Good article
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| jacog Jun 08, 2010 8:18 AM EDT |
... despite the groan-worthy title. ;) Anyway, I agree with pretty much all of it. |
| bigg Jun 08, 2010 8:42 AM EDT |
It's accurate so long as it is taken as a comment on Ubuntu and not all free software projects. Free software projects such as LyX can match any non-free package in terms of documentation, support, and user friendliness. |
| jacog Jun 08, 2010 8:53 AM EDT |
Well, the article does mention other projects that are doing it right in his opinion, like Elementary. |
| hkwint Jun 08, 2010 10:35 AM EDT |
OTOH, there are enough projects wishing to do what the article suggests. The KDE and (especially) KOffice team for example, they have enough ideas about documentation and fixing issues, but they just lack the manpower. The same might hold for Ubuntu. One of the problems might be that Desktop Linux is just too complex. Many elements of it are not 'only aimed at the desktop'. I think all these things might be easier if someone really made a Desktop-distro, and not a half baked attempt while using all kind of generic software such as Xorg and everybodies nightmare: The text / keyboard input system. I mean, they leave out kernel modules not needed for the desktop, but they include all kind of fancy generic stuff for Xorg and text input. The text input system is so complex you have to work on four different area's for just getting the Euro-sign to work. And once done, it works only for X, and not for the terminal, or the other way around. What would be nice, is a free operating system that 'cuts down' on these complexities. For example, why would the user care if X does have a client / server achitecture? Why would the user care about symbols, tty's, termcaps, keycodes, encodings and such? If I type a key, I just want the right symbol to show up! But fixing such stuff is almost impossible, partly because 'medieval input oddities' have been hard-coded in the Linux kernel, some by Linus himself (!) What Ubuntu does, is mainly taking all kind of complex generic software, and than only cutting down on the GUI. So they take bloated software and present it in a 'lean' GUI. But taking server software and putting an MacOSX skin on it, that's not fixing the issue. That's not a real 'distribution' IMNSHO, that's skinning. If they want to make a simple OS, they go arguing about if some button is on the left or the right, because of usability issues. Why are they not working on making the software more simple - instead of just the interface? This might be one of the reasons Android is so popular, also for developers: It's designed, meant, optimized and used for mobile phones. Linux, Xorg, the text input system etc, they're just not designed and meant for the Desktop. 'Simplicity' was never one of the main goals, and therefore, it's complex. Maybe it's time for Hubuntu (Haiku based Ubuntu) or something, I'm not sure. But Desktop Linux suffers from its shear complexity caused by future bloat - also meant for servers / other platforms, that IS for sure. |
| Sander_Marechal Jun 08, 2010 12:17 PM EDT |
I disagree with you, Hans. Vehemently. X.org's client/server architecture is a blessing for desktop users because the geeks who support them (us!) rely on it to provide support. It makes other things easier as well, such as screen layouts. I have a different layout than my girlfriend and we both use the same machine at the same time. Quoting:Why would the user care about symbols, tty's, termcaps, keycodes, encodings and such? I can see you haven't done a lot of programming. Text is never easy. In fact, it's one of the hardest things to get right and it's almost always done wrong. Linux has it mostly right. And thanks to that Linux is available in more languages and scriptures than any other OS. And I can do such fancy things as watch Latin, Cryllic and Asian writing in my applications at the same time. |
| vect Jun 08, 2010 3:50 PM EDT |
I agree. All of you are complainers. Give Ubuntu a little space and respect (they earned it). |
| Steven_Rosenber Jun 08, 2010 6:11 PM EDT |
The reason I posted this article — and why I think it's one of the most important articles written about FOSS in the past year — is that it calls out Ubuntu specifically but also the rest of the FOSS world for its developer-centric focus. Yes developers of free software must be catered to, but many projects care very little about users who aren't also developers. My knowledge about Canonical's employees and their various duties is limited, but after reading this article it seems that not many of them work on documentation. Usually the best Ubuntu docs I do find are written by the community - there just needs to be more of it (and I am willing to contribute to this effort). If Ubuntu is going to diverge even further from Debian than it has in the past, I wish development would focus on real user experience, on eliminating bugs and addressing all of the issues that keep would-be users from shedding their former proprietary OSes for FOSS. I'd love to see Ubuntu go the direction of Red Hat not by charging for an enterprise release while also offering a free community release but instead by keeping the six-month releases cutting-edge for the fanboy users and simultaneously offering a more conservative release with a focus on hardware compatibility, continually eliminating bugs and making the user experience is as good as it can be. Just deciding that this six-month release, or that one, will be an LTS and shoveling a boatload of new, untested features into it is not my idea of what non-technical users want or need. In this scenario, development would occur in the six-month releases, and once features were debugged, user-tested and deemed ready for the "conservative" release, they would be rolled in at regular intervals of, say every 12 or 18 months. That's very Fedora/RHEL-like, and what works for Red Hat and its users might work a lot better for desktop users of Ubuntu as well. |
| vect Jun 08, 2010 11:16 PM EDT |
steve, ubuntu is fine and you sound like an impatient nag. ubuntu's attention and resources are on the desktop. they will plug documentation and other holes when they get to them. Why do you assume they need to be told about these things after they've committed themselves so heavily to the desktop? ubuntu is a winner. it has brought real improvement to the desktop. it hasnt been perfect, but its been pretty good and certainly better than the half-assed efforts of sled, rhel, mandriva, etc. Don't be a loser who is never satisfied with a win. |
| jdixon Jun 09, 2010 12:16 AM EDT |
> Don't be a loser who is never satisfied with a win. I'm not. Of course, that's why I've used Slackware for over 15 years now. Maybe someday Ubuntu will be as fast, flexible, and stable as Slackware; but I doubt it. |
| vect Jun 09, 2010 1:33 AM EDT |
Things like setting up a server or installing strange emacs plugins are things any idiot can do in ubuntu. Currently, the cheapest computers from dell have plenty of room on them for kde, gnome, and xfce at once. I doubt you would notice any 'slowness' or 'inflexibility'. You could build your own wm with fvwm. If you ever finished, you'd have something that is slightly 'fast and flexible'. You'd also be an idiot. 'hm, i have small ram and very little hard drive space. should i start looking for a job? meh, i'll just use slackware.' |
| gus3 Jun 09, 2010 1:57 AM EDT |
Calling people "losers" and "idiots" is no way to win friends and influence people, vect. I've used both Slackware and Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Eee PC 900. UNR has a lot going for it, being a first-class Ubuntu project. Still, I run Slackware on it now, because it's a better fit for how I use it: sometimes as a remotely-admin'd filtering proxy, and sometimes as a stand-alone desktop. The only Ubuntu thing I wish Slackware had, is a faster boot. Slackware is BSD-based, with a very serialized init; where Ubuntu uses Upstart and can take great advantage of zero seek-time on flash storage. |
| vect Jun 09, 2010 2:53 AM EDT |
i guess it doesn't come across in my messages, but i'm lauging while i type some of these things and... i'm sorry. i didn't realize i was coming off like that. A few years ago, I tried building my own wm with fvwm, so I'd be the first to say that it takes an idiot to know an idiot. I understand what you're saying BUT I'm reacting against people who complain of 'big' distros like ubuntu and big software like gnome. gnome is not that big. ubuntu is not that big. |
| vect Jun 09, 2010 2:56 AM EDT |
and hey im not all bad. i stand by things i like, such as ubuntu. |
| jdixon Jun 09, 2010 2:08 PM EDT |
> ... and... i'm sorry. i didn't realize i was coming off like that. No problem. It's all too easy to do when communicating in a written medium, and I've done it myself on more than one occasion. > I'm reacting against people who complain of 'big' distros like ubuntu and big software like gnome. gnome is not that big. ubuntu is not that big. While I will freely admit that Ubuntu will probably never be my favorite distribution, and that I'd recommend Mint to a new user over Ubuntu, Ubuntu still has a number of good points. The primary ones being: It's newbie friendly forums, it's (Debian based) ease of software installation and upgrades, and it's desktop user focus. While I'm concerned by recent changes and proposed changes such as this one, I doubt those features will change. Simply put, it's a good distro with a lot to recommend it, though it's not necessarily the best for any given purpose. And I agree that neither Ubuntu nor Gnome is all that big. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jun 09, 2010 2:18 PM EDT |
Quoting:ubuntu is fine and you sound like an impatient nag. ubuntu's attention and resources are on the desktop. they will plug documentation and other holes when they get to them. Why do you assume they need to be told about these things after they've committed themselves so heavily to the desktop? I have a pretty thick skin, and I don't take your comments personally. I'm totally impatient and make no apologies for it. Let me spell it out for you: Ubuntu spends much time and effort catering to its fanboy minions. All I ask is that you listen to what I say and what the OP Benjamin Humphrey says about the direction of not just Ubuntu but the whole of FOSS. Notice how we haven't had the usual flood of "2011 will be the year of the Linux desktop" articles? That's because nobody believes that we're getting any closer. Promoting (and sometimes just as quickly killing off) such half-baked apps/solutions as the social desktop, Shotwell, F-Spot, Pitivi, PulseAudio - that's not going to serve the millions who've never run anything on the desktop but Windows or Mac OS. Ubuntu is doing quite a bit for the Linux desktop, and the project and parent company's ambitions and budget are grander than that of any other similar project. Canonical, a for-profit company, depends on thousands of unpaid volunteers to help with development, documentation and marketing. For these reasons, the project carries quite a bit of responsibility on its shoulders. Like Humphrey, I think Ubuntu would benefit greatly from some core changes in its philosophy and methods. Ubuntu has done a lot, but I fear that the continuing focus on what is billed as innovation is leaving usability, stability and polish in the back of the bus. I like the idea of the "social desktop," but the way it's presented is confusing, buggy and not sparing of either CPU or disk space. It's great for a development release but not so much for an LTS that is expected to hold up for two or three years. Pitivi seemingly came out of nowhere as the default video editor for a distro that didn't have one in the previous release. I've written extensively about F-Spot's shortcomings, and Shotwell looks to be far from ready for general use (and I stand by my contention that gThumb blows both cleanly out of the water). PulseAudio? Ubuntu isn't the only distribution to dive into it before it was ready for the general user. At least it's getting better with each release and is usable. Kernel mode setting has been a nightmare for me - Ubuntu is the first distro to get it more right than wrong, so I give the developers credit for that. Xorg has done much to kill uptake of Linux over the past couple of years. Again, Ubuntu isn't the only project to just take what Xorg is releasing with no questions about the resulting breakage. I've been equally screwed in OpenBSD, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu by Xorg regressions on my Intel video-running hardware. I'd love not to complain ... I still stand by my contention that the Red Hat development model would bring much needed sanity to the desktop Linux space. If it only had as many packages as easily added as there are in Fedora, I'd be running CentOS 5.x right now on the desktop. As it is currently presented, the Ubuntu LTS is a "cheat" - it will be supported long-term but wasn't created with long-term use in mind. It's just a regular six-month release but with years of security patches. Yeah they pulled from Debian Testing rather than Sid, but what's in Testing this week could have been in Sid last week - it theoretically made the release more "stable" sooner, but not over the long haul. It's not like any other non-technical-user, desktop-focused distribution is doing what I'm proposing here. The field is clear for Ubuntu, Fedora (they'll never do it) or "other" to fill this void. |
| tracyanne Jun 09, 2010 4:50 PM EDT |
Can anyone explain to me why it is that the majority of Linux drivers that Brother publish (all GPLed) are not available by default from the repositories. It seems strange to me that if one purchases anything but a small subset of printers from companies like Brother, the Drivers have to be downloaded from the Brother site, they are GPLed and the source code available. In addition there are few 64 bit binaries. This seems to apply across the board. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jun 09, 2010 5:29 PM EDT |
Whatever you think of the end result, Microsoft and Apple develop for the non-technical user, while most Linux distributions pay a little lip service to that segment but focus on the more geeky side of the aisle. The percentage of contributors vs. users will always be the same. So if you want more contributors, first you need exponentially more users. |
| jdixon Jun 09, 2010 7:41 PM EDT |
> The percentage of contributors vs. users will always be the same. I doubt that's true, Steven. As your user base becomes less "geeky", the percentage of users who are capable of contributing drops. Now, if you expand the ways in which they can contribute, it helps the situation quite a bit, but I suspect it will still drop. |
| vect Jun 09, 2010 9:29 PM EDT |
steven, thanks for being so amiable. your points are good but i still disagree. Packaging recent versions of a software is one way Ubuntu influences the developers of that software. The Gwibber devs can be happy because they know users will be using their newest release and not something they released two years ago. Gwibber devs will have an easier time debugging new features as more users will be exposed to them. Gwibber devs will (hopefully) respond with enthusiasm by continuing to develop and improve Gwibber. Ubuntu is not paying money to Gwibber, but Ubuntu needs Gwibber to grow and improve. If Ubuntu only packages a 'stable' version of Gwibber, Ubuntu will lose a leveraging influence it has on Gwibber. Ubuntu's involvement with these projects would necessarily be complex. Ubuntu must remain satisfied with using community software 'as-is'. Development and documentation represent a potential bottomless pit for draining Ubuntu resources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_war . Ubuntu can only encourage developers to act responsibly and there is a fine line between using resources to 'encourage' a project and using resources to 'sustain' a project. |
| vect Jun 09, 2010 9:39 PM EDT |
this is purely speculation, but i think if ubuntu software center succeeds and if it becomes possible to make a small amount of money developing software for it, it will profoundly affect the linux desktop. more people will use oss, more developers will adopt oss development routines using tools like ant, make, git, etc.etc. and things may just generally start snow-balling and improving from that point on. |
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