Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess.
> And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier.
What did you switch her to?
I haven't seriously tried KDE, though I've heard lots of good things about it recently. I don't know why Ubuntu chose GNOME over Mate, the latter seems a perfectly fine typical desktop environment paradigm.
> What did you switch her to?
AwesomeWM (which is technically a windows manager and not a desktop environment, but it's full-featured enough to be essentially like a DE), which I keep coming back even after trying other DEs/WMs. I had hesitated to put her on it since its configuration isn't user-friendly (it's a .lua text file..), but I just essentially copied over my configuration, and she's been much happier than on GNOME.
Personally, I am all for standardization and homogeneity. We need standards and homogeneity. I would gladly steamroll over all the people who oppose "monoculture" for the sake of opposing something.
You can't please everyone but I think gnome is the right answer for most people. Don't like something? Come join the discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org (I hope I got that right)
Better link https://gitlab.gnome.org/groups/GNOME/-/issues
I do this with awesome, and it works well. It's a one-liner in rc.lua:
awful.spawn.with_shell "nm-applet"
The problem is I think the deep issues I have with Gnome are not things which are easily fixed, e.g. "stop leaking memory", "don't be a single-threaded Javascript process", "allow me to control workspaces independently on each monitor/screen", &c. &c.
I would love to see Gnome improve though, even if I never end up using it, but I am not currently seeing any obvious signs that this will occur.
I mean I still can't get over the asinine comment covered here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4757077
Very poor choice of words which will hurt us for a long time.
Archived at https://archive.fo/NbzkY
This is the opposite of the standardization and cooperation across desktop environments and window managers that I want!
I'm biased, but Plasma or even Mate would have been much better choices. Plasma has been so good lately and seems to take community feedback seriously. Stability has been great, it's extremely lightweight and the customization options make me...happy. I've been kicking myself for not switching from Gnome to plasma sooner. For anyone skeptical of plasma, I urge you to give it a try : kubuntu, kde neon, fedora kde, arch + plasma, opensuse are all great.
For Canonical: I suppose it sort of makes sense from a historical perspective in that before Unity they used Gnome, so they were returning to Gnome. But given that Gnome appears to be a single-threaded Javascript engine with memory leaks, I'm not convinced it's a great choice. Still, Gnome is backed by Red Hat and just got a $1 million donation ( https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1... ), so in theory it should get better....but I've been thinking "it should get better soon" for a while, so who knows.
Modern KDE (e.g. 5.12+) is amazing! It's slim, it's fast, it lets you configure tons of stuff and it looks beautiful.
If you haven't used it in the last two years you should give it a try!
So they dumped their own thing. Since unity was partially based on gnome, they used gnome before, and somebody else (rh) keeps pumping resources into it, it seems like a natural choice.
Of course. But unfortunately I think that what makes sense from a historical and resource-evaluation standpoint ends up falling down in terms of real-world usability.
Then I discovered MATE. =D I have switched back to GNU/Linux with a MATE desktop since, and I could not be happier. To my taste, it gives both Windows and macOS a run for their money.
Out of curiosity: what is that "nice interface you use" your wife asked about?
The 'nice interface I use' which I switched my wife to is AwesomeWM. Not that user-friendly to configure, but really pleasant to use.
I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of the reactions I heard about it.
Agreed. I think a lot of it just came down to performance. Unity was ahead of it’s time, and a lot of people just didn’t have the hardware to handle it with zero lag.
2. HUD (Heads Up Display) — by just tapping Alt and typing, you could quickly select an option from almost any application's menu (saving you the time of looking through the menus and trying to remember whether the desired option was under Edit or View).
3. Not a speed benefit, but: better use of vertical space.
BTW I think that XFCE is a great DE.
Absolutely. I for one embrace (positive) change and had no problem adjusting to Unity. I liked it a lot, even more than Gnome 2, but the performance was just shockingly bad on every computer I used it on. From my Thinkpad T420s with the Intel graphics to my desktop with a GTX 970. Everything was noticeably slower than it was under any other desktop environment. I finally just quit using it. The real shame is they had a version based on Qt a while back that didn't require compositing. If they had continued with that, the performance would have been stellar. Oh well.
Wish Canonical would have just created MATE themselves.
I have been using Ubuntu since 2005 and it was a rough grind on the "just-works" front in those beginning days. By 2010, desktop Ubuntu was in great shape and laptop Ubuntu was nearly there (moreso on suspend/resume, not so much on battery). People were just starting to breathe and then Unity came and threw any semblance of stability out the window.
Once I moved to the US I started using Mac and never looked back. The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX.
With all the IOS apps they keep bringing to macOS, the merging of the IOS and macOS dev teams, and the imminent release of ARM macbooks I wouldn't get comfortable
So yes, I never used Unity but I didn't ask for its demise. There were alternatives and I was happy with them. Still Canonical decided to dump Unity. Why? They couldn't make money out of it, and out of Mir and the old Convergence project. [1]
In his words
> Some of the things that we were doing were clearly never going to be commercially sustainable, other things clearly will be commercially sustainable, or already are commercially sustainable.
> The decision] meant that we couldn’t have on our books (effectively) very substantial projects which clearly have no commercial angle to them at all.
That's not because people were asking Canonical to kill Unity.
[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unit...
I remember struggling with Linux GUIs since the earliest days of Redhat and we are talking 15 years ago. Unity is comparable to my retina macbook and Win10 desktop. This is not a small achievement. Your grandmother could use it.
Internet opinion tends to be loud but may not be representative when you mix in the vested interests pushing their own desktops, astroturfers and a certain community who think they should control Linux and everyone needs their approval and blessings.
In Unity's case it was this last group with the most vicious reactions. No one can be so bitter about a desktop unless they are vested in something else. I wish Ubuntu hadn't abandoned it.
Good grief. Presumably that should be "Fond as users... are of the Linux desktop"...
Looking at the site: http://thecloudmarket.com/stats#/by_platform_definition
The numbers haven't changed in the last 2 years, looking at "Popular Images": http://thecloudmarket.com/#/popular
The top listed image is Ubuntu 7.10 ("Gutsy") from 2007...
.. and looking at recently added the most recent is from 1 year ago: http://thecloudmarket.com/#/recentlyadded
So a bit of a bad journalism moment there I think that's a very bad source!
I'm sure theres a more recent source but one 2015 article claimed that Canonical was claiming "In 2015, over 2 million Ubuntu instances were launched in the cloud – Based on their statistics, Canonical claims that 67,000 new Ubuntu cloud instances are launched every day! That’s by far the largest number that any OS vendor can dream! Ubuntu dominates the LAMP deployments in the cloud."
So indeed, probably missing a few zeros :) I can't find a newer public source, but this blog post from 2015 has some numbers for Ubuntu: https://blog.ubuntu.com/2015/12/22/more-people-use-ubuntu-th... - At least 20 million unique instances of Ubuntu have launched in public clouds, private clouds, and bare metal in 2015 itself. - In fact, over 2 million new Ubuntu cloud instances launched in November 2015. - That’s 67,000 new Ubuntu cloud instances launched per day.
Of course some instances last minutes or days, but never the less.
(Disclaimer: I work at Canonical just in case that matters to you)
Edit: Oh, server. Forgot that context.
Also stuff like having root disabled and letting normal users use sudo by default and having had unattended-upgrades that does automatic security update installed by default makes you feel there's actually someone who cares doing the QA.
And it has great number of packages along with PPA in case there isn't one pretty much allows you to handle most software without manual compile/install/update process which is a nightmare from admin perspective to do.
And the fact it had worked great on me over the last 10 years against 100 or so servers makes me feel confident using it.
Oh you're supporting netbooks and doing a distro related to it? Cancelled.
Oh you started a cloud service that stores files forever? Cancelled.
Oh you created a competitor to X and Wayland for compositing? Cancelled.
Oh you created an alternative window manager to replace Gnome She'll? Cancelled.
Did they cancel their phone yet?
Didn't they have some kind of $30,000 server they were talking about for a while that wad cancelled?
It's hard to keep up with all their cancelled projects.
I thought it was about making a distro that was approachable and accessible?
Source: vaguely remembered "What does ubuntu mean?" promo videos from many years ago.
For example, they could have instead contributed to MATE for the last decade, and it might finally be as good as Windows 2000.
What is he even talking about?
I personally always wondered if anybody at Canonical had ever used it. It never worked right. You always had the feeling that you have to beg to make unity accept a mouse movement or a key shortcut to view that damned panel -- for starters.