
Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/138200-key-parts-of-ubuntu-13-04-will-be-developed-in-secret-to-escape-the-critics-ire
======
benologist
Rewrite of <http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1200> written and
submitted by one of five Ziff Davis (ExtremeTech.com, Geek.com and PCMag.com)
employees that spam HN.

Their other employees/accounts include:

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a>

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm>

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82> (their social
media manager)

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly>

Then there's also maxko87 and evo_9 but I haven't figured out what their
connection is yet, maxko87 autosubmits extremetech articles and evo_9's usage
mirrors ukdm's who submits ~50% geek.com + ~50% a small group of other sites,
but for extremetech.

~~~
icelancer
Yeah, wow. Just checked his submission history. Gotta love these blogspambots.

------
Karunamon
_Shuttleworth is sick of Ubuntu features being torn apart by critics before
they’re ready._

    
    
      <snark>
    

Well maybe if Shuttleworth didn't require a crap interface and built in ads on
the desktop and making smartass comments when challenged about it, they
wouldn't be torn apart by critics.

    
    
      </snark>

~~~
kkowalczyk
<nosnark>

Maybe if we didn't have "critics" like you that are quick to rant and diss
other people work while not doing anything themselves, highly-visible projects
wouldn't have this problem and wouldn't require such steps.

I lead a fairly successful open-source project and I'm on the receiving end of
this attitude of entitlement as well.

People don't realize how much work goes into developing of software and when
you give it away for free, with source-code, it's very demoralizing to have
non-constructive, abusive comments like the above ("crap interface" ?).

I'm sure Ubuntu, being vastly more popular and visible, receives vastly more
"constructive criticism".

</nosnark>

~~~
Karunamon
>it's very demoralizing to have non-constructive, abusive comments like the
above ("crap interface" )?

I'm sorry, compared to standard GNOME (v2, v3 can join Unity on the junkpile
IMAO) or KDE, Unity is _crap_ , and I am hardly alone in that opinion.

Perhaps certain open source developers just suck at taking any kind of
criticism? That's sure what these moves feel like.

I would bet large sums of money we're going to see something distasteful come
of this, along the lines of further intrusive desktop advertising ala Amazon
Lens.

Maybe if you would start listening to the community more when there's a large
outcry (amazon lens, unity, gnome 3, etc etc etc) there would be fewer people
who feel they are "entitled" to a desktop experience that doesn't suck!

~~~
donniezazen
Can you explain in great details questioning the design choices made by Unity
and how it is crap. I like both Unity and Gnome 3.

~~~
Karunamon
<http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/unity.html>

<http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3.html>

Same guy, takes the words out of my mouth in both cases.

Worth mentioning is that they have, admittedly, made a great deal of progress.
Unity isn't the buggy mess that it was back a couple of major releases ago,
which renders moot a good deal of the author's complaints.

I could still do without the mandatory 3d acceleration (which wouldn't be so
bad if they would leave Unity 2D alone but nope, they're killing that
off.....) and the full screen , space wasting interface. I am on a desktop,
not a netbook. Optimize accordingly, please.

Unity is a fine interface for smaller screens and mobile devices. Not so much
for the desktop.

~~~
jfoutz
Oh, right the guy who said: "Unity 3D behaves spectacularly on all tested
hardware, including old and new graphics cards. The performance is quite good,
the responsiveness is great, and you even get reduced power consumption."

~~~
Karunamon
Yet it somehow causes 10fps+ drops in virtualization, and is nigh unusable on
older hardware (yes yes anecdotal and meaningless i'm sure).

Again, I wouldn't care if they would have just left 2d alone.

I for one am getting very tired of being told how I should be using my
computer.

~~~
jfoutz
See, right there, that's perfect. Concrete examples of stuff that's wrong and
what they could do better. Great comment.

When you say thinks like Unity is a pile of crap, i look at the pile of crap a
neighbor dog left on the lawn and think that would never display emacs.

Also, no gun to your head. run whatever you like man. I'm only engaging you
because you're kind of being a jackass. I think you have something useful
contribute, because you're clearly passionate about Unity. It's just hard to
get you to say _exactly_ what you mean.

~~~
Karunamon
>Also, no gun to your head. run whatever you like man. I'm only engaging you
because you're kind of being a jackass.

I'm being a jackass because frankly I am tired of Canonical's shit. I can sort
of forgive unity, okay, fine, ignoring what your users want in a UI seems to
be the in thing nowadays (c.f. Microsoft, Gnome).

The Amazon lens was a bridge too far. I don't care if it's opt out - any form
of advertising in a core OS component should be optin, not the other way
around!

What put the final nail in the coffin for me was Shuttleworth's flippant
response to those concerns.

And now with this whole "developed in secret" thing, the coffin reaches 5 feet
under. As far as I can tell, Ubuntu's only real asset now is popularity. (And
even that's declining, if the Distrowatch numbers mean anything...)

    
    
      Rank	Distribution	H.P.D*
      1	Mint	        3403
      2	Mageia	        2462
      3	Ubuntu	        2042
      4	Fedora	        1522
      5	openSUSE	1311
    

If they keep going out of their way to make their users feel like they don't
matter, that final advantage will also disappear.

------
abc_lisper
Canonical has gone mad. More and more it seems like this company is the worst
thing that could happen to linux. Seems like embrace and extinguish to me.
Make a distro the best among others, so novices can tentatively take their
first steps in it. Now botch it, kill it and burn them so badly they would
never come back to linux again.Sigh!

~~~
munchhausen
Are you nuts?

Ubuntu 12.04 is the best distribution of a Linux-based OS by such a huge
margin that it's, as they say, not even funny. Even if I take into account the
fact that many users seem to nurse a rather passionate dislike of Unity, I
don't see how anyone can claim that Canonical is "botching, killing and
burning" anything. Ubuntu is in the long term most definitely on a steady path
of continuous improvement, and is currently at a level where the "it just
works" factor is present in surprisingly huge amounts. (I am saying this from
the perspective of both the desktop and the server versions - the server
version is ridiculously hassle-free to run compared to what I am used to with
supposedly superior "enterprise" distros the likes of RHEL and SLES.)

To be honest, your comment is so bizarre that I now wonder if it was supposed
to be a wind-up.

~~~
macavity23
Agreed 100%. I recently picked up a little thinkpad laptop as a take-
everywhere-don't-mind-too-much-if-it-dies machine. Ubuntu 12.04 supported
absolutely every bit of hardware on it out of the box, with the exception of
the fingerprint reader, which needed a single package install, and nary a cfg
file edit in sight (fingerprint auth for login and sudo is awesome!). This
includes:

* Hardware accelerated graphics

* Suspend and resume when closing/opening lid

* All the non-standard thinkpad buttons - external monitor, volume etc

* USB bluetooth adaptor

* External bluetooth trackpad (Apple)

* 3G dongle - this was not only autodetected, but popped up a wizard that asked me to identify my carrier, and then proceeded to configure everything and just magically brought up the internets

Anyone who doesn't think this is a big deal has not been running linux for
very long :-P

Personally, I still replace Unity with Gnome3, but that's a single add-repo
and package install, taking about 2 minutes. Unity is significantly better
with each release, if that continues I'll probably go back to it in a few
versions.

I don't get the vitriol either. Slackware and Debian are still around if
Ubuntu is too n00bish for you; personally I'm old and I want shit to just
work. Haters gonna hate I suppose.

~~~
abc_lisper
Yeah. How do i know. I upgraded my work machine to ubuntu 12, and here is what
happened. Unity flat-out does not get rendered. Dual monitor setup wont work.
So i had to switch to fluxbox and use xrndr to make the screen visible on both
the desktops. I have been using linux for almost 12 years now, and somehow it
does not seem like an improvement. So much for it just works.

------
imchillyb
IMO, Mr. Shuttleworth is a douche.

This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and
design decisions they did not want. The decisions made by Shuttleworth have
nothing to do with FOSS or the users. His decisions were made solely with
personal goals in mind. Mr. Shuttleworth desired a single code base for
Ubuntu. That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed
baby, the portable device version of Ubuntu. Mouse and keyboard do not
function well on portable devices so...enter Unity.

All of these things would be fine, if Mr. Shuttleworth did not claim that all
of this was to provide his users with a superior experience. We already had a
wonderful experience. Now, not so much.

I will now be replacing all of my machines', and our corporate machines'
Ubuntu installs with an alternate flavor of Linux. I was willing to live with
the Unity change, I was willing to live with the Grub change. I am not willing
to live with this.

FOSS is not built upon secret sauce Mr. Shuttleworth. For shame!

~~~
freehunter
Hyperbole and drama. Ubuntu was the same as all other versions of Linux. All
other versions of Linux are still the same as Ubuntu has been changing. The
answer to your problem? Just use some other flavor of Linux. They're exactly
the same as they've always been.

This is the entitlement that Shuttleworth hates. It's his project. People
contribute because they want to contribute, but it's still his project. He
owes you nothing, and you owe him nothing. You're mad because... you don't
have any other choice? I know that's not true.

How about, you're mad because you want to be mad about something and this is
what you've picked? That's about the only reason to be this emotionally
involved in your operating system of choice.

------
dude_abides
I can see how Shuttleworth is drawing inspiration from Apple and MS Surface,
but normally, you don't announce that X will be developed in secret, you
develop X in secret, and then announce it!!

~~~
stephengillie
That works well with unannounced features or unexpected patches. What do you
say when you just developed version 12 in the full public eye, and
mysteriously all public activity on version 13 stops?

------
donniezazen
Blame Ubuntu or Shuttleworth but Ubuntu is the only Linux distro with any
direction and actively expressing itself. You can never satisfy 100% of your
customers.

------
zzleeper
(Honest question) Is there any user-friendly alternative to Ubuntu?

I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet-
annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to
minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is
barely half a pixel thin.

~~~
columbo
It really depends on what you consider user friendly. If you want fast access
to the top ten applications you will normally use and an OS that is almost
entirely hidden go for crunchbang (<http://crunchbang.org/>) (video demo
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBuqWPcsTig&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBuqWPcsTig&feature=related))
. CB has been my distro of choice for several years now.

~~~
shardling
Crunchbang is pretty awesome on low-end systems, too.

I recently tried about 10 different "lightweight" distros on an old P3 with
~128 MB of RAM, and Crunchbang was the only one that ran ok and felt polished.
(IIRC puppy linux was the only other one that ran fine, and it's just
hideously ugly.)

My favorite distro was one that prominently mentioned that it could run on low
end systems like mine. It turned out that the installer needed more RAM than
the distro... I suggested to the developer that this be mentioned on the
download page, and he seemed confused/offended! :(

------
Zigurd
That seems awfully thin-skinned. Having written a couple books for
programmers, hate mail is just part of the landscape, and the more your own
tastes and opinions come into play, the more there is for people to disagree
about. Sticks and stones, etc.

Ultimately it's not crucially important. But it's also unnecessary. And if you
don't have Google's resources behind your behind-closed-doors development, you
could be missing out on community contributions.

------
acabal
I don't think they should _develop_ in secret, but they most definitely
shouldn't _release_ until things are polished.

Much of the criticism Unity and various other features received was well-
deserved, because Canonical released essentially alpha software. Then when the
criticism comes in, the defense is, "hey take it easy guys, we weren't done
yet!" Well if you're not done--don't release!

There's a middle ground here: develop and design in public, but don't release
until you're truly ready. Everyone says that sticking to LTS is the only way
to guarantee a stable system, but that's just not practical in the milestone-
distro world, where an important update to one piece of software you find
critical requires an update to the entire system.

------
theevocater
If they code some "secret" features and then release the code... why does it
matter it was coded in secret? This seems to be such a non-issue. In fact,
Shuttleworth's mistake here was talking about it at all.

He is paying to have code developed to help improve Ubuntu and he happens to
want to get somewhat polished versions of it before they release to public.
Why is this bad? Sometimes people release early/often and that works for them.
In this case Shuttleworth and by extension Canonical believe that releasing at
the polished stage is beneficial.

Plus its not like there is some uber-secret group in a dark chamber coding
this stuff up -- you just have to be an ubuntu developer with a little bit of
traction to be part of it.

------
mistercow
Marketing-wise this would absolutely be an effective strategy, but you have to
take a page from Apple's book and spin your motivation to be positive. You
can't say "I'm sick of critics dissing features before they're ready" because
that sounds _whiny_.

Instead, you have to express that you are working on some really kick-ass
features and you want them to really "pop" when they debut. You have to focus
on the positives and pretend that the critics don't exist. (Publicly, that is;
internally, you had better listen to the critics).

------
stephengillie
Is developing from within a "glass house" a stressful downside to FOSS?

~~~
mrsebastian
I know that Mozilla struggles with this -- that it's a whole different PR ball
game, when tech writers have access to the nightly FTP server.

------
viraptor
I'm not exactly sure how can you develop a popular and polished interface
without a lot of user testing. From the bugs I reported it seems like they
don't have enough testers in Canonical itself, or maybe their qa its just not
going deep enough. Either way... I don't think that cutting off early beta
testers will be good for the project.

------
BruceIV
I predict the secret whiz-bang features will be even more half-baked than
normal for new Ubuntu features - on their six-month release schedule, new
stuff generally isn't stable and full-featured for about three releases (which
is a bit of a pain).

------
nnq
"[...] and you get your name in lights." ...and the prize for the greatest
attention whore of the OS BDFLs club goes to...

