Their other employees/accounts include:
- http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a
- http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm
- http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82 (their social media manager)
- http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly
Then there's also maxko87 and evo_9 but I haven't figured out what their connection is yet, maxko87 autosubmits extremetech articles and evo_9's usage mirrors ukdm's who submits ~50% geek.com + ~50% a small group of other sites, but for extremetech.
<snark>
</snark>Maybe if we didn't have "critics" like you that are quick to rant and diss other people work while not doing anything themselves, highly-visible projects wouldn't have this problem and wouldn't require such steps.
I lead a fairly successful open-source project and I'm on the receiving end of this attitude of entitlement as well.
People don't realize how much work goes into developing of software and when you give it away for free, with source-code, it's very demoralizing to have non-constructive, abusive comments like the above ("crap interface" ?).
I'm sure Ubuntu, being vastly more popular and visible, receives vastly more "constructive criticism".
</nosnark>
I'm sorry, compared to standard GNOME (v2, v3 can join Unity on the junkpile IMAO) or KDE, Unity is crap, and I am hardly alone in that opinion.
Perhaps certain open source developers just suck at taking any kind of criticism? That's sure what these moves feel like.
I would bet large sums of money we're going to see something distasteful come of this, along the lines of further intrusive desktop advertising ala Amazon Lens.
Maybe if you would start listening to the community more when there's a large outcry (amazon lens, unity, gnome 3, etc etc etc) there would be fewer people who feel they are "entitled" to a desktop experience that doesn't suck!
Ubuntu 12.04 is the best distribution of a Linux-based OS by such a huge margin that it's, as they say, not even funny. Even if I take into account the fact that many users seem to nurse a rather passionate dislike of Unity, I don't see how anyone can claim that Canonical is "botching, killing and burning" anything. Ubuntu is in the long term most definitely on a steady path of continuous improvement, and is currently at a level where the "it just works" factor is present in surprisingly huge amounts. (I am saying this from the perspective of both the desktop and the server versions - the server version is ridiculously hassle-free to run compared to what I am used to with supposedly superior "enterprise" distros the likes of RHEL and SLES.)
To be honest, your comment is so bizarre that I now wonder if it was supposed to be a wind-up.
* Hardware accelerated graphics
* Suspend and resume when closing/opening lid
* All the non-standard thinkpad buttons - external monitor, volume etc
* USB bluetooth adaptor
* External bluetooth trackpad (Apple)
* 3G dongle - this was not only autodetected, but popped up a wizard that asked me to identify my carrier, and then proceeded to configure everything and just magically brought up the internets
Anyone who doesn't think this is a big deal has not been running linux for very long :-P
Personally, I still replace Unity with Gnome3, but that's a single add-repo and package install, taking about 2 minutes. Unity is significantly better with each release, if that continues I'll probably go back to it in a few versions.
I don't get the vitriol either. Slackware and Debian are still around if Ubuntu is too n00bish for you; personally I'm old and I want shit to just work. Haters gonna hate I suppose.
This can be a reason Shuttleworth is afraid of critics. Imagine a new feature will be "Ubuntu Premium": a package of brand new professionally developed productivity apps, ranging from webdev and graphics to security products. It's the next logical step after the introduction of ads.
If such an unpopular feature was announced today, Ubuntu will lose its users way before the release of v13.
This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and design decisions they did not want. The decisions made by Shuttleworth have nothing to do with FOSS or the users. His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind. Mr. Shuttleworth desired a single code base for Ubuntu. That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the portable device version of Ubuntu. Mouse and keyboard do not function well on portable devices so...enter Unity.
All of these things would be fine, if Mr. Shuttleworth did not claim that all of this was to provide his users with a superior experience. We already had a wonderful experience. Now, not so much.
I will now be replacing all of my machines', and our corporate machines' Ubuntu installs with an alternate flavor of Linux. I was willing to live with the Unity change, I was willing to live with the Grub change. I am not willing to live with this.
FOSS is not built upon secret sauce Mr. Shuttleworth. For shame!
This is the entitlement that Shuttleworth hates. It's his project. People contribute because they want to contribute, but it's still his project. He owes you nothing, and you owe him nothing. You're mad because... you don't have any other choice? I know that's not true.
How about, you're mad because you want to be mad about something and this is what you've picked? That's about the only reason to be this emotionally involved in your operating system of choice.
Who do you think the Ubuntu user base is? I'm willing to bet the vast majority are not developers locked into the gnome 2 style desktop environment as you appear to be claiming.
> His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind.
How dare he make choices he believes will benefit the company he has personally dumped massive piles of cash into. Really, what an asshole. </sarcasm>
> That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the portable device version of Ubuntu. Mouse and keyboard do not function well on portable devices so...enter Unity.
The gnome dev process was a train wreck, KDE is a bloated mess, and xfce is devoted to being minimalist. His only choices were forking gnome 2 or building their own DE. I really can't blame him for not wanting to take over a massive existing code base. Particularly one that is locked into a desktop metaphor that doesn't have a long term future for the masses.
> All of these things would be fine, if Mr. Shuttleworth did not claim that all of this was to provide his users with a superior experience. We already had a wonderful experience. Now, not so much.
What makes you think people like you (developers, presumably) are the target market for Ubuntu? They aren't, they never were, ubuntu has always had the goal of being a distro for non linux geeks. Its pretty clear looking at the mass market that the standard desktop metaphor is on its way out for general purpose computing needs.
I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet-annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is barely half a pixel thin.
I recently tried about 10 different "lightweight" distros on an old P3 with ~128 MB of RAM, and Crunchbang was the only one that ran ok and felt polished. (IIRC puppy linux was the only other one that ran fine, and it's just hideously ugly.)
My favorite distro was one that prominently mentioned that it could run on low end systems like mine. It turned out that the installer needed more RAM than the distro... I suggested to the developer that this be mentioned on the download page, and he seemed confused/offended! :(
Thanks for mentioning this.
Ultimately it's not crucially important. But it's also unnecessary. And if you don't have Google's resources behind your behind-closed-doors development, you could be missing out on community contributions.
Much of the criticism Unity and various other features received was well-deserved, because Canonical released essentially alpha software. Then when the criticism comes in, the defense is, "hey take it easy guys, we weren't done yet!" Well if you're not done--don't release!
There's a middle ground here: develop and design in public, but don't release until you're truly ready. Everyone says that sticking to LTS is the only way to guarantee a stable system, but that's just not practical in the milestone-distro world, where an important update to one piece of software you find critical requires an update to the entire system.
He is paying to have code developed to help improve Ubuntu and he happens to want to get somewhat polished versions of it before they release to public. Why is this bad? Sometimes people release early/often and that works for them. In this case Shuttleworth and by extension Canonical believe that releasing at the polished stage is beneficial.
Plus its not like there is some uber-secret group in a dark chamber coding this stuff up -- you just have to be an ubuntu developer with a little bit of traction to be part of it.
Instead, you have to express that you are working on some really kick-ass features and you want them to really "pop" when they debut. You have to focus on the positives and pretend that the critics don't exist. (Publicly, that is; internally, you had better listen to the critics).