

Canonical to fund upstream Linux usability improvements - qhoxie
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080911-canonical-to-fund-upstream-linux-usability-improvements.html

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halo
The actual blog post at <http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/162> is
much, much more interesting than this one.

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jrockway
Call me cynical, but I bet even if the Ubuntu desktop becomes measurably more
"usable" than OS X or Windows, people will still use OS X or Windows because
they have already learned how to work around the unusability of those OSes. At
some point, people don't know what's usable, they just know which buttons to
press to get what they want.

However, if we make Ubuntu easy for new users to pick up, and we make sure new
users (read: kids) have Ubuntu, then we'd be on to something.

(BTW, I call it "the Ubuntu desktop" instead of "the Linux desktop" because
the latter term is meaningless. My definition of the Linux desktop is xmonad,
emacs, urxvt, firefox, and amarok. I doubt many other people have the same
taste, although I advocate it to anyone that will listen.)

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halo
I think as time goes on computer manufacturers will make slow movements
towards it to avoid paying the 'Microsoft tax' particularly on low-end
computers where Linux thrives. If computer manufacturers want to use it
hardware vendors will be forced to support it. Once there's a sufficient
market-share and the environment is better set-up to support it commercial
software development will start inching towards it.

This has been a big struggle so far as there's long been a catch-22 that not
many people use Linux and it's difficult to use Linux because no-one supports
it as not many people use it. The cycle is slowly but surely changing - and
already has happened to a degree with ultraportables - but expect it to take 5
to 10 years for it to get a decent amount of market-share as it continues to
improve. I'm not saying it will ever 'take over' Windows, but it only needs
5-10% market share to be taken seriously - much like Mac OS X - and it's
already got a highly dedicated user-base that's more likely to grow over time
especially as there's as thanks to ultraportables there is now product that
can be used to expose people to it.

What didn't help was the highly fractured community, something which has
significantly improved as of late largely thanks to Ubuntu; over-idealistic
"free software" evangelists who didn't like seeing the bigger picture; poor
user experience, something which has changed significantly with text files
being the exception rather than the rule; traditionally poor software support
that's slowly but surely changing thanks to web-based apps, a wider selection
of native applications, improvements to Wine and Microsoft's move towards
.NET, and hopefully in the long-run greater, better and easier commercial
applications; the lack of support by OEMs but this has largely changed with
Dell, the biggest computer manufacturer in the world, slowly but surely moving
towards Ubuntu; and the "Linux is hard" meme that perpetuated thanks to
overenthusiastic highly technical users a decade ago which made Linux a dirty
word.

It's very easy to forget that many of the variables that made alternative OSes
getting a reasonable market-share impossible even 10 years ago have changed
beyond recognition.

~~~
iigs
I contend that Linux's big market share opportunity will come not from
conventional PCs no longer being sold with Windows, but from the erosion of
the conventional PC markets. Nobody wants a big box of wires in their office,
and I contend that even laptops are too big. I believe that the future
involves smartphone class devices and accessories to make them more useful for
present-day laptop type duties.

Lots of professionals are already issued BlackBerries and their ilk, and
current/near future phones are shipping with 1G of system RAM, and 16-32G of
flash. Give me better productivity software and remote desktop over bluetooth,
and I'd kiss my ThinkPad goodbye.

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jwilliams
This is interesting - For me what will be the fascinating to see is how they
tackle this from technical, community and business perspectives.

At the very least will give some insights into the challenges on increasing
usability in Linux (I find it hard to find two people who agree on how
"usable" Linux is, let alone on the challenges) - and at the best introduce
some significant improvements.

