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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

I miss the days when new Ubuntu releases included things desktop/laptop users could get excited about. Nowadays it's all stuff for servers and phones. I run Ubuntu on both my workstations, so it's sad to see that use case feel more and more like an afterthought.

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The reason is they make little to no revenue from desktop, and no profit. As a cost center they subsidize it to bolster their server and hopefully mobile offerings by a network effect - people using Ubuntu server may want to develop on Ubuntu desktop and vice versa. [1]

It would be a loss if Canonical drops support for desktop as in my experience Ubuntu desktop is the easiest and most practical desktop Linux available. I like that Shuttleworth is committed to it but hope that that lasts.

To me this is refreshing. The Linux desktop has been, for me, a very mature product for the past couple of years. I no longer fear that having to update will mean tweaking everything to get things working.

Oh man, that brings back nightmares/memories

It's fun when you're 14, infuriating as you turn into an old far with schedules and deadlines.

The issue that Red Hat realized long time ago, and many of the other GNU/Linux vendors as well, is that there isn't hardly any money to be made on the FOSS desktops.

Developers of desktop software usually live from unit sales of their software and consumers don't pay for subscriptions, trainings or support.

So this leaves enterprise customers as the only source of income for many distributions.

EDIT: typo are => as

Hardly any money to be made on the desktop, period.

For MS is is virtually a loss leader to push things like Active Directory and Exchange.

Tell that to the software vendors selling software packages to Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android and consoles.

They would be all out of business if that was the case.

you have inadvertently indicated exactly why the desktop, up front cash drain as it might seem, is actually a huge cash gusher. That is because it is the piece of the ecosystem which users bond to most intimately, and if they don't like your endpoint UI, they sure aren't going to be axed to use your (highly profitable) backend services. Witness how Ubuntu, arguably the original "pretty" Linux, dominates amongst startups doing cloud. And why Windows lost so much ground. And why AAPL was so stupid to dump the Xserve. Can you imagine what might have happened if Apple took just 1 or 2 billion out of its 250 billion cash horde and "did BSD" on the cloud? Properly?

Apple doing something in the cloud? Properly? Hahahahaha...

Updated packages without the whole UI/system being changed underneath you isn't always bad.

I have a nexus 5 that I just play with no sim card (currently on the Nexus experience ROM). I wonder if anyone here has tried installing yakkety yak on a nexus 5. If you have, will you please share your experience? Thank you.

I believe the parent means installing Ubuntu Touch on your android phone. The best tool to do this with is MultiROM[1], an app in the play store that allows you to select the ROM you want at boot time.

I tried this a couple years ago on a N6 and was very unimpressed as it was incredibly slow and unresponsive, had no apps you could install, and just barely met the definition of "phone OS". It was more of a PoC and didn't even have a shell prompt. Things have probably improved a bit since then[2], but I would expect you'll get bored of it. I follow the android ROM scene and (unlike iOS) I've never seen people say "#$%$% all this! I'm gonna run Ubuntu Touch from now on!"

Still, it's fun to install just so you can say you did.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tassadar.m...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch

I installed Ubuntu Touch on my Nexus 4 a few months ago to compare it to Sailfish OS. It ran reasonably smoothly, but seemed to be missing a bunch of functionality. I installed a Spotify client only to learn that because Ubuntu Touch pauses background apps, you could only listen to music with the screen on and the app in the foreground. Similarly, if you started a Terminal session, and, say, went to the browser to look up a command, you would return to a completely new Terminal. I uninstalled it a few hours later - I'm willing to put up with a lot in a mobile OS, but a lack of multitasking puts it in 2007 territory.

I went with an Android ROM from XDA that brings it up to Android N. Thanks for sharing your experience.

I know exactly what you mean. If you still want to get excited for UI changes...have a look at Ubuntu Gnome. They generally have nice tweaks/changes every update.

Personally I am pleased that there is more focus on their server offering, past attempts to monetize their desktop users ended badly (and rightly so).

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