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Comment by sixbrx | Hacker News Reader

Is Ubuntu replacing everything above the Kernel one piece at a time?

In the case of nautilus, they're right. Gnome developers are slowly becoming delusional and losing track of what they're supposed to accomplish. Therefore, its time to put Gnome aside and build something new.

I totally agree. Starting from Gnome Shell to removing type-ahead find from Nautilus, GNOME developers' decisions have been more and more deluding.

Nautilus, like any other software of the GNOME project is subject to the "unexpected" changes by the GNOME team... as when they decided to remove the type-ahead-find feature. As long as the Ubuntu team create better software and replace "bad pieces" I'm with them.

I spent a good chunk of time restoring type-ahead find to Nautilus, which is now available in trusty-proposed (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1164...).

Now I read this. Not very happy.

At least Ubuntu 14.04 will have type-ahead find. Thank you for all your work.

I suppose that's true. Thanks!

I used to love Nautilus. It's gotten steadily worse year by year.

Would that necessarily be a bad thing?

Yes. See my earlier comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7083763

Are we really going to fault Canonical for developing new open source projects, or for those projects not being adopted outside of Ubuntu? I don't have a need for another file manager any more than I needed another init system, but if this was being done by anybody besides Canonical, the comments would say ~"So stoked to see a new option disrupting the file manager space".

They're betting they can provide a better UX with their own tool. If they fail, or can't maintain it, or whatever, then that's on them, and people will shift onto other distros.

I'm looking forward to seeing what they do better, in the hopes that other projects can benefit as well.

If Canonical wants to develop a new file manager, power to them! I, too, am looking forward to seeing what they do better.

My comment was specifically in regards to the idea of 'what's wrong with Canonical reinventing everything', e.g., discarding Wayland for Mir. Sorry if that was unclear.

In theory: No, but it might make sense to make the difference between Ubuntu and all other Linux distributions clear. Maybe Ubuntu should not be called "Linux" anymore, just like android which also uses the kernel but has it's own userland.

In practice: Yes, Cannonicals questionable open source policy could throw free software desktops a few years back. Just look at Mir for an example. EDIT: or hdevalences comment below!

There appears to be a giant difference between ubuntu and android, though. Seems somewhat vindictive to feel ubuntu is no longer linux.

it might just be. the idea of open source encourage them to contribute and make current projects better - if nautilus isn't suit for them for some reason they should try to cooperate with this project developers to add features and changes, and IMHO only if they get some really tough "no" on their most needed features they should start their own replacement. preferably as a fork. just as google does with webkit - they contribute and make the current open source project better and only when the project management (AKA Apple) blocked them too hard they had to fork it.

If you take Unity as an example. It's a wonderful idea that is full of bloat, bugs and small usability problems but nobody really seems to care about it.

It's bad if for no other reason than they're spreading their resources thin. They've already got a huge number of projects to maintain -- a window manager, an entire graphics stack, an init system, a cloud storage stack, all used almost exlusively in Ubuntu, and all in addition to the more traditional distro duties of maintaining a set of kernel patches and an up-to-date and secure software repository. I'd rather they concentrate on the latter.

You're thinking of Mint.

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