If any Canonical employee is around here they should be taking notes or this will blow in their face like Upstart, Mir, Unity 8, etc.
Or maybe Shuttleworth doesn't care at all and he just wants the big bucks from MS.
Or maybe Shuttleworth doesn't care at all and he just wants the big bucks from MS.
It's always the same, you hear people complaining the most.
Ubuntu has been a success because they took some risk.
The first one has been to make installing proprietary drivers easy. Something they got a lot of heat for.
And since they managed to become the most popular Linux distro ever, I think critics should maybe ask themselves why.
But they messed up with Unity 8 and Mir. They didn't want to work with the community, they didn't care if they were working on stuff that already existed. Instead of working with the upstream devs, they worked alone. Where did they end up? Back to Gnome Shell with a lot of years of effort down the drain.
And this is even worse. More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23433794
Original comment:
They also created their own init system Upstart, only to replace it with systemd later. They have their own source control system, Bazaar.
I really appreciated Ubuntu back in '06 when my laptop's wifi and graphics drivers just worked out of the box. I've used Ubuntu in various forms for a long time. But their management has some serious NIH problems.
Citing these as a case of NIH is inaccurate -- Upstart and Bazaar predate Systemd and Git, respectively.
It's fairer to say that Canonical's technology, for whatever reason, often doesn't seem to catch on with the broader FOSS community.
Nobody can assemble some new kind of app packaging, slowing the starting speed to 5-10 seconds and call that "good rounded software"
"It is just a couple of seconds more sometimes, not a big deal" isn't going to cut it. Most of the Internet using Ubuntu, already knows that.
I think Canonical is again in denial.
It already happened a couple of times: MIR, Unity (buried by not being community driven probably), Unity8, the mobile project or something, all but forgotten now.
This snap thing is probable the pet project from a couple top guys in Canonical. Maybe hundreds of powerpoint presentations have been watched about some "big strategy" for the next years, but they didn't know the thing (snap) is unbearable slow.
It's a complicated endavior, and it will need many iterations before becomming a decent solution. That's why we have to start ASAP.
There's no comparison.
The recent I ran Debian and now Ubuntu will be gone. Evaporated in a poof of smoke. I'll be elsewhere. Probably back to Debian.