Martin Gräßlin, KDE: "Good Bye, Ubuntu"
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The weirdest part of this attack is that he specifically mentions certain toolkits as 'competitors' who do not support Mir but do support Windows.
When superficially reading this someone who has followed recent events might think this is about Intel, who has recently refused a patch to their graphics card drivers and are rather big in their opposition of Mir.
But when reading more carefully, it does not really make sense to call Intel a competitor of Ubuntu in any sense. And the Intel linux graphics driver project obviously does not really support Windows.
The only project that comes to mind that does fit these criteria is KWin. Why would Mark single out KWin? I don't know, but obviously Martin is rather upset about it.
I get the feeling that maybe Mark just sort of jumbled some characteristics of Mir opponents together, and the jumble accidentally fit KWin perfectly.
Whether it was intentional or not, Mark should really apologize for causing Martin to feel this way.
The attacks were not really that ad hominem. While I see Martins point with the technical reasons and why that annoys him if political reasoning gets accused, his technical reasons are more grounded on policy, and the step from (technically founded) policy to politics is not that far, especially if you are someone who is convinced that your new solutions for something is great and want to see it adopted, which could be Shuttleworths position. And reactions like Intels sabotage is probably not something that is easy to accept with a smile.
And I don't think that you have to apologize for the effect of your actions, but for your mistakes. So it's not necessarily about how Martin feels, but about what Mark said - if that was indeed wrong, for every aspect of wrong. I didn't like his language comment, that was harsh and targeted against foreign speakers.
Also, there were always clashes between Ubuntu/Canonical and Kubuntu/KDE. I don't see behind the curtains, I have no overview who behaves how when they interact directly. But the language barrier and the cultural differences (isn't KDE still a bit german influenced?), and the question who holds the power, makes the situation probably prone to issues like these.
Finally, I don't think it is possible to judge about the technical aspect of the whole discussion without being familiar with the code of those projects, so it's hard to take sides based on that.
I should probably add: I was a team member ubuntuusers.de, the german ubuntu support forum Martin mentions in his post, and remember him a bit from then. This leads to a bit of sympathy, but that was years ago and details are gone, and I parted on bad terms with that team (I hope that expression fits here). So I am always not sure in which direction my history with the Ubuntu community influences my judgement of such situations. Grain of Salt and stuff.
As someone who read that blog post for the first time today and with no context - all I can say is that it didn't come across that way to me. What I got was grousing about political motivations for a paragraph - nobody was named or called out and it was only a few sentences worth of commentary.
Now I understand that there was subtext there that I - as someone not involved in that community - undoubtedly missed. But when I read the OP then read the Shuttleworth post, I could only see it in the most oblique fashion.
With several dozen million Ubuntu desktop users worldwide[1], Canonical has become the gravitational center of the FLOSS desktop and a promising platform for other form factors. No other FLOSS desktop comes even remotely close in terms of mass adoption.
As a consequence, many other FLOSS projects that historically have perceived themselves as more important "upstream projects" to the Ubuntu desktop have now become, effectively, contributing projects to Ubuntu. It is now they who depend on Canonical to reach and interact with the vast majority of FLOSS desktop users.
For the individuals who identify themselves with those other projects, this tectonic shift in power has not been enjoyable. More and more of them are gradually realizing that if they want to continue working with Canonical, it will have to be on Canonical's terms.
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[1] There were over 25 million Ubuntu users at last count: http://blog.canonical.com/2013/10/01/ubuntu-pre-installed-an...
I think the problem here is the attitude coming from Mark Shuttleworth which is a terrible example for the rest of the Ubuntu community. Regardless of what Shuttleworth believes, KDE is a own standalone open source project and does not owe anything to Canonical/Ubuntu.
I refuse to believe there was major lobbying until I see actual emails (and the number of emails).
I think a fewer users -> fewer contributors -> slower feature velocity -> fewer users death spiral is possible.
I wonder if this is not a positive thing after all, for a mature project. I do not think KDE should add new features at 200 mph speed. I think Ubuntu is actually going too fast.
It doesn't say depend on to be able to write code. Or depend on to be able to have a github account. Or depend on to be able to exist.
It says depend on to reach and interact with the vast majority of FLOSS desktop users.
And Ubuntu and Unity are still a bug ridden mess. I know it's about money and manpower and it's hard to fix sometimes complicated bugs but I've switched to KDE recently just because of the annoying bugs in 13.10.
Some examples:
- No Menu on Eclipse Kepler (it's only the most used FOSS IDE) - there is a workaround on askubuntu through.
- While moving a lot of files with nautilus my system starts grinding - turns out gvsd-metadata occopius 4GB memory and one cpu core. Nautilus uses 1GB memory and and another CPU core.
- indicator-application uses 100% CPU randomly
- Firefox colors are pale after switching windows
- Random artifacts on GUI elements while working with the system for a longer time.
- Drag and Drop does not work reliably.
- Switching Windows and Workspaces does not work reliable.
- I can start Firefox in Lightdm without beeing logged in. Just add an event then Evolution starts up. Let's you also happily sends Mail through the lightdm user.
- Without Evolution adding an event does nothing. Just does not work.
- etc.pp
KDE exhibits none of these problems so far.
If Unity and Ubuntu would be more stable and more polished (e.g. good support for legacy apps like ghostview and emacs/xemacs in Unity) and stable file management, few memory leaks - it would be an fantastic system. I really like Unity and the ideas behind it but sometimes you can't really work the system.
That's pretty darn bad. You have reported this, right?
> I cannot remember that I have ever been insulted in public, in fact I'm not used to getting insulted at all. And if people normally are able to say sorry. I and many others asked Mark to withdraw his comment and post an apology instead.
Ok, see here's the problem. The developer community, and especially the FOSS portion of the developer community, love to tout the fact that the community is a "meritocracy". But what does that mean? Certainly, insulting individuals (as opposed to their work product) is not in the spirit of a meritocracy.
...but neither is asking for an apology.
Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth have made a technical decision. If the FOSS community is a meritocracy, the fate of their products will be determined by the merit of those decisions. That they also spilled so many vitriolic words in the direction of the "competition" should matter not at all.
If the FOSS community is a meritocracy, then the appropriate reaction would be to continue making the best decisions possible, producing the best products possible, and ignoring anything anyone says that does not speak to the merits of those decisions or products.
...if this is a meritocracy.
Perhaps it's high time we drop the charade of "meritocracy" and admit that software projects, FOSS or otherwise, are run by humans with human emotions and human reactions, and that for better or worse, the majority of the developer community makes decisions based more on emotion than on a dispassionate evaluation of a project's merits.
How many people do you know like that? Do you think this describes the majority of the people in the FOSS world?
You could maybe base the merit on the process, but I think they'd all lose.
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=15698#c3...
(To be clear, it's fine with me if someone disagrees with some other software's UI decisions, but it's another thing to call those other people "stupid" when those decisions are to make use of an API you explicitly implemented, or call their code "broken" when the bug is demonstrably yours. Quoted words are his.)
This is a personal insult.
Saying that a program and its behavior is stupid, is not a personal insult. For example, I think my gnome3 fallback menu bar is stupid for crashing when loading its icons for a particular sub menu (running unstable). I do not however think that gnome3 developers are stupid.
I also want to do some preliminary debugging of the issue before sending in a bug report.
(map stupid-behavior! chrome-developers)In general Google apps play very bad with desktop standards. Logical, regarding their position about the desktop.
I just have to use Chrom* because Opera committed suicide.
The horror.
It's time to let go of a 12-year-old OS.
Some things (some games I like, ripping disks) are better done in XP.
12.16 still works nicely (apart from Google+, which takes up unreasonable amounts of CPU time, but unfortunately there are some people there worth reading).
TBH, most people have moved away from KDE. There are very few people using KDE. Everyone I know uses Ubuntu/Unity. They may not like Unity but KDE4/Plasma is worse.
If anyone does find something like this that isn't getting enough attention on the official bug reports, I'd suggest just mentioning it to a developer friend who uses KDE.
> There are very few people using KDE.
> Everyone I know uses Ubuntu/Unity.
> They may not like Unity but KDE4/Plasma is worse.
It seems likely that the percentage of linux users using KDE has shrank, while probably the total number went up, but I'd be very curious to get hard data.
I'm one of the people that moved from KDE to Gnome after the fuck-ups with KDE 4.x. Plasma taskbar became unreadable after a few hours use and they kept blaming nvidia drivers when in fact plasma had a pixmap leak. I moved on and never looked back.
I wonder where you got your data, the 2013 /r/linux survey found out: "Just like last year, there is a lot of variety in what /r/Linux is using as it's graphical environment of choice with "Other" being the top category. The top three are KDE 4, Gnome 3, and XFCE. (...) KDE 4.x was third last year. This year it moved up to first place.
For the second year in a row Unity wins "Most Hated Environment" of /r/Linux, followed by GNOME 3, KDE 4, and then KDE 3.
And gnome is well known for telling their users they're stupid and clueless, but I don't remember reading such a thing from kde in the ten years I've been using it.
2012 /r/linux survey: http://constantmayhem.com/ty-stuff/linuxsurvey/report.html#f...
Evironment Non-Server Users Server Users Total
KDE 4.x 392 667 1059
GNOME 3.x 376 627 1003
XFCE 378 605 983
Unity 342 438 780
Cinnamon 378 397 775
GNOME 2.x 213 463 676
[0] http://constantmayhem.com/ty-stuff/linuxsurvey/2013.html#fav...
"Is there any valid reason to change the code except Chromium? In general I am against changing our code to fix broken applications and Chromium is broken. They should just use the system titlebars and not do their own stupid things."
A thousand times this. Being a participant in various FOSS things and other projects I have come to learn that the idea of a meritocracy is a thought terminating cliche. It is perpetuated by the nerd culture around FOSS that can program beautiful stuff day in and day out but has a chronic deficiency in social ability.
I know it's kind of a worn-out point by now and I will probably gather downvotes for it, but that's the sad truth of the matter. As nerds, we like to reduce our reality to technicalities, those pesky old meat space constraints only hold us back! And that works well for a couple of years when one quarter of the community awakens to their social core, realizing the community around them in horror while another quarter of the community doubles down and goes borderline sociopathic. Then those two sides fight a bitter fight and the whole community suffers.
To me, all this comes down to one problem: centralization. If you don't reduce your scope and humble your ambition, you will fall by it. Happens. Every. Time. Canonical always aspired to be the Linux distro but to achieve that, it had to accept a cost to the community in form of collateral damage.
It's human constraints holding back FOSS. Ambition in the misguided few (sadly, mostly people who aspire to and assume leadership positions), carelessness and sheep behavior in the idealistic many.
There is no technical solution to this and technical solutions is what the majority of FOSS participants come in for. Only to find that - surprise! - the FOSS community has the same meat space constraints as every other goddamn thing on this planet. Until we put more emphasis on not letting social skills atrophy in this atrophy-enabling climate, this history will simply keep on repeating itself.
Not sure how having feelings is related to meritocraty.
And.. If anything Shuttleworth leads because he's rich.
What you're suggesting is that insults are acceptable. And if you read his posts correctly, he already explained that his decisions were based on technical merit. However, if the other side totally fails to be able to handle being judged on technical merit, then too bad for them.
In brief this is what he's saying.
To put it simple: Canonical proposed a patch for KWin and KWin didn't accept it. Now Canonical can maintain that patch or not. End of the story.
That's why forks happen and that's one of the beautiful things of open source (if KWin doesn't meet Ubuntu needs: customize it!).
I think this post is about communication between upstream and downstream. If you ask me, I wish there was more Jono and less Mark. Canonical is trying to influence some external projects and it doesn't look like things are working as smooth as they could. "Open Source Tea Party"?
That's not how you make upstream accept your changes.
At the end I think Canonical will maintain any patch that upstream can't or doesn't want to accept, say KWin, Intel, or whatever. Eventually, if MIR is the future of Linux desktop, upstream projects will include support for it.
- the ethically politically motivated: there are many sides of the spectrum here. Copyleft GNU advocates are a good example. Writing GPLv3/v2 is an issue of freedom and the code the write is a political statement
- the open source as a business model types: another category with different sides of the spectrum. Companies that dual-license as a restriction mechanism is another example. One license model allows anyone to use it with a GPLv3 license, while the author company really expects to make money of the consuming companies that do not want (or cannot) use that license. The consuming company has to buy another "commercial" license that does not require them to GPL anything.
- the I-just-want-to-build-cool-stuff camp: I found it on GitHub, so I just fork and use it. Often, they don't really understand licensing restrictions (or care). It is about hacking.
- the I-want-this camp: They may be seriously fed up with a particular piece of software. So much, that they are starting a new Open Source software and putting a lot of intellectual (and emotional) effort to build something they envision. Criticisms to the project are direct criticisms to the person. After all, the motivation for creating the project was personal.
- etc
The point of this, is that it is easy to forget that the motivation for using and creating Open Source for all these camps is drastically different. It is easy to get political, be attacked by zealots, get personal, or emotionally offensive.
People criticise Ubuntu and Canonical all the time. There are countless posts and comments about the Amazon lens, and many on their decision to go with Mir over Wayland.
This is ridiculously hyperbolic.
What he means is that it's impossible for a prominent developer to criticize their technical decisions without facing a ton of hateful backlash from Ubuntu fans and Mark Shuttleworth himself. Which he knows, from experience, because he did just that, criticized the design of Mir and said that he wouldn't support it, and he got exactly that backlash.
If Mark Shuttleworth actually followed the Ubuntu code of conduct http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/conduct, we would not have gotten here:
Be respectful
Disagreement is no excuse for poor manners. We work
together to resolve conflict, assume good intentions and
do our best to act in an empathic fashion. We don't allow
frustration to turn into a personal attack. A community
where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a
productive one.
First of all, it's a lazy insult - it's just applying a label (also known as name calling) to put people down without any context. It implies that these people are irrational, inflexible and idealistic, but with a bad connotation. He could have argued that those things are true in a more diplomatic way, and more importantly, by using evidence other than just claiming that mir is "important" or "a huge leap forward for gaming performance...". Instead, he just labels the people who happen to disagree with him as the tea party. Great.
Secondly, I think it's fair to be concerned about what's going on with mir. Maybe he's telling the truth that they just want the best solution... I think everyone, whether you want Wayland or not, would like to move away from X. So maybe mir is the right way to go. However, they failed to make the case for this in a typical open source way. Why not improve Wayland instead of going off and doing your own thing? If the direction of Wayland is awful or wrong, why not point that out? And instead of just claiming that's the case, why not try to use evidence to prove that it's the case? I have been following this closely, but have no idea what the advantages of the two proposed systems is better... but it certainly seems that almost everyone other than Canonical is rooting for and working on Wayland, which isn't really a good sign...
It's very easy to be skeptical because of all the good will they sacrificed by sticking Amazon adds in my god-damned desktop. Honestly, that seems like such a shameless land-grab for clueless users' personal data which really damages their privacy. It wouldn't even have been an issue if it was simply opt in. So, because they made that poor decision, people are skeptical, critical, maybe even a bit irrational. But that shouldn't be surprising. And even if you're being personally attacked yourself, it doesn't make it right to attack other people - many of whom aren't trying to make their contributions a business and are doing their work with pure intentions - unlike Canonical and Mark who clearly have a business angle in all this (which, in and of itself, is totally fine).
Sorry for the rant, guys. I mean, do people really think "open source tea party" is at all fair?
No. If nothing else, it is an insult to the original (Boston) Tea Party. One might remember that those individuals were protesting irrational decisions made by a king who was far isolated from said subjects.
The implementation of those taxes by using troops and "general warrants" was a problem. Sadly, the formation of thought on that is once again back with us and not imposed by a ruler across the ocean.
As to the modern Tea Party, I guess it depends who you talk to on if they think its an insult.
All Wayland really does is hand out framebuffers in local RAM. The Wayland devs consider app display remoting to be a special case used by relatively few users, and outside the scope of the core project.
And now you know why I'm sticking with X for now.
I'm not terribly eager to move away from X. I'll switch if there's something that runs all my programs, and does everything X does but cleaner and better. A POSIXy version of rio from Plan 9 would be a good start.
But Wayland isn't that and I'm not eager to adopt Wayland. Let alone fucking Mir.
I just installed Arch. It pains me to say it, but I can't put up with Ubuntu's "My way or the highway" antics any more. It is a shame.
> We considered and spoke with several proprietary options, on the basis that they might be persuaded to open source their work for a new push, and we evaluated the cost of building a new display manager, informed by the lessons learned in Wayland. We came to the conclusion that any such effort would only create a hard split in the world which wasn’t worth the cost of having done it. There are issues with Wayland, but they seem to be solvable, we’d rather be part of solving them than chasing a better alternative. So Wayland it is.
I still don't understand what made him change his mind completely and disregard all the problems, which the rift created by Mir would cause.
Bothering others to support Mir would be a common occurrence now and a direct consequence of this completely unnecessary "hard split". And it's unacceptable to bug people constantly when they say they aren't interested in that support.
Since Mr. Shuttleworth apparently decided he doesn't need the community, perhaps they should part ways amicably while they can.
Also Canonical devs were suggested to fork the code without caring too much for a future remerging.
Of course, nobody needs an excuse to stop working for Ubuntu for free, so if it bothers him so much this is the best decision.
Ubuntu does lots of things right (being overly decisive being one of them), but this whole Mir-affair just strikes me as plain absurd.
> If I as a developer feel personally attacked (and I did that) the chances that I with the maintainer hat on will revert my patch goes down and not up
My 'attacking' him comment: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321190#c17
His comment accusing me of attacking him: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321190#c20
I had similar experience proposing patches and people feeling offended because I criticized their "sacred" selected options. People identify with their work, so if you criticize their work, they fell criticized.
"Trust me on this one, I am the one right because it is me and I have so much experience than anybody else..."
It seems at the end of the day FOSS is not different than other organizations in the power fights area.
Here is Mark's comment that (I believe) Martin is so upset about:
> Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what THEIR agenda is. At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party ;)
Really? This is what the uproar is about?
Mostly Mir exists because Canonical had a huge case of NIH.
Sorry for not having any technical information.
I don't understand graphics systems enough to evaluate their claims, and I've yet to hear an impartial analysis of them. Possibly no-one who can evaluate them is impartial.
Mark may have said hurtful things but these Devs like martin take things way too personally.
Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors
attack a project on purely political grounds, you have
to wonder what THEIR agenda is. At least we know now who
belongs to the Open Source Tea Party And to put all
the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for
approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think
about shell development. Every app developer will
consume Mir through their toolkit. By contrast, those
same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every
important piece of the stack they can get their hands
on… most notably SystemD, which is hugely invasive and
hardly justified. What closely to see how competitors to
Canonical torture the English language in their efforts
to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but
not Mir. But we’ll get it done, and it will be amazing.
So, he sees this as his time essentially being volunteered for him by Mark, to support a display server with an architecture he doesn't agree with, after he's already put the effort in to support the display server that pretty much everyone else in the desktop Linux ecosystem have been targeting. And if you don't agree with Mark, or the technical decisions made leading to Mir, you get branded as "the Open Source Tea Party", "purely political", an "outraged individual" who has "NIH'd just about every piece of the stack."
seems to imply that the Ubuntu developers will either be the ones to get KDE working on their stack, or go their own way with or without kDE support. It doesn't look like Shuttleworth is insisting through this that Gräßlin devote his time to their project.
Isn't Mir supposed to have XMir as a compatibility layer anyway? Wouldn't this mean that KDE should work on top of it without extra porting work?
There were people announcing that our software will work
just fine on top of their technical stack, others posted
videos showing our software working somewhat on top of
an (IMHO idiotic) hack. It was decided on a mailinglist
I'm not subscribed to that I would walk people through
the KWin code base in a telco for adjusting KWin for
their technical stack. All of that without ever asking
whether we are interested at all. In case of the telco I
was not even asked whether I would want to participate
and whether I have time for that. I experienced this as
a constant pressure and a disrespect to our own
decisions.
Isn't Mir supposed to have XMir as a compatibility layer
anyway? Wouldn't this mean that KDE should work on top of
it without extra porting work?
KWin is a window manager and compositor, which is fairly specific to the precise graphics stack underneath it.
What open source IS, is a Darwinian paradigm for software. Software is made, released into the wild. It succeeds, or it doesn't. If you don't like it, you fork it, release back into the wild, and whichever version is better lives on. Linus, Mark Shuttleworth, RMS, etc... - they don't owe shit to anyone.
People used to rag on SUSE for their deal with Microsoft, and now they rag on Canonical. But guess what - SUSE survived and is still a billion dollar business (it was sold to Attachmate recently for 2.2 billion), and Canonical is making the most popular desktop distro, and the only desktop vendor with the balls to take on the mobile space.
BTW, I fully support Martin's decision to abandon Ubuntu if he wants to. Ubuntu is obviously going ahead with Mir and Unity, if it becomes difficult to support, switch to SUSE, or Debian, or fork Ubuntu...
And $225 million in yearly revenue doesn't hurt...
Personally, openSUSE has always been my favourite distro. A bit sentimental perhaps, my first Linux was SUSE 6 back in the day, running 13.1 now. So fast and so flexible...
Honestly, if Kubuntu disappeared tomorrow I don't think it would be a bad thing, KDE users still have SUSE, Archlinux, etc...
Edit - And of course SUSE is amongst the top contributors towards KDE, Gnome, Libre Office, and many other open-source projects, certainly contributing more than Canonical and often more than Red Hat...
Sadly, this isn't unheard of in the F/OSS world, and this isn't the first time something like this has happened. Even more sadly, it probably won't be the last.
FOSS is about freedom. One can do whatever they want. I don't see what is sad about this. The drama is what is nonsensical.
I could not disagree more. Nothing about being part of the FOSS world mandates acting like a dick.
FOSS is about freedom. One can do whatever they want.
Just because you are free to do something, doesn't mean that you should do it, or that you're not an asshole for doing it. I'm not in any way suggesting that Mark or anybody else should be denied their right to free speech. But verbally abusing somebody else for having a different belief is still being a dick, even so.
I don't see what is sad about this.
OK, tell me this... who benefits from this outcome? As far as I can tell, the answer is "nobody". OTOH, who suffers? Well, potentially everybody who's part of the KDE on Ubuntu ecosystem. And the person who's being bullied and abused into walking away from something that he would probably prefer to remain involved in, IF it weren't for the asshole'ish behavior.
The drama is what is nonsensical
I don't see it. If somebody is being a dick, calling them out for their behavior is hardly "nonsensical drama". It's just being forthright and honest.
You know what, I installed ubuntu12.04 while it come out, but I am very disappointed, I wasted a whole day try to make it easy to use, but I give up finally, and re-installed the ubuntu10.04 instead. When ubuntu 13.04 come out, I did this again, and changed back to ubuntu 10.04 again. Now ubuntu 13.10 come out, I just want to say, fuck off, I will never install it. You know what, you have been waste time for years to do negative work to make ubuntu worse.
What's wrong with you people, I just don't get it ...
I still like ubuntu, but I am already start to try other linux distribution out, like Mint, I want to say that, if ubuntu keep in this direction, I probably will say good by to Ubuntu which I have used for 7 years, since ubuntu 7.10 when I was still in collage.
Maybe you think I am a little impolite, I do loved ubuntu, I am just expressing my disappointment about what you ubuntu people have done to this lovely os for recent years!
I'm a bit hazy about what happens when Mir replaces X. I gather that this particular argument is about ensuring that the compositor for KDE will work with Mir, or, more accurately, who does the work to ensure that KWin will work on Mir.
The pain from interpersonal conflicts is real and powerful. But how we handle ourselves during conflict says more about us than any amount of code we'll ever write.
To me Ubuntu is to other Linuxes, what Apple is to PC. The more closed, independent, "simple but beautiful" (noting that "simple" is not my own style and preference) variant.
You can't really do "closed" Linux, because you (the closer) need everyone else. And, as seen with Intel's rejection of a mir patch, everyone else can shut you out.
If enough people care enough and step up to the plate then KDE will continue to work on Ubuntu, but I wouldn't count on that happening.
One thing about Ubuntu is that, if you put Android to one side (Android basically uses the Linux kernel, but does not use things such as libc etc.), Ubuntu is the largest Linux desktop by far. Wikipedia web logs show them coming at 77 times the number of their nearest competitor, Fedora ( http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOpera... ).
Combine this massive user base, which often is not of the traditional Unix user background, with its automated bug report tools like apport, and traditional bug reporting trouble ticket web sites like Launchpad, and you have a massive exposure of the traditional Linux/X/fdo/Gnome ecosystem to users. Which means many of the "eyeballs for bugs" can, and sometimes does, come from Ubuntu. I have mostly looked at the evince/poppler/cairo applications and dependencies, and it seems to me that far more bugs are discovered on Ubuntu than in any of the other distro bug trouble ticket systems. If apport reports were more carefully maintained, that number would increase by some multiple.
I have also noticed that Canonical is good for patching bugs reported anywhere on Ubuntu. For example, if a patch or bug report is languishing in the Debian trouble ticket system, Ubuntu will sometimes grab it and apply it to Ubuntu. So reported unfixed bugs in Debian, with patches languishing in its trouble ticket system, will be patched in Ubuntu. For example, this ( http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=570904 ) bug report was never touched by any Debian developer, but it was patched downstream on Ubuntu.
The thing about Ubuntu is it seems to have bad relations with so many of its upstreams in the FLOSS community. Linux. X. Gnome. Debian. Banshee. And I guess in this specific case KDE.
It is too bad that things are not working more smoothly, where the massive user base exposing bugs is not flowing upstream more smoothly, and making Linux, Debian, Gnome better products. However much Ubuntu forks things, it is still very dependent on these upstreams, Gnome included. Yes, Gnome included - take a close look, Unity changes some things, but there are still tons of dependencies on Gnome.
And Ubuntu really is dependent on the FLOSS community. When Ubuntu finds a massive fd.o or Gnome bug, it tends to get patched quickly. The entire ecosystem of all distros is looking at it. I have seen a lot of Unity only bugs languish. Basically, 99% of them have to be fixed by a Canonical engineer. Usually this does not happen, even if it is a major bug you sometimes have to wait a long time. Ubuntu has the user base but it does not have the developer base.
(I'd say more, but I've long ago stopped commenting on Ubuntu for similar reasons as Martin Gräßlin.)
I was impressed by the fact that Ubuntu fixed this within three months even though the bug report was in the upstream ticket system, where it had not been fixed. Debian fixed it nine months after Ubuntu.
I appreciate the fact that Canonical has done things which help Ubuntu which sometimes, inadvertently or not, hurt Debian. For example, Canonical hiring so many Debian developers helped make the sarge release late. As I said in my post, Ubuntu is not that good about sending patches upstream. For a while, I was of the mind that Ubuntu was a mixed bag that in some ways helped and in some ways hurt the FLOSS community. Although over the past year or two, it seems the trend has been more toward the latter way.
Funny that distrowatch stopped being used as reference by ubuntu followers since ubuntu fell from the top to make room for mint and debian, /r/linux survey data doesn't corroborate wikipedia data either.
Does anyone know why clicking the link to this page in Firefox/Ubuntu makes the active light on my webcam come on for a second just as the page finishes loading?
If you have the Google Talk plugin (or whatever it's called now) you can do video chat right in the browser.
Some bug with the drivers, I presume? (I have all the add-ons in Firefox 24.0, but no light for me)
This is one of the reasons that demotivated me from developing FLOSS, the constant pressure and lack of respect towards the taken decisions.
"This is one of the reasons that demotivated me from developing commercial software, the constant pressure and lack of respect towards the taken decisions."
Btw, I know nobody who uses standard Ubuntu. Everyone uses some variant like Xubuntu, Kubuntu etc. which are really well put together distros for the average user.
Just use debian.
Sort of.
It's people like you to whom Martin was referring when he wrote, "There are many users who seem to think that Ubuntu is a religion and Canonical without fail. If you criticize technical decision you are a heretic and the holy inquisition is coming after you to burn you."
X is good doesn't mean Y is bad. If I say, trust me, you will get back to using X does not mean Y is bad. It means X is that good.
"a community of living organisms (plants, animals and microbes) in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment (things like air, water and mineral soil), interacting as a system."
I wish bloggers can find a better term for referring to something specific to software development. An ecosystem is a specific term in ecology.
I don't see your problem.