My dislike grows
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| r_a_trip May 03, 2012 9:19 AM EDT |
Mark proclaiming Bug #1 fixed. Yuck, just yuck. That bug described the dominance of MS on the desktop and the detrimental effect of proprietary software on software developers and the less fortunate contingent of end-users. I don't see it fixed. MS is still top dog on the desktop and where MS lost share it is mostly usurped by control freak Apple. Of Mark's assumed fix (mobile devices, really?), only Android is FOSS and iOS is more restricted than Windows itself. The proliferation of walled gardens is in full swing. Just because Canonical doesn't care about the desktop anymore, doesn't mean that Bug #1 is fixed. Looks like we need to look at other companies and distro's to make that happen. |
| DrGeoffrey May 03, 2012 10:20 AM EDT |
Quoting:Just because Canonical doesn't care about the desktop anymore, doesn't mean that Bug #1 is fixed. Looks like we need to look at other companies and distro's to make that happen. I reached that conclusion when Mark decided to develop Unity instead of following Gnome's new desktop metaphor. Quite honestly, I don't care for either interface. But, IMNSHO Canonical quite simply does not have the excess resources to waste. "It's nothing personal mind you. Just business." - Mrs. Carlson |
| gus3 May 03, 2012 11:55 AM EDT |
@DrGeoffrey, are you sure you aren't quoting Abe Vigoda as Tessio? |
| DrGeoffrey May 03, 2012 12:37 PM EDT |
@gus3 A *lot* of people have used that line. At the time however, I was thinking of the Big Guy's momma from WKRP in Cincinnati. "That's one mean Momma." - Venus |
| tuxchick May 03, 2012 1:01 PM EDT |
What r_a_trip said. |
| Khamul May 03, 2012 6:59 PM EDT |
I'm glad to hear that Bug #1 is completely fixed now. Since we don't have to worry about MS being dominant on the desktop any more because of the proliferation of mobile devices, I'll just go ahead and use my smartphone to edit some AutoCAD drawings and edit some complex and lengthy documents. Oh wait... The only thing that's really "fixed" now is that the mobile phone proliferation, and Apple's refusal to support Flash in iOS, has rendered Flash much less important on the web, but there's still a bunch of crappy websites that require it. |
| tracyanne May 03, 2012 7:02 PM EDT |
Did someone mention that Ubuntu's number 1 bug is Mark Shuttleworth? |
| BernardSwiss May 03, 2012 8:30 PM EDT |
When I can walk into a "Big Box" chain, and not have to worry that confessing a preference for Linux will result in the item I'm interested in suddenly being "out of stock", when I can go to a major computer OEM website, and find a Linux option at all, let alone offered with configurations and options equal to those offered with Windows devices, when I can call up tech-support and not be informed that the problem is that I'm using Linux, which "isn't very good at network or internet" and the only cure is to use a real, "modern", "capable" "full-featured" operating system that doesn't suck at networking (ie. Windows or OS X), when I can buy a consumer appliance, such an ebook reader that actually runs on Linux, itself, and not have to spend a couple of evenings searching the web, till I can dig out where the product's devs have helpfully on their own initiative stashed their own tools online, because the product's official website doesn't even mention Linux, and presumes that my new ebook reader can only be activated via a Windows PC (or perhaps a Mac if I want to be "different"), or failing that won't mind "borrowing" someone else's Windows PC to get my ebook reader up and running, THEN (and only then) "Bug Number One" will have been fixed. |
| tuxchick May 03, 2012 10:18 PM EDT |
+1 Bernard. |
| montezuma May 04, 2012 7:12 PM EDT |
Who cares what Bling Shuttleworth thinks anyway. The guy is full of himself. |
| dinotrac May 05, 2012 9:44 AM EDT |
>The guy si full of himself The guy has spent a lot of money promoting Ubuntu, which means a lot of money promoting Linux -- even if he doesn't call it that. Though I'm not a big Ubuntu fan, I'm inclined to give a tip of the hat to somebody who's doing that. |
| montezuma May 05, 2012 10:02 AM EDT |
Dino, Point accepted and if you look at my posting history you will see I have given Shuttleworth due credit in the past. This was particularly so with certain folks around here who used to slag off Ubuntu in the early days in order to promote other distros (for example PCLinuxOS or Debian). Indeed for many years I supported Ubuntu by reporting bugs and helping folks on the forums. However my point remains. I became very peaved last year when Shuttleworth decided to pull rank over Unity. What pisses me off is that Ubuntu was promoted as a community and indeed that is what the name means. But in the end Shuttleworth rode roughshod over that community because he has an agenda in terms of making Canonical profitable. Now you could argue that since he put his money into the project it is his to control just like a corporation. However Ubuntu was never promoted in that way. It was promoted by Shuttleworth in the early days as a genuine community effort. These days it seems that he has decided to take what the community has built and cash it in at the bank. Kind of like a crop farmer. I don't agree with that dishonesty and playing people for suckers. |
| dinotrac May 05, 2012 10:17 AM EDT |
@montezuma -- I don't think anybody ever hid Ubuntu's true nature. And there is nothing contradictory about a corporation fostering a community. Apple does it, Microsoft does it, IBM does it. However, anybody taking part in a community centered around a corporate effort must be cognizant of what a corporation is and why it exists. Getting upset at a corporation for trying to further its project is a wee bit dishonest, too. If you wanted a true non-corporate entity, Debian has been around for years. They make a fine base distribution, but they haven't exactly moved the Linux ball forward. I'm not disputing your right to be pissed off at the things Ubuntu does, just as I retain the right to get pissed at the KDE folks, or anybody else. Somebody screws up, it's fair to let them have it, but... a capitalist enterprise is a capitalist enterprise and that's what Ubuntu has been from the start and that 's been what Ubuntu has claimed to be from the start. |
| lcafiero May 05, 2012 2:18 PM EDT |
dino -- Overall, I agree with your post above, and you know that my reputation as an Ubuntu, um, "critic" precedes me. But I'd like to point out a nuance that may explain people's -- how can I put this? frustration? -- views about Canonical/Ubuntu's given or taken place in the FOSS realm and why people might feel a sense of betrayal. Yes, Canonical/Ubuntu has always been a capitalist enterprise and they may have claimed to be, sotto voce, from the start (sotto voce in the same way they're no longer a "Linux OS"). However, Canonical/Ubuntu arguably veiled their intentions and acted in a disingenuous manner, especially with people new to FOSS, when they went to the lenghts they did to portray themselves as the "group Linux kumbaya" and with their symbols (a stylized group of people holding hands, or whatever the logo represents), while a tsunami of documentation portrays them as taking much from the wider FOSS community a,nd returning little, to build their capitalist enterprise; in stark contrast to how two other capitalist enterprises -- Red Hat or Novell (with OpenSUSE) -- interact with the same paradigm. So whose fault is it? Is it the fault of the people who were misled and are now angry that they were? Arguably, yes, and as you said they'd have every right to be. Ultimately, though, for one to be misled, someone else has to do the misleading, so fault -- more fault, in my opinion -- lies with the misleader as well as with the misled. |
| Steven_Rosenber May 05, 2012 3:07 PM EDT |
Ubuntu "moved the ball forward" for Linux and free software, no question. But the honeymoon between Canonical and the geeky masses is over. It's hard to court the already converted while digging for new markets (mobile, TV, tablet). I hope they eventually get it right. Things are more than a bit bumpy right now in the Ubuntu ecosphere/community. It'd be worse if Canonical was actually finding some kind of success in the post-PC market. Right now it's a lot of talk and a lot of changes to the flagship product (Ubuntu PC desktop) to accommodate other devices, but not a lot of uptake on said devices. That said, look at Ubuntu Server. They seem serious about it, and it is a very credible and compelling product. No Unity-like mistakes there. |
| gus3 May 05, 2012 7:15 PM EDT |
dinotrac wrote:I don't think anybody ever hid Ubuntu's true nature.Not even when they took "Linux" off their home page? dinotrac wrote:there is nothing contradictory about a corporation fostering a community. Apple does it, Microsoft does it, IBM does it.And so does Oracle, and so did The SCO Group, despite their best efforts. |
| dinotrac May 05, 2012 8:23 PM EDT |
Quoting:Not even when they took "Linux" off their home page? Especially then. |
| gus3 May 05, 2012 9:14 PM EDT |
So, you're really talking about Canonical, not Ubuntu? |
| TxtEdMacs May 06, 2012 7:30 AM EDT |
gus, SCO was a takeover followed by the name appropriation that gave the wrong impression, because too soon legal blackmail became their business' modus operandi. That was due to Unix not delivering the level of profits they felt they were entitled. |
| montezuma May 06, 2012 12:00 PM EDT |
Dino, You perhaps did not listen to Shuttleworth's rhetoric in the early days. He used the name Ubuntu to promote the distro as having a central role for the community of users. Ubuntu still makes great play of this: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CommunityCouncil The consequence of this was that a large number of people including me took part under that understanding that when major decisions were made that the community would have a serious input into the future of the distro. The community in the process added a large amount of value to the distro. Shuttleworth played both sides of the street on this and in the process pissed off a lot of people including the Debian folks you mention. I think if you suggested to Shuttleworth in those days that his community was analogous to the Microsoft "community" then he would have objected violently. That after all is what Bug #1 was all about. Ultimately I am not particularly concerned since I will revert to Debian or a Mint variant of same if Shuttleworth continues further along the path he is taking. I just am irritated by his mealy mouthed spin. |
| flufferbeer May 06, 2012 3:34 PM EDT |
I think that the Canonical M$ and his minions sorta MUST set some high expectations for their Baboontu Dev Summit thing out there in Oakland,California this week. Notice the DEV emphasis in this super-hyped hullabaloo rather than on the "Community" and its wonderful LUnity-accepting (more like UNaccepting!) end-users. I agree with dinotrac insofar as just by looking at the corporate sponsors of this, we can see the high stakes Canonical is putting on its "Developer, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, ....." Does that Bug #1 refrain sound familiar to anyone?? 2c |
| caitlyn May 06, 2012 6:41 PM EDT |
Quoting:That said, look at Ubuntu Server. They seem serious about it, and it is a very credible and compelling product. I respectfully disagree. Red Hat offers 10 years of support and SUSE offers 7. Canonical offers 5 but the server build is useless long before that. Red Hat and SUSE both backport patches and support for new hardware into their enterprise kernels. Canonical doesn't do that with Ubuntu so even a year after release it may just not work with a new server due to lack of hardware support. In general, I don't see anything compelling about Ubuntu server that isn't available in a much better supported package elsewhere. |
| montezuma May 07, 2012 8:49 AM EDT |
Caitlyn, I did a quick comparison of subscription prices on servers also. I was surprised that RedHat which is the acknowledged market leader with a rather large technical support staff compared to Canonical has pricing apparently little different per server per year. Surely if you are competing with RedHat you should offer a significantly lower price point? Not that I understand the practicalities of such decisions...... |
| dinotrac May 07, 2012 8:53 AM EDT |
@monte -- You might be surprised. That brand recognition of Ubuntu is worth something. I've been in several situations where people have recommended Ubuntu servers. I presume personal familarity with Ubuntu is spilling over into server choice. Not so different from the initial growth of Windows NT with one glaring exception: NT grew when Unix servers were expensive non-commodity items costing arms and legs. |
| caitlyn May 07, 2012 11:29 AM EDT |
@dinotrac: In my business I have run into many Red Hat shops, a fair number of SUSE shops, lots of smaller businesses using CentOS, a few using Scientific Linux, and an occasional Debian installation. I have yet to encounter even one Ubuntu server shop. I have heard of exactly one in this state. Of course, I'm in North Carolina, the home of Red Hat. My take is that if the IT Manager decides the Ubuntu hasn't got a chance. If the admins have free run then you never know what might turn up. I remember replacing Gentoo with Red Hat in one place some years back. Management was terribly unhappy that an admin had put Gentoo on any of their servers. Miraculously he didn't get fired even when he objected to Red Hat at every turn. |
| dinotrac May 07, 2012 11:55 AM EDT |
I would bet that Ubuntu is getting no uptake in real professional IT shops. Web startups might be a different matter. They aren't often blessed with that professional outlook. |
| vainrveenr May 07, 2012 12:05 PM EDT |
Quoting:I was surprised that RedHat which is the acknowledged market leader with a rather large technical support staff compared to Canonical has pricing apparently little different per server per year. Quoting:In my business I have run into many Red Hat shops, a fair number of SUSE shops, lots of smaller businesses using CentOS, a few using Scientific Linux, and an occasional Debian installation. I have yet to encounter even one Ubuntu server shop. I have heard of exactly one in this state. Of course, I'm in North Carolina, the home of Red Hat. These pair of comment snippets bring back some recollection of Red Hat's mutually reciprocal antipathy towards Ubuntu in the written piece of less than two years ago, 'Ubuntu Empire Strikes Back', linked to LXer via http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/139397 As author Susan Linton wrote: Quoting:The old "Ubuntu doesn't contribute back" argument cropped up again when Dave Neary released a report of the talk he gave at GUADEC on the contributions made to the GNOME desktop environment. He found that Red Hat and Novell contributed the most, and that Ubuntu and Mandriva (primarily a KDE distribution) were among the lowest. A firestorm of debate ensued, and Shuttleworth was accused of name calling and guilt to try to win the argument. Indeed. One could even expect that this mutual antipathy between Red Hat and Canonical will no doubt continue, especially between their respective supporters. This, surrounding the facts of Ubuntu's latest server offering. |
| jdixon May 07, 2012 12:08 PM EDT |
> I would bet that Ubuntu is getting no uptake in real professional IT shops. And with the financial problems and then sale of Novell, I'd bet SuSE uptake has seen a severe drop in favor of Red Hat. Managers don't like to bet on a product they think may not be around in 2 years. |
| Fettoosh May 07, 2012 12:16 PM EDT |
Quoting: ...but the server build is useless long before that I am not sure what you mean by that, do you mean a Linux that is supposed to run for ever it suddenly becomes useless? Quoting:Canonical doesn't do that {backport patches} with Ubuntu so even a year after release it may just not work with a new server due to lack of hardware support. It would have been more convincing if a link was furnished. Quoting:Of course, I'm in North Carolina, the home of Red Hat. Very appropriate disclosure. And if I am not mistaken, I believe you mentioned some where else that you worked for Red Hat previously, so you could be better informed about RH than Ubuntu. I agree with Dino about the "personal familiarity spilling" thing, you could be a proof of that. :-) |
| number6x May 07, 2012 3:00 PM EDT |
When I read the title of the thread, I imagined Mark Shuttleworth as Ubuntu's # 1 bug... |
| caitlyn May 07, 2012 3:52 PM EDT |
Quoting:I am not sure what you mean by that, do you mean a Linux that is supposed to run for ever it suddenly becomes useless?No, I mean if it doesn't support current hardware, meaning any server a company is likely to buy, it is useless. Quoting:It would have been more convincing if a link was furnished.Or you could look at any Ubuntu LTS kernel and see for yourself. http://dag.wieers.com/blog/ubuntus-need-to-catch-a-wave Quoting:And if I am not mistaken, I believe you mentioned some where else that you worked for Red Hat previously, so you could be better informed about RH than Ubuntu.Not exactly. I worked as a consultant for Red Hat but I was a third party contractor for seven months. I was offered a permanent position but the nearly 100% travel schedule was simply too much for me. |
| caitlyn May 07, 2012 3:54 PM EDT |
With all due DISRESPECT for your casting aspersions and assuming that I an 1) not knowledgeable about Ubuntu and 2) speaking from personal bias:
Quoting:I agree with Dino about the "personal familiarity spilling" thing, you could be a proof of that. :-)In a word: no. p.s.: Dino never made such an accusation leveled at me. |
| Fettoosh May 07, 2012 5:58 PM EDT |
Quoting:Or you could look at any Ubuntu LTS kernel and see for yourself I don't claim to be knowledgeable about Ubuntu LTS kernel and I am not sure I can or need to determine anything, and thanks for the very informative. So your point is pretty much an expansion on the article's main point quoted below: Quoting: So what are you getting at ? To me, what he is saying is that, Canonical is trying to piggyback RH kernel to avoid hiring developers to do its own since it would be too costly for them. I believe that is different than Canonical doesn't furnish such support. Quoting:With all due DISRESPECT for your casting aspersions Casting aspersions on anyone is never in my intentions. Sorry you took it that way. All what I was saying is that you are more familiar with RH than with Ubuntu and because of that your are more inclined to gravitate towards using RH instead of Ubuntu. |
| caitlyn May 07, 2012 6:28 PM EDT |
Actually, it's been pretty well documented that Ubuntu LTS does not use the Red Hat kernel, which is why the hardware support deteriorates over time. Again, if it doesn't work on current servers it's pretty well useless to most enterprise customers. What Dag wrote is, unfortunately, not 100% accurate. If that has changed recently, as in Ubuntu 12.94 LTS, my information may be out of date, |
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