Ubuntu is not a democracy and nor should it be | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu is not a democracy and nor should it be

omgubuntu.co.uk

28 pointsr11t27 comments

Democracy is a damping utility: it pretty much guarantees that nobody too horrible will damage the country or organization but it also pretty much guarantees that nobody really good still can't make appropriate progress easily. Democracy is kind of the safe, average choice of how to rule a group of people.

A good dictator would be really effective and could do tremendous amount of good. The downside is that generally in a dictatorship, the ruler could also be an evil dictator and cause lots of damage.

In business, the owner is the dictator but luckily, he can only crash his own company, and people are voluntarily employed by him. Dictating what the company must do is often called the leader's vision.

If the vision is any good, the company will thrive. If it's bad, it will go down under.

However, if it's about the damn close button, we can only watch how it goes since Mr Shuttleworth has the final say and he will go up or down by his decisions. I don't understand peoples' moaning either: the buttons in Metacity are configurable and even if they weren't, people are not so stupid that if they want to use Ubuntu in the first place it would all break down because they can't close the damn windows.

>A good dictator would be really effective and could do tremendous amount of good. The downside is that generally in a dictatorship, the ruler could also be an evil dictator and cause lots of damage.

I don't think this is quite right, since it assumes the possibility of a sufficiently good dictator.

I think they have happened over time, just not regularly and as with many disciplines, the bad and mediocre tend to outweigh the good, but if you consider Julius Caesar, Alfred the Great, Saladin, Suleyman the Magnificent and Ataturk, then actually there are a few (perhaps more historically than now due to the lower prevalence of current opportunities for would-be dictators).

We have historical evidence that there can exist a "good" dictator for an iron-age society. I don't think such a thing can exist for a silicon-age society; it's too complex to run, and inefficiencies you can ignore in the iron age make you grotesquely uncompetitive in the silicon age.

That people in the 21st century still think centralizing everything is the answer to any problem is a testament to the continuing power of the Utopian Dream to override reason. (This is a parenthetical; I am not saying iuguy is advocating it.)

Relevant scripture:

Therefore, if it were possible that you could have just men to be your kings, who would establish the laws of God, and judge this people according to his commandments [...] if this could always be the case then it would be expedient that ye should always have kings to rule over you. 16 Now I say unto you, that because all men are not just it is not expedient that ye should have a king or kings to rule over you. 17 For behold, how much iniquity doth one wicked king cause to be committed, yea, and what great destruction!

http://scriptures.lds.org/mosiah/29

It's nothing to do with democracy. It's about unjustified stubbornness over a poor design choice that will making upgrading implausible for a great deal of users.

A great deal of wankers, rather.

Are you serious? You have a problem with any sysadmin who runs Ubuntu for non-savvy users?

Look, nobody really cares that the window decorations are on the left. I have used X programs on a mac, and I have never closed the window instead of picking the "file" menu. This may happen once a year, about as often as a Windows user hits Alt-F4 instead of Alt-F2.

> I have used X programs on a mac, and I have never closed the window instead of picking the "file" menu.

Probably because Mac menu bar is on desktop and not within the window.

Not X programs.

"nobody really cares that the window decorations are on the left"

... you're trolling, right? All of the ubuntu users I know disagree with these supposedly "superior" design decisions mac users cite. Guess what, a lot of people disagree. Sure, the people doing the work can do whatever they want and the linux crowd can go back to using other distros. Doesn't make it any less sad that they don't seem to care if or who uses their product (in the end they will).

Buttons left or right, whatever.* What annoys me is that, so far, we have heard no reasoning as to why the close button is the third from the left instead of the most outer one. It makes no sense other than covering their asses for Apple repercussions.

*Except, you know, having the menu bar and window control options 5px apart isn't the smartest thing you can do.

Hah, I didn't know that -- that would be pretty dumb.

I assumed the only reason they tried this was to copy Apple. For right-handed mousers (most people) having controls and scrollbars on the right appears to allow easier/faster access. I don't see any benefit in switching.

They never gave any justification for switching sides, AFAICT.

Are they still harping on about buttons on the left? I admit, from a usability point of view it's clearly a fail, but the good thing about Linux is that if you don't like it you can alter it and make a new release. Perhaps they could call it "RightHandSideBuntu: Linux for human beings who don't want to re-learn basic aspects of window behavor because of some designer's whim".

They're making a mountain out of a molehill. Someone can just build a package or a distribution variant (a la Kubuntu or Xubuntu) that overrides what people perceive to be a problem and, bam, problem solved.

People didn't like the brown theme either, but just changed their theme once Ubuntu was installed. They can do the same with this.

Many (though last time I checked not all) Kubuntu themes let you choose the order of the management widgets, right out of the box. A long time ago I set "close" on the left and everything else on the right.

I broadly agree with or am at least sympathetic to the idea that we shouldn't have 10,000 configuration choices for both technical and human reasons, but I question whether perhaps a config setting here might be a net gain vs. the community cohesion cost. When making cost/benefits decisions its important to consider all costs and all benefits.

Defaults matter. Most people do not want to fuck around with their computer, they just want it to work right and be sane from the start.

Most people do not want to fuck around with their computer

Really? Back in the day (10 years ago) when I was crazy enough to do tech support for ordinary folks running Windows, it was rare I'd find someone who hadn't changed all their cursors, their window coloring, and their wallpaper, all to eye burning, heavily customized detail.

I'd guess the customization and theme changing is even more prevalent on something like Linux, considering the slightly better informed userbase.

How did I know that this was going to be over the ridiculous button-shuffle on the window decorators: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1186958

Ubuntu is the only Linux distro in the position to be able to make bold design decisions, but unfortunately the people they have making those decisions are just as mediocre as the rest of the clowns, if not worse.

The few times they've exercised this have been fuckups, like the focus-stealing cpu-churning auto-update popup, and now this childish theme nonsense.

The free software community benefits from free software, not from people nitpicking on the mailing list. As the T-shirt says, "Shut the fuck up and write some code."

Ah meritocracy; nice in theory, in practice it generally falls apart pretty quickly. (been there, tried it a couple of times)

Anyway; the problem is there is a claimed meritocracy around Ubuntu but it's a bit of a facade. A friend who is a beta tester (and very active bug poster) says it's a bit of an old boys crowd in reality. (not that it's necessarily bad thing; but I hate these sham organisations everyone builds to make it look prettier)

Hardy a good old boys club. I would suggest actual examples rather than a 'my friend says' vague statement.

As someone with direct Ubuntu development experience, the majority of packages (ie what they refer to as universe) are generally maintained by community members with very few ties to each other other than IRC interaction.

It is likely one of the easiest projects to get involved with because not only is it not a selective club, but they actively run training classes on how people can get involved.

Thought experiment: what's the open-source analogue to market pressure that would force Canonical to reverse course?

The market system isn't a democracy either, except in one sense - money votes. But when the product is free, and the infrastructure for automatic updates and upgrades from a single vendor is baked in, how do users express their preferences?

The same way users express disapproval of paid programs: use another product. (Debian, Fedora, etc.)

I trust a qualified doctor to prescribe my medicine based on what he knows.

OK, if the author refers to Mr. Shuttleworth or the Ubuntu team, I should remind him that the actual doctors behind the new changes are Mr. Steve Jobs and his team. Copying from Apple and doing it right is difficult. We should give credits to Ubuntu team for doing this right.

The idea of free software in my opinion is not just going with GPL and other licenses. Free software communities used to have a free culture. That's what Ubuntu lacks.

But since what Ubuntu actually does is building a business, what's going on is totally ok. Maybe free culture is the barrier of building a good business with free software. So if Ubuntu is taking that path...

"OK Ubuntu, Good Luck with that".

The button layout is as far from the Mac layout, as it is from BeOS. It's a new layout, with unprecedented degree of unfortunate in it. The placement of the control group, the spacing, the visuals, and the proximity to other critical controls makes it nearly unusable.

OS X controls are nothing like this.

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