Coming in Ubuntu Linux 13.04: instant purchases from the desktop
pcworld.com
pcworld.com
Hell, I'd even pay cash money for Ubuntu if they could guarantee regression-free updates and a truly solid desktop (i.e., no "oh yeah it works just fine, except for this long list of annoying problems"). But their priorities seem to be elsewhere. Blame can certainly be assigned outside Canonical but the buck has to stop somewhere.
Personally I think this cheapens the desktop quite a bit. I'm already advertised at for 90% of my day, now I get to be advertised at in my one sanctuary, my desktop.
OSX "just works" because it has a full suite of software that comes loaded on it and "just works" very well and makes a lot of Windows programs jealous (except for some Office products). If people want customization and general freedom, they already have Linux for free.
I think it is safe to say that the market for people unhappy enough with both OSX and Linux, and willing to pay for that, enough to justify years and years of expensive and risky development, is _relatively_ small.
I suspect that if a hacker friendly OS that "just works" does come out, it will be from a computer company trying to offer a non Windows option (either for price and/or because people start not liking Windows). Given the volume of computers such large companies make, the unit cost associated with a polished OS will be very low. Although this OS would be designed for the average user, the company would likely choice to use open source programs for cost.
I'd pay $2k+ for a 14 inch laptop, 1600x1200 IPS screen, SSD, i7, dedicated graphics, and a good keyboard (with home, end, pgup, pgdown) that could run Linux. Hell, I'd be happy with the dedicated graphics just working in Windows, and I'd dual-boot to game. But no such machine exists right now.
It's not Linux though.
Slackware is simple, easy to use, and "it just works". It's free software so of course it's hackable. It's not as GUI-y as an OSX fan might like, but otherwise, it fits your requirements.
It even has the "top dollar" price tag ($30-$50 depending on if you want the 6 CD set or a single DVD, and whether you sign up for the subscription or not), although you can download it for free if you want.
To me it seems like they are targeting entertainment users, when they really should be targeting power users and application developers. The first two (entertainment & business users) already being dominated by the competition and the last two (system/server development and infrastructure) already having a good track record. The nice thing about researchers and creators are that they mostly want the same things like low-latency processing of multimedia, stability, flexibility, power and value. Features that will trickle down to entertainment users that do care about it, but are unable to evaluate it exclusively.
Paradoxically enough this used to be Apples territory before they switched to Unix. With the exception of value and therefor also power, leaving the an opening for hobbyists (creators) and large scale deployments (research) to Microsoft and Linux respectively.
To do this you'll need application developers to bridge the gap between system & server developers and power users, which there seem to be a surprisingly small overlap between, at least seen to activity. These are unfortunately the people you piss off when you value sponsored searches and flashy menus over consistency.
Also, drivers are just as bad as they were back in 8.04. I still can't watch a fullscreen YouTube video without terrible stuttering, screen tearing or audio lagging. And before you say so, no, it's not my computer hardware that's causing these problems.
If you are a long-time Linux user then you should not have a problem using apt-get or synaptic, or installing xubuntu-desktop or whatever you want. You should also be familiar with the concept that some hardware does not come with good Linux drivers. Ho hum.
Any popular linux distro lets you choose your desktop and almost everything else, the main reason to choose one distro over another is your faith in their package curation
I don't think that they're making any sort of direct choice to stop doing those things. I just think that their current desktop manager choices have been bad. I tried installing the latest Ubuntu on my main desktop PC this past weekend and it was a failure. I did get all my drivers working, but they didn't work out of the box anymore. Even once I had them all working, Unity seemed very unstable and in general the experience was very disappointing. It appeared to me that they were positioning themselves so that they could start throwing money making ad software and garbage onto my desktop. Now with the recent blog announcements that they might be enabling direct-from-desktop 1 click purchases and stuff, I doubt I'll ever consider installing it as a desktop, again. At least without xwindows, all of the original reasons for why Ubuntu was awesome still shine.
Within my circle, it was the first thing we googled for. I like Ubuntu. Canonical's best best is to go the way of Wikipedia and plead for pledges or seek out crowdfunding. They also have an opportunity to take some share of the desktop market away from Windows 8 but adding in features like this hurts them more than it helps.
Social networks, shopping, etc. are all features that should NEVER be part of the core of the computer operating system. These are things that should be opt-in experiences to the user and are unwanted bloat for many.
The only reason Canonical, in my book, can get away with this and Apple can't is that Ubuntu is provided free of charge so there must be some sort of revenue stream, whereas OS X already costs me money and therefore I shouldn't have to put up with anything I don't want.
I wonder if there is a market for something like a CentOS/RHEL base system (think slow moving core system) with a faster pace of release for the desktop applications for a small fee.
I kinda get this on my laptop using CentOS plus some carefully chosen additional repos..
I know Ubuntu 12.10 made it certain I wont recommend them. This is only making things worse.