[Bradford] Ubuntu

[David Spencer]

Hi Mo, hi everybody, sorry for being late to this discussion.

It's a fascinating question, we are clearly at some kind of turning
point, but who knows how it'll turn out long term?

I think there's a better case for arguing that it's Red Hat that's
playing the worst dominate-or-fragment game.  Whether this is a
faction within Red Hat that's out of control, or whether it's a
classic corporate 'extend-extinguish' roadmap, or whether Red Hat is
too dominant to even know about its effects on the rest of Linux, is
an open question.  But I see most of the disruption coming from Red
Hat, not Ubuntu.  Specifically, that's Gnome 3 and its malign effects
on non-gnome gtk stuff like xfce; and systemd swallowing udev,
cgroups, consolekit etc (what's next, Lennart?).

By contrast, Ubuntu's changes of direction affect only Ubuntu.  Ubuntu
has always been criticised for not pulling its weight in
maintainership, but, looking at what happens when Red Hat maintains
stuff, frankly I prefer Ubuntu that way.  Oh, and I haven't noticed
Ubuntists flaming and astroturfing like the Lennartists do.

I love lists and people that list things, so lets have a go at your list, Mo:

1. I leave Ubuntu alone and Ubuntu leaves me alone.  I wish I could
say the same for Red Hat.  If I feel the need for Ubuntu, I use Mint
:D

2. Maybe Mint will end up based directly on Debian.  I can't see
Debian or KDE changing direction to accommodate Ubuntu: (a) it would
be silly to try, and (b) they are not the sort of communities that can
easily change direction ;-)

3. I wish Ubuntu Touch well, and Ubuntu Edge too.  I worry that if the
Edge fails to meet its finance goals the knock-on effects will be
immense, we'll be stuck in an IOS and Android-only world forever.
[Windows Metro being dead already]

4. Please please please succeed in convergence, everybody else's
attempts are truly hideous, but if it is successful, it would be nice
if there was a way for the wider community to be able to reuse
Ubuntu's stuff.  Which is the only real point of the current moaning
about Ubuntu.

Just my opinions; please feel free to agree or mock.
-D.


On 28 July 2013 09:09, Mohammed Djavanroodi <mo.roodi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I'm new here and this is my first submission so please be gentle!
>
> Now a little background. I work as a web developer and while at work I have
> to use Windows, at home I solely use Ubuntu and have done for a while,
> although I've only recently started using it exclusively. I've been playing
> around with Linux on and off for the past 10 or so years but I'm by no means
> l33t!
>
> What I really wanted to do was guage people's feelings towards Ubuntu and
> Canonical.
>
> In the community there seems to be a lot of mixed feelings towards the
> approach and decisions that Canonical are making, from setting unity as
> their default desktop environment in 11.04 to plans to use mir as their
> display server in 13.10 onwards to their smart scopes and Amazon search
> results.
>
> And then there's Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Edge as well. Basically it would
> seems Mark Shuttleworth has had a plan all along and now we're starting to
> see the plan which is convergence.
>
> My own personal opinions are mixed. I like Unity now, but that's not always
> been the case. The Amazon search results was just a complete mistake, and I
> think IF done right the whole convergence thing looks like it shows promise,
> although as a traditional laptop users I hope they don't make any
> compromises!
>
> So here are my questions for discussion:
>
> 1. What are people's thoughts on Ubuntu?
>
> 2. Do you think using Mir will cause fragmentation in Linux?
>
> 3. Can Ubuntu touch gain any traction in a market dominated by Android and
> iOS?
>
> 4. Can Ubuntu succeed in convergence where others have compromised too much?
>
> I appreciate that this is quite a wide range of different discussions. I
> also want to open the floor to more general discussions about Ubuntu as
> well. Some in the Linux community have said that Mark Shuttleworth wants to
> be the next Steve Jobs... Is that ridiculous?
>
> Also Ubuntu is the distro that Steam recommends, with Ubuntu changing to Mir
> which distro will steam suggest for it's Linux gamers?
>
> Apologies this submission is a bit of a brain splurge!
>
> Thanks,
> Mo
>
>
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