
​Mark Shuttleworth on where Canonical and Ubuntu Linux are going next - severine
https://www.zdnet.com/article/mark-shuttleworth-dishes-on-where-canonical-and-ubuntu-linux-are-going-next/#ftag=RSSbaffb68
======
_emacsomancer_
I think the major distros defaulting to GNOME is not going to end well. I
tried very hard to use (and like) GNOME Shell for a while, and put it on my
wife's computer as well. I always ended up finding completely wrong for the
way I want to interact with my computer. And my wife long complained "why
don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last
week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier.

~~~
ploggingdev
I'm interested to learn why they chose to switch to Gnome instead of KDE
plasma. What was the thinking behind it? Why wasn't the community involved in
the decision? Gnome has the backing of Redhat and is the default DE on Fedora,
so Canonical backing an alternative would have been desirable.

I'm biased, but Plasma or even Mate would have been much better choices.
Plasma has been so good lately and seems to take community feedback seriously.
Stability has been great, it's extremely lightweight and the customization
options make me...happy. I've been kicking myself for not switching from Gnome
to plasma sooner. For anyone skeptical of plasma, I urge you to give it a try
: kubuntu, kde neon, fedora kde, arch + plasma, opensuse are all great.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
I've heard lots of good things about KDE lately.

For Canonical: I suppose it sort of makes sense from a historical perspective
in that before Unity they used Gnome, so they were returning to Gnome. But
given that Gnome appears to be a single-threaded Javascript engine with memory
leaks, I'm not convinced it's a great choice. Still, Gnome is backed by Red
Hat and just got a $1 million donation (
[https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-
pledges-1...](https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-
pledges-1m-donation-over-two-years/) ), so in theory it should get
better....but I've been thinking "it should get better soon" for a while, so
who knows.

~~~
yoodenvranx
> I've heard lots of good things about KDE lately

Modern KDE (e.g. 5.12+) is amazing! It's slim, it's fast, it lets you
configure tons of stuff and it looks beautiful.

If you haven't used it in the last two years you should give it a try!

------
awat
I have to agree with him on Unity, the reaction to it seemed to outweigh it’s
presentation. I gave it a try and liked some aspects but ultimately ended up
on Cinnamon.

I realize that’s a totally subjective statement but I was surprised by some of
the reactions I heard about it.

~~~
jitix
I actually stopped using linux as my main OS in 2010 because of Gnome3 and
Unity. The "Applications","Places","System" menu was clear, intuitive and
desktop oriented. I never liked KDE, and MATE seemed like a rather unoptmized
fork. So it left me with using Xubuntu VM on a Windows host (and I hate
Windows because of it lacks bash).

Once I moved to the US I started using Mac and never looked back. The best
thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and tablet UX.

~~~
roryisok
> The best thing that Apple does is that they don't try to merge desktop and
> tablet UX

With all the IOS apps they keep bringing to macOS, the merging of the IOS and
macOS dev teams, and the imminent release of ARM macbooks I wouldn't get
comfortable

~~~
roryisok
Not sure why that got downvoted but ok. Just expressing my opinion that apple
are moving toward exactly this

------
jessaustin
_Found as users -- and Shuttleworth himself -- of the Linux desktop..._

Good grief. Presumably that should be " _Fond_ as users... _are_ of the Linux
desktop"...

~~~
Cyphase
Also, "... Snap _contanizeried_ applications ...". That 'z' is way out there.

------
a4dev
Are those cloud usage numbers missing some zeros? "Ubuntu dominates the cloud
with 209,000 instances."

~~~
lathiat
This "Cloud Market" stats they quote (which they've quoted in the past) seems
like a very dead website.

Looking at the site:
[http://thecloudmarket.com/stats#/by_platform_definition](http://thecloudmarket.com/stats#/by_platform_definition)

The numbers haven't changed in the last 2 years, looking at "Popular Images":
[http://thecloudmarket.com/#/popular](http://thecloudmarket.com/#/popular)

The top listed image is Ubuntu 7.10 ("Gutsy") from 2007...

.. and looking at recently added the most recent is from 1 year ago:
[http://thecloudmarket.com/#/recentlyadded](http://thecloudmarket.com/#/recentlyadded)

So a bit of a bad journalism moment there I think that's a very bad source!

I'm sure theres a more recent source but one 2015 article claimed that
Canonical was claiming "In 2015, over 2 million Ubuntu instances were launched
in the cloud – Based on their statistics, Canonical claims that 67,000 new
Ubuntu cloud instances are launched every day! That’s by far the largest
number that any OS vendor can dream! Ubuntu dominates the LAMP deployments in
the cloud."

So indeed, probably missing a few zeros :) I can't find a newer public source,
but this blog post from 2015 has some numbers for Ubuntu:
[https://blog.ubuntu.com/2015/12/22/more-people-use-ubuntu-
th...](https://blog.ubuntu.com/2015/12/22/more-people-use-ubuntu-than-anyone-
actually-knows) \- At least 20 million unique instances of Ubuntu have
launched in public clouds, private clouds, and bare metal in 2015 itself. \-
In fact, over 2 million new Ubuntu cloud instances launched in November 2015.
\- That’s 67,000 new Ubuntu cloud instances launched per day.

Of course some instances last minutes or days, but never the less.

(Disclaimer: I work at Canonical just in case that matters to you)

------
stewbrew
Serious question: What are the advantages of Ubuntu on a server over, say,
Debian?

~~~
pmontra
In my experience Debian has considerably older packages. However if one
installs everything with docker the underlying OS has very little importance.
It stops at sshd, systemd and vim, anything else can be dockerized.

~~~
cup-of-tea
A lot of people run Ubuntu _inside_ the container. There are many libraries
today that officially only support some Ubuntu LTS (Tensorflow, for example).

------
ddtaylor
Mark changed his mind a lot and Canonical has started and cancelled many
projects to the point it's hard to care about their new stuff anymore.

Oh you're supporting netbooks and doing a distro related to it? Cancelled.

Oh you started a cloud service that stores files forever? Cancelled.

Oh you created a competitor to X and Wayland for compositing? Cancelled.

Oh you created an alternative window manager to replace Gnome She'll?
Cancelled.

Did they cancel their phone yet?

Didn't they have some kind of $30,000 server they were talking about for a
while that wad cancelled?

It's hard to keep up with all their cancelled projects.

~~~
themodelplumber
Sure, it's a bummer to see potentially cool stuff get canceled. But Ubuntu was
all about innovation from the start. I wouldn't mind seeing twice as many
canceled projects, because it's a sign that you're willing to put yourself out
there and fail often. Innovation has a cost, and if part of that cost is "we
can't support netbooks but other distros will, heck you can even use Xubuntu
if you want" that's fine with me.

~~~
thefifthsetpin
> Ubuntu was all about innovation from the start

I thought it was about making a distro that was approachable and accessible?

Source: vaguely remembered "What does ubuntu mean?" promo videos from many
years ago.

~~~
themodelplumber
Yes, and at the time that was a huge innovation. Don't ask a neckbeard, but it
was a huge innovation.

------
ma2rten
_You can love technology and you can have new projects and it can all be
kumbaya and open source, but what really matters is computers, virtual
machines, virtual disks, virtual networks. So we ruthlessly focus on
delivering that and then also solving all the problems around that._

What is he even talking about?

~~~
pram
No more vanity projects for the desktop version of Ubuntu is what I got out of
it. He’s probably referring to the spirit in which Ubuntu desktop was
originally released (the Linux desktop for everybody) and now the focus is on
things that can assist virtualization and containers in the cloud.

------
stewbrew
"I'm now convinced a lot of the people who demanded its demise never used it."

I personally always wondered if anybody at Canonical had ever used it. It
never worked right. You always had the feeling that you have to beg to make
unity accept a mouse movement or a key shortcut to view that damned panel --
for starters.

