Ubuntu Linux Community: Canonical Vows to Maintain Focus | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu Linux Community: Canonical Vows to Maintain Focus

thevarguy.com

34 pointsjeffreyfox29 comments

Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

http://design.canonical.com/2013/05/ubuntu-com-update/

I'm struggling to find anywhere in the cited Ubuntu blog post that talks about a vow to maintain focus. The summary itself never revisits that phrase to explain it further, and while the words "maintain" and "focus" do appear in the Ubuntu post, they are completely separate and there is no theme of vowing anything or staying focused on any particular thing. If anything, it's the opposite.

    Phase one of the restructure consisted of updating
    Ubuntu.com to reflect the expanded scope of the
    project.

Weird!

The blog post from Alejandra was about how Canonical is developing the Ubuntu web presence. In general, it's about how you balance a complex set of needs from a wide range of users - probably an interesting read for some people in this Forum.

The actual article seems to be focusing on the implication that this means Canonical will continue to value and maintain the link to it's Community of users. Still in the context of the web site.

ps I work for Canonical

>> The take-away: Even as Ubuntu forges paths across hardware where traditional Linux (pace Android fans) has never before ventured, and Canonical commercializes the operating system to an extent not yet seen, it is keen to keep peace with Ubuntu users.

I'm not sure what that means but if it means Ubuntu will soon not be recognizable then I don't know if that's a good thing. Unity removed functionality we had in Gnome 2 that the Gnome developers had ironed out over years. Now we have a cool looking Launcher that is barely usable compared to Gnome 2 Panels.

We have global menus like a freaking Mac, unless you remove the two offending packages to restore normal application owned menus.

We have a solid bar at the top which without global menus is useless and even with them is questionable.

Bring back Gnome 2 Panels please Canonical.

I realise you might hate unity, but I just wanted to make clear, some people (me) like it!

I've tried plain gnome 3, latest kde, xmonad and xfce, and out of all of them have decided I like unity the best. The combination of:

* Press win key + type 'th' gets thunderbird selected, win key + 'ch' gets chrome gives me quick access to all my apps.

* I like a dock with fixed icons in fixed positions, so I can open an app, or get open windows, with 'mouse memory'.

I found the other window managers I tried very poor in their default configuration. Maybe I could configure them to act better, or more like I want? But I don't want to spend the time (I did spend a couple of days trying xmonad, before giving up, I really wanted to like it but it seems purposefully designed to be painful to configure)

dmenu from the suckless tools package can provide some of the 'invoke an application by pressing a meta key and typing its name' functionality you are missing. Not pretty but it works.

Linux Mint + cinnamon. Give it a shot.

I tried, it felt like the old Linux I did not like from the past.

If you want Gnome 2 Panels, run one of the Gnome 2 forks.

Personally I love Unity, and I finally have my beloved global menus back, like a freaking Amiga - something I have missed since about '97. I don't want to waste space on menus in every single application window.

Unless It's changed in 13.04, you can simply install gnome-panel to get the old-fashioned panels back. It's one of the first things I do on a new Ubuntu install.

I'm on 12.04, I think I tried that and ran into a use case where it failed but I can't recall the details. Thanks though, it might be worth another look.

I'd suggest trying Cinnamon. http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/

Do you dislike global menus just because it reminds you of a Mac? Is it actually a bad thing, and why? Have you ever tried actually using Unity for more than a few days? I understand that old habits stay strong, but sometimes breaking out of them and learning a new interface can be beneficial.

I used the Mac in the old days and have a fondness for the single menu. However, Unity's is broken. Why? It hides itself if you are not hovering over it. So the fitts-law advantages are effectively nulled. Talk about clutching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Unfortunately there are a number of these amateurish decisions throughout Unity, even though it has some nice parts.

Every OS I've run has had application menus except maybe for GEOS (I think it was called) on the Commodore 64 so that's what I'm used to. Well, that and the fact that all previous versions of Ubuntu had application menus then all of a sudden they are global and the close, menu icons are on the left. I guess it was like Ubuntu's user interface was hijacked by an alternative personality of Ubuntu.

Have you tried Xfce? A lot of Gnome 2 users have migrated to it and are quite happy.

Posting this from my laptop running Ubuntustudio; has XFCE4 by default and nicely done

CentOS/Scientific Linux/Springdale Linux 6.x provide an approximation to Ubuntu 10.04 including Gnome 2.x. Support until 2020.

Those nice people at Mint Linux are developing an alternative desktop UI.

Idea: Perhaps someone needs to register 'idontlikeunity.org' or something. Then we can just link to the site with simple alternatives and keep the noise down.

PS: I use Unity/12.04 on the desktop. Quite happy with it as I tend to use the ALT-letter keys for menus anyway.

Out of curiosity what can't you do with the launcher/indicators in Unity that you could do in GNOME2?

The big thing is I can't right click and edit the properties and change the path from a binary to a wrapper script I've written.

With Canoncial doing more and more stuff on their own instead of really contributing to the Linux community, i've recently switched back to Debian and without regrets.

Thanks, but no thanks, for Unity, Upstart, Mir and whatever else you will come up in the future.

Is there any particular reason you prefer dogmatism to pragmatism in choosing your Linux distribution?

Where is the pragmatism to build (in a rather closed manner) software like unity, upstart or mir, in an open source ecosystem that has viable alternatives? I am confident that Linux will be a better system if efforts are combined and focused and not split up. And thus, i think that Linux would be in a better state today if Canonical would have chosen Gnome Shell, systemd and Wayland (for example). Thus, my voice/vote goes to systems where i see the future.

Besides i wasn't using Unity anyway and i have learnt and used Debian far before Ubuntu, so it's not like i had trouble switching.

I really don't understand this view that seems to be shared by quite a number of people: that Canonical shouldn't attempt (and some seem to suggest aren't competent) to build their own system components, but should instead confine their efforts into supporting other's projects. To me it seems that there's more than enough development resource available across the Linux community, and for system components where the 'right' solution is not obvious having multiple projects try out different approaches seems like an advantage to me. Let the code do the talking and then we'll see which solution works best.

That's fine in itself but Canonical seems to fail to make educated decisions on technical details and is not behaving "nice" when it first says "we'll support Wayland" and then abandon it. It would even be fine to abandon Wayland but Canonical didn't show any intention to do so until they released the first Mir code already (by this time the decision must have been made for quite some time). Plus, spreading FUD about Wayland and how it is not working for Ubuntu is not helping either. Especially since all points have been debunked very fast. It's not putting the decision making at Canonical into a good light.

I also never understood why they didn't put their efforts into Gnome Shell to create their vision of a desktop. It's totally possible to customize Gnome Shell (or even fork, see Cinnamon). Instead it's running compiz (which is critized for being hacky, bugridden and understaffed for quite some time) or QML (Unity 2D), two totally different APIs.

And how would you rationally justify developing upstart when the rest of the world puts its efforts into systemd? I understand that systemd is not as mature as upstart, but how far would it be with upstart efforts put into systemd?

The problem of Canonical is not even working on seperate projects but the utter failure to work with the rest of the Linux community. Do you see other destributions offering Unity, for example? No. Will you see Mir in Fedora or Debian or Suse or Gentoo as primary displayserver? Never. Upstart? Nope. Do i think that it's Canonicals fault to not reach out to the community and combine efforts? Yes. Yes. Yes. And this is the soul of open source movement. Canonical doesn't really get it.

What they do get is to make Linux easier to use for the masses, that's for sure.

Debian Unstable? Or Stable? I found the big problem with Debian Stable is that they move way too slow for any modern Linux distro.

I wish that all Linux distros would just go to a rolling release model like Gentoo, and where Ubuntu is going.

Yeah they're going to continue to focus on trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole by creating a soccer mom friendly Linux and trying to piss off the rest of the Linux community.

I say go for it, keep focusing on removing features that took years to perfect and reinventing the wheel for the sake of reinvention while chasing a group that doesn't care about their operating system. The sooner they make themselves irrelevant the better.

Yes, I suspect that Canonical are attempting to "creat[e] a soccer mom friendly Linux" but I think the motivation may be to make some money so they can continue to develop the Ubuntu core.

I imagine that a workstation/high end laptop developer oriented version of GNU\Linux will be developed, and many would argue we already have such distributions available. Room for everyone. I personally want my Ubuntu phone for perhaps nostalgic nationalist reasons.

Haha, focus.

Just installed Raring again last night and noticed the long-standing bug (compiz and gnome-terminal where the window won't keep its size if not on the first tab) still in the newest release. How about broken window resizing, where you only get an outline like in Windows 3.1? I could go on, and on, and on.

Meanwhile they have people writing display servers and a new mobile interface for xsake.

I'd kill for a modern, mature workstation OS in the tradition of NextStep, or SGI 4dwm, Windows 2000, even Ubuntu 10.04, etc. I like lots of the other choices, say Cinammon, XCFE, etc, but they are unfinished or not integrated well. Gnome has destroyed many of the powerful tools these products share. KDE has nice tech but is too cluttered. OSX is nice but we use linux everywhere. I'll be trying Mint 15 soon and crossing my fingers.

I know that the linux desktop has been a boondoggle for years but perhaps there is a market for workstation-oriented distribution with deep integration and features that work. Would enough people pay for that? I would. Is it enough for a small startup to get funded? I'd be interested in starting one, though I realize it is unlikely.

What I want is something debian based with Upstart, gnome3, and replacement window manager and panel/launcher, fitting on a single CD or DVD (around a gig).

Ubuntu with GNOME3 installed and running LXDE and Launchy comes close, except LXDE defaults to using PCManFM instead of nautilus, Leafpad instead of gEdit, LXTerminal instead of Gnome Terminal, etc. Where this is most obnoxious is the replacing of gnome preferences with their own preference tool.

If I was going to start a major project, my approach would probably be to take gnome3, replace gnomeshell with openbox and try to port gnome2 panel to gnome3.

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