

Ubuntu Linux Community: Canonical Vows to Maintain Focus - jeffreyfox
http://thevarguy.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-linux-community-canonical-vows-maintain-focus

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sciurus
Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they
found on another site, submit the latter.

<http://design.canonical.com/2013/05/ubuntu-com-update/>

~~~
h2s
I'm struggling to find anywhere in the cited Ubuntu blog post that talks about
a vow to maintain focus. The summary itself never revisits that phrase to
explain it further, and while the words "maintain" and "focus" do appear in
the Ubuntu post, they are completely separate and there is no theme of vowing
anything or staying focused on any particular thing. If anything, it's the
opposite.

    
    
        Phase one of the restructure consisted of updating
        Ubuntu.com to reflect the expanded scope of the
        project.
    

Weird!

~~~
slgeorge
The blog post from Alejandra was about how Canonical is developing the Ubuntu
web presence. In general, it's about how you balance a complex set of needs
from a wide range of users - probably an interesting read for some people in
this Forum.

The actual article seems to be focusing on the implication that this means
Canonical will continue to value and maintain the link to it's Community of
users. Still in the context of the web site.

ps I work for Canonical

------
jebblue
>> The take-away: Even as Ubuntu forges paths across hardware where
traditional Linux (pace Android fans) has never before ventured, and Canonical
commercializes the operating system to an extent not yet seen, it is keen to
keep peace with Ubuntu users.

I'm not sure what that means but if it means Ubuntu will soon not be
recognizable then I don't know if that's a good thing. Unity removed
functionality we had in Gnome 2 that the Gnome developers had ironed out over
years. Now we have a cool looking Launcher that is barely usable compared to
Gnome 2 Panels.

We have global menus like a freaking Mac, unless you remove the two offending
packages to restore normal application owned menus.

We have a solid bar at the top which without global menus is useless and even
with them is questionable.

Bring back Gnome 2 Panels please Canonical.

~~~
CJefferson
I realise you might hate unity, but I just wanted to make clear, some people
(me) like it!

I've tried plain gnome 3, latest kde, xmonad and xfce, and out of all of them
have decided I like unity the best. The combination of:

* Press win key + type 'th' gets thunderbird selected, win key + 'ch' gets chrome gives me quick access to all my apps.

* I like a dock with fixed icons in fixed positions, so I can open an app, or get open windows, with 'mouse memory'.

I found the other window managers I tried very poor in their default
configuration. Maybe I could configure them to act better, or more like I
want? But I don't want to spend the time (I did spend a couple of days trying
xmonad, before giving up, I really wanted to like it but it seems purposefully
designed to be painful to configure)

~~~
mayneack
Linux Mint + cinnamon. Give it a shot.

~~~
Shorel
I tried, it felt like the old Linux I did not like from the past.

------
buster
With Canoncial doing more and more stuff on their own instead of really
contributing to the Linux community, i've recently switched back to Debian and
without regrets.

Thanks, but no thanks, for Unity, Upstart, Mir and whatever else you will come
up in the future.

~~~
mhw
Is there any particular reason you prefer dogmatism to pragmatism in choosing
your Linux distribution?

~~~
buster
Where is the pragmatism to build (in a rather closed manner) software like
unity, upstart or mir, in an open source ecosystem that has viable
alternatives? I am confident that Linux will be a better system if efforts are
combined and focused and not split up. And thus, i think that Linux would be
in a better state today if Canonical would have chosen Gnome Shell, systemd
and Wayland (for example). Thus, my voice/vote goes to systems where i see the
future.

Besides i wasn't using Unity anyway and i have learnt and used Debian far
before Ubuntu, so it's not like i had trouble switching.

~~~
mhw
I really don't understand this view that seems to be shared by quite a number
of people: that Canonical shouldn't attempt (and some seem to suggest aren't
competent) to build their own system components, but should instead confine
their efforts into supporting other's projects. To me it seems that there's
more than enough development resource available across the Linux community,
and for system components where the 'right' solution is not obvious having
multiple projects try out different approaches seems like an advantage to me.
Let the code do the talking and then we'll see which solution works best.

~~~
buster
That's fine in itself but Canonical seems to fail to make educated decisions
on technical details and is not behaving "nice" when it first says "we'll
support Wayland" and then abandon it. It would even be fine to abandon Wayland
but Canonical didn't show any intention to do so until they released the first
Mir code already (by this time the decision must have been made for quite some
time). Plus, spreading FUD about Wayland and how it is not working for Ubuntu
is not helping either. Especially since all points have been debunked very
fast. It's not putting the decision making at Canonical into a good light.

I also never understood why they didn't put their efforts into Gnome Shell to
create their vision of a desktop. It's totally possible to customize Gnome
Shell (or even fork, see Cinnamon). Instead it's running compiz (which is
critized for being hacky, bugridden and understaffed for quite some time) or
QML (Unity 2D), two totally different APIs.

And how would you rationally justify developing upstart when the rest of the
world puts its efforts into systemd? I understand that systemd is not as
mature as upstart, but how far would it be with upstart efforts put into
systemd?

The problem of Canonical is not even working on seperate projects but the
utter failure to work with the rest of the Linux community. Do you see other
destributions offering Unity, for example? No. Will you see Mir in Fedora or
Debian or Suse or Gentoo as primary displayserver? Never. Upstart? Nope. Do i
think that it's Canonicals fault to not reach out to the community and combine
efforts? Yes. Yes. Yes. And this is the soul of open source movement.
Canonical doesn't really get it.

What they do get is to make Linux easier to use for the masses, that's for
sure.

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JeremyMorgan
Yeah they're going to continue to focus on trying to make a square peg fit
into a round hole by creating a soccer mom friendly Linux and trying to piss
off the rest of the Linux community.

I say go for it, keep focusing on removing features that took years to perfect
and reinventing the wheel for the sake of reinvention while chasing a group
that doesn't care about their operating system. The sooner they make
themselves irrelevant the better.

~~~
keithpeter
Yes, I suspect that Canonical are attempting to " _creat[e] a soccer mom
friendly Linux_ " but I think the motivation may be to make some money so they
can _continue_ to develop the Ubuntu core.

I imagine that a workstation/high end laptop developer oriented version of
GNU\Linux will be developed, and many would argue we already have such
distributions available. Room for everyone. I personally _want_ my Ubuntu
phone for perhaps nostalgic nationalist reasons.

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mixmastamyk
Haha, focus.

Just installed Raring again last night and noticed the long-standing bug
(compiz and gnome-terminal where the window won't keep its size if not on the
first tab) still in the newest release. How about broken window resizing,
where you only get an outline like in Windows 3.1? I could go on, and on, _and
on_.

Meanwhile they have people writing display servers and a new mobile interface
for xsake.

I'd kill for a modern, mature workstation OS in the tradition of NextStep, or
SGI 4dwm, Windows 2000, even Ubuntu 10.04, etc. I like lots of the other
choices, say Cinammon, XCFE, etc, but they are unfinished or not integrated
well. Gnome has destroyed many of the powerful tools these products share. KDE
has nice tech but is too cluttered. OSX is nice but we use linux everywhere.
I'll be trying Mint 15 soon and crossing my fingers.

I know that the linux desktop has been a boondoggle for years but perhaps
there is a market for workstation-oriented distribution with deep integration
and features that work. Would enough people pay for that? I would. Is it
enough for a small startup to get funded? I'd be interested in starting one,
though I realize it is unlikely.

~~~
jdboyd
What I want is something debian based with Upstart, gnome3, and replacement
window manager and panel/launcher, fitting on a single CD or DVD (around a
gig).

Ubuntu with GNOME3 installed and running LXDE and Launchy comes close, except
LXDE defaults to using PCManFM instead of nautilus, Leafpad instead of gEdit,
LXTerminal instead of Gnome Terminal, etc. Where this is most obnoxious is the
replacing of gnome preferences with their own preference tool.

If I was going to start a major project, my approach would probably be to take
gnome3, replace gnomeshell with openbox and try to port gnome2 panel to
gnome3.

