Canonical Is Still Operating At A Significant Loss

[Luke]

What do you means "shops that you can't get rid of?"

<clip> actually i feel a little insecure, when i propose ubuntu to newbies (example elderly people that dont want to worry about viruses and causing mayhem to settings or deleting files that shouldnt be deleted) about the shops that you cannot even get rid of (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and that the amazon symbol is stalking my shopping attempts...

The shops can be shitcanned all the way be dumping Unity and using any other DE. They are not present in Xubuntu, Kubuntu, UbuntuStudio, certainly not in Mint, all of which share Ubuntu's base. I would imagine you can keep most of Unity and remove all lenses with remote capability, but I removed Unity from my drives when the online-offline distinction started to fade, and removed Software-Center so as to remove support for paid software. Unity itself is a Compiz plugin, someone could always write a replacement for the "home" lens for secure systems that limit online activity to the browser and APT.

Last I heard the "home" lens and all lenses coming from Ubuntu could be configured to search only locally (in "privacy", but I can't confirm that as a non-Unity user. If this is so, the real value of a home lens replacement might be for making safe live discs for things like banking, for use by folks who prefer Unity.

[profoundWHALE]

You can also get rid of the unity amazon crap through fixubuntu. They have a script that you only have to run once.

[dh04000]

Good, I hope they rot in hell.

And yes, I registered just to post this.

I'm always AMAZED by the APATHY of the moderators on this forum. This comment has been reported for its absuive language content and its overall lack of being anything that resembles meaniful discussion, but yet, it's still here, hours and hours after being reported. THIS is a perfect example of why a post about trying to improve the forum quality has is currently being discussed on the forum, and the apathy of the moderators is the driving cuase for this conversation.

[arstyl]

Any criticism towards Ubuntu, coming from anyone leading a less-free tech life than RMS,
can suck it. Unless you've flashed your android devices and installed Firefox OS,
unless you've never used proprietary software on your distro, you can just crawl back into the basement
from whence you surfaced.

Why? Well, firstly, because you are not the only ones who can use such language. Secondly,
I fail to see how what Ubuntu did with Mir is any worse than what Linux Mint did.
I fail to see how Ubuntu's move to Unity was any worse than the way things went for Gnome and KDE.

I keep running into the claim that, had not Ubuntu succeeded some popularity, some other distro would have done
the same. As far as I'm concerned, no. No, it wouldn't. Just look at the LibreOffice crap, the Linux environment would
be eternally stuck in a bureaucratic-esque mentality of "if it works, don't fix it".

Apologies to neutral viewers, this post had to stoop to the level of some trolls in the anti-Ubuntu camp who are
just pissed at the fact that the Steam download page does not redirect to their preferred, obscure distro.

[aigarius]

Sure, OpenSuse.

Thanks, was not aware that Open Build System did actually get moving after all those years in development. Another example of Cannonical show an example that other follow years later and at some point OBS might be even better than what Launchpad does, but it quite possible that without Cannonical we would have ahd neither. And even explicitly without Mark - I know first-hand that he is a great organizer and a very good coder, despite being rich

[Veto]

I'm always AMAZED by the APATHY of the moderators on this forum. This comment has been reported for its absuive language content and its overall lack of being anything that resembles meaniful discussion, but yet, it's still here, hours and hours after being reported. THIS is a perfect example of why a post about trying to improve the forum quality has is currently being discussed on the forum, and the apathy of the moderators is the driving cuase for this conversation.

Indeed, it seems a lot of people in these forums are getting way too little sex Unfortunately some of the constructive gems are lost in the endless, useless and mindless trolling.

[RahulSundaram]

Thanks, was not aware that Open Build System did actually get moving after all those years in development. Another example of Cannonical show an example that other follow years later and at some point OBS might be even better than what Launchpad does

On the contrary, this is an example of people being ignorant outside the small circle they pay attention to. OBS has been in active use for several years and for multiple distributions which launchpad or ppa systems never did and has fairly good adoption outside of openSUSE as well. Lets face it.. Bzr was ok but git has clearly won the significant mindshare and Bzr is practically unmaintained at this point as well and since launchpad is tied to Bzr, I don't see much of a future for either. The real change that had good adoption outside of Ubuntu especially before systemd came along was upstart and Scott deserves some credit for spearheading that.

[jonnor]

Re: distros with "PPA"

Sure, OpenSuse.

Arch Linux has the AUR, Arch User Repository, which is extremely active. https://aur.archlinux.org/

[Yedor]

I wouldn't read too much into their UK financial report, covering "only their UK activities". That will likely be in the negatives regardless. Canonical is an Ltd based in a tax haven with 0% corporate tax. If there is any profit, it will be made in the Isle of Man.

[mrugiero]

Cannonical did a fantastic thing - they took the technically superior, but harder to install and a bit intimidating Debian and made it into a paragon of out-of-the-box usability that rest of the Linux distributions and even rest of the OSes are still struggling to replicate parts of. Ubuntu and Cannonical sent out millions of free Linux Live CDs to developing nations that not only helped develop their IT infrastructure in a more indpendant way, but also brought in a fresh and entusiastic wave of Linxu and free software users and, later on, developers. Some of those newcomers and some newcomers attreacted by other distributions that emulated some parts of Ubuntu success now appear to be doing some things better than Ubuntu does. That is not a reason to hate Ubuntu. Cannonical do things and people that do things make mistakes; nobody is perfect.

Nobody is denying they did some good. Although, you are overblowing it a bit, at least in my country it hadn't had that much of an effect: public administration still uses Windows, in some cases even pirated one (really). Most of the traction was done by people convincing their friends to give a try, around here. I don't know in other contexts, though.

If someone does something better than Cannonical then we have two implementations where before we had none and we all are richer as a result.

That's not necessarily like that. If you have something applications don't directly target, then we all are richer and we can sing and dance and be happy, yay. If it's something applications call, then you created a new problem. You see, Linux doesn't fail for a single reason, but several. One of the important reasons is software support. If you make it harder to support a wide audience (let's say, you have over 9000 toolkits, and everyone wants their to be supported because they can't afford running the 9000 toolkits at the same time), you discourage developers from supporting your OS. Luckily for us, X was too hard to target in most cases, so someone smart developed toolkits as a higher level. Still, having two or three different display systems means that everything calling X directly, or Wayland directly, or Mir directly, can't run natively in others. Toolkits are currently being ported upstream to Wayland, while it seems like Canonical will have to support downstream the same toolkits for Mir. Also, there are a few applications calling X directly, and there are probably some programmers that would want to do the same with the next gen display servers. That's probably not going to happen after all, because doing so will mean you have to support a separate branch for each or lack support for one.

Basically all that Cannonical has created from scratch did not have a functional precedent at the time. Or at least it was not know well enough or has some significant deficiencies. Some things still have basically no precedent - does anyone have a PPA system?

Not quite true. It was true for upstart, it was true for bazaar, and for the software center, but it is not true for Mir. For Unity, I'm not completely sure as I remember someone in the forums mentioning GNOME Shell weren't supposed to become what it's now by the time Canonical forked, but got inspired by Unity. I'm not sure.
As for PPAs, there isn't anything EXACTLY like that that I know of, but personal repositories exist at least for Arch. I can't find any info about when AUR began existing to say if Canonical came first, though.

In the next few years we're going to see a whole lot of change in Linux distros as a whole, that's for sure. I've never seen such a rapid development demand and acceleration. But if it weren't for Ubuntu, Linux as a whole wouldn't have caught on like it did. If Linux never caught on like it did, Valve probably wouldn't have ported their whole steam infrastructure over like they did. And if Valve never ported all that over, there wouldn't have been as many games and driver improvements as there are now.

If it weren't for X11, Linux wouldn't have been usable at all all this years, but maybe it's obsolete by now. Nobody denies the good Canonical did (well, some do, but I don't think arguing with them will make them change their minds anyway), but that doesn't mean everything they do is good.

I'm always AMAZED by the APATHY of the moderators on this forum. This comment has been reported for its absuive language content and its overall lack of being anything that resembles meaniful discussion, but yet, it's still here, hours and hours after being reported. THIS is a perfect example of why a post about trying to improve the forum quality has is currently being discussed on the forum, and the apathy of the moderators is the driving cuase for this conversation.

I'm not sure if it's apathy or lack of time. When I see a spambot it also takes several hours until they ban them and delete the posts. I usually ignore that kind of stupid post. Except when is BO$$, I kind of like to answer his stupid claims.