Mark Shuttleworth Comments Following Ubuntu Community Friction, Uncertainty

[jrbrtsn]

If you want a Debian(ish) distro that works pretty well on a bleeding edge laptop, Ubunutu or derivatives is usually the only choice.

[mos87]

loss of leadership == lack of leading transgender body-positive non-cis BAME space-women from Andromeda identifying as a lampshade??

[danboid]

A couple of weeks ago, I started switching to Oracle Linux 8.2 (Wayland) as my desktop OS (having been a Ubuntu user for 15 years). With essentially all my major applications now on AppImage (LibreOffice, GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, etc.) and Google Chrome providing its repository (both deb and rpm), whatever OS I use really doesn't make much difference. Using a server OS like Oracle Linux actually makes the system respond snappier and the battery last longer. A lot longer.

Wow!

A pro Oracle (Linux) comment! I've seen it all now!

[lyamc]

All you guys complaining about Canonical forking a project are complete hypocrites.

Do you really love freedom or do you just love freedom if it's what you like?

What absence of self-awareness you guys have.

Furthermore, Canonical doesn't have the same responsibilities as you or me. If Gnome decides to break the backwards compatibility with their shell AGAIN, then what does Canonical do other than roll back the changes and wait another few weeks, delaying the rest of their development due to dependencies? And in the meantime their corporate clients, the ones giving money for the developer's paychecks, are frustrated by Canonical's inability to control their own OS.

TL;DR if you don't like people forking projects then don't open source them, and if you're a corporation providing a service to another corporation, you need a certain amount of control in order to make sure you can meet that promise.

[Ironmask]

All you guys complaining about Canonical forking a project are complete hypocrites.

Do you really love freedom or do you just love freedom if it's what you like?

What absence of self-awareness you guys have.

Furthermore, Canonical doesn't have the same responsibilities as you or me. If Gnome decides to break the backwards compatibility with their shell AGAIN, then what does Canonical do other than roll back the changes and wait another few weeks, delaying the rest of their development due to dependencies? And in the meantime their corporate clients, the ones giving money for the developer's paychecks, are frustrated by Canonical's inability to control their own OS.

TL;DR if you don't like people forking projects then don't open source them, and if you're a corporation providing a service to another corporation, you need a certain amount of control in order to make sure you can meet that promise.

Nobody said anything about being angry about their constant forks and new projects. People are angry that Canonical never finished a single one, which ultimately hurt the other projects that they inevitably switched to in the end. They have no reserve, it comes off as ungenuine. They want to be the Apple of Linux but they don't actually do much to accomplish that.

[eltomito]

Come on, people! Ubuntu is super easy to install, use, install software on and comes in tons of varieties. Give them a break for supporting all of this!
And a little thought on Debian: they do a lot of the heavy work behind all this, as I understand, but the way they function isn't perfect either. Some libav instead of ffmpeg, anyone?

[Charlie68]

"Community" caused more damage to the Linux world than anything else with their extremism and holy wars against this or that. Linux "community" is probably among the most toxic of all tech communities. A casual glance at the comment section on any Linux news portal proves this, to say nothing about the relationships between developers on mailing lists and between developers and community. Sure there are many great people in Linux community, but lets face it a good deal of Linux community is as toxic as it gets.

Certain users are causing damage to the gnu / linux ecosystem, not the communities. You talk about community, as if it were one and it is not! There are so many communities, each with different rules and goals and usually rarely leave stupid comments on the stupid blog.
Gnu lives thanks to communities and even Ubuntu lives thanks to communities, Ubuntu without its community and the others would have died as their Ubuntu touch!
Canonical's behavior towards the Ubuntu community has never been sincere and collaborative, other realities such as Debian and also openSUSE, Arch etc. they have always been more decision-makers, but this is also thanks to a different organizational structure.
As I wrote at the beginning, there are some Linux users, who think of the distribution or the DE as something that must necessarily compete with others. This is fine if they were commercial distributions, they are not and there is no point in making holy wars for Gnome or KDE or Ubuntu or openSUSE or whatever. Appreciate the work that is done to you and choose the one you prefer, without waging holy wars!
For this reason I believe that the Linux user must grow ...

[emblemparade]

I dropped Ubuntu for Debian when the Kubuntu drama occurred. And frankly I do not regret at all. With some backports it just shines, the only drawback being the (really) outdated Firefox on Stablee.

Could you potentially use the Firefox Flatpak on Debian stable? That technology is designed specifically to address this kind of problem

I'm not necessarily recommending it, just asking if it can do the job.

[Mez']

Good intentions isn't always enough. Take Mir for example - that was completely unnecessary and really threw a wrench in the progress of Wayland, just so Canonical could develop Unity, which they eventually abandoned. So they didn't just go against the grain, they screwed over another project that outlived their own. They weren't trying to be malicious, but the thing about Linux is it's very community driven, and it's kinda anti-community when you're doing things your own way. Hence Ubuntu's shrinking community members..

Right, and that's exactly what got Ubuntu to be so popular - they made tools and found ways to make Linux easier to adopt. That's not the problem. The problem is, they keep trying to write new systems (whether anyone asked for them or not) from scratch. That is why they're being alienated.

Even with Canonical's help, wayland would not have been ready for Ubuntu Touch in 2014 on Ubuntu Edge, then supported phones and tablets in 2015-2016. It still isn't ready in 2020 (except maybe for vanilla Gnome if you have development related workflows).
They wanted to bring a product to the market fast, and wayland development was/is too slow, plus they didn't want to hear Canonical's ideas.
In the grand scheme of things, your vision is lovely and ideal and I would support it, but in reality (where life happens) this is not always as straightforward and you need to make decisions to pursue your own vision if you believe it is worth it. Every day in the corporate world, someone decides that for the project to be ready on time, they'll have to go for the short term solution (also, sometimes if you don't go short-term to catch the train, there's not even a long term left where you can strive for better solutions).

They eventually dropped Ubuntu Touch and Unity later on and Mir as a display server was not necessary anymore. Their views then aligned back to the community and they eventually started to improve the wayland experience because it started to make sense this time.

Mir still lives on as a wayland compositor and I would use it over Mutter any day of the week if it was possible (DE/compositor not as intertwined).

I don't disagree, but I question if that was the most optimal solution. Canonical could have just contributed toward Gnome instead of making their own fork. Combining resources to make a better product is more effective than sharing a few crumbs but otherwise going your own way. That being said, neither Gnome nor Unity were very polished for years, and Unity was abandoned by Canonical.

Keep in mind, my points could have been invalidated had Canonical actually finished what they started, because sometimes they were on a good track. Unity was actually becoming pretty decent. Upstart was a fast, lightweight, and easy init system. A lot of the work to make Linux (without Android) more phone-friendly was valuable. But none of that matters because they gave up on such things. I could see this hurting morale of contributors

It's just a no for Gnome. Gnome is the worst project in terms of accepting other's views, they just do their things for themselves in their bunker, and don't care if users are satisfied with it as long as they are. Canonical tried to suggest their ideas and they were given the single finger salute. Hence Unity. Gnome is the exact kind of mentality that justifies going a different way if you have a similar but distinct vision. You won't ever be listened to.

We all know why Unity was abandoned. Resources. And the money these cost. IPO. Not because of its quality, not because of a lack of users. It's more of a streamline than of a defeat.
The one thing that bothered me about them though is how big they thought they were while they actually weren't. They had a vision, the good kind, but it was too soon to finance those huge endeavors, and maybe even more difficult on their own at the time, sure. They should have seen things a bit smaller. Or focus on one. Which is probably why they didn't finish what they started. They were too much ahead without the financial backing to deliver their vision.
I believe they are more mature now, they gave up part of their dreams for the sustainability of their activity, and it was the right decision. They had a misstep along the way, they learned. I hope their strategy is to come back to these dreams in 2-3 years but this time, with the financial means and the necessary working capital requirements to support them, eventually leading to a better projects finished/projects started ratio.

[lyamc]

Nobody said anything about being angry about their constant forks and new projects. People are angry that Canonical never finished a single one, which ultimately hurt the other projects that they inevitably switched to in the end. They have no reserve, it comes off as ungenuine. They want to be the Apple of Linux but they don't actually do much to accomplish that.

Considering they have the most popular Linux distro, they must be doing something right.