to, but doesn't cite, Ubuntu's recent integration of Amazon search results to the desktop and the inclusion of non-free apps in their App store. I liked the pragmatism and neutrality of this post.

mattdeboard8• 14 years ago

Er, Mark Shuttleworth is a big muckety muck for Canonical. This is a marketing piece.

mattdeboard8• 14 years ago

> "That’s why Unity in 2013 will be all about mobile"

Cool, but don't fuck up my desktop experience with your experimentation like you have been doing.

gnaritas2• 14 years ago

Unity is all about fucked up. And gnome3 in 12.10 has been very unstable for me, getting rather frustrated.

talloaktrees• 14 years ago

I just switched to lubuntu, i recommend it even for powerful pcs

mattdeboard8• 14 years ago

Well, Unity 2D was actually really ok for me, but Unity 3D -- now the only option out of the box -- is really FUBAR. I just rolled my girlfriend's laptop back to 12.04, and am going to sit there until next LTS probably.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

I assume they must be getting deals with some relatively big hardware manufacturers in that case. And hoping those manufacturers don't simply take the open source code from unity and use it to build their own system cutting canonical out of the loop altogether.

w1ntermute3• 14 years ago

Just switch to Xubuntu. Xfce isn't changing any time soon. None of the "interface innovation" Unity is notorious for.

mattdeboard8• 14 years ago

I may eventually, but for the time being I'm going to stick with 12.04 and Unity 2D which I like a lot.

zanny2• 14 years ago

Is there a way to drag / drop arbitrary files onto the panel (ie, directories, executables, scripts, etc)? Setting up launchers and what not is so cumbersome.

beefsack• 14 years ago

I've been switching DE like crazy the past year or so trying to find a comfy fit, I've settled on XFCE (Xubuntu) with the bottom panel replaced with Plank, and have completely fallen in love with it.

chmike2• 14 years ago

I'll switch to Xubuntu too because I need remote access. It's not just a matter of UX. Cloud service doesn't solve my problem.

The future looks dark because applications won't be able to support Wyland and X11. There will be a fork and Ubuntu is betting on it with the goal to compete with Android and iOs. On this path, users like me are left as orphan. I've change OS before, I can do it again.

xradionut• 14 years ago

"Cool, but don't fuck up my desktop experience with your experimentation like you have been doing."

Yes, Microsoft has a patent on that with the release of Windows 8... :D

joeblau• 14 years ago

I think it's too late for that :). I can't even upgrade beyond 11.10 and I'm looking for alternative Linux flavors if anyone has some good suggestions. I've heard Mint is nice.

tonyedgecombe• 14 years ago

It's a shame they are pissing away the opportunity to become stronger on the desktop while Apple/MS focus on the tablet and phone market.

gosu2• 14 years ago

After hanging on to vanilla 11.04 (the last gnome2 release) until it became too out-of-date to use, I switched to xmonad with a dzen workspace display in place of gnome-panel. It took a fair amount of time to customize (which I can do now, no thanks to you, Ubuntu), but now my DE is optimal again.

I eventually wound up switching off Ubuntu altogether when I realized that I seriously disagreed with its general direction of removing customizability and features for marketing reasons, that I disliked most of its core applications, and that Arch, with its AUR, had a more complete and up-to-date repository of software that I cared about. That particular switch was pretty time consuming, but I learned a decent amount about the modern Linux userspace. I have a nice sleek system now that does what I want it to, and not the other way around.

Have a nice life, Ubuntu. Good luck getting grandma to install you.

andrewcooke• 14 years ago

it's hard to read that without feeling the huge weight of criticism (all the kow-towing and talking about experts). and then i come here and 2 out of 4 posts are complaining.

really, can't you just go somewhere else? ubuntu is fine for my laptop. it might even do for my mother's next time i visit. if you want something else, either use something else or at least have the graciousness to complain without "fuck up" and "muckety muck". you're beyond tiring. go away. please.

mattdeboard8• 14 years ago

"Works on my machine!"

I'm more pissed about the fact that there are so many show-stoppers moving from 12.04 to 12.10. I like 12.04. It's solid. 12.10 is not. I'm going to bitch about it.

edit: By the way, I did not know "muckety muck" had a negative connotation. I just use it as a synonym for boss. I should probably quit telling my boss he's a muckety muck.

stingraycharles• 14 years ago

The problem is that bitching about past issues adds little value. We all know that they made bad choices in the past, it just isn't really useful to keep reminding everyone about those facts every time something about Ubuntu comes up.

theshadow3• 14 years ago

This goes without saying but no one is forcing you to upgrade from 12.04 to 12.10. 12.10 is not an LTS release so naturally you should stick to 12.04 if you don't want any of the kinks that are a side-effect of being on the bleeding edge. For me personally, I upgraded from 12.04 -> 12.10 last week and after a 'apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping' I can barely even tell I'm running 12.10!

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

Ubuntu has the big advantage of being the most widely supported Linux distribution.

Of course if you don't like it you could switch to arch or something, but then you have the problem that you want to install program X that only has ubuntu install instructions and you end up having to read forums just to install the thing.

PommeDeTerre4• 14 years ago

Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe there's something to the huge amount of criticism? You know, maybe we should all consider listening to it?

The Ubuntu community got so large because Ubuntu was something that people found very useful. Then a few years ago, questionable decisions started being made. They brought a very poor experience to a huge number of people, without offering any benefit.

The criticism is valid, and it should be voiced loudly and often.

It's not isolated to Ubuntu, either. There are other major open source projects that have started to actively defecate upon their existing user base. Firefox and GNOME are two big ones. We see the same kind of widespread, large-scale anger from their communities, too.

The leadership of Ubuntu, GNOME and Firefox have all chosen to essentially ignore the ever-growing disillusionment within their existing communities. I think it will cost them dearly. We've already seen a lot of people moving to alternatives.

More importantly, these are the power users who are moving away. These are the very people who are needed by any project that really wants to succeed. They're the ones who help drive others to use the given product. Without them, the project is nothing. It may take a few more years, but I do think that we'll see GNOME, Ubuntu and Firefox go the way of XFree86, if things don't change today.

rlpb3• 14 years ago

Remember that Ubuntu flavors such as Xubuntu and Lubuntu exist, and that their existence is supported from the top (just read TFA). Members of the Ubuntu community who don't like Unity just use them instead. No dissenting voices are needed within the community, since all are accommodated.

> ignore the ever-growing disillusionment within their existing communities

You assume that the voices of dissent come from within their existing communities. I don't think that's true. I think they come from people who wish their own favourite project/fork were as popular, but fail to see why it isn't.

theshadow3• 14 years ago

This post is nothing but a nice heaping of FUD. Looking at it from a distance the decisions made the Ubuntu brass have largely paid off. I like many others had my doubts when I initially played with Unity in 11.04 when it was slow and lumbering, however in 12.04 I doubt there are many people who would categorize Unity as a substandard experience. I haven't played with the latest GNOME so I can't comment there but Unity definitely blows KDE out of the water. I doubt lens-shopping makes it into the next LTS released, if it does it will be turned off by default.

I know we live in the age of hyperbole but statements like this "There are other major open source projects that have started to actively defecate upon their existing user base." are not constructive in any way. Ubuntu adoption is growing not shrinking, Firefox market share while not growing is holding steady. Claiming that these projects are going down is nothing but FUD. (I know many people would love to see Ubuntu and Firefox go down just so they can have a chance to see their pet distro on top and Chrome on top but alas it ain't happening any-time soon)

b87ggga3• 14 years ago

What's your problem with Firefox?

gosu2• 14 years ago

Perhaps the issue is that Mark hasn't been the only one working on Ubuntu. Maybe other people who have contributed their time and effort in some form are unhappy to see it go to waste. (You probably don't want those people to go away, by the way.)

Maybe people who haven't contributed anything are unhappy to see a good thing go seemingly bad, as a matter of principle. Or, like someone mentioned, they're sad that Ubuntu's remaining community resources (which might not strictly be Mark's to spend) will now be spent in a way that doesn't benefit them and their friends.

Then there are people who might be offended that they were excluded from Ubuntu's audience in the name of "not excluding people from Ubuntu's audience".

pqs2• 14 years ago

It works on your laptop, but not on my father's in law desktop, where it used to work. Ubuntu used to work on this machine and, somehow, after each upgrade it has become less stable. It freezes completely and there is no way to solve the problem. In fact, there are some bugs in Ubuntu's buck tracker that might be related, but they are marked as "won't fix".

Anyway, today I'm transitioning my parents in law to Windows 7. It will be a pain for me, but at least it will work for them. It won't freeze.

Good luck Mark S. You will end up with a "very interesting" user interface that nobody will use, because of stability problems or because of the pain caused by such an interface.

keithpeter3• 14 years ago

"Anyway, today I'm transitioning my parents in law to Windows 7. It will be a pain for me, but at least it will work for them. It won't freeze."

Glad you found something that works for you and your father in law.

I'll just mention that CentOS 6.3 (and the other RHEL 6 clones, Scientific Linux and Springdale, formerly PUIAS) have a kernel and applications that are similar roughly to Ubuntu 10.04. Ubuntu 10.04 is still supported on the desktop until April 2013 so people have three months to explore alternatives should they have hardware problems or find recent Ubuntus not to their taste.

wyck• 14 years ago

Maybe you should practice what you preach. Complaining about complainers is the bottom of the barrel, and asking people to go away from a community just because they disagree and maybe don't use the right wording is a mis-understanding on your part.

People are genuinely upset about Canonical's direction, the tech community knows the context and history here, it does not need explaining. A simple "fuck you" reaction is sometimes appropriate.

Canonical is clearly taking the wrong direction and the simple solution is to switch to a better community, there are literally tons of them,

http://distrowatch.com/

chez17• 14 years ago

So a major distribution being used all around the world should stop being criticized because it's "fine for your laptop"? That seems astonishingly myopic.

reinhardt• 14 years ago

Zorin [1] (based on Ubuntu) looks sweet, has anyone played with it?

[1] http://zorin-os.com/gallery.html

_account• 14 years ago

Zorin is really good. Personally, I grew tired of little bugs with their window manager switching stuff.

Also, worth trying is crunchbang(debian w/ openbox) and pinguyos(ubuntu w/ gnome2).

Aardwolf• 14 years ago

I wish there was a new great desktop environment focusing on THE DESKTOP.

zalew• 14 years ago

xfce. it's not new but it's great.

sandGorgon• 14 years ago

Cinnamon desktop - the same one that powers Linux Mint

keithpeter3• 14 years ago

"And in this regard, we know, scientifically, that Ubuntu with Unity is better than anything else out there."

Quote from the linked article, emphasis added. I'm actually interested in the methodology in use by Canonical. I can find the following reference easily...

http://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-uni...

together with some work on application software

http://design.canonical.com/2011/08/thunderbird-evolution-us...

Anyone got anything else solid from Canonical?

PS: I know and rather like Unity as manifest in 12.04/12.10. It will be interesting to see how the UI changes and what implications the UI have for the underlying system as the transition to mobile device moves forward. I think that users should stick to LTS or move to a 'rolling distro' if they need very reliable and/or specific interfaces. Of course, that will reduce the pool of testers and the range of hardware tested, but it looks as if Canonical will be working with hardware manufacturers anyway.

meaty3• 14 years ago

That is the vomitous self-congratulatory thing I've ever read and what I've come to expect from our multi-millionare South African marketing overlord. Mark: if you're reading this, please take note.

Translated:

We're going to push our own goals rather than asking what people want, you know like Amazon again.

We're including everyone in our statement, apart from those people with an opinion other than ours.

Giving, giving, giving dammit giving giving!

We're lying about Unity with a sample size of 15 people that we all knew already, even though the community hates Unity. It's like Ballmer saying how everyone loves Windows 8 Metro but it's not selling.

Mobile bandwagon jumpy jump. Let's dumb it down so it can be use for gefingerpoken as well as anything else (not going to happen - probably worse than Windows 8).

More cloud tie in - we want your data just like all the other vendors.

Completely ignore the foundation that everyone else such as GNU, Linux kernel people, Xorg and surprisingly Debian have provided them.

Completely ignore the humongous bug database which makes Ubuntu like a pre-Alpha release of Windows for reliability.

Ugh it makes me sick. Sorry to sound cynical, but the above is 5 years of using Ubuntu canned in a few statements.

zimbatm2• 14 years ago

So how much did you contribute back in these 5 years ?

meaty3• 14 years ago

Cash, promotion, merchandise, landscape subscription, bug reports, forum help (I have over 3000 posts on Ubuntu forums), stackoverflow, testing to name a few...

uvtc• 14 years ago

If you like the ease-of-use of Ubuntu, but don't like Unity nor Gnome 3, just use Xubuntu (or Lubuntu).

Xubuntu in particular provides what I think of as a regular no-surprises desktop --- exactly what I want and expect from a desktop OS.

Ubuntu in 2013

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