Some individuals in the Linux community regularly criticize Canonical for "not playing along well with others" and taking Ubuntu in directions that go against "the community's wishes." I think those individuals are misguided. Canonical does try to collaborate with other projects and distributions. It's just that such collaboration is not the company's priority.
Canonical's priority, as best as I can judge, is to make Ubuntu the world's leading Linux distribution for desktops and other platforms -- cloud, tablet, phone, etc. So they will use whatever F/LOSS code works best to achieve this goal, regardless of whether it's internally or externally developed. They are not letting 'ego' and 'pride' get in the way of achieving their goal.
If using systemd will help them achieve their goal more than using upstart, they will use systemd. Ditto for Unity versus Gnome, and for Mir versus Wayland. For them, it's not about "winning the argument," but about "winning the #1 spot."
The move to Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell was not Canonical's idea, it was the Gnome Project who decided their roadmap. Canonical in fact developed Unity because of concerns over Gnome Shell. Personally, I rather like Gnome Shell, especially with a judicious choice of extensions, but I have to admit my Core Duo 2 laptops do not always like a fully composited desktop.
Gnome 2 is obsolete, but lives on in RHEL 6 releases, e.g. CentOS/Scientific Linux/Springdale Linux with support until 2017 (apps and hardware) and 2020 (security only). External repositories provide newer kernels[1].
The MATE desktop is a fork of Gnome 2 built on libraries that are being moved forward. External repos for Debian Wheezy and mainstream packages for Debian Jessie. Mint also provide a MATE desktop[2], with the familiar Ubuntu package base.
A clarification: The classic look of Gnome 2 sort of lives in RHEL 7 since it will run Gnome 3 with Classic Mode[1] meaning that all that effort for a new UI/UX is wasted as the looks and the "user's workflows" will be the same as it was under RHEL 6 (IOW Gnome 2 like).
I take the point, and it is worth emphasising that the 'classic' mode is the default for RHEL7 installations when you choose Gnome as the desktop environment. However the 'mode' is skin deep - no customisation, can't remove panels, can't add panel apps &c.
I wonder how many EL 7 desktop users will opt for the KDE desktop now that both are presented as equal choices on installation?
It has always seemed strange to me too. I have just always chalked it up to being an ubuntu thing.[1] I don't know if it has caught on in other distro-ecosystems but it seemed like it started with Ubuntu; which was peculiar because you do not have to deal with dependency hell--you have apt right there in that little black box!
The other ubuntu curiosity is installing `command-not-found` by default? I never thought you could have something worse than /usr/games/sl in your path, but then ubuntu introduced me to `command-not-found`.
I find `command-not-found``a lot more useful than `sl` (sl is some ascii animation that'll be shown for a short/long while if you write it).
Usually when I get to `command-not-found` it's something I haven't installed on a new system somewhere and I've found it helpful at times. It rarely annoys me.
From what I understand, "sl" was engineered to train new users into typing correctly, by putting them back on track to their final destination, instead of railroading them into promptly installing and running new commands. Only a fascist would force them to run on time.
If I mistype something, it takes ages for command-not-found to search the entire Internet for “emacss” or whatever, during which I am slowly driven mad by the system punishing me and forcing me to wait.
Ah, that makes sense, the version on my machine runs off the local apt/dpkg database, so I was wondering why why you'd consider it worse than sl. (It does spew several lines of noise, but that's less of a problem when you have a sixty-somthing line terminal and barely a problem at all when you've got scrollback.)
What would you estimate is the ratio of typos versus "thought it was installed"? Personally mine is probably 1,000 to 1. If I type a command and bash says command not found I know the program is not installed. If I need that program I am a big boy and can use apt without anyone holding my hand.
You can do that too, although I have had an ... interesting experience jumping around desktop environments on Ubuntu. I'm not sure what exactly is happening, but some kind of config information is steadily bleeding between them every time I do a system update.
Sometimes if I pull up KDE (which I don't usually, since I found xfce), the panel will have as many as three different sound menus, only one of which is actually functional.
From looking at the Gnome Developer page "Desktop files: putting your application in the desktop menus" [1], it seems that it wasn't designed to work correctly with more than one desktop installed. This isn't surprising as it's an uncommon use case. [Edit: This is incorrect, see below]
For example, on a system running 13.04 with MATE installed, the Graphics menu has entries for Image Viewer (Eye of Gnome, the default) and Eye of MATE Image Viewer (MATE's port of eog).
Looking in /usr/share/applications there are the two corresponding .desktop files:
Xubuntu is just a set of packages for Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu LTS and one of the first things I do on a new install is sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop .
Now, if you're on RHEL then Xubuntu would be a bit of a leap, but just installing xfce on Ubuntu is going to be a lot more painful than installing xubuntu-desktop which has a little more functionality out of the box.
What is significantly different? I looked on the xubuntu site and I could not find much information. I did not realize that xubuntu was a lot different than normal ubuntu with xfce4 installed.
RHEL is primarily a server, not a desktop. All the desktops are in the repos already though, and Fedora has offical spins if you don't want to install them yourself for some reason. Gnome, MATE, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, it just takes one command to group install.
I don't think they ever provided you with GNOME2, specifically, they provided you with GNOMEcurrent version, and they still do. You make it sound like they changed their minds, which I don't think is the case.
Why are you even using Ubuntu? If you actually know what GNOME2 is and care about it, you are almost certainly not the target audience for Ubuntu. If you use something else, you will probably prefer it over Ubuntu.
Lets examine the popular non-Ubuntu choices that I'm aware of:
SUSE/RHEL/CentOS/Oracle Linux/SciLinux?
All RPM based, and while there's nothing wrong with that, and YUM works fine, I already know apt-get and dpkg, why should I switch?
Gentoo?
Again, no apt-get. (And no, I don't care if there's a compatibility layer.)
Debian?
Wake me up when I can get the latest nvidia driver anywhere in its ecosystem. Meanwhile there's a PPA for Nvidia-$latest that works with my optimus laptop.
Additionally, call it do-release-upgrade, call it apt-get dist-upgrade, call it aptitude full-upgrade. It needs to not cause my system to die in fun and exciting ways. Which it did, going from Squeeze to Wheezy on my server.
Mint?
I have yet to be convinced this isn't Ubuntu reimplemented poorly, with less resources, and less attention. How many 3rd party PPAs are there vs Ubuntu? Since I'm digging into using PPAs for bleeding edge releases, why shouldn't I just use Ubuntu?
Linux on the desktop is Ubuntu for me. I threw Openbox on there and I'm good to go with minimal hassle.
If you're passing off Gentoo based on the presence of 'apt-get', you might be failing to understand the point of Gentoo =)
Gentoo uses something called 'portage' -- It's for building everything from source. This gets us access to really bleeding stuff very quickly, while leaving the lid open on an absurd amount of code out there.
This helps me write libraries for the entire Windows and Linux ecosystem. If I can prove that I can support my new binary's ABI there, I've proven that it can survive anywhere.
But if you're looking for apt, you should probably consider any of the binary-based distributions. Gentoo is not for the faint of heart, but if you want to learn Linux and development, it will benefit you like non other.
Debian has apt -- and while its release cycle is a little longer, I've found it to be more stable for mission-critical "apt"/binary-based hosting. In my experience I've found they screw up the packages a little less -- look to how many patches Ubuntu maintains on PHP for a comparison on how dangerous Ubuntu will sometimes play!
Ubuntu was the easiest way for me to get Linux on a new laptop with the secure boot nonsense. And it doesn't involve a lot of tweaking, most stuff works out of the box.
I am typing this on Ubuntu right now (it seemed easier than other options to get it on a Macbook air). I have Manjaro on my other laptop (Majanjaro gets used, Ubuntu is there for the installer), and Mint Debian edition at work (I did think this was a great distro, until a recent update has made it crash a lot).
Maybe... but the companies buying support contracts and sending real dollars RedHat's way are going to be mostly the big shops, the enterprise shops, and I've never seen ubuntu-server in an enterprise shop.
US Army (2007): “When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source. It may come as a surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is ‘the’ single largest install base for Red Hat Linux. I'm their largest customer.”[1]
If you define an enterprise shop to mean a company that doesn't use software like ubuntu-server, congratulations, you are right, but you have also made a completely meaningless observation.
Well good thing that I didn't define it tautologically like that then.
Instead, I suggested - as did your parent comment - that support contracts are very important to "enterprise" shops. That can be considered a defining characteristic in so much as nebulous terms have defining characteristics. And if you don't understand the importance of those support contracts, a lot of their behaviour will appear strange.
It's simply a fact that a lot of these companies officially support RedHat, often Suse, sometimes CentOS, but rarely so far for Ubuntu Server. That may change, but Ubuntu is definitely not there yet.
Support isn't just about SLA's, its about your vendor actually providing software/drivers/etc for your environment. I think you will find many commercial applications only support recent versions of RHEL, SLES or in some industries Oracle Linux.
These products don't ship with source code, and they tend to fail spectacularly when put on machines that don't happen to have the "right" kernel, library and system tools. Frankly, having shipped binary products on linux in the past, it can be a real PITA just maintaining an application over three or four versions of RHEL or SLES (which have a lot more in common with each other than they do with debian based distros).
I don't have a formal definition, but in my head "enterprise" is somewhere around the "10,000+ headcount" line.
I of course have only worked for a few enterprise shops; my evidence is purely anecdotal, and I know that.
An important part of the equation though as to how much this matters to Canonical or RedHat; was this shop you worked in paying for a support contract?
(Support contracts are perhaps not a defining feature of "enterprise", but they are a common theme)
That does not address the above comment. Just because they aren't getting money for the installs does not mean that ubuntu isn't being used as a replacement for RHEL.
I think your statement is more true of CentOS than Ubuntu. Many Ubuntu server installations choose it because it is free and reputedly easy, and pass up CentOS because it doesn't have a lot of selling points that appeal directly to non-Linux users, nor RHEL because it costs money.
Also your comment reminds me of an argument against stealing music on the Internet, lol.
Canonical doesn't really compete in the traditional enterprise space, we're a cloud company, so you'll see us on AWS, HP Cloud, etc on the public cloud side and OpenStack for private clouds.
Although no doubt there are Ubuntu servers in the cloud like that, this summary seems unrealistic:
> we're a cloud company
Then what's up with Unity and the push towards a common interface? Cloud servers are not phones/tablets.
And BTW, I think Canonical (and Microsoft) pushes towards common interfaces have been huge steps backward, no matter how well intentioned, so given that, I wish Cananical were just "a cloud company".
Just spit balling here but, in general enterprise OS selection is driven by software requirements. And the requirements, for enterprise linux software, tend to be RHEL or Oracle Linux... i.e., not Ubuntu Server.
Unity was a terrible choice. The early versions crashed a lot. Every time I've tried to use it, I get frustrated and end up removing it within a day. There's some magic key combination you have to know in order to do something as fundamental as opening multiple instances of an application.
The "start" menu equivalent in more traditional desktops has a list of installed applications by category. Browsing this to figure out what applications you have is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with your system. The "search" function in Unity requires you to know what you're looking for; there's no way to discover what's installed by browsing.
Unity would be fine as an extra option. It might even be a good default for smartphones. But I jumped ship for Linux Mint when Ubuntu tried to shove Unity down everyone's throats by making it the default.
For the first two releases where Unity was the default, I tried to like it but had to give up within a week because it was simply too buggy, given the Compiz plugins I wished to run. (Had I used it stock, doubtless it would have worked better.)
In the third release featuring Unity, also the release where they removed the classic GNOME shell, I tried Unity again and was satisfied. It was better than the GNOME shell I had been using theretofore.
I do not believe Unity to be perfect, but I do enjoy using it more than almost any window manager. (For completely unrelated reasons, I switched to i3 a couple of months ago, but of window managers directed at normal users, Unity is certainly my favourite.)
Unity was buggy in the beginning, but it has been usable ever since 12.04 LTS. I'm typing this on a MacBook that I use for work and when I'm in OS X, I miss Unity.
The screen is uncluttered, the shortcuts are great, the dashboard is great, the various special effects are finally not nauseating, the only thing bothering me is that I can't move that launcher on the right side, but lack of customization is a problem with Gnome in general.
Unity was rolled out too early, and in a hardly stable state. It sacrifices desktop usability for consistency across devices: desktop, tablet and phone. I disagree that desktop computing design should be constrained by the limitations of touch-based devices. So, rather than a breath of fresh air, I see it as a disruptive change in UX, intended to win in the long term, but at the expense of short-term usability. Ditto for the move to Mir.
But I don't resent Canonical for this -- I use Linux because I can choose the experience (KDE 4 at the moment). I just hope the short-term sacrifices in terms of usability and fragmentation don't harm adoption too much.
It sacrifices desktop usability for consistency across devices
I don't know what kind of usability impediment you're talking about? To be honest, I'm kinda tired of hearing this, because it seems to come from people who never really used Unity. I have extensively used KDE (v 2), Gnome (v 2), xfce4, Unity and now i3. I tried Unity simply because I was puzzled by the conflicting arguments. Power users complaining so much, while newbies were raving. I thought I would test drive it for a month just to see, I ended up using it for a year. Unity isn't perfect (no graphic environment is), but it does have its highlights. Most of the essential functions are documented in the cheatsheet that appears when someone keeps the WinKey pressed.
In my opinion, most power users who complain never took the 2 minutes required to understand how that desktop works and presumed that all they had to do was to plug in their mouse and click away. If they'd taken the time, there would be less complaints, since Unity is rather keyboard centric. Newbies on the other hand thought "let's learn Linux", read the manual, and came out ecstatic.
I don't know what kind of usability impediment you're talking about?
Not being able to use the programs installed on my computer?
That seems like a pretty big usability impediment to me. I have a Unity and non-Unity laptop. The problem that Unity allows less than ten apps on the side. It's true that I can search for the things - but that requires me to know the name of the many oddly named Linux apps out there. And yes, I've spent more than minutes, in fact I've spent days using and attempting to customize the thing.
The screen mechanics are ghastly also imho but I could learn them if, like, the GUI let me actually run my installed application.
Sure it works as a kiosk or those who just start a shell and leave. But if you're really using seriously, why pontificate about it.
That is the primary method of using it, it's not the alternative.
The problem that Unity allows less than ten apps on the side
For one you don't need to know the name of the program, you just need to know a few keywords about what it does. e.g. type in "brow..." in the dash and see it proposing Firefox and other browsers you may have installed. In case you still have no idea what your program does, nor what its name is, you can still navigate to find your programs the old fashion way, using the dash and filters. I would assume that after using a program once or twice a user can either drag its icon to the side or simply remember its name. And if they do neither of those, the dash keeps a history of most frequently accessed programs. While using Unity I had 3 icons on the launcher and I _never_ even used them, and I run many apps at once.
Not being able to use the programs installed on my computer?
This is the first I've heard of Unity conflicting with a program and that might be a bug in one or the other.
But if you're really using seriously, why pontificate about it.
Since many are pontificating against it, I think people deserve to be exposed to counter arguments. A lot of people have taken upon themselves to decide that Unity is this and that, without even using it properly. They spread fud as truth, instead of disclaiming it as their own opinion. And frankly when you see the arguments, it is obvious that they haven't used the thing for more than a few minutes. It just strikes me as odd that people would keep doing this when there is ample evidence that the GUI is positively received by most people who give it a chance. If you don't believe me, ask System76 or Zareason, after all their business is directly tied to having people satisfied after they buy a linux box.
I view your sentiment as a little shortsighted. On a typical desktop you end up with over a hundred of applications installed and you end up using only 10 apps daily. A typical Windows Start menu gets extremely cluttered and extremely hard to search for the app you want. That's why keyboard-enabled search works much better.
OS X does the same thing. It has a launcher on which you pin the most used apps and for everything else you need to search it with Spotlight, or go to the Applications directory in Finder. I haven't seen many people complain about the usability of OS X in this regard. IMHO, the Start menu is a broken abstraction.
As for the UI and that bullshit on being optimized for tables ... I actually like that Unity is so space efficient. For example, why in the world would I need a window top bar, if the window is maximized? Vertical space on 16:9 screens is precious, Unity optimizes for it and I find that to be awesome ... like, one of the reasons many people like Chrome's UI over Firefox is exactly because of this, yet Unity brings this design decision for all apps.
Yes, almost same opinion. I've got feeling about unity people are really trying to step forward linux desktop UI. Not just copy and paste then edit something.
- remove cascade style start menu.
- quick search interface for application, files.
- well organized keyboard shortcuts and inline shortcut help
- make free vertical space as possible as
- it's simple. users only need to understand windows key, left launcher.
Yes, It was buggy and slow at the first time. Maybe Canonical had pushed so much earlier. But it's now working well and really usable.
KDE 4 has all the benefits of Unity as well as the ability to be customized. For users that like a 'start' menu, you can have it, but you're right that keyboard launchers are just better most of the time. KDE has two built-in, and every other DE works with Synapse, which is much faster than Unity for keyboard-based launching.
The UI is optimized for tablets and phones, but not because of space efficiency. In fact, Unity is less space efficient, because it demands that the launcher be so huge (to afford touch-based interaction). In every DE I've ever used, I actually hide the top/bottom panel, but that's not possible in Unity (the top panel affords no customization whatsoever, AFAICT). So, in practice, Unity is consistently less space-efficient with my vertical space than every other DE, in addition to being less customizable.
Just an anecdote of course, but on my not very beefy laptop Unity is the only environment I've tried that runs slower than Windows. Using it it seemed great and I'd like to use it, but unusably slow for me.
I was on that same wave length for a long time. But I gave it a year then rounded up the usual suspects (xfce, gnome, kde) and was surprised to see how much I missed unity.
Since folks don't seem to know what I was referring to, I wrote up my experiences with Unity. The tl;dr is in the paragraph second to last ('But Why?'), for folks that don't want the nitty-gritty.
http://killring.org/2014/02/17/unity-shortcomings/
Canonical's priority, as best as I can judge, is to make Ubuntu the world's leading Linux distribution for desktops and other platforms -- cloud, tablet, phone, etc. So they will use whatever F/LOSS code works best to achieve this goal, regardless of whether it's internally or externally developed. They are not letting 'ego' and 'pride' get in the way of achieving their goal.
If using systemd will help them achieve their goal more than using upstart, they will use systemd. Ditto for Unity versus Gnome, and for Mir versus Wayland. For them, it's not about "winning the argument," but about "winning the #1 spot."