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Ubuntu To Pay for Upgrades To the Free Software User Experience
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Sep 11, 2008 05:31 PM
jcatcw writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, is using his millions to improve the Linux user experience, hiring people to work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE. He had doubted that desktop Linux could ever equal the smooth, graceful integration of the Mac OS. Now, between the driving pace of open-source development, and Shuttleworth's millions, it might be happening. Why not? After all, Mac OS itself is based on FreeBSD. Desktop Linux's future is starting to look brighter."
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Interesting. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Interesting)
The other day though, he needed to chop up an audio file and didn't know what to do on his Mac. I didn't know either, but I do know how to do it with Audacity on Linux. So he sent me the file and then sat down with me as I did what he wanted. His only comment was "Wow, that's so easy on Linux". Granted, what he was seeing that was easy was in fact Audacity, not Linux, and I'm sure there is an easy to use app under Mac, but it's nice to see that, although Desktop Linux is constantly getting railed on, once someone not exposed to it actually sits down and sees what can be done, they're not intimidated by it.
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Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe somebody should point out that Audiacity works fine on Mac OS X, too (even without X11). I'm using it all the time for minor cropping/ogg-encoding work.
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Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Informative)
In fact, it uses wXwidgets [wxwidgets.org] for it's GUI, which aims to be cross platform between windows and the *nixes. Really, more of a testament to FLOSS, if not Linux.
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Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
I had to do that same thing the other day. I'm a Mac user, and I just used Audacity because I know it can do the job and it's free.
What's the official Mac way? Probably QuickTime Pro (which you have to pay for, which has always annoyed me). Or a third party piece of software. Actually I think you can cut bits out with QT (non-pro) but it's a bit unintuitive. I considered using Garage Band (which I'm sure could do it) but that would be overkill.
I've got to say, it was the first time I'd used Audacity in maybe two years. It was just as ugly as ever, unfortunately. It looks almost EXACTLY like the program that came with my SB16 in the Windows 3.1 days. It works, but could really use a little interface TLC, especially on the Mac (where the Linux/Windows style interface just looks even more out of place).
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Where's the BSD? (Score:5, Informative)
As anyone with half a brain knows, Mac OS X is based on the Xnu kernel, not the FreeBSD one. Xnu is a combination of Mach combined with various bits lifted from FreeBSD 5.x (but is not itself the FreeBSD kernel). OS X is an updated NeXT, not a GUI-fied FreeBSD.
I can't believe the editors let such a blatant slip-up onto the front page. Wait, it's slashdot --practically speaking, we have no editors. ;_;
Something great, but not new (Score:5, Informative)
Quite a broad range of things to improve (Score:5, Interesting)
X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE
Frankly, that's a considerable amount of work he's planning on hiring up for. This intrigues me greatly, to be honest. And, with any luck, this all comes back to the community so that not-Ubuntu users can get in on it, too.
Though I give it five minutes before we hear complaints that they're not helping out some obscure toolkit or DE. :-)
Re:Quite a broad range of things to improve (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Quite a broad range of things to improve (Score:5, Interesting)
Mark suggested himself that maybe Gnome could/should run on QT. With the Gnome crowd wanting to move away from GTK 2 and break compatibility anyways, I say now or never.
People should be seriously looking at the merits of such a move.
Why rewrite a new GTK 3 from the ground up, especially given one of the goals of a new GTK would be QT-like theming engine that is easier to deal with, when it already exists?
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Re:Quite a broad range of things to improve (Score:5, Insightful)
That isn't entirely true. Both GTK and QT have various language bindings which allow you write in a variety of languages.
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Gnome + KDE (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Gnome + KDE (Score:4, Insightful)
Specifically, I thought they were going to unite their libs so that gnome and kde would be cosmetic changes of the overall GUI subsystem sitting atop X.
Some things like DCOM have already been united and shared.. It just takes a few dedicated individuals to do so.
I personally would love united libs that any gui can use while knowing that every "frozen" feature will be as such for any major versions. Let everybody use it, from GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and any other manager.
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Re:Gnome + KDE (Score:4, Insightful)
It will probably never happen. Plus, the competition probably does both teams a lot of good. But let's look at the specific reasons:
And one could go on for a while regarding why these projects can't just magically join together. It's sort of like the cries of Webkit in Firefox. Read the Ars article on that subject to get a feel for trying to combine projects with similar goals but completely different designs. They just don't mesh.
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Re:Gnome + KDE (Score:4, Interesting)
The two environments take entirely opposite approaches to design:
They are both an equally valid approach, but the target demographics are incompatible. It would be stupid to try and combine them.
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Re:Gnome + KDE (Score:5, Funny)
What a wonderfully balanced opinion you have.
I can't imagine why there's such bad blood.
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Re:Gnome + KDE (Score:4, Insightful)
Yawn. What don't you get? There's choice and everyone has their own opinion on what is best. What makes you any more right than them? And, frankly, what makes you think we give a shit about your two-bit opinion anyway? If Shuttleworth wants to blow his money on GNOME as well as KDE, who are you to criticize?
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Re:Gnome + KDE (Score:5, Funny)
I disagree. I seriously hate KDE.
KDE is dysfunctional, overwhelms me with options, looks like shit (well, that can be themed, but...) and just generally sucks.
If Gnome had been chosen instead and as much time had been spent on polishing Gnome as Mandrake/Mandriva has spent on polishing KDE, we would not have this discussion.... Mandriva (i.e. Gmandriva) would already rule the desktop.
Sadly, I see more and more development time wasted on supporting / trying to polish KDE into something usable instead of just throwing the towel into the ring and going with Gnome.
====
Sorry if this offends your sensabilities, but I just couldn't resist, and I think that is pretty much sums up the silly debate between KDE and Gnome users who are both happy with their own choices.
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Re:Gnome + KDE (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Gnome + KDE (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is exactly why it's good that there are two major desktops. You get to use KDE. I get to use Gnome. For me Gnome is superior because it aligns better with the way I work. I don't care that it doesn't have a gazillion options because I'm not going to be twiddling them anyway.
You can twiddle to your hearts content on KDE.
Isn't choice wonderful?
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An omen! (Score:5, Funny)
ALSA Drivers Please!! (Score:5, Interesting)
As an audio software developer, I have tried several times to make and port programs to Linux.
Basically, you never dare to request anything other than the default config from an alsa driver. Trying different sample rates, formats or channel configs can cause anything from an unhelpful error code to a segfault (I kid you not).
So it's hard to take Linux seriously in this context.
ALSA is a roadblock, due to being "good enough", but it's nowhere near good.
Please, ALSA, GO AWAY!!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
I've done a lot of work on audio on Linux, not for the audio itself, but because I work with satellite telemetry that's frequency-modulated in the audio band. I hate ALSA. It broke completely with the Unix philosophy.
Before ALSA, one would open audio devices just like files, acquire audio data just like reading files, play audio just like writing files. ALSA went the Redmond way, one different API for each different type of data.
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Re:Please, ALSA, GO AWAY!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Amen to everyone who bashes alsa here, I agree wholeheartly.
I think it's high time for a rewrite, maybe they get it right the third time...
It's really amazing how thoroughly they managed to screw up something so relatively simple (when compared to other areas of the kernel).
Every time my box decides to re-shuffle the order of my soundcards (re-promoting the onboard sound to default), or decides to remain silent for the rest of the session after I plugged/unplugged my USB headset, or requires me to play trial&error with barely documented and obscure config files (asoundrc/openalrc) to *maybe* get sound in a game working it reminds me of why 2008 is probably still not the year of linux on the desktop...
To be fair, yes ALSA "works" most of the time and even out of the box. The distro-hackers managed to beat the hardware-detection into submission so that pretty much any liveCD will give you sound (at least on one of your cards...) right away. Just never try to get fancy, like going beyond adjusting the Master-volume. You're in for a world of pain.
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Straight from Shaney's mouth (Score:5, Funny)
"Macs were interesting because 1) they weren't Intel and 2) they weren't Unix, now they're both. Oh well."
Are his millions enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
Red Hat has invested a lot of money to improve the Linux desktop experience as well. They've made great strides, but still - they still have a ways to go, at least in the opinion of this user of both OSes. So spending more money does not guarantee they'll reach the goal.
I think, in order for Linux to really break through here, they probably need to have teams of actual designers rather than have the coders do most of the design themselves. They also probably need to "think different" and come up with their own usability/interface ideas, rather than keep mimicking Apple's (which Gnome seems to frequently do, if discussions on the developer email lists are any indication).
In any case this is a good thing, and I hope Linux continues to push forward thanks to this new investment.
Re:Are his millions enough? (Score:5, Informative)
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Mark Shuttleworth is... (Score:4, Interesting)
**Geek points not redeemable for any cash value.
No MS Exchange integration? (Score:4, Insightful)
No Reason Why Not (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no reason Shuttleworth can't deliver something on par with OS X. All he needs to do is concentrate on functionaliy, usability, and marketability, and not worry that much about ideology. I.e., the same things Apple worries about.
The market does not care how software is writen, it just cares about what it does and how it looks.
Re:Flash content (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can get Adobe to open source Flash, I'm sure that can be arranged.
In the mean time, the best you can do is to tell web developers to not use Flash, but open alternatives.
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Re:Flash content (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, there are a great many things Flash does for which there are no alternatives, open or otherwise.
Let me give you a recent, stupid example: We want to let users upload a bunch of things at once. We have three options:
1: Build something using multiple file upload fields. (This could be done elegantly -- by hiding one as soon as it's set, and generating a new one.) In other words, we force the user to select each file individually, and click browse again -- and the files can't start uploading until they've all been selected.
2: Accept zipfiles. Extra work for us (admittedly not much), and extra work for them.
3: Use Flash. Not only can they select more than one file in the open dialog (ctrl+click, shift+click, ctrl+a, etc), but as soon as they select one, we can start uploading it.
I want to use open alternatives. I hate Flash more than... I'm not a very hateful person, but Flash makes me homicidal. But even something as simple as that, there's an advantage to using Flash.
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Re:Flash content (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, the process to share files under Ubuntu is almost exactly the same as in Windows. You clearly just don't WANT to be able to share files under it.
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Re:Flash content (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Flash content (Score:5, Insightful)
A life without entertainment isn't worth living.
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Re:Flash content (Score:5, Funny)
Link for 64 bit version please?
Adobe don't believe in 64 bit. In fact i think their programmers get confused if you ask them to count to 33
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Lunix??? (Score:5, Funny)
WTF is Lunix???? Doesn't exist, according to distrowatch.
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Re:Lunix??? (Score:4, Informative)
Linux / Unix
Sorry, it's common parlance in Plan 9 world [google.co.uk]. However, I didn't know it was so insular until your post.
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Re:Why Not? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe the problem is until Linux geeks get laid more, they simply won't bother to take time to smell the flowers: i.e. pay any attention to the end-user's experience.
I have a thought! Maybe Mark should be paying hookers!? BRILLIANT!
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Re:Why Not? (Score:5, Funny)
<BENDER>
In fact, forget the development!
</BENDER>
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Re:Why Not? (Score:4, Insightful)
That kind of stuff has almost always been done at the distro level. Sun, Redhat, Novell, Ubuntu, etc. Independant developers tend to stick to their projects at least in the Gnome universe [gnome.org].
I wish Sun, or someone else would do more usability studies like this [gnome.org] one. That is exactly the kind of feedback we need. I find it nearly impossible to imagine the noob experience after having used Linux for the past 10 years.
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MacOS could be based on RiscOS (Score:5, Interesting)
for all that it mattered. BSD was free and worked, in 1986. That's why Jobs - when he solicited his engineer's choice - was told to use BSD 4.
MacOS is "based" on NeXT - which was derived from extending the Smalltalk-like model of Objective C to a whole series of desktop and application frameworks.
You see, Jobs and his guys were SO blown away by the GUI at PARC, that they missed the object revolution, used to create it. They were all determined to do this again, the 'right' way, without saddling Mac/Lisa compatibility to the horse.
That got engineered on later ;-)
You want further illustration of this argument? Try managing an OSX workgroup from the network with existing BSD and opensource. You effectively manage the POSIXy parts of the system, while having almost no policy or configuration management of the Finder/Application experienc through which much of the Mac user interacts. You could - in theory, with the sources available, swap a modern Linux distro under there instead of the hybrid BSD. Almost no one would notice.
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Re:MacOS could be based on RiscOS (Score:5, Funny)
Jeremiah Cornelius (137) *
People with user numbers like that always make me think of early generation vampires or very old wine.
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Re:MacOS could be based on RiscOS (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah the ironic thing was that Apple already had an MKLinux port [mklinux.org] for their Macintosh systems, and all they really needed to do was integrate the Mac OS GUI with MKLinux and then just use the OpenStep [wikipedia.org] enhancements because they too are open sourced like MKLinux and could have saved the money they used to buy out Next and bring Steve Jobs back and just do it all better by themselves.
Instead they got Steve Jobs and Next and a much more bigger and bloated operating system than they expected to get.
The other option, besides buying up Be Inc. was to license AROS [wikipedia.org] and then build Carbon and Mac OS systems on top of that as it is already object oriented and based on the AmigaOS that IBM licensed from Commodore to give OS/2 2.0 an object oriented WPS system [os2world.com] as Commodore got there already in 1985 before anyone else did, and Apple was basically doing the same thing with OSX that Commodore did with AmigaDOS/Workbench in 1985.
The Amiga was already object oriented even going back to its 1970's roots as the Atari Lorianne project that was basically an Atari 2600 mod to turn the Atari 2600 into an object oriented GUI computer, but the Atari 400/800 projects put Lorianne on the back burner until Commodore bought out the team in the 1980's. The Amiga project predated the Apple Lisa project, and the Lorianne/Amiga team offered Apple to buy them out first, but gave Steve Jobs his idea for the Lisa computer (and later the Macintosh) and he told them no, and visited Xerox's PARC to get some more good ideas.
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Re:Simple start (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats right.
Ubuntu works fine.
Firefox works fine.
Gnome/X works fine.
Compiz works fine.
Pretty much every app works fine.
Bugs are addressed quickly on ubuntu's website.
ADOBE makes a crap version of Flash for Linux.
It's Ubuntu's fault Flash crashes. Nuh-huh
Try: The proprietary software dealer.
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Re:Simple start (Score:5, Insightful)
We can fix the open source stuff if it was at fault.
We could even fix Flash if it was Open Source.
But the cold hard truth is Flash is closed source and proprietary means ONLY the creator can make changes that would increase stability. That's also the same reason why kernel debuggers wont touch a listing from a tainted kernel.
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Re:Simple start (Score:5, Insightful)
There are, what, a few thousand programmers who understand Linux systems programming well enough to debug GUI programs and post patches? It's not trivial for those programmers to fix Flash because Adobe won't let them see the source code. How is that Ubuntu's fault?
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Re:Why do people go on about how great Mac OSX is? (Score:5, Informative)
It's slow, crashy and overcomplicated.
Your first two arguments are unprovable flamebait, and the last is a matter of opinion. There are lots of people who think it's fast, stable, and just complicated enough.
It's got an ugly, messy desktop environment and it doesn't come with any decent usable software.
Again, the first is a matter of opinion, and I would think you could at least realize that you're in the minority. Lots of people think the desktop is pretty and well-organized. The last is, again, flamebait. It may not come with as much as your typical Linux distribution, but Safari, Pages, Mail, iTunes, Xcode, DVD Player, and the various iLife apps, among others, are far from unusuable or indecent. And, despite the fact that it doesn't come with as much as your typical Linux distribution, there are many thousands of free and open source programs that you can install.
It's got this weird browser that doesn't render stuff, doesn't have AdBlock and which usually gets replaced with Firefox.
"Doesn't render stuff" is, again, unproveable flamebait. Safari does just fine in rendering tests. You're also showing off your ignorance, as it does have AdBlock [sourceforge.net]. Come on, that's the first link in Google.
It can't play back most videos or music files without expensive shareware.
This is just wrong [videolan.org] and uninformed [perian.org]. Those are just examples off the top of my head that I like, there are plenty of other free and open source players out there.
It doesn't even have a usable text editor!
What about TextEdit and Pages is not usable?
If those are too flashy for you, just install vim or emacs. They work fine.
It's utter crap. Ubuntu is already better than Mac OSX. Please don't try to make another crappy OSX Aqua-looky-likey clone thing.
You clearly do not even know what you're talking about. Please spend some time using OS X or at least do a bit of research before you try to troll again.
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Re:Stop saying that Mac OS is based on FreeBSD. (Score:5, Informative)
Do you ever even read any posts? Rliegh stated clearly that the kernel is XNU which is... fuck it read it yourself.
There ain't no FreeBSD kernel in OS X. Got it? It's the userland, process model, the networks stack and the virtual file system that was taken from BSD, but the kernel and drivers are heavily influenced by Mach.
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Re:Stop saying that Mac OS is based on FreeBSD. (Score:4, Informative)
In that line of argument, the Linux kernel is GNU HURD, because it ended up being a replacement for the then never delivered GNU HURD kernel, for the GNU OS.
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