

Has Ubuntu lost it? - alipang
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/has-ubuntu-lost-it--1162717

======
untog
_Unfortunately, the learning curve was too great for most people, and users
elected to put the buttons back in their rightful place with gconf-edit. "_

Some users did. The vast majority did not. The target market for Ubuntu
doesn't even want to be using gconf-edit.

 _" Even today a Google search for 'window buttons on right' brings up a guide
to fixing Ubuntu - and this is for a design change made two and a half years
ago_

Yes, it's called the internet and it's a fantastic resource for looking up old
information that people have archived.

The entire premise of the article appears to be "Ubuntu is opinionated. Here
are the controversial decisions they made". I don't see any bearing on whether
they've "lost it".

~~~
gnaffle
I don't think the article was very good at explaining _why_ they've lost it. A
lot of controversial decisions turn out to be good in the end.

I think the biggest mistake has been to neglect Linux power users, which has
been their biggest grassroots evangelists. At one point some years ago _every_
Unix guy I knew ran Ubuntu on their laptops because it "just worked" (well,
compared to other distros). And some of them had started recommending it to
friends and family. Nowadays, many of the same people are running Macs, and
guess what they recommend? Macs (or iPads).

Their second biggest mistake has been the "me too" attitude. Netbooks popular?
Ubuntu Netbook Remix! Oh wait, tablets you say? Ubuntu for Tablets! Google and
Apple launch TV platforms? Ubuntu TV! Oh, and don't forget that we have a
phone OS as well!

To make any one of these succeed they would need to dedicate great salespeople
and marketers to secure deals with PC, tablet, TV or phone manufacturers or
operators. Or they would have to make them so insanely great that people would
line up to get them. Google TV, backed by a big company is pretty much dead in
the water.

I would LOVE for all of these products to succeed and to use well designed
open source products. But it's just not going to happen this way.

~~~
JVIDEL
I don't know if that many devs are really into macs, most I know aren't and
those who do are usually because their company uses/issues them one. In some
parts its more peer-pressure than actual convenience. Still unity tries to
copy a lot of OSX's look&feel to the point that its just awkward.

I would add that the problem with current ubuntu is that it tries to appeal to
both casual and power users and manages to enrage both. Users coming from
Windows (still 90% of all PC users) plain _hate_ unity and find it confusing,
it used to be that i out of 3 people I showed ubuntu to would install it but
after unity I haven't been able to convince anyone because the first thing
they see is an OS that makes no sense.

All power users I know prefer even gnome3 to unity, but most stick to KDE and
xfce. A lot and I mean a lot have moved to Cinnamon, no surprise there since
that environment is awesome, basically what ubuntu should be like. Of course
if unity is too mac-like Cinnamon is too windows-like, but it manages to pull
a lot of stuff that unity just can't while remaining fairly snappy unlike the
sluggishness of the "dash".

~~~
synchronise
Since Windows 8 started shipping, its users trying out Ubuntu for the first
time may be more familiar with Unity due to them both having similar search
functions and layout.

------
NateDad
I think it's funny when people complain about unity and how users hate it. The
only users that even know what it is are the hardcore linux geeks. I used
ubuntu back in the day (2006-ish) and moved off Linux because it was too much
of a pain in the butt to use for everyday use... even my standalone email
server I just gave up on eventually because it was too much of a hassle
running linux.

I just started using Ubuntu again last year and... I couldn't figure out what
this Unity thing was that people kept complaining about. I guess it's the
menubar that appears at the top? And the transparent start menu thingy that
pops up when you click the button at the top of the launchbar on the left? Is
that what people are complaining about? Seriously? I didn't even notice that
it was something that was supposed to be different after the first 2-3 times I
saw what it did. Maybe because I'm not a hardcore linux guy? Maybe because it
doesn't really look that different from Windows 7 / 8 stuff?

So... from a Windows user's point of view, I think Ubuntu is doing well. It's
easy for me to use (it does take a lot of getting used to for the windows
buttons to be on the left).. and honestly, for most people, we're in a post-
desktop-OS world. Nothing matters outside the browser. I install Chrome and
log into Chrome sync, and my world is the same across all desktops.... because
the browser is everything. That, more than anything else has made my
transition back to Ubuntu easy... because the OS doesn't matter anymore for
day to day things. For dev, sure, you need your dev tools, and the environment
matters a lot.

~~~
clark-kent
Unity got a lot better with Ubuntu 12.04, it sucked when it first came out. I
used to hate Unity but after some updates it's now my favorite desktop.

~~~
Pengwin
Using 13.04 now, and I tried reasonably hard to keep away from unity.
Eventually I gave up when I couldn't deal with the small annoyances like
screen tearing in XFCE and the buggy feeling of plastering Gnome3 over ubuntu.
Im running Unity on 13.04 now and it feels stable and polished.

However, I dare say I could actually do away with the unity menu and replace
it entirely with synapse and although I am used to it, a global menu is a
stupid paradigm.

------
air
"the Upstart init daemon (which pointlessly duplicated much of the work done
in SystemD)"

I think this chronological confusion sums up the insight that can be found
from the article.

~~~
Sammi
Jup, I stopped reading when I got to that. If basic facts are wrong, then what
else is wrong with this article?

------
NanoWar
Why we can thank Canonical:

 _" To innovate is to get a chance to define the future, but it comes with the
risk of alienating your current users. The unique advantage desktop Linux has
is that we can do both. Ubuntu can innovate while Mint, OpenSUSE, and all the
others play it safe.

That's the advantage of the open source ecosystem that we've built up over the
years. But we only have that advantage if people are willing to take risks.
Mark Shuttleworth is taking a tremendous gamble. If it pays off, then the
whole Linux community benefits."_

~~~
areski
Canonical is making a huge difference for thousands of newbies, thanks to them
they can use a Desktop Linux without the fear of complexity.

It's bravery to be willing to take those risks, not everybody have to follow
that direction and the diversity of the linux ecosystem is what made his
strength. Some will succeed some will fails, but at the end, the whole Linux
community will get better!

------
eksith
Summary: Ubuntu has become Windows. It's pursuing devices and fragmenting the
ecosystem.

The problem with Ubuntu, by and large, seems to be a Metro style revolt
against Unity although Unity achieved suckdom first. Things broke with
change... often this was unnecessary change. But you know what? The nice thing
about Linux is that there's so many more distros to choose from.

Linux Mint ([http://linuxmint.com](http://linuxmint.com)) for example is
actually quite nice. Don't like Ubuntu? Don't use it for crying out loud! It's
not like Windows; a whole 'nother platform. The same software you know and
love will still work.

Best of all, it's got a bloody start button!

~~~
drdaeman
Fragmenting what? There were no solid ecosystem, ever, nor there's any.

There's Linux kernel, GNU base userspace (although some replace it with BSD or
Solaris one, huh) and bunch of various software running above those. After
this there were nothing common in those software since the very beginning.
Just more and less popular software.

Edit: removed X11 as possibly common component, because I totally forgot about
DirectFB, huh.

~~~
eksith

      >Fragmenting what?
    

I can't quite figure that out from the article either, but from the language,
I guess they're insinuating that the architecture changes ( in the Ubuntu way
as opposed to the traditional "Linux way" ) will mean different approaches to
software.

    
    
      Daniel Stone, contributor to X.Org (one of the base technologies 
      without which we'd still be staring at blinking green text on a 
      black background), put in: "I'm not worried about Wayland's 
      future at all. I'm just irritated that this means more work for 
      us, more work for upstream developers, more work for toolkits, 
      and more work for hardware vendors."

~~~
drdaeman
I don't get the fuss about Wayland and Mir. Like inventing a new mostly-
incompatible subsystem is something new in GNU/Linux world. I mean, there were
no "Linux way" ever - just take a look at zoos of sound subsystems, network
management subsystems, init/rc subsystems and so on. GNU/Linux world is well-
known for having magnitudes of software doing same things but in completely
different ways, sometimes with some compatibility layers (like ALSA-OSS), but
frequently completely mutually incompatible. This is not good, nor bad thing,
it's just that there's no any established rules beyond fundamentals POSIX and
FHS (and even those are poked from time to time), just more or less popular
approaches.

GTK ran on DirectFB just fine, without X11 stack, so getting rid of X11 is
nothing new. There were XDirectFB that worked as a X11 server, too. Not sure
if the code's maintained and works now, though - haven't visited that land
for, IIRC, about 5 years. Anyway, and I don't remember any worries about that.

~~~
gnaffle
I think DirectFB is a bad comparison, since AFAIK it was never used widely by
any distro. I think people are right to worry that a new graphics engine will
lead to loads of wasted work dealing with compatibility problems and other
issues down the road. Based on the massive amounts of problems caused by the
sound system zoo, I understand the concern.

~~~
gsnedders
It's widely used on embedded devices, even if not on desktops.

~~~
gnaffle
Ubuntu, or Linux?

~~~
gsnedders
DirectFB, I meant (on Linux, typically everything above the kernel is pulled
in as needed, no real distro in use).

------
neya
Hardcore Ubuntu user here. I come from a Windows background. I mean like for
15 years almost, I was running on Windows. When I first got introduced to
Ubuntu (5 years ago), it was a breath of fresh air. I loved the terminal and I
loved the freedom of choice and the fact that nothing was thrusted into my
throat. It was really nice. Until they introduced Unity. It was one of the
poorest User experience designed, ever. Suddenly the OS I was in love with
became so alien.

Of course I could switch back to the original normal GUI with a few command
line entries and a few option entries. But it was already too late. The
flexibility I had in 10.xx was gone in 12.xx. 12.xx become so clunky, heavy
and painful to use, that I had to abandon it altogether. I can back up my
statements too - Try comparing boot/shut down times of 10.xx and 12.xx, you'll
know.

Meanwhile, on Windows, the start button just disappeared. And I DID get used
to it, but the fact that Ubuntu's Unity had become synonymous to Microsoft
pushing their Metro UI into my throat was a nail in the coffin.

Now I run dual boot - Mac OS X along with Windows 8.1. I'm using the Mac OS
for about a year or two now and it's really good at what it does. Almost feels
like Ubuntu's 10.xx w.r.t boot times. And I never will be looking back.

Ubuntu is a perfect example of "Don't fix something if it ain't broke."

~~~
talles
I felt exactly as you.

IMO, Ubuntu 10.04 was the best version. ever.

~~~
fein
13.04 server + xorg and fluxbox.

I know not what this 'Unity' hate is all about. apt-get still works last I
checked.

You guys need to stop equating OS releases with the UI that ships with the
desktop versions. 13.04 is loads better than 10.04, and it has nothing to do
with whatever DE happens to ship with it. If you don't like Unity, download
Xubuntu.

~~~
dman
At the point where you are switching desktop environments you are already well
into debian / slackware territory.

~~~
MichaelSalib
Except for the bit where ubuntu does regular scheduled releases.

~~~
seabee
This is why I choose Ubuntu over debian on my (3) servers. I don't want to cut
myself on the bleeding edge of development but I'd prefer to stay ahead of the
curve; easier when you have more frequent releases plus a good selection of
PPAs.

~~~
dman
Using fluxbox is a strong indicator that youre less more interested in the
latest bells and whistles and more interested in "do things my way". I include
dwm, ratpoison, awesome users in this camp as well.

------
ricardobeat
No.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

~~~
pessimizer
previously posted:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6051838](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6051838)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6051885](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6051885)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6050005](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6050005)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033705](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033705)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092040](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092040)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126390](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126390)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5993532](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5993532)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4432743](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4432743)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907225](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907225)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5131430](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5131430)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3069940](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3069940)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3681835](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3681835)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5290948](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5290948)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4845506](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4845506)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2071746](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2071746)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4204684](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4204684)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366180](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4366180)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5140817](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5140817)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843320](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843320)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5851922](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5851922)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5932835](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5932835)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818931](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818931)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4344059](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4344059)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5718567](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5718567)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4362884](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4362884)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2148927](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2148927)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726192](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726192)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4516313](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4516313)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510398](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510398)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3967543](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3967543)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853639](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853639)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5050894](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5050894)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4205347](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4205347)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853602](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853602)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5964628](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5964628)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4550397](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4550397)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016801](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016801)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5668334](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5668334)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4351090](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4351090)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5855384](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5855384)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4337332](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4337332)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4923126](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4923126)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860925](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4860925)
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5933767](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5933767)

~~~
gruseom
That wins some kind of award, though I'm not sure what.

~~~
pessimizer
passive-aggressiveness?

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853639](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853639)

------
durzagott
Whenever I see a headline with a leading question in its title my automatic
response is "no".

It's lazy writing and tries to colour my opinion before even presenting the
facts.

~~~
mattbessey
You've adopted Betteridge's law of headlines:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

~~~
eertami
Is there a law about how this wikipedia article will turn up in the comments
section of every headline with a question mark?

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Not yet....we could call it eertami's law though....

------
ChuckMcM
Does anyone know if commits 'offered' is tracked? One of the issues Google
always had was they would submit their changes back to the community but then
the community would reject them for one reason or another (a lot of the
container stuff seemed to start out that way).

------
andrewcooke
i don't know, but opensuse continues to be awesome and more american users
should try it out. i have to use a variety of linux distros for work, and i
use opensuse on my own machines where i get the choice. it's so frustrating
that such a polished, easy to use but powerful system gets so little love :o(

~~~
zandorg
I too use OpenSUSE. I tried Ubuntu on my huge-screen Dell Precision M70, and
it couldn't find the Nvidia driver. OpenSUSE got it right first time. I also
think OpenSUSE is most like Windows, which is a plus for me.

------
zdw
Ubuntu could have gone much further focusing on helping people learn to love
the Unix CLI than trying to chase and reimplement GUI trends over and over for
the last decade.

~~~
xradionut
Really?

Anyone who wanted the CLI has had plenty of choices of various operating
systems and distributions over the years. Ubuntu's strength is that it's
useable and installable with a minimum amount of CLI. That means there's less
of a barrier to newbies and casual users.

("Real" users can use blinking LEDs and chorded keyboards instead of fancy GUI
cheats...)

------
null_ptr
_> of the 100,000 kernel patches made in the preceding five years, only 100 of
these came from Canonical_

Still better than 0, and that's not counting all the fixes they do to other
system components and tools that other distros benefit from.

I think it's great that Ubuntu is using Canonical's resources to go in wild
directions. I prefer Cinnamon as my desktop environment, but I'm glad Unity is
being worked on too. It's awesome they want to be on phones and TVs, you never
know where great ideas can sprout from.

That being said, I plan to give OpenSuse and Fedora a try soon just to see
what I've been missing out on the past few years.

------
shubb
It looks like Canonical, as well as Microsoft, think that something in the
form factor of a MS Surface is the way things are going. If you are going to
have a desktop/tablet, you need a touch driven UI.

Five years ago, when Samsung Q1 UMPCs were exciting [1], I'd have agreed, but
it turns out that tablets (with tiny their screens even when you plug in a
keyboard), are crap for creation. People don't just want to be passive
consumers.

Hence, this unified Tablet/PC idea is a bad one. I'm sure it'll fly
eventually, just like mice over trackerballs, but that doesn't mean it's
better. Dedicated devices that are good at creation and consumption
respectively (PC, Laptop, TV, Tablet) are better. Unified Tablet/PCs yield
interfaces that are bad for everything, and extra RSI from the touchscreen.

But it's the way of the future, so Linux had better be ready. Because soon
it'll be hard to buy a laptop that isn't a tablet. And can you think of a
better Desktop Environment for touch screen than Canonicals?

[1][http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Samsung-Q1-UMPC.ht...](http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Samsung-Q1-UMPC.htm)

~~~
dreamfactory
> but it turns out that tablets (with tiny their screens even when you plug in
> a keyboard), are crap for creation

Disagree massively. If you look at the iOS market, you'll see a ton of content
creating apps making good money. For example, ipads are now better for making
music on than laptops.

~~~
shubb
You may have a point there. I'm sure being able to draw on the screen is
pretty good for art work too.

~~~
dreamfactory
Yes the art app market is also very big. There's a really ignorant meme going
round in tech circles that ipad is only good for passive consumption - people
think it sounds smart but it couldn't be further from what is actually
emerging in reality. (Have to say for some reason I can't ascertain, I hate to
see people take pictures on an ipad - but go into a busy tourist spot in a big
city now and observe.)

------
etler
What Ubuntu got popular off of was it's ease of setup. They now seem to be
using that validation to justify their decisions in UI and everything else,
which has nothing to do with what people liked about Ubuntu in the first
place. I feel like their PR takes a "we know better than you" attitude for
their decisions, but they never proved themselves to be competent at any of
the things they're pushing for.

~~~
takluyver
I get the impression that now most desktop distros have quite simple
installers. Were they difficult before because of some technical obstacle, or
simply because they hadn't spent the time to make it easy? (honest question -
I didn't use Linux until Ubuntu). If it's the latter, that seems to give
Canonical at least one point for knowing what users would want.

~~~
etler
It wasn't the simplicity of the installer interface. It was the actual
installation. Ubuntu did the best job simply working with a large variety of
hardware. You installed it and you didn't have to do a bunch of painful manual
setup by modifying a dozen obscure config files. Linux had the reputation of
being a pain to setup, and ubuntu addressed that.

------
anon1385
_In a speech at the Linux Plumbers Convention in 2008 he criticised Ubuntu for
not contributing more to the Linux kernel, saying that, of the 100,000 kernel
patches made in the preceding five years, only 100 of these came from
Canonical, creating the strange situation whereby the world 's most popular
Linux distribution contributed only 0.1 per cent of the work needed to keep
the kernel going._

 _Four years later, in 2012, Kroah-Hartman complained that "Canonical uses me
as a gatekeeper of what bugs get fixed in their kernel package and sent to
their customers. There's so much wrong with this, I don't know where to
start..."_

If the Linux kernel maintainers are that upset about this then they should
have used a licence that forced Canonical to contribute (code or financially),
but they didn't, they made the Linux kernel 'Free Software', and that means
Canonical can do what they want with it (freedom 2 in this case), so long as
they are not restricting the freedom of others. Either change the licence or
shut up.

~~~
icebraining
Why? What is this new strange rule, that prevents one from criticizing others
if one doesn't want to contractually force them to do the right thing?

~~~
sz4kerto
That's what's going on in the other thread where some people are criticising
Linus and some others say that he's not paid by them, so shut up.

My opinion is that even you're a volunteer, you should listen to criticism or
don't call yourself a volunteer (as this usually means that you want to
achieve something for the benefit of others (at least in part), or you're
doing something in cooperation with others). If you're not completely isolated
then your actions have an effect on others so you should be prepared for
criticism.

------
mindcrime
Lost what? Sorry, lump me into the camp of linux die-hards who don't much care
for Ubuntu. I grudgingly use it at OSI[1] because it's our standard, but I
much prefer Fedora or CentOS. Although, once I muster up the time and energy
to switch this Ubuntu box to KDE, I'll probably like it a lot more.

Anyway, having used Ubuntu on my work desktop for the past year and a half, I
don't see what all the hype is about. It isn't "better" than Fedora in any way
that is particularly noticeable to me, and the much vaunted "apt-get" seems to
do exactly what yum does for me on Fedora. If it's better, it's such an
incremental level of "better" that I find it hardly distinguishable.

But Unity... uuugggghhhhhh....

[1]: [http://www.osintegrators.com](http://www.osintegrators.com)

~~~
ajross
RPM/yum has grown up a lot, and yes -- it works as well or better than apt-get
at basically everything now (openSUSE's zypper is actually spiffier still).
But for a long time Debian and its derivatives had an overwhelmingly better
package management experience, and a much larger universe of packages to draw
on than the RPM distros did. And this intuition persists in the community.

Though I will say this: for all the feature and usability improvements we've
seen in yum, the Fedora people seem to be trying their damndest to break them
all by this insane wrapping in "PackageKit" that manages to succeed in both
dumbing it down to the level of unusability _and_ "enhancing" the power user
experience by spending 3-5 seconds every time you typo a command trying to
figure out how to install "mkdri".

~~~
mindcrime
FWIW, Ubuntu has it's own "waste time everytime you typo a command"
functionality, at least in the release I'm on. It's actually useful every once
in a blue moon...

------
ChikkaChiChi
Any "open" community that has to publicly state that it will only work with
those that have established credibility in its own community has "lost it"

I'll politely withhold my comments about the disasters of Unity and now Ubuntu
mobile.

------
rocky1138
It seems sort of unfair to compare kernel contributions from Canonical to a
company like Red Hat simply because of the time-frame during Linux's
development that Red Hat was a part of. Isn't is possible that Red Hat helped
out more because it was around closer to the start of the Linux project?

Also, Canonical's and Ubuntu's strengths may not lay in kernel development,
but instead pushing the boundaries in what can be done on the UI. I certainly
don't remember Red Hat or SUSE doing the sort of risky things with their UI
that Canonical is willing to try.

~~~
takluyver
This is actually what the conclusion of the article says - that Canonical is
taking worthwhile UI risks, and probably doesn't feel much need to work on the
kernel.

------
rob22
Never. When i saw the unity interface on couple of years ago, its truel
impressive and new kind of UI. People would change M$ to Ubuntu its quite
useful( unity UI).. I realy love the interface... Most of the hardcore linux
geeks doesn't like that environment.in future it would be occupied any other
interface..

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synchronise
I personally find it interesting that they bothered to mention Ubuntu TV. That
project hasn't seen a code commit in months, and by the looks of it there have
been little effort to transition away from the deprecated Unity-2d base it's
built on.

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tomrod
I don't normally complain about articles. The content is valid. I'm having a
hard time parsing over the ads though!

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poopscoop
Is nobody going to mention that atrocity of a pie chart rendered at an angle?

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monokrome
Ubuntu lost it 5 years ago.

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_sabe_
I actually think all this ambivalence is Ubuntus bigest problem. Now it has
become apparent that all along they wanted to go down the path of only using
the kernel, and then build a whole new software-stack on top of it, just like
Android.

But they have not communicated this to the community, all the community has
seen is half-hearted attempts to contribute (to projects that they where going
to get rid of anyways) and sporadic design changes that went to far away from
the vanilla experience of gnome (making it feel fragmented), and then
ultimately replacing fully functional software (with software that's full of
bugs and obviously not stable yet).

Now, in the normal Linux community world, everything above seems like total
madness, unless as stated in the first paragraph your endgame was all along to
replace everything to make a unified product. If they only communicated this,
I think they would have gotten alot of support and understandig instead of
alienating them selves.

~~~
takluyver
I don't think it is the case that they had always planned to build a whole new
software stack. And that's not even what they're doing - Ubuntu runs loads of
'Linux ecosystem' applications, which Android never aimed to do.

On the system level, only last year they were talking about one day moving to
Wayland - which they later decided against for reasons I don't know enough
about to judge. My understanding is that they only made Unity because they
felt they didn't have enough influence in the design of Gnome 3. I don't think
there's as much of a master plan as you suggest.

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derleth
Once again, I feel that I'm the only one who knows it's possible to run non-
Unity UIs on Ubuntu.

Window Maker. It works. I run it. Have for years. I can't be the only one,
because it's still right there in the repos.

