Has Ubuntu lost it? | Hacker News Reader

Has Ubuntu lost it?

techradar.com

121 pointsalipang144 comments

Unfortunately, the learning curve was too great for most people, and users elected to put the buttons back in their rightful place with gconf-edit."

Some users did. The vast majority did not. The target market for Ubuntu doesn't even want to be using gconf-edit.

"Even today a Google search for 'window buttons on right' brings up a guide to fixing Ubuntu - and this is for a design change made two and a half years ago

Yes, it's called the internet and it's a fantastic resource for looking up old information that people have archived.

The entire premise of the article appears to be "Ubuntu is opinionated. Here are the controversial decisions they made". I don't see any bearing on whether they've "lost it".

Yes, the title seems harsher than the actual article, and at the end they give Ubuntu quite a bit of praise, too.

Totally agree.

Linux is really organic. Users are doing what they feel is the best way of doing things. If something better comes along, users will switch. The mindshare shifts to better project and old projects die. It is survival of the fittest.

If Ubuntu and others are willing to take the risk...let them.

I guess I felt the gist was more that Shuttleworth and the upper echelon of Ubuntu have appointed themselves soft-BDFLs and despite the cries of the community, design decisions are not something he tends to bend on.

The justification was flimsy at best to shift the buttons left. It just made it more "Apple-ish"

Moving the buttons to the left was important for maximizing in Unity with the combined menu/titlebar.

They could have kept them on the right but then they would get confused with the systray icons/indicators.

Another way of wording that would have been to say that window manipulation (including scroll and resize) have always existed on the right side of the window and moving some of those controls to the left is not only a flaw in Unity, but in OSX as well.

Granted, the paradigm is shifting with touch, but it has been an established guideline in window design for quite some time.

Perhaps Unity should have been designed with this in mind, instead of altering established behavior.

>Perhaps Unity should have been designed with this in mind, instead of altering established behavior.

But.... /innovation/!

I'm a firm believer that you innovate to solve interesting problems, not just to be different (ahem... Apple). And while I agree that sometimes we don't even know a problem exists until we fix it, I don't really think I'll ever exclaim "Woowee, having these buttons on the left totally makes everything so much easier! How did I ever work like this before?"

> Another way of wording that would have been to say that window manipulation (including scroll and resize) have always existed on the right side of the window and moving some of those controls to the left is not only a flaw in Unity, but in OSX as well.

As GP explained, it plays well with systray icons which have been on the right for a long time. There is only one bar to use(or use extra screen space) and I would rather have systray untouched.

This sounds reasonable if you only look at the last decade, but it simply isn't historically true.

The notion of a window manipulation widget first arrived[1] in 1984 with the Macintosh, which had a close box on the left hand side of each window's title bar. Windows 1.0 shipped a year or two later, with one widget on the left and another on the right.[2] Amiga Workbench launched the same year, with a close widget on the left and two layering widgets on the right.[3] Macintosh added a maximize button on the right a couple of years later. Windows 3 echoed the Amiga look, with a close/menu widget on the left and minimize/maximize on the right. CDE and the other Unix window managers which came along around this time generally used the same setup: a close and/or menu widget on the left and one or two zoom widgets on the right. [4]

It was not until Windows 95 that Microsoft moved all of its widgets over to the right side of the title bar. Mac OS and the Unix window managers did not follow. In my recollection it was only with the rise of KDE that Linux GUI design started to follow the Microsoft path, with min/max/close on the right... but of course there was the pin widget on the left for a while.

Mac OS continued to have the close widget on the left and the min/max widgets on the right until OS X, which moved all three to the left to make room for a new toolbar show/hide widget. The toolbar concept flopped and the button went away, so there were no right-hand widgets for a while; but now there's the full-screen widget.

In conclusion, the window title bar is a land of contrasts. Thank you.

1 - The Macintosh predecessor "Lisa" had an icon on the left side of its window title bar, but I don't know whether this was an active widget or just a decoration.

2 - I never used Windows in this era and don't know what the widgets actually did.

3 - I think they were layering widgets, but I could be wrong; I only used an Amiga for an hour at a friend's house once.

4 - I remember Solaris, Irix, and NeXTStep; the former two had the same system as Windows 3, while NeXTStep put the close box on the right and a single max/min button on the left.

Even Windows 95 (and up to at least 7, I think, although I don't use them much) still have a window control widget on the left side. The app icon, when it was still drawn, would invoke a control menu or close if you double clicked. I'm pretty sure that behavior continued to work in Vista/7 even after the actual control (the icon) isn't being drawn.

Google Chrome on Vista doesn't have the app icon on the left hand side, but clicking in that area does drop down that menu.

Chrome is one of "those" apps that feels the need to override the host's interface language and draw its own window decorations.

It certainly wasn't the first, but I still blame WinAmp for starting this whole silliness.

I think even most of the people who did put them back on the right are probably using them on the left now.

At the time it did seem a bit arbitrary and I thought it was an attempt to be more 'mac like'.

However looking at it along side Unity and the rest of the UI changes it made perfect sense to move the buttons their.

Personally I had no problems adapting to the buttons being on the left, it seemed to be more of an issue to change it from the defaults than to just get used to it.

I also like the idea of Mir provided they keep it compatible with Wayland. Having Android support for native Linux apps would be great.

About my only issue with Unity right now is the 'disappearing' menu. Not having it visible things visible can make you forget it exits, you do need that visual reminder. My mum keeps asking me things like how to print, the only thing I have to do is tell her to move the mouse to the top of the screen then she can figure it out. The apps draw is a bit of a pain to navigate. I think something the UI people have forgotten is that you need to be able to 'discover' these features (or the apps) and be reminded that they exist. If I browse a menu, then I will see all the apps I have installed or all the options I can choose.

In any case I'm using Awesome now. The desktop environment is mattering less and less. Almost everything is either in a terminal or web browser.

I don't think the article was very good at explaining _why_ they've lost it. A lot of controversial decisions turn out to be good in the end.

I think the biggest mistake has been to neglect Linux power users, which has been their biggest grassroots evangelists. At one point some years ago _every_ Unix guy I knew ran Ubuntu on their laptops because it "just worked" (well, compared to other distros). And some of them had started recommending it to friends and family. Nowadays, many of the same people are running Macs, and guess what they recommend? Macs (or iPads).

Their second biggest mistake has been the "me too" attitude. Netbooks popular? Ubuntu Netbook Remix! Oh wait, tablets you say? Ubuntu for Tablets! Google and Apple launch TV platforms? Ubuntu TV! Oh, and don't forget that we have a phone OS as well!

To make any one of these succeed they would need to dedicate great salespeople and marketers to secure deals with PC, tablet, TV or phone manufacturers or operators. Or they would have to make them so insanely great that people would line up to get them. Google TV, backed by a big company is pretty much dead in the water.

I would LOVE for all of these products to succeed and to use well designed open source products. But it's just not going to happen this way.

Google TV's biggest hurdle was content companies breaking desktop video sites and demanding special treatment, effectively based on screen size.

You cannot always be the first, especially when you aren't the one making hardware. I'd rather have Ubuntu doing what is currently is rather than thousands of Linux derivatives making slightly different variations of the same model on the same hardware it's been on since the beginning.

>Their second biggest mistake has been the "me too" attitude. Netbooks popular? Ubuntu Netbook Remix! Oh wait, tablets you say? Ubuntu for Tablets! Google and Apple launch TV platforms? Ubuntu TV! Oh, and don't forget that we have a phone OS as well!

They think they're a content company trying to put their on OS on as many devices as possible (control a horizontal).

Really they're a platform company, and they should be trying to make exactly one most popular thing (my guess is Amazon instances running Ubuntu) run as well as possible with all their other services, like their package manager, their cloud, etc. They should try to own a vertical, like Apple does.

I don't know if that many devs are really into macs, most I know aren't and those who do are usually because their company uses/issues them one. In some parts its more peer-pressure than actual convenience. Still unity tries to copy a lot of OSX's look&feel to the point that its just awkward.

I would add that the problem with current ubuntu is that it tries to appeal to both casual and power users and manages to enrage both. Users coming from Windows (still 90% of all PC users) plain hate unity and find it confusing, it used to be that i out of 3 people I showed ubuntu to would install it but after unity I haven't been able to convince anyone because the first thing they see is an OS that makes no sense.

All power users I know prefer even gnome3 to unity, but most stick to KDE and xfce. A lot and I mean a lot have moved to Cinnamon, no surprise there since that environment is awesome, basically what ubuntu should be like. Of course if unity is too mac-like Cinnamon is too windows-like, but it manages to pull a lot of stuff that unity just can't while remaining fairly snappy unlike the sluggishness of the "dash".

Since Windows 8 started shipping, its users trying out Ubuntu for the first time may be more familiar with Unity due to them both having similar search functions and layout.

> Netbooks popular? Ubuntu Netbook Remix!

Xmonad with Ubuntu works fantastic on a netbook.

> The target market for Ubuntu doesn't even want to be using gconf-edit.

I consider myself an advanced user (currently running i3 tiling window manager, very recommended) and even I really didn't ever want to be using gconf-edit.

Jesus christ.

Agreed. Seriously, what's wrong with text config files and a text editor?

I think it's funny when people complain about unity and how users hate it. The only users that even know what it is are the hardcore linux geeks. I used ubuntu back in the day (2006-ish) and moved off Linux because it was too much of a pain in the butt to use for everyday use... even my standalone email server I just gave up on eventually because it was too much of a hassle running linux.

I just started using Ubuntu again last year and... I couldn't figure out what this Unity thing was that people kept complaining about. I guess it's the menubar that appears at the top? And the transparent start menu thingy that pops up when you click the button at the top of the launchbar on the left? Is that what people are complaining about? Seriously? I didn't even notice that it was something that was supposed to be different after the first 2-3 times I saw what it did. Maybe because I'm not a hardcore linux guy? Maybe because it doesn't really look that different from Windows 7 / 8 stuff?

So... from a Windows user's point of view, I think Ubuntu is doing well. It's easy for me to use (it does take a lot of getting used to for the windows buttons to be on the left).. and honestly, for most people, we're in a post-desktop-OS world. Nothing matters outside the browser. I install Chrome and log into Chrome sync, and my world is the same across all desktops.... because the browser is everything. That, more than anything else has made my transition back to Ubuntu easy... because the OS doesn't matter anymore for day to day things. For dev, sure, you need your dev tools, and the environment matters a lot.

> The only users that even know what it is are the hardcore linux geeks.

Which is what... 90% of the user base?

The point of Ubuntu is to bring Linux to the masses. People bring up Unity like it's hurting Ubuntu... and I don't think it is. It doesn't hurt the average non-techie's perception, and techies can install KDE or whatever. Maybe one day I'll install a different window manager and marvel at what a big difference it makes... but right now, it really doesn't matter to me. I can get to Chrome, the terminal, and my text editor of choice. Nothing else really matters to me.

Without techies to recommend it to friends, family and coworkers, Ubuntu will never reach the masses. Non-techies are not independently evaluating Ubuntu.

I used to recommend either Ubuntu, or Mint for someone that wanted/needed Linux but just didn't know or need to know anything technical.

Now I only recommend Mint, and I use Lubuntu.

On the other hand, I don't think Linux can ever reach the masses just through techie recommendations. Even though hardware support has got much better, putting it on any old hardware usually leaves you with some problem, often involving graphics drivers.

I think it needs either OEMs shipping Linux preinstalled with a known-good set of hardware, or better collaboration with hardware manufacturers so it really will work flawlessly on almost any machine. And I see Canonical pushing in both of those directions.

Everybody mentions the hardware support (which I think is fine for the most part), but no one is addressing the elephant in the room: no big vendors develop or port applications to the Linux platform. Valve is the odd one, and even then, it took some years to release something.

Unity got a lot better with Ubuntu 12.04, it sucked when it first came out. I used to hate Unity but after some updates it's now my favorite desktop.

I agree with you, I was a gnome shell user before 12.04, but after I switched to unity I never looked back.

Using 13.04 now, and I tried reasonably hard to keep away from unity. Eventually I gave up when I couldn't deal with the small annoyances like screen tearing in XFCE and the buggy feeling of plastering Gnome3 over ubuntu. Im running Unity on 13.04 now and it feels stable and polished.

However, I dare say I could actually do away with the unity menu and replace it entirely with synapse and although I am used to it, a global menu is a stupid paradigm.

Those like me that went "Oh cool" or "interesting" and figured it out and kept using, don't really feel the need to open up a comment box and say "OMG! This is pretty OK!" so well you never hear from us.

It first had its kinks but it never bothered me. Yeah I don't know who is really that bothered by Unity.

There were basic things (like opening, closing, and resizing windows) which seemed to take multiple steps. As a guy who was used to OSX, Windows XP, and some other linux (an older Ubuntu with Gnome, I think, I don't pay that much attention since they are all so similar) it was fucking horrible.

Maybe they fixed it in later editions (and we're just hearing from the early adopters who got burnt, and switched their UI), but there were just basic things which were hard to do in the early Unity. The only time I've been more annoyed with a UI was Windows 8.

"the Upstart init daemon (which pointlessly duplicated much of the work done in SystemD)"

I think this chronological confusion sums up the insight that can be found from the article.

Jup, I stopped reading when I got to that. If basic facts are wrong, then what else is wrong with this article?

Thank you! Upstart was released almost 4 years earlier (Wikipedia):

Upstart initial release - 24 August 2006

systemd initial release - 30 March 2010

Why we can thank Canonical:

"To innovate is to get a chance to define the future, but it comes with the risk of alienating your current users. The unique advantage desktop Linux has is that we can do both. Ubuntu can innovate while Mint, OpenSUSE, and all the others play it safe.

That's the advantage of the open source ecosystem that we've built up over the years. But we only have that advantage if people are willing to take risks. Mark Shuttleworth is taking a tremendous gamble. If it pays off, then the whole Linux community benefits."

Canonical is making a huge difference for thousands of newbies, thanks to them they can use a Desktop Linux without the fear of complexity.

It's bravery to be willing to take those risks, not everybody have to follow that direction and the diversity of the linux ecosystem is what made his strength. Some will succeed some will fails, but at the end, the whole Linux community will get better!

Summary: Ubuntu has become Windows. It's pursuing devices and fragmenting the ecosystem.

The problem with Ubuntu, by and large, seems to be a Metro style revolt against Unity although Unity achieved suckdom first. Things broke with change... often this was unnecessary change. But you know what? The nice thing about Linux is that there's so many more distros to choose from.

Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com) for example is actually quite nice. Don't like Ubuntu? Don't use it for crying out loud! It's not like Windows; a whole 'nother platform. The same software you know and love will still work.

Best of all, it's got a bloody start button!

Fragmenting what? There were no solid ecosystem, ever, nor there's any.

There's Linux kernel, GNU base userspace (although some replace it with BSD or Solaris one, huh) and bunch of various software running above those. After this there were nothing common in those software since the very beginning. Just more and less popular software.

Edit: removed X11 as possibly common component, because I totally forgot about DirectFB, huh.

  >Fragmenting what?

I can't quite figure that out from the article either, but from the language, I guess they're insinuating that the architecture changes ( in the Ubuntu way as opposed to the traditional "Linux way" ) will mean different approaches to software.

  Daniel Stone, contributor to X.Org (one of the base technologies 
  without which we'd still be staring at blinking green text on a 
  black background), put in: "I'm not worried about Wayland's 
  future at all. I'm just irritated that this means more work for 
  us, more work for upstream developers, more work for toolkits, 
  and more work for hardware vendors."

I don't get the fuss about Wayland and Mir. Like inventing a new mostly-incompatible subsystem is something new in GNU/Linux world. I mean, there were no "Linux way" ever - just take a look at zoos of sound subsystems, network management subsystems, init/rc subsystems and so on. GNU/Linux world is well-known for having magnitudes of software doing same things but in completely different ways, sometimes with some compatibility layers (like ALSA-OSS), but frequently completely mutually incompatible. This is not good, nor bad thing, it's just that there's no any established rules beyond fundamentals POSIX and FHS (and even those are poked from time to time), just more or less popular approaches.

GTK ran on DirectFB just fine, without X11 stack, so getting rid of X11 is nothing new. There were XDirectFB that worked as a X11 server, too. Not sure if the code's maintained and works now, though - haven't visited that land for, IIRC, about 5 years. Anyway, and I don't remember any worries about that.

I think DirectFB is a bad comparison, since AFAIK it was never used widely by any distro. I think people are right to worry that a new graphics engine will lead to loads of wasted work dealing with compatibility problems and other issues down the road. Based on the massive amounts of problems caused by the sound system zoo, I understand the concern.

It's widely used on embedded devices, even if not on desktops.

Ubuntu, or Linux?

DirectFB, I meant (on Linux, typically everything above the kernel is pulled in as needed, no real distro in use).

Agree. I do like the general idea behind Mir. Canonical is at least trying to get the the "Linux-desktop" thing happening. If that means re-inventing the wheel, then go ahead. If they hit home with this, it will benefit us all Linux users.

No one seemed to care about Gnome fragmenting the Linux Desktop back then, because it had 'the right license'.

It was, however, one of the reasons most big-house commercial software was not ported and sold in Linux versions, and sent Linux into a black hole of license fundamentalists until Ubuntu changed that.

Why this point of view? Because I believe that the best possible computing platform from a technical point of view (the most efficient, better designed, etc) is a combination of both an open source foundation and the possibility of open source and closed source applications on top of it.

There was a time around 2008 when I thought Ubuntu could be that solid ecosystem. That me, a customer I'm supporting, a developer I'm submitting a bug report to, the author of an FAQ I'm reading, a fellow user I'm helping out in the forums, a package maintainer testing a binary release and a hardware vendor debugging their drivers might all be seeing the same things on our screens and getting the same responses to the same commands at our terminals.

Unfortunately it seems like Canonical does not share my vision.

> The nice thing about Linux is that there's so many more distros to choose from.

Indeed. But what people seem to miss is that even in Ubuntu, there are a number of desktops to choose from. If you don't like Unity, Ubuntu gives you LXDE, XFCE, KDE and GNOME options as well.

What I like about Ubuntu is its developer model. Take Debian, add some specific goals, and make those goals work well. Anybody can participate, and not at the exclusion of other goals, either. Hate Unity and love GNOME? Others did, and now we have Ubuntu GNOME.

There's no need to turn Unity hate into Ubuntu hate.

That's very true. Thank you for that well reasoned response. I suppose Ubuntu as a "brand" is getting more and more inseparable form Unity from the user perspective, which is unfortunate, since there are so many flavors to choose from.

Side note: Edubuntu with KDE was installed recently on a friend who runs a daycare. It was very well received by both children and staff.

> Don't like Ubuntu? Don't use it for crying out loud!

The reason why I use it is tremendous convenience. Just about anything under the sun is available via a simple "apt-get install".

I kept cursing it for its hamfisted approach to GUI, until I eventually switching to Kubuntu. That was weird, being that I've been a Gnome user ever since the very first Gnome public release. But I'm fine with the new environment, and that's what matters in the end.

Here's the thing though - at the same time Ubuntu was being panned for going their own way with Unity and 'abandoning Gnome', both Gnome and KDE were also abandoning the traditional desktop with their 'visions' of what people should be doing. It was a horrible time to be looking for a traditional desktop that was also tightly integrated.

Hardcore Ubuntu user here. I come from a Windows background. I mean like for 15 years almost, I was running on Windows. When I first got introduced to Ubuntu (5 years ago), it was a breath of fresh air. I loved the terminal and I loved the freedom of choice and the fact that nothing was thrusted into my throat. It was really nice. Until they introduced Unity. It was one of the poorest User experience designed, ever. Suddenly the OS I was in love with became so alien.

Of course I could switch back to the original normal GUI with a few command line entries and a few option entries. But it was already too late. The flexibility I had in 10.xx was gone in 12.xx. 12.xx become so clunky, heavy and painful to use, that I had to abandon it altogether. I can back up my statements too - Try comparing boot/shut down times of 10.xx and 12.xx, you'll know.

Meanwhile, on Windows, the start button just disappeared. And I DID get used to it, but the fact that Ubuntu's Unity had become synonymous to Microsoft pushing their Metro UI into my throat was a nail in the coffin.

Now I run dual boot - Mac OS X along with Windows 8.1. I'm using the Mac OS for about a year or two now and it's really good at what it does. Almost feels like Ubuntu's 10.xx w.r.t boot times. And I never will be looking back.

Ubuntu is a perfect example of "Don't fix something if it ain't broke."

I felt exactly as you.

IMO, Ubuntu 10.04 was the best version. ever.

I don't know, I'm enjoying the latest, but with Xmonad.

Most people I have talked to tend to agree that 10.10 was on of the best point releases. However, 10.04 was a really solid the LTS release.

I have had a lot of odd issues with 12.04 (random freezes after unsuspend, crashing apps, etc). 13.04 seems to fix a lot of the outstanding stability issues.

13.04 server + xorg and fluxbox.

I know not what this 'Unity' hate is all about. apt-get still works last I checked.

You guys need to stop equating OS releases with the UI that ships with the desktop versions. 13.04 is loads better than 10.04, and it has nothing to do with whatever DE happens to ship with it. If you don't like Unity, download Xubuntu.

At the point where you are switching desktop environments you are already well into debian / slackware territory.

Except for the bit where ubuntu does regular scheduled releases.

This is why I choose Ubuntu over debian on my (3) servers. I don't want to cut myself on the bleeding edge of development but I'd prefer to stay ahead of the curve; easier when you have more frequent releases plus a good selection of PPAs.

Using fluxbox is a strong indicator that youre less more interested in the latest bells and whistles and more interested in "do things my way". I include dwm, ratpoison, awesome users in this camp as well.

`apt-get install xfce-desktop lightdm` isn't exactly what I would describe as slackware territory.

you know xfce is present in a default slackware install? :D

I had problems with getting updates, because I think they only support two years? Meh I was still on Firefox 3.5 and wanted to update, to I tried the new Ubuntu with Unity and it sucked. Then I tried Gnome 3, Gnome Shell and they all disappointed me in a different way :( I'm on Linux Mint now, and very happy! The logo is the only thing that's ugly in my opinion haha...

Same here, used Ubuntu for years until Unity came out and drove me back to Windows for desktop use.

I use Ubuntu on my laptop, and haven't touched unity. Just install something else!

I just switched to Gnome Shell and I'm happy. And I check on Unity with every release to see how is it going...

did you read the article? the last part is talking exactly about this type of attitude, I'd rather Ubuntu plays it unsafe, risking it all, expanding, getting to the common folk laptops and phones, and my phone than circle around irrelevant stuff.

If you're a HC Ubuntu user you can change your display anytime and make it work for you, I see nothing wrong with them trying to move further than the point where I'm at, I'm semi-geek, I can deal with this myself, I don't want Ubuntu to be doing everything exclusively for me then going ~oh how dare they did something that haven't pleased ME!?~, I want it to succeed.

I've been enjoying Linux Mint for the past year, which for me comes configured almost exactly the way I want it out of the box, and I don't feel limited by the choice and configurability it offers.

I like Mint a lot, but I liked it more before going through the upgrade process.

yeah, that's the problem of mint. They don't support dist-upgrade so, when they release a new version, you are supposed to reinstall the full os or try yourself a dist-upgrade changing manually all the repos and being careful with confilcts (and there will be often).

In my opinion that is a nonsense

I agree. Using their Debian testing based rolling release could fix that, for the price of losing Ubuntu-compatibility...

I also come from a windows background and I love unity. To me the stale concept of drop down/up menuing systems has always been less than usable.

They work ok for individual applications but for running a desktop, it's a lot of wasted effort. I much rather just type the first few letters of an app and go.

I do not get why the big desktop distros are just supposed to repeat M$ style menus. It seems a lot to me that people just want to stay stuck in the past using a less optimized system because it feel comfortable.

Unity is hardly metro.

Most Ubuntu Unity nay-sayers are stuck with a Windows95 clone with xterms and fail to see the irony in that.

What is it about Linux that people are afraid of when it comes to change? Change is the only constant anywhere.

You are welcome to be running an old distro on an old box because it's comfortable to you but please stop whining when stuff moves forward without you. There are plenty of people waiting down the road for more interesting things to occur and you simply don't get there by doing nothing but fixing bugs.

F.U.D.

You said that Ubuntu is not "flexible" anymore, but now you are running OS X and Win8? Are you kidding me? It's like moving to North Korea because of NSA's spying.

The only slow part about Ubuntu is Unity, but if you try running OS X, Ubuntu and Windows on the same-priced hardware, Ubuntu will _still_ probably win. And you can easily replace it with "sudo apt-get install whatever-DE-you-want && sudo apt-get remove unity". After that, all of the bloat is gone.

For example, Ubuntu + XMonad runs _perfectly_ on a $200 Chromebook, which could not handle Unity.

Also, it may be a big surprise for you, but gasp Ubuntu is not the only Linux distro. You want fast boot time -- try Arch. Want a stable distro? install Debian. Need an easy-to-use distro similar to Ubuntu, but with a normal DE? consider Mint.

>Ubuntu's Unity had become synonymous to Microsoft pushing their Metro UI into my throat was a nail in the coffin.

I don't understand this. It seems like you dislike Win8 UI so much, mere associating of Unity with Metro caused you to stop using Ubuntu -- to switch to Win8?

As long as Ubuntu ends up running in my Phone, I don't care if any of the 1% that runs Linux on the Desktop loves or hates Unity.

Smartphones and tablets are the market-share growers now.

So you couldn't figure out how to change the DE? Maybe OSX and Windows are the right choices for you.

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Nice. I was going to complain about how terrible question headlines were but I didn't know there was a name for them.

previously posted:

That wins some kind of award, though I'm not sure what.

passive-aggressiveness?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853639

Nice. It's a comment on the link-bait headline more than a joke, not surprised it's a pretty common reaction.

You are a warrior-poet. Thank you.

Whenever I see a headline with a leading question in its title my automatic response is "no".

It's lazy writing and tries to colour my opinion before even presenting the facts.

You've adopted Betteridge's law of headlines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Is there a law about how this wikipedia article will turn up in the comments section of every headline with a question mark?

Not yet....we could call it eertami's law though....

Does anyone know if commits 'offered' is tracked? One of the issues Google always had was they would submit their changes back to the community but then the community would reject them for one reason or another (a lot of the container stuff seemed to start out that way).

i don't know, but opensuse continues to be awesome and more american users should try it out. i have to use a variety of linux distros for work, and i use opensuse on my own machines where i get the choice. it's so frustrating that such a polished, easy to use but powerful system gets so little love :o(

I too use OpenSUSE. I tried Ubuntu on my huge-screen Dell Precision M70, and it couldn't find the Nvidia driver. OpenSUSE got it right first time. I also think OpenSUSE is most like Windows, which is a plus for me.

Ubuntu could have gone much further focusing on helping people learn to love the Unix CLI than trying to chase and reimplement GUI trends over and over for the last decade.

People are by and large visual creatures so it makes sense that they would focus on the GUI rather than the CLI.

Though I agree that they were less innovative than I would have liked on the graphical side of things. However when they did 'innovate' with Unity people complained (and still do). Not a lot, but they were extremely vocal.

Really?

Anyone who wanted the CLI has had plenty of choices of various operating systems and distributions over the years. Ubuntu's strength is that it's useable and installable with a minimum amount of CLI. That means there's less of a barrier to newbies and casual users.

("Real" users can use blinking LEDs and chorded keyboards instead of fancy GUI cheats...)

One of my pet peeves is that I think Linux users are disproportionately obsessed with the command line. A well designed GUI can actually be really powerful, but it seems like we compare well-designed CLIs to badly designed GUIs, decide that CLIs are amazing and keep not bothering to write good GUI apps.

That's not to say that CLIs aren't powerful - I have a terminal open all the time, and for many things it's the quickest option. But I think we underestimate how useful GUIs can be.

> of the 100,000 kernel patches made in the preceding five years, only 100 of these came from Canonical

Still better than 0, and that's not counting all the fixes they do to other system components and tools that other distros benefit from.

I think it's great that Ubuntu is using Canonical's resources to go in wild directions. I prefer Cinnamon as my desktop environment, but I'm glad Unity is being worked on too. It's awesome they want to be on phones and TVs, you never know where great ideas can sprout from.

That being said, I plan to give OpenSuse and Fedora a try soon just to see what I've been missing out on the past few years.

It looks like Canonical, as well as Microsoft, think that something in the form factor of a MS Surface is the way things are going. If you are going to have a desktop/tablet, you need a touch driven UI.

Five years ago, when Samsung Q1 UMPCs were exciting [1], I'd have agreed, but it turns out that tablets (with tiny their screens even when you plug in a keyboard), are crap for creation. People don't just want to be passive consumers.

Hence, this unified Tablet/PC idea is a bad one. I'm sure it'll fly eventually, just like mice over trackerballs, but that doesn't mean it's better. Dedicated devices that are good at creation and consumption respectively (PC, Laptop, TV, Tablet) are better. Unified Tablet/PCs yield interfaces that are bad for everything, and extra RSI from the touchscreen.

But it's the way of the future, so Linux had better be ready. Because soon it'll be hard to buy a laptop that isn't a tablet. And can you think of a better Desktop Environment for touch screen than Canonicals?

[1]http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Samsung-Q1-UMPC.ht...

> "something in the form factor of a MS Surface"

you mean something in the form factor of the iPad? I don't want to get into a debate about who made that shaped device first, but the iPad was the first that anyone normal had heard of.

The vision of the surface (unlike the ipad) is that it is both a tablet, and a PC.

You can mount it on a wall, put a bluetooth keyboard and mouse under it, and you are at a PC.

You can clip in the little clippy keyboard, and it's a laptop.

I don't have a problem with ipads. Ipads are a specialist device for consuming content, and apple make laptops for doing other stuff on. You're supposed to have both.

I have a problem with Tablet/PCs, like the surface, because they are trying to be both, and failing. It's like asking for a lorry that's also a sports car - you're gonna get something, and it's gonna be really really bad.

fair points all - in this way, Ubuntu is indeed more similar to Windows 8 on a tablet than iOS on an iPad is to either.

Personally I'd kinda like to have a bigger Surface-style device, like 15", and plug in my mechanical keyboard. That way the laptop's keyboard isn't getting in the way.

Only trouble is it wouldn't be good for use on my lap, but that could be solved with an arrangement similar to a Surface with keyboard attached, where the "keyboard" is just something to put my real keyboard on.

This could also be a nice arrangement for people who fly a lot, if you could hang the screen on the seat in front of you.

> but it turns out that tablets (with tiny their screens even when you plug in a keyboard), are crap for creation

Disagree massively. If you look at the iOS market, you'll see a ton of content creating apps making good money. For example, ipads are now better for making music on than laptops.

can you get Live, Cubase or Reason on a ipad yet? can you connect your pro fire-wire sound card to an ipad?

NO tablets are great for playback and controller use cases for composing/creation not so much.

Now Live on a Surface pro might be good for music creation.

Obviously you won't get a 1:1 correlation with legacy desktop apps. ReBirth is an example of an app arguably not worth porting to ipad. Unsurprisingly, the ipad does better in areas where it innovates and sometimes exceeds desktop capabilities - for example apps like Konkreet Performer, Traktor, Reactable, Samplr, Lemur, Impaktor, Electrify, all the Korg and Moog apps. There are a ton of DAWs to choose from but they are among the less interesting things out there.

Calling Live a 'legacy desktop app'?

Isn't desktop legacy by definition? ;)

Some of us prefer the term mature.

Well, touchscreens are trendy right now and they're moving a lot of hardware and software.. but for real hardcore musical creation?

They won't be a centerpiece like a desktop running Ableton Live until they get a hell of a lot more powerful.. and frankly, the first thing most people will do with their touchscreen musicbox is find a board covered in keys, knobs, faders, and buttons to attach to it.

I think people might underestimate just how tactile music is and how important it is with electronic/computer-powered music to see what you're doing at the same time as you're doing it or--conversely but no less importantly--to be able to do what you're doing without looking at it.

I mean, there's talk of tactile feedback touchscreens and everything else, but really--this is a solved problem, it's called a button.

You're obviously correct that tablets are CPU-bound compared to desktop which is why the more exciting stuff is native on the ipad rather than being a port. Traktor is a good example - the ipad version is very different and stripped down yet more powerful in a number of ways. When you talk about 'hardcore creation', remember that Brian Eno is a big fan of the ipad. Now you can get Reactable for ipad and even an emulation of the Tenori-on - you won't find anything remotely like those capabilities (or e.g. Samplr or Impaktor) on desktop.

And the controller market is much larger for desktop than tablet - the tablet is a very popular controller for the desktop (especially Ableton as it happens). Consider that for a long time Lemur has been a high end pro choice precisely due to it being a soft controller and they are now working with the ipad.

I'd like to see Eno do a show with naught but one ipad. I think Reactable is basically a toy and as for the Tenori-on.. I don't know if you've ever played one, but it was kind of terrible.. I think it probably would do better as an app than a discrete physical device though. It looked cool and novel, but the build quality was poor and the interface actually wasn't worthwhile, it was a toy. It's so much easier to address tone using a keyboard, and you don't need a crazy 16x16 grid to address time. A linear array of 16 buttons, any of which you can hold to address a specific point in time, and then manipulate that point in time by pressing keys on a keyboard or turning encoders to set parameters works very well.

Samplr looks cool, but I don't actually see the capability. Controllerists hack together things like this in PureData, Max/MSP, and Reaktor all the time. Just watching the video, the issue of the finger covering the display is huge. I see him changing parameters that are tightly clustered by pressing on them and then sliding his finger left and right. So.. the nearby parameters are inaccessible when doing this? What happens when my hands get sweaty?

I think touch screens have their uses but they simply don't replace tactile controls. Having an integrated computer and screen that can present a large amount of information is itself a huge advancement. The overly touch-centric UI is a regression, in this musician's opinion. I see a lot of novelty, but I've yet to see anything that I personally would even consider bringing onto the stage. Keys work, knobs work, faders work, decoupled controls and display work. In all the novelty I don't see any real tools for managing the complexity and demands of live performance, I see complexity added without practical affordances.

Tightly coupling control and display is just not such a great idea and I really don't think it takes much imagination once you remember all of the different sensors and hard input devices that exist to come up with another way of implementing any interface that works well on a touch screen.

I'm more interested in the possibility of apps w/ dedicated controllers, or multipurpose controllers, than I am in the standalone apps. Unfortunately, these devices don't really put configurability very high on their feature sets.

If you haven't done so recently, go play a modern hardware synth or sequencer. Then think about the explosion of possibility that 'desktop'(Which is really a misnomer with laptops and small headless computers on the table) solutions offer... then revisit a tablet app and you'll find yourself asking, as I found myself asking, why do I have to obscure the information with my finger and why is such a large part of my screen given over to taking input?

I know obviously an amateur who hasn't had to work in the real world i doubt sound on sound would agree with him/her on this

You're not actually in the music industry are you. Nobody who was would cite SoS.

You may have a point there. I'm sure being able to draw on the screen is pretty good for art work too.

Yes the art app market is also very big. There's a really ignorant meme going round in tech circles that ipad is only good for passive consumption - people think it sounds smart but it couldn't be further from what is actually emerging in reality. (Have to say for some reason I can't ascertain, I hate to see people take pictures on an ipad - but go into a busy tourist spot in a big city now and observe.)

Let me know when I can use XCode on iPad.

The goal Ubuntu appears to be aiming for is that you dock your phone/tablet to a workstation setup with a full-sized screen and keyboard, and all your apps and content seamlessly carries on in the new environment. That's a bit different from Surface's model of attaching a keyboard and using the same touchscreen.

What Ubuntu got popular off of was it's ease of setup. They now seem to be using that validation to justify their decisions in UI and everything else, which has nothing to do with what people liked about Ubuntu in the first place. I feel like their PR takes a "we know better than you" attitude for their decisions, but they never proved themselves to be competent at any of the things they're pushing for.

I get the impression that now most desktop distros have quite simple installers. Were they difficult before because of some technical obstacle, or simply because they hadn't spent the time to make it easy? (honest question - I didn't use Linux until Ubuntu). If it's the latter, that seems to give Canonical at least one point for knowing what users would want.

It wasn't the simplicity of the installer interface. It was the actual installation. Ubuntu did the best job simply working with a large variety of hardware. You installed it and you didn't have to do a bunch of painful manual setup by modifying a dozen obscure config files. Linux had the reputation of being a pain to setup, and ubuntu addressed that.

In a speech at the Linux Plumbers Convention in 2008 he criticised Ubuntu for not contributing more to the Linux kernel, saying that, of the 100,000 kernel patches made in the preceding five years, only 100 of these came from Canonical, creating the strange situation whereby the world's most popular Linux distribution contributed only 0.1 per cent of the work needed to keep the kernel going.

Four years later, in 2012, Kroah-Hartman complained that "Canonical uses me as a gatekeeper of what bugs get fixed in their kernel package and sent to their customers. There's so much wrong with this, I don't know where to start..."

If the Linux kernel maintainers are that upset about this then they should have used a licence that forced Canonical to contribute (code or financially), but they didn't, they made the Linux kernel 'Free Software', and that means Canonical can do what they want with it (freedom 2 in this case), so long as they are not restricting the freedom of others. Either change the licence or shut up.

Why? What is this new strange rule, that prevents one from criticizing others if one doesn't want to contractually force them to do the right thing?

That's what's going on in the other thread where some people are criticising Linus and some others say that he's not paid by them, so shut up.

My opinion is that even you're a volunteer, you should listen to criticism or don't call yourself a volunteer (as this usually means that you want to achieve something for the benefit of others (at least in part), or you're doing something in cooperation with others). If you're not completely isolated then your actions have an effect on others so you should be prepared for criticism.

Similar to the position some have that if you comment on a bug/flaw/shortcoming of an open source app, that you are somehow obliged to shut up and get involved in the bug report process. In case it's not obvious, I don't subscribe to this view.

I don't think it's valid criticism in the first place.

The kernel is only a single part of a much bigger "Linux desktop distribution". For desktop users, work on good default configurations for all software, X (or its replacements), window managers, package managers, backports of security fixes to old software, and many other things that Canonical does are just as valuable as improving the kernel itself.

Why aren't the kernel maintainers allowed to voice their opinion on how their product is being utilized? Changing the license would have impacts far beyond just preventing Canonical from leeching their work. Sometimes the best thing to do is voice an opinion and hope that the message is heard.

This is so true. I remember ancient times Apple withheld Webkit development process, but people kept bitching about this for year or so, despire numerous smarty pants who argued Apple can do anything it wants and should raise no criticisms.

This became very loud, Apple was forced to release webkit development process to public, and then Chrome happened, phones got browsers that didn't suck, every desktop toolkit got HTML renderer that rocks, this was tremendous example of open source success.

So thank you, smarty pants, a bit more effort on your part and we'll have no Chrome, no phone browsers, no nothing.

There is some things which are totally legal, but morally wrong. Canonical doesn't have a legal obligation to contribute kernel code, but it doesn't make their behaviour right, and kernel developers have every right to criticize them.

Lost what? Sorry, lump me into the camp of linux die-hards who don't much care for Ubuntu. I grudgingly use it at OSI[1] because it's our standard, but I much prefer Fedora or CentOS. Although, once I muster up the time and energy to switch this Ubuntu box to KDE, I'll probably like it a lot more.

Anyway, having used Ubuntu on my work desktop for the past year and a half, I don't see what all the hype is about. It isn't "better" than Fedora in any way that is particularly noticeable to me, and the much vaunted "apt-get" seems to do exactly what yum does for me on Fedora. If it's better, it's such an incremental level of "better" that I find it hardly distinguishable.

But Unity... uuugggghhhhhh....

[1]: http://www.osintegrators.com

RPM/yum has grown up a lot, and yes -- it works as well or better than apt-get at basically everything now (openSUSE's zypper is actually spiffier still). But for a long time Debian and its derivatives had an overwhelmingly better package management experience, and a much larger universe of packages to draw on than the RPM distros did. And this intuition persists in the community.

Though I will say this: for all the feature and usability improvements we've seen in yum, the Fedora people seem to be trying their damndest to break them all by this insane wrapping in "PackageKit" that manages to succeed in both dumbing it down to the level of unusability and "enhancing" the power user experience by spending 3-5 seconds every time you typo a command trying to figure out how to install "mkdri".

FWIW, Ubuntu has it's own "waste time everytime you typo a command" functionality, at least in the release I'm on. It's actually useful every once in a blue moon...

Any "open" community that has to publicly state that it will only work with those that have established credibility in its own community has "lost it"

I'll politely withhold my comments about the disasters of Unity and now Ubuntu mobile.

It seems sort of unfair to compare kernel contributions from Canonical to a company like Red Hat simply because of the time-frame during Linux's development that Red Hat was a part of. Isn't is possible that Red Hat helped out more because it was around closer to the start of the Linux project?

Also, Canonical's and Ubuntu's strengths may not lay in kernel development, but instead pushing the boundaries in what can be done on the UI. I certainly don't remember Red Hat or SUSE doing the sort of risky things with their UI that Canonical is willing to try.

Redhat is probably the biggest contributor to gnome shell

This is actually what the conclusion of the article says - that Canonical is taking worthwhile UI risks, and probably doesn't feel much need to work on the kernel.

Never. When i saw the unity interface on couple of years ago, its truel impressive and new kind of UI. People would change M$ to Ubuntu its quite useful( unity UI).. I realy love the interface... Most of the hardcore linux geeks doesn't like that environment.in future it would be occupied any other interface..

I personally find it interesting that they bothered to mention Ubuntu TV. That project hasn't seen a code commit in months, and by the looks of it there have been little effort to transition away from the deprecated Unity-2d base it's built on.

I don't normally complain about articles. The content is valid. I'm having a hard time parsing over the ads though!

Is nobody going to mention that atrocity of a pie chart rendered at an angle?

Ubuntu lost it 5 years ago.

I actually think all this ambivalence is Ubuntus bigest problem. Now it has become apparent that all along they wanted to go down the path of only using the kernel, and then build a whole new software-stack on top of it, just like Android.

But they have not communicated this to the community, all the community has seen is half-hearted attempts to contribute (to projects that they where going to get rid of anyways) and sporadic design changes that went to far away from the vanilla experience of gnome (making it feel fragmented), and then ultimately replacing fully functional software (with software that's full of bugs and obviously not stable yet).

Now, in the normal Linux community world, everything above seems like total madness, unless as stated in the first paragraph your endgame was all along to replace everything to make a unified product. If they only communicated this, I think they would have gotten alot of support and understandig instead of alienating them selves.

I don't think it is the case that they had always planned to build a whole new software stack. And that's not even what they're doing - Ubuntu runs loads of 'Linux ecosystem' applications, which Android never aimed to do.

On the system level, only last year they were talking about one day moving to Wayland - which they later decided against for reasons I don't know enough about to judge. My understanding is that they only made Unity because they felt they didn't have enough influence in the design of Gnome 3. I don't think there's as much of a master plan as you suggest.

Once again, I feel that I'm the only one who knows it's possible to run non-Unity UIs on Ubuntu.

Window Maker. It works. I run it. Have for years. I can't be the only one, because it's still right there in the repos.

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