Ubuntu Focusing on Tablets and the Cloud in 2013 202
sfcrazy writes "Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has shared his plans for 2013. It was clear from the Nexus 7 initiative that Ubuntu is eventually looking into the mobile space more seriously. Google created the cheap device Ubuntu was looking for wider testing and development. The initial builds of Ubuntu for Nexus 7 also showed that, despite popular perception, Unity is far from ready for the mobile devices. In fact quite a lot of 'controversial' technologies introduced in Unity don't fit on a mobile devices such as Global Menus or HUD. So there are many challenges for Mark — redesign Unity for mobile, which may upset users again, get Ubuntu app developers to redesign apps for Ubuntu mobile, get top developers to write apps for Ubuntu... Is it all feasible when companies like RIM or Microsoft are struggling or is Ubuntu becoming a 'me too' company which is not brining anything new to the table and is simply trying to claim a pie?"
Shuttleworth also wants to do something or other with the cloud: "It’s also why we’ll push deeper into the cloud, making it even easier, faster and cost effective to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice, or create clouds for your own consumption and commerce."
What about retina? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is all well and good, but Ubuntu and other Gnome based desktops still can not deal with retina displays well yet (unless you go to kubuntu, and even KDE is iffy). Why aren't they working on this? There are good laptops out there that we can't use yet, and I haven't seen any indications anyone a Canonical cares. IMHO this is a lot more important than getting it on the Nexus line (as cool as that might be).
Re:What about retina? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you find an element of the KDE interface which does not scale, you should report it as a bug!
But the general point is, I guess, that Mark made a big mistake when he went down the GNOME route: picking the technologically inferior option always comes back to bite you in the opensource world.
This is because when everything is free and you are competing for users and developpers, even network efects cannot win in a universe of open standards and source. The best tech wins in the end. Of course, you can keep the bad tech on life support for as long as you have money :)
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He didn't just go "down the GNOME route". He left it, trying to walk parallel to the route, hoping to keep it in site, but then some brambles got in the way, and then a ravine, a lake, and suddenly, he couldn't even see the GNOME route anymore.
Soon he stumbles across the remains of an old disused railroad track. Shuttleworth stops a moment to catch his breath and survey the area. A few drops of rain patter on the grass amid the chatter of crickets as dusk slowly settles in, and a humid breeze hints at a coming storm. Carefully tip-toeing along the weathered-cracked timbers, he follows the track a short distance and rounds a bend into a grassy clearing. Scattered around here are remnants of industry; broken barrels, wagon wheels, a headless axe ha
Re:What about retina? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure it's more important to you, but what's in it for Canonical? I'm thinking there's very few people who'll spend $1699 (minimum) on a rMBP in the first place. And Linux has around 1% market share, so at best I'm thinking one in hundred of those few people are interested in putting Linux on it. Actually my gut feeling is that the intersection between people willing to buy a very expensive Mac and insisting on putting a $0 operating system on it is even less than that. But yes, let us say it could marginally increase desktop *bunbu market share.
Since we're talking Apple it'd be a cold day in hell before it shipped with *buntu OEM option, so it'd be all self-installs. Does Canonical make any money on the people who download and install it themselves? Well they tried now recently with their Ubuntu lens to great uproar, but I'd say the answer is no. They certainly seem to focus on everything else like smart phones, tablets and smart TVs to make money. Maybe they're getting something from OEM deals like Dell, maybe they're making a bit on desktop support contracts - server support contracts is another thing entirely - but on the whole I doubt getting proper Retina support would contribute anything to Canonical's bottom line. Trying to be a contender to Android has more potential, but honestly they're now far, far behind Google on that.
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That's OK, my eyes cannot deal with retina displays well, either.
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Without your pixelated screens, flickery 24fps movies, and scratchy phonograph records, you won't know what's real and what's virtual anymore? We can't have that, now can we?
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It's not like tablets are full-fledged PCs
Retina displays are on amd64 laptops too.
Re:Ubuntu vs Android (Score:5, Interesting)
What can Ubuntu do on a tablet that Android can't?
Lots of things. Say you have an app built using the LAMP stack; and want to tun it on the tablet. You can't do that on Android since the APM stack is still not good enough in Android. So you either rewrite your app in Android-Java, or run it in a browser, hosted elsewhere on a proper Intel server. But Ubuntu on a tablet would be a better fit in more than 90% use cases.
It's not like tablets are full-fledged PCs
Why not? Like a PC, a tablet has a CPU, RAM, enough storage, and more options for 100% always-on networking than the PC's LAN or WiFi. Many tablets support full USB so keyboards and mice can be connected when required.
Android is just the Linux kernel without GNU; a full fledged GNU/Linux would be a very useful gadget.
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Lots of things. Say you have an app built using the LAMP stack; and want to tun it on the tablet. You can't do that on Android since the APM stack is still not good enough in Android. So you either rewrite your app in Android-Java, or run it in a browser, hosted elsewhere on a proper Intel server. But Ubuntu on a tablet would be a better fit in more than 90% use cases.
It's not like tablets are full-fledged PCs
Why not? Like a PC, a tablet has a CPU, RAM, enough storage, and more options for 100% always-on networking than the PC's LAN or WiFi. Many tablets support full USB so keyboards and mice can be connected when required.
Android is just the Linux kernel without GNU; a full fledged GNU/Linux would be a very useful gadget.
Ditch the conditional: now there is a distro (based off the MeeGo work) that you can install on tablets [plasma-active.org]
Re:Ubuntu vs Android (Score:5, Insightful)
what is the difference between a tablet and a fully fledged PC? My first response would be that it could run raw linux apps without re-codoing them significantly.
Re:Ubuntu vs Android (Score:5, Insightful)
You can port onto phones with comparative ease. But there are both limitations and enhancements.
You can use the phone's sensors, crowd source data, use location info more meaningfully, and interact with the user with whatever touch mechanisms are supported.
But there are severe limitations: storage is small and not getting larger quickly. User space isn't huge. You're limited to 32bit memory models. There aren't serious math co-pros, but ARM does integer math quickly enough. And despite what you've heard, ARM still uses power, and doesn't magically become a Xeon. Even with multiple cores, you don't get multiple work.
That said, the screen IO gets faster, juicier, and more colorful all the time. I'd love to have Debian underneath, rather than Google anything on my phone.
But I think that Shuttleworth doesn't understand cloud. Civilians aren't going to do much with cloud because Shuttleworth overestimates civilians. They don't have time to program, they just want to use this stuff-- that's why they pay others to do the work in the form of program loads and competitive *native* features. They're just not going to create and port a LAMP stack, then do geophysics array curve fitting. Instead: they're going to play games, and not ones they wrote themselves.
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As an example, we need a proper usenet client for tablets, I'd love to run something like Thunderbird on my Nexus 7, including pop3 support for offline reading of mail.
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One condition (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as we can run our own cloud on our own server at home, I'm all for it. Otherwise, screw it. I don't want to give any company control over my own godamn data.
Re:One condition (Score:5, Informative)
As long as we can run our own cloud on our own server at home, I'm all for it. Otherwise, screw it. I don't want to give any company control over my own godamn data.
Then perhaps you want to check out ownCloud [owncloud.org]. It's Open Source. You can host it yourself. They also have a provider you can rent from (which is how they make ends meet.) There are native clients for Android and iPhone. It supports SSL and can encrypt files stored on the server if you choose. It does a rudimentary form of versioning. It can even translate ODF files to HTML for easy online viewing of documents.
Your data, your control, your responsibility. Everything you just asked for.
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Tonido is also pretty good in this respect. You can even buy a plug computer from them running their software.
It was fun while it lasted! (Score:2, Interesting)
And now the diaspora of real users who need desktops. It seriously escapes me why everyone is on the race to the cloud and tablets when you need real regular computers to develop the apps for them. Even if tools are available, development on anything but a physical keyboard is a chore.
Re:It was fun while it lasted! (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the desktop is a solved problem, KDE provides an excellent, highly polished desktop experience, which contains a number of innovations -- but remains not-too-different from the desktops of the naughties.
Different devices, with different input capabilities require different interfaces. If you do it the KDE way, the inerface is largely abstracted from the core of the programmes, and you can switch fromone to the other. If you are GNOME, ubuntu of microsoft (or apple), you try to have one interface to rule them all. IMHO, this is a bad idea, but some people seem to like it, so...
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You can polish that [thing] all you want. It's still an overblown piece of [stuff].
If you think you can just abstract the interface, then you don't understand proper user experience design at all. And this is where I have to give Apple some credit (grudgingly)... they aren't trying to cram phone, tablet, and desktop into a single OS.
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When I get my damn scroll arrows back in Lion, I'll believe that. That's sufficient reason not to "upgrade" from Snow Leopard.
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Clearly, there were not enough pixels in those "retina" display. Alternatively, some dick in the arts department figured that his screenshots looked cooler that way, and fuck the users. Yes I am being potty mouthed, but you can't multiply by four the number of pixels on you screen (yay!), and then try to spare an extra 20 (yay?) or so at the expense of a much less efficient interface (boo!).
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Apple has avoided the Ubuntu trap of attempting to cram phone, tablet, and desktop into a single OS which thus becomes crap, and has instead written independent crap for each.
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There is nothing in a mailer in terms of logic which is different between the mobile and the desktop version. only the way you interact with your mails changes. The same goes for the web browser (how is the rendering engine different in the desktop browser and the mobile one?), and so on and so forth. You can absolutely abstract interface and core logic. In fact, you should!
And the reason you do that is precisely because you do not want the same experience on very different devices. Apple is actually trying
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Because the desktop is a solved problem, . . .
. . . called Mac OS.
That's where many desktop Linux users I've known are now. Many hated going there, because they believe in software freedoms, but they had work to do.
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After nearly 10 years of strictly Linux I converted to MacOS in 2005ish. After the initial dreaminess wears off, it turns into quite the nightmare. You learn that it really has all the consistency of Windows and all the application support of Linux. I have moved on to Windows 7 (games) with Cygwin (work) for desktop, Linux for servers and Android for phone and tablet. Unless Windows 9 does a 180 I will likely be going back to Linux for the desktop. That's going to be a couple years away though at least
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Really? I'm the other way; I'm a scientist, and my boss coerced me into using OSX. I hated it so much that he finally relented and let me use a Mint desktop. I wanted to use Mint because I had work to do, after all.
Re:It was fun while it lasted! (Score:5, Interesting)
("coerced" is probably too strong a term -- everyone in the research group uses Macs, so it was more peer pressure. :P)
Still, I don't see how folks are productive with them. I see people holding the "left" arrow key for five seconds in the terminal to scroll to the beginning of the line since Apple doesn't believe in the "home" key, highlighting things and then doing "command-click, choose copy from menu, command-click, choose paste from menu" instead of having proper middle-click-to-paste support, and other such things that seem a great deal harder than on Linux.
Then there's the fact that Apple seems to have merged the concepts of "show me the programs that are on this computer and let me launch them" with "show me the windows that are open and let me switch to them", with the result that figuring out which of 8 terminals is the one I want is more involved than it needs to be. I'm not sure why it does this; is the differentiation between the actions "switch to my Firefox window" and "launch Firefox" really too complicated for the average user?
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Then there's the fact that Apple seems to have merged the concepts of "show me the programs that are on this computer and let me launch them" with "show me the windows that are open and let me switch to them", with the result that figuring out which of 8 terminals is the one I want is more involved than it needs to be. I'm not sure why it does this; is the differentiation between the actions "switch to my Firefox window" and "launch Firefox" really too complicated for the average user?
It's more of a design choice, are your applications designed to primarily run as a single-instance, multi-document application or as multi-instance, single-document application? Personally I'm on Win7 and I've found that I prefer the combined taskbar/launcher icons over the old way where I'd scan the taskbar and if I didn't see it I'd go launch it or I'd launch it and then realize oh I got two copies open. Implied in that is that I want one instance of the application to cover my needs, like multiple tabs i
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KDE seems pretty straightforward. Other than performance/bloat concerns, what's wrong with KDE? It's a pretty ordinary GUI that works pretty well.
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It seriously escapes me why everyone is on the race to the cloud and tablets when you need real regular computers to develop the apps for them.
Computers aren't going away, but most desktops are in a corporate environment, and MS has that market sewn up. Tablets are a good target for Linux, though.
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Sewn up, huh?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/12/26/021222/google-challenging-microsoft-for-business-software?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed [slashdot.org]
Microsoft may very well be stomping on their dicks, in much the same way that Ubuntu is. Time will tell whether Microsoft has anything "sewn up". No one can really "challenge" a giant like Microsoft, but what if the giant just suicides?
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It seriously escapes me why everyone is on the race to the cloud and tablets
And the farmers in a certain area thought it was silly for a man to waste time and money building a castle until he became their lord, prevented them from leaving the land, and forced them to give him grain and coin taxes in exchange for protection from other lords with castles.
Anyone pushing cloud and tablets wants to be a digital liege-lord.
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Hi. Even if you don't understand their reasons, the fact is a LOT of people are buying mobile devices. More than the number of PCs in the USA in 2012. These guys even expect that the current trend will lead to the number of PCs being much smaller than the number of mobile devices [businessinsider.com]. One of the slides I linked to there even says that these new consumers add up to a $10Bn market, growing at 100% per year. So yes, you'll prefer your more conventional PC to work, which is fine, but if companies overlook the mobil
Fuck the cloud, fuck tablets (Score:2, Insightful)
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OwnCloud [owncloud.org] is a cloud. On your server. your way. And it's great: who does not want access to their data all the time, through the network?
Without some corporation snooping that is...
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It is not so much the number of servers as the network interface. It can be installed on any number of servers mirroring one another, the server might be running in a VM, which is probably closer to what you think of when thinking cloud.
But from the point of view of the user, the important things are freedom of usage, and control over their data.
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Has the definition of cloud changed so much that it can even be done now, with a single server?
From the very beginning the cloud has always been the connection medium between point a and b it has nothing to do with what is on the end points. Think back to those plastic templates we used to draw network diagrams with. Once we went out onto a public network the shape was a cloud. Marketers, in recent years, jumped on that because referring to the internet and the web sounded so blah and they needed something new and exciting. Thus, we now have the cloud. New name, for the same thing.
As for whether yo
Re:Fuck the cloud, fuck tablets (Score:4, Insightful)
Has the definition of cloud changed so much that it can even be done now, with a single server?
The definition of cloud has always been intentionally hazy (pun intended.) Because it's not fixed, it can mean whatever the speaker needs it to mean in the current context. At home, I might define the cloud to be "remote access to my data from whatever device I have at hand". That might mean accessing data stored on my own server, or access to my data stored on other people's servers. At work, many of the app people equate "Software as a Service" with cloud, while our infrastructure guys can use it to mean "scalable on-demand platforms" like EC3.
In the most general terms, the cloud is access to any kind of remote resource via the network. Once upon a time, the old name for it was client/server, but that terminology came from the days of dedicated point-to-point lines between machines, and was too technically correct for the illiterate managers who didn't yet understand that an IP network allowed access to any machine on the network.
Anyway, there is no one precise definition of "cloud". In my experience, anyone who is overly hung up on the word seems to be missing the bigger picture.
Too little too late... (Score:2)
The opportunity to build a tablet with a "free" (i.e. included at no extra cost) operating system has passed Ubuntu by. Google, and Apple for that matter, have already done it. Those two also enjoy a big advantage over Ubuntu - a massive collection of apps optimized for the tablet form factor. If you're a hobbyist then I could see wanting to run Ubuntu on a tablet but otherwise I don't quite see the point of it all.
Non-bullshit non-jargon translation please... (Score:3, Funny)
"Itâ(TM)s also why weâ(TM)ll push deeper into the cloud, making it even easier, faster and cost effective to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice, or create clouds for your own consumption and commerce."
I feel Mark had 3 pegs more than normal when he spoke the above. Can anyone suggest a proper geek-speak version?
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Geek translation:
Focusing on tablets = You will get more of the Unity crapbloat
redesign Unity for mobile = We tried to sell it on desktop and...
push deeper into the cloud = there are kids reading you know.
faster and cost effective to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice = we are going cheap on giving you a choice between clouds and clouds or clouds...
create clouds for your own consumption and commerce = You know who will consume and who will do commerce.
We'll See (Score:5, Funny)
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But it worked well for Apple. :P
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Yes, hope we'll see Ballmer as a MS leader for many more years. He'll drive the company into the ground.
Be careful what you wish for. The scenario you ask for would also most likely have Apple as the dominant player and I don't think Apple would be prone to make Microsoft's mistakes.
Hahaha - Unity even fails mobile (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly Unity is unsuitable for the desktop, so many of us dumped it. We assumed it was designed with myopic focus on mobile, and made jokes about it being for a one meter tablet to be worked with knees and elbows. But now mobile users are saying it is poorly designed for that space also. Canonical needs to toss their UI rubbish in the can, leave that to those who are gifted at it.
Re:Hahaha - Unity even fails mobile (Score:4, Funny)
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Unity is not good on a laptop with 1366 x 768 display. I ditched it for xfce which at least lets me use the
whole screen...
I don't want Unity on my tablet. Thanks for listening Mark.
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My question is -- why not target touchscreen desktops? There's already a feature-restricted linux variant for tablets - it's called Android. It would be more efficient in terms of resources to build an open-only non-spyware Android variant than to build something open from scratch.
I think we should target 3 user experiences -- fixed-screen + keyboard + mouse/trackball (current desktops/laptops) -- (handheld) touchscreen only (current tablets) -- fixed-touchscreen + keyboard.
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does anyone buy touchscreen desktops, and if they are dumb enough to do so, how many minutes do you think it takes before they notice their arm is tired and never use it again
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Many people dumped it but many others took it up. I thought I would just give it a go for giggles, being a KDE user, but now like it so much it's my full time desktop OS. I always hated those stupid tree menus, and the Dash is exactly what I've been looking for without actually knowing it at the time. Now Unity is more polished I think a lot of people that hesistated to make the jump and used MATE during the interim will think about switching as soon as Canonical remove the Amazon spam by default in your se
Not likely! (Score:2)
Tablet are more similar to (smart)phones than to PCs.
First, they have different hardware and, even with the same "model", they can have different variants in order to accommodate different mobile networks (mainly 3G (aka UMTS) vs 4G (LTE) or different SoCs.
So I would say Ubuntu won't focus on the whole tablet market.
Second, they have limited resources. Not the CPU, but the "internal" storage. Yes, it can be grow up to 64GB. But the I/O performances are fa
mobile data plans suck for cloud use even unlimite (Score:2)
mobile data plans suck for cloud use even unlimited ones with slow down after useing X data and don't even think of roaming as well.
I hope Ubuntu becomes viable on tablets (Score:4, Interesting)
I got an Android tablet last week. It is very frustrating. Half of the stuff does not work if you do not have a Google acount or are not willing to tie your device that closely to an advertising company. The one-app-at-a-time UI is constraining. I would much rather a system like APT to manage installed packages. An Ubuntu distribution on a tablet with a tiling window manager and the ability to run Android apps would be awesome.
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You can easily remove all of the cloud integration crap from Ubuntu Desktop. Presumably you would be able to do the same with Ubuntu Tablet.
Goodbye Canonical, it has been nice knowing you (Score:4, Insightful)
What saddens me is that Canonical's roots are in Africa. A huge place where there is sporadic 3G connection.
I'd really like someone to explain to me how their vision of 'the Cloud' can work when there is no universal 3G data connection available to the majority of the people. Perhaps they have forgotten what Ubuntu originally meant?
Then there is the cost of 3G. Don't even get me started on 4G (EE is a joke) data plans.
Until they become IMHO an order of magnitude cheaper then frankly you can forget universal cloud adoption.
Cloud afficitionados seem to forget (or have a blind spot) this (insignificant in their eyes at least) essential feature.
I run my own private cloud but I am under no illusions about the sort of connectivity I will have to it from the parts of the world where I do most of my business namely, the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa.
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The name "Ubuntu" has its roots in Africa, but I fail to see how either Canonical or indeed any significant part of Ubuntu has their origins there. Despite how people have talked about how Linux would be a good fit for poor countries, market share in Africa has been way lower [statcounter.com] than in the rest of the world, ranging from 0.2% in 2008 to 0.5-0.6% today - download as CSV for the numbers. Pretty much all the drive in the OSS community has come from high-bandwidth countries where downloading hundreds of megabytes
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The problem is that you're thinking of it from a consumer/desktop point of view. It sounds more like Canonical wants to go after the server market.
The cloud that he is referring to is PaaS, which is essentially just automated data centers. Think web hosting companies but with the customer facing ops people replaced with REST APIs. This lets you have things like elastic scaling, which is useful for hosting websites with peaky traffic loads.
Amazon has their own version of Linux, based on Red Hat, that is desi
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And many monster movies have been set there. Monsters! What are they thinking? Do you want monsters on your desktop?
(I don't need saracsm tags on this, do I?)
Internet Access in South Africa [visual.ly] Broadband Internet access in South Africa [wikipedia.org]
Become an ASP (Score:2)
One option Canonical might want to consider is becoming an Applications Service Provider based on Ubuntu server, and hosting their services for customers. They may not be able to compete w/ the likes of RedHat/CentOS/OEL, Debian, Slackware or Gentoo, but if they do it as an apps service, they'd probably have a better chance of keeping the lights on. Maybe target those SMB or smaller segments not addressed by the likes of even a Dell or HP, and they should be good to go.
But I don't see them displacing An
Ubuntu wants to be on tablets? (Score:5, Informative)
Ubuntu is doomed. If tablets are Ubuntu's goal, they fucked up already: first off, Unity, which is drek on the desktop is also drek on tablets - so they alienated a large part of the desktop users in favor of nothing (add the local search beamed to Amazon thing for extra bonus points of alienation).
And in the meantime, KDE waltzes in, almost effortlessly creates Plasma and already now there is a distribution, Plasma Active, running on the Nexus 7, and it's actually usable and easy on the eyes.
I should also mention that the tablet marketplace is cutthroat-competitive, and even Microsoft has its work cut out to get in.
Ubuntu should step back from the precipice right fucking now.
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That's some revisionist history there. Ubuntu are so doomed that Valve have picked it for their primary distro for Steam. It's such a drek on the desktop that desktop users are flocking to it (albeit largely due to the momentum Ubuntu has managed to gather). The Amazon thing is a massive mistake, I'm surprised that haven't back-pedalled yet as nobody is going to upgrade until its gone.
KDE hardly waltzed in and effortlessly created Plasma. You obviously weren't an early 4.0 adopter like I was. It was a compl
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The KDE developers don't think they work for Apple and seem to listen to what users want.
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The KDE developers don't think they work for Apple and seem to listen to what users want.
Or Microsoft, for that matter - thanks go to Miguel, for his contribution in derailing Gnome.
KDE Plasma Active and Android (Score:2)
Does the Plasma Active distro play nicely with Android? Will it install cleanly and still dual-boot with Android? Or does it even have the necessay kernel mods so it can actually run Android and plasma active together?
Whats up with the Unity obsession? (Score:2)
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The complaints are usually being made by people who don't have anywhere to go. For someone who has used and has learned to love the Gnome 2.xx desktop moving to XFCE or KDE is simply not an option, and Gnome 3.0 is not a way forward. Where do those people go?
This is
Depressing: no reference to Debian, f**k that!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
when someone prefers XFCE to Unity, they are still benefiting from enormous efforts by hundreds of people to make the core Ubuntu platform
I feel truly depressed. A quick look at some Debian packages with apt-get showsrc xfce4-terminal shows 2 uploaders, and the work being done mostly by Yves-Alexis Perez. Then having a look at the Ubuntu package shows that there's almost no work at all from Ubuntu on that package, but the rework of 2 patches, AND THAT'S IT.
So, instead of a self-satisfying self-congratulation, and telling about the "hundreds of people" behind it, Marc should truly thanks the thousands of Debian Developer doing the real work FOR FREE (and the other thousands of maintainers who aren't DD and get their package sponsored). These are the real persons that makes it possible.
If you’ve been arguing over software licenses for the best part of 15 years then you would probably be fine with whatever came before Ubuntu.
If what Marc is saying here is that Ubuntu doesn't care anymore that software should be free (as in Freedom), then yes, it's time that everyone stops using Ubuntu. By the way the recent global search spyware finished to convince more and more people.
Whether you’re building out a big data cluster or a super-scaled storage solution, you’ll get it done faster on Ubuntu than any other platform, thanks to the amazing work of our cloud community.
With all the due respect Marc, I believe my Folsom packages of Openstack, which I'm slowly uploading to Debian experimental (but also available on a non-official repo), are both better and more easy to use than the ones currently in Ubuntu. You'd better stop touching yourself, and remove these lintian warnings which are all over the place on the Ubuntu packaging.
Consider it a gift from all of us at Ubuntu.
That's it, now I want to slap you in the face... We are talking about COMMUNITY SOFTWARE, not Canonical. Neither XFCE or Openstack are (c) Canonical. If you want a list of the top committers in each project to show you are wrong, I can do that, no pb.
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Mint is good. I've been very happy with Ubuntu till they begin to force Unity down my throat.
Whichever environment you like, you'll feel at home with either xfce, lxde, kde, mate or cinammon.
Careful (Score:2)
As any pilot can tell you, pushing deeply into clouds often results in disorientation and losing one's way. Of course if one is already lost, I guess you're not really risking much.
Claming a piece of the pie (Score:2)
Isn't 'bad', as if you dont grab a piece quick enough, you get no pie.
Re:Whose perception? (Score:5, Funny)
See, that's the one really nice thing about Ubuntu and Unity. You can walk away from them and not even feel like you've lost something of value.
Re:Whose perception? (Score:5, Informative)
And a lot of us geeks spread the gospel of Ubuntu to the unwashed masses. Now it's turned out that Ubuntu was a false prophet, so we're having to do a lot of damage control (and further explanations of why Ubuntu's off the deep end).
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The bad thing is, Ubuntu was something of great value just four years ago. At the time, it was the only version of Linux that you could show someone out of the box and get them excited about using a new operating system. Part of the allure was beryl/compiz, but most of what made it special in the Linux world was that it played nicer with the mandatory binary blobs (like wireless firmware and graphics drivers). It was an acceptable compromise between the GNU way and everyone else.
And a lot of us geeks spread the gospel of Ubuntu to the unwashed masses. Now it's turned out that Ubuntu was a false prophet, so we're having to do a lot of damage control (and further explanations of why Ubuntu's off the deep end).
So, if Ubuntu had stayed with Gnome Shell, they wouldn't be a false prophet? I don't care for Unity, myself, but I don't see where Ubuntu defaulting to it negates the other pluses you mention.
Re:Whose perception? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ubuntu started by offering candy and jewelry, and now it's getting a little controlling. If we don't leave soon, abuse will be the end result.
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How is this Informative? It's just an opinion, a totally unsupported one.
And btw, your "part of the allure was beryl/compiz" recollection is telling. Ever you ever thought that maybe Canonical is going after a more mainstream target than people who enjoyed playing with Beryl and Emerald?
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How is this Informative? It's just an opinion, a totally unsupported one.
Beats me; I didn't get to moderate it. :)
And btw, your "part of the allure was beryl/compiz" recollection is telling. Ever you ever thought that maybe Canonical is going after a more mainstream target than people who enjoyed playing with Beryl and Emerald?
My point is that Ubuntu is one of the first mainstream distros to use compiz by default, which appealed to the mainstream audience. I participated in a few Linux fairs where ordinary people happened to be walking through the area, and the geeks were taking our DSL mini CDs, but the mainstream people took the Ubuntu CDs after seeing the spinning cube desktop demo (even understanding that this wasn't a program that worked in Windows, that it would "destroy" their curr
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What's this - Bash Ubuntu-day? Ubuntu is at the moment the only serious desktopcontender for linux.
Not entirely true, but it was for a few years, and it's still neck and neck with the others. And that's why I'm personally ticked that it's losing its way. Competition is a good thing, but Ubuntu now has a different goal in mind.
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And being the most popular distro/brand it is the first to be officially targeted and supported. Think Steam.
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That must be Shuttleworth's perception. The popular perception is that Unity is not ready for anything, and will likely stay like that because it is a terrible design in the first place.
I agree...And he can't see the obvious cause he's so invested in being right.
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I am different from most people around here as I don't mind Unity and I don't throw fits over it, but I don't think it's innovative. It's like they put all the mediocre aspects of OS X into one design.
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No, it's a great design.
Most innovative thing
The second does not lead directly to the first. It almost sounds like an art review. Imagine a GUI that is all black: the buttons all work, there are menus, windows, etc., but they're all one color. That's innovative. It's art (it evokes an emotional response of frustration). But it's not a great design for an interface.
Re:Whose perception? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can innovate by putting barbecue sauce on peach ice cream. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.
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Likewise. I'd assumed that the move towards Unity was aimed at the 'future' ie tablets etc, and that the desktop was yesterday and was to be sidelined. Ubuntu seem to be totally lost at sea now, with what I see as a troubled tablet UI (Unity) and a rejected and stagnant desktop UI.
From day one, Canonical said Unity was not about tablets, but was to take advantage of computers being almost always connected to the internet and having screens wider than they are tall. Many in the Windows world have been moving the menu bar to the side of the screen for the latter reason. Many in the Linux world, running something other than Gnome 2 were doing so, likewise.
Being a tablet OS takes a lot more than just having a launcher with big buttons. You need to have an interface designed around touch
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I cannot possibly believe that Ubuntu is that out of touch with what its users really want.
Shuttleworth doesn't care about his users. They represent only a minor percentage of the market. He wants new users, and is willing to destroy everything for his pyhrric victory.
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I think by now it's just tradition to hate it. Same as with MS, no matter what they do . And change... always hate change!
I use Ubuntu, Win7, Win8, iOS and Android (Kindle Fire & HTC phone) on a nearly daily basis and they're all fine . Each has its quirks, but they're all usable.
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And change... always hate change!
I hate change when I feel like it's forced on me.
(And of late it seems like everyone out there feels like it's their right to slip in UI changes on you whenever they feel like it...)
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Canonical's actions are taking it into a downward spiral. As much as I thought Linspire has messed a good thing up they at least stuck to one thing (the desktop).
They did indeed. Actually,Linspire had a lot of potential; but things just went from bad to worse with them for a lot of mind boggling reasons. Yeah, I'm not sure if Shuttleworth will be able to pull his fat out of the fire, time will tell.