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Ubuntu 14.10 Is Codenamed The Utopic Unicorn

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  • #31
    dee certainly puts some things fairly strongly, but I don't see any purposeful trolling there, and he does bring up good points.

    The reason why Canonical is not always regarded in the best light and why people express themselves about it is because Canonical is influential. There are no hard numbers, but it seems that at least companies focus on Ubuntu first and foremost when porting their products. Which means that whatever Canonical does, the vendors will try to adapt, and if Ubuntu goes the other direction than the rest of GNU/Linux distributions, then suddenly all those programs can become unportable. Yes, the chances of that happening are slight (someone may decide to create compatibility layers or what not), but you can't say they're non-existent.

    And yes, the community aspect is important. Ubuntu is supposed to mean just that, but as of late Canonical has been dropping design decisions from the top, and it seems that they don't often care about what the community thinks. This is in sharp contrast with what the KDE VDG (and possibly other groups) have been doing lately ? they are outsourcing the design work to the community, where everyone can suggest ideas and improvements, and it seems to work very nicely. I didn't like the widget design, so I made some mockups of my own, and in the end together we got a design that I'm satisfied with (not exactly as I would like, but a good compromise all in all). If Canonical had applied the same methods, we wouldn't have Mir today, because Wayland developers would have explained all the misunderstandings from the get-go. Instead, we would have a fantastic Unity Wayland compositor by now, and everyone would have been happy.

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    • #32
      Originally posted by dee. View Post
      First of all, some friendly advice: please learn to use paragraphs and punctuation. Long posts without paragraph breaks are physically painful to read, and run-in sentences with 20 commas just make you seem like an out-of-breath teenager venting about his/her FEELINGS... neither of which do any favours to your credibility.

      With that out of the way, I can see you've adopted the same general tone as most devoted Ubuntu fans: "everyone else are just haters who are jealous and want Canonical to fail"... "others just want Linux to be hard and only use command line"... "Canonical is the ONLY one innovating on Linux, without Ubuntu, Linux will fail"...

      And as I've said before, it's no wonder - this rhetoric comes directly from Shuttleworth. Shuttleworth is, although a misguided, grandiose, and at times downright a pompous fool, also a charismatic person who has the gift to make people believe in what he's saying. That's not a bad quality for a leader as such, but it's also meaningless - and potentially dangerous - if not used responsibly...

      Many times I've now seen this same rhetoric being used by Shuttleworth, and then numerous Ubuntu fans come to forums and parrot his talking points - and it's only natural, it comes with the territory: you're a huge Ubuntu fan, you idolize Shuttleworth, you take your behavioural cues from him. Too bad that the rhetoric Shuttleworth uses is increasingly often arrogant, fallacious, passive-aggressive and even downright slanderous (remember the whole Mir FUD debacle...)

      Mark has a tendency to make strawman arguments. He likes to dress up his opponents as foolish old dodderers who are too set in their ways to see Mark's brilliance. And this is a narrative that is very effective - we tend to root for the underdog, the story of the little guy who nobody believed in, who everyone laughed at but triumphed at the end against overwhelming odds is ingrained very deeply in our culture: it's a story told thousands of times in various forms... it's a formula used very often in Hollywood movies, because it's an effective narrative, it's something people relate with very easily, and has appeal to most people. We want the little guy to win.

      And this is the narrative that Mark also uses - he wants to craft this story where he is a lonely, misunderstood genius, where the Old Guard laughs at him and doesn't believe in his brilliance...

      Of course there has been many good things made by Canonical, they've made some very useful contributions to the Linux ecosystem - but recently they've also made some very questionable moves, and it's delusional behaviour to claim that there hasn't been controversies because of those decisions.

      The problem is, when you accept Mark's narrative of "everyone is just a mean jerk who wants to keep us down, they just don't understand our visionary brilliance", you're also shutting out all criticism and honest debate about the decisions of Canonical. When your counter to all arguments made against Canonical, all criticism expressed towards Canonical's decisions, is to say "you're just a hater who wants to see Canonical fail"... that's a problem, because then, who is there to question the actions of Canonical?

      No man, no business, no government, no corporation, no organization should have our unconditional trust. You should never follow anyone blindly. Always think for yourself... Nothing is holy - everything should be open to be questioned and debated against.

      Dee did you notice how earlier I told someone to be nice and respect others opinions as no opinions are correct? Then you go and post this rude peice of garbage. There is a reason noone respects what you write dee.

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      • #33
        Originally posted by GreatEmerald View Post
        dee certainly puts some things fairly strongly, but I don't see any purposeful trolling there, and he does bring up good points.

        The reason why Canonical is not always regarded in the best light and why people express themselves about it is because Canonical is influential. There are no hard numbers, but it seems that at least companies focus on Ubuntu first and foremost when porting their products. Which means that whatever Canonical does, the vendors will try to adapt, and if Ubuntu goes the other direction than the rest of GNU/Linux distributions, then suddenly all those programs can become unportable. Yes, the chances of that happening are slight (someone may decide to create compatibility layers or what not), but you can't say they're non-existent.

        And yes, the community aspect is important. Ubuntu is supposed to mean just that, but as of late Canonical has been dropping design decisions from the top, and it seems that they don't often care about what the community thinks. This is in sharp contrast with what the KDE VDG (and possibly other groups) have been doing lately – they are outsourcing the design work to the community, where everyone can suggest ideas and improvements, and it seems to work very nicely. I didn't like the widget design, so I made some mockups of my own, and in the end together we got a design that I'm satisfied with (not exactly as I would like, but a good compromise all in all). If Canonical had applied the same methods, we wouldn't have Mir today, because Wayland developers would have explained all the misunderstandings from the get-go. Instead, we would have a fantastic Unity Wayland compositor by now, and everyone would have been happy.
        That's all fine and dandy, but it didn't happen yesterday. The changes made by Canonical in the development of Ubuntu years ago have been discussed ad nauseam and now it's time to move on. Those who are fine with them will keep discussing the pros and cons of this or that particular design decision. Some can be very critical of them (I'm one of those, actually), some may find all of Canonical's decisions absolutely perfect (they can probably be called fanboys and it would be pretty accurate; but there's not a single one of those in this particular discussion here). What's simply not acceptable is this constant spam on every Ubuntu article by people who have long expressed their opinion against those changes made years ago. It's OK to be upset at some point, especially if you were an Ubuntu user in the past and have been ignored by the changes. It's not OK to whine for years, well after you stopped using the software made by a particular developer or company. Moreover, it's kind of sick.

        This particular troll is one of the most annoying and sad, since he seems to have nice rethorical skills that could be put to better service, yet he insists in using them to poison every discussion about any Ubuntu news. All we Ubuntu users ask is to stop the spam. You don't want to use Ubuntu? The "market" is full of options for you. Now leave Ubuntu users alone and stop making useless noise. Are you using Ubuntu and don't like a particular aspect of it? Welcome to the debate!

        I tried KDE a couple of times and check it every two or three point releases. I find it hideous and lacking on every UI design aspect and I happen to believe this occurs precisely because KDE is designed by too many people. Too many people that aren't particularly gifted for design either. I also happen to think that there's no such thing as "community design". Now, you won't hear me repeating this on every ocassion a news post about KDE appears anywhere on the web. I have better ways to spend my time and thinking than constantly poking KDE users.
        Last edited by Aleve Sicofante; 25 April 2014, 01:59 PM.

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        • #34
          Originally posted by Aleve Sicofante View Post
          That's all fine and dandy, but it didn't happen yesterday. The changes made by Canonical in the development of Ubuntu years ago have been discussed ad nauseam and now it's time to move on. Those who are fine with them will keep discussing the pros and cons of this or that particular design decision. Some can be very critical of them (I'm one of those, actually), some may find all of Canonical's decisions absolutely perfect (they can probably be called fanboys and it would be pretty accurate; but there's not a single one of those in this particular discussion here). What's simply not acceptable is this constant spam on every Ubuntu article by people who have long expressed their opinion against those changes made years ago. It's OK to be upset at some point, especially if you were an Ubuntu user in the past and have been ignored by the changes. It's not OK to whine for years, well after you stopped using the software made by a particular developer or company. Moreover, it's kind of sick.

          This particular troll is one of the most annoying and sad, since he seems to have nice rethorical skills that could be put to better service, yet he insists in using them to poison every discussion about any Ubuntu news. All we Ubuntu users ask is to stop the spam. You don't want to use Ubuntu? The "market" is full of options for you. Now leave Ubuntu users alone and stop making useless noise. Are you using Ubuntu and don't like a particular aspect of it? Welcome to the debate!

          I tried KDE a couple of times and check it every two or three point releases. I find it hideous and lacking on every UI design aspect and I happen to believe this occurs precisely because KDE is designed by too many people. Too many people that aren't particularly gifted for design either. I also happen to think that there's no such thing as "community design". Now, you won't hear me repeating this on every ocassion a news post about KDE appears anywhere on the web. I have better ways to spend my time and thinking than constantly poking KDE users.
          Thank you for the well thought out and presented statement. We need more people like you here on the forum.

          Comment


          • #35
            And now, back to the actual topic....

            I don't like the name or its mythical association, and the Utopic part is even worse. It sounds more like a Fedora name, except slightly less silly.

            The good news is that a lot of people (including me) will just call it 14.10.

            Comment


            • #36
              Click style/ portable apps actually increase OS forkability and can be handy

              Originally posted by r_a_trip View Post
              Be careful what you wish for. A dominant Canonical and a ubiquitous Ubuntu, while bringing all the benefits of a mono-culture, like everybody and their dog standardising on and writing for and using Ubuntu, it'll also bring all the negatives. Once Canonical takes up the top spot in the OS market and network effects forces a majority of computer users to use Ubuntu as well, you'll be beholden to whatever Canonical deems best for their business and dependent on whatever functionality Ubuntu provides.

              Ubuntu being open source won't protect you against this. Forking only makes sense when one can deviate from whatever is unwanted in the parent. If Ubuntu has top spot and everybody writes to their homegrown software (Mir/Unity/Click), a fork needs to closely follow Ubuntu to be able to use all the third party infrastructure and applications written against ubuntu. A fork in such a situation becomes a symbolic relabeling, while still being Ubuntu for all intents and purposes.
              The strength of the Linux distro system up till now, iss that most of them are roughly equivalent. It gives users the power to reject unwanted changes, because they can swap distro X for distro Y and carry on with computing like nothing changed at all. It is an incentive for distributors to deliver systems devoid of anti-features.

              In a world with 90% Ubuntu and the rest fringe systems, you'll be back in the late 90's, early 2000's. Fine if you happen to like what Canonical releases, but a major nuisance when you don't fancy it.
              Actually, it was of course possible to run Debian et all during that era. I used Debian in an Athlon 500 that operated as an unattended sound server because Debian and XMMS were a hell of a lot more reliable than Windows 95 and Winamp. They worked so well that for the sound to stop usually indicated the power had been out! One real headache was of course offline package installation in a non-networked system where APT could not be used in the normal way.

              Had something like "click" existed for any distro the packages could have been dropped into any other distro, with no dependency issues due to local libraries. This sort of thing was why Audacity only needed two versions at a time for all of Windows, while for Linux you needed one compiled against what you were using. In those days the rapid growth of on-disk space used by such programs would have been much worse than today, and of course was a real headache for Windows users.

              Today, the "meltytech" git versions of Kdenlive shipped as a locally-run binary with all dependencies in the program folder work the same way, and are great for playing with the new GLSL GPU accelerated/Movit versions without screwing up the system-wide installation of the stable version. I've got Shotcut the same way and have also experimented with such versions of Blender. The Kdenlive packages are compiled against 12.04, will run on that, anything later than that, my guess is they would work on Debian too and who knows what else. A different version is made for Fedora. Heck, it would be possible I suppose to custom compile "click" style apps to include their own local install of Mir, (or Wayland, or X) so they could run from console on any system with KMS and open drivers from a PPA supporting all three video rendering systems. This way, the presence or absence of some key application in a distro becomes less important.

              With current large disks, that sort of thing would promote more and not less compatablity, but of course as long as the source will compile across the various distros, it will always be possible to custom build, as was often done in the past. A lot easier now when not using CPU's that take endless hours to do the job.

              Comment


              • #37
                Originally posted by Aleve Sicofante View Post
                That's all fine and dandy, but it didn't happen yesterday. The changes made by Canonical in the development of Ubuntu years ago have been discussed ad nauseam and now it's time to move on. Those who are fine with them will keep discussing the pros and cons of this or that particular design decision. Some can be very critical of them (I'm one of those, actually), some may find all of Canonical's decisions absolutely perfect (they can probably be called fanboys and it would be pretty accurate; but there's not a single one of those in this particular discussion here). What's simply not acceptable is this constant spam on every Ubuntu article by people who have long expressed their opinion against those changes made years ago. It's OK to be upset at some point, especially if you were an Ubuntu user in the past and have been ignored by the changes. It's not OK to whine for years, well after you stopped using the software made by a particular developer or company. Moreover, it's kind of sick.
                But this goes into circular argument territory. A post is made, someone mentions something a bit negative, someone assumes that person has malicious intent and calls them out, and then the non-Ubuntu-user camp has to repeat the arguments that were indeed discussed elsewhere.

                Aside from refraining from calling out, I don't see a way out of this. I'm pretty sure that the calling out by itself is not going to make any difference, either.

                Comment


                • #38
                  Dee did you notice how earlier I told someone to be nice and respect others opinions as no opinions are correct? Then you go and post this rude peice of garbage. There is a reason noone respects what you write dee.
                  Did you notice how, instead of addressing any of the actual points of the discussion, you resort straight to ad-hominem attacks against me? Apparently my post also got you so mad you forgot how to spell...

                  Take a deep breath, count to ten, then come back with rational arguments about why you think what I've said is incorrect. That's how adults behave.

                  Originally posted by Aleve Sicofante View Post
                  That's all fine and dandy, but it didn't happen yesterday. The changes made by Canonical in the development of Ubuntu years ago have been discussed ad nauseam and now it's time to move on. Those who are fine with them will keep discussing the pros and cons of this or that particular design decision.
                  Hmm... so you're saying, only people who are fine with Canonical's decisions should be allowed to discuss them?

                  You're kind of proving my points for me... why are you so intent on trying to extinguish any criticism on Canonical? If you're truly confident that Canonical's decisions are good ones, then they should withstand any criticism levied against them. You should be able to argue against the actual points instead of resorting to ad-hominems and insults and falsely accusing your opposition of "trolling" (and btw, since it came up, please learn the meaning of "trolling"... no one has done any trolling in this thread. Just because you disagree with something doesn't make it "trolling").

                  What's simply not acceptable is this constant spam on every Ubuntu article by people who have long expressed their opinion against those changes made years ago.
                  Well, let me once again remind you of the facts: nobody was spamming this thread - one person expressed their opinion and made the assertion that many people are dissatisfied with Canonical's recent direction, and that's when YOU (along with a couple of other Ubuntu fans) started "spamming the article". Demanding "numerical proof" for the idea that "many people are dissatisfied"... even a small, relatively non-threatening claim like that - that many people are dissatisfied - is apparently too much to stomach. No criticism allowed.

                  This particular troll is one of the most annoying and sad
                  If you can't beat them with rational counter-arguments, try insults!

                  Comment


                  • #39
                    Originally posted by dee. View Post
                    why are you so intent on trying to extinguish any criticism on Canonical?
                    There's a time and place for it. Hint: This article/news blurb isn't it (unless you're criticizing the name). Otherwise, you look foolish...

                    Comment


                    • #40
                      Originally posted by Aleve Sicofante View Post
                      All we Ubuntu users ask is to stop the spam. Now leave Ubuntu users alone and stop making useless noise. Are you using Ubuntu and don't like a particular aspect of it? Welcome to the debate!
                      Who's WE? What spam? Who's US? What debate? Your "arguments" are "you are just a hater/troll/whatever". People like you make me hate Canonical and their ubuntu even more.

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