Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence • Hacker News Board

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#161

Post by dullgiulio » Wed, Apr 05, 2017, 8:05 PM UTC

tradesmanhelix wrote: post #100

"Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence" Translation: "We don't really care that much about Linux on the desktop because it's not making us much $$$." Dear Canonical, Your actions are a huge let down to the community. You caused a lot of strife with the move away from Gnome to Unity in 2010, and now you're ripping the rug out from under even more users after feeding us crap about converge…

I think you are conflating problems a bit too much.

1. Canonical must worry about the bottom line. It is a company before being a "FOSS company." 2. You are accusing Canonical of hyping before shipping. But also complaining that they did ship Unity and it was "a lot of strife". Either, or.

I think Canonical is doing what many other companies in technology do: try to catch an opportunity to become a de-facto standard. Becoming so is very difficult.

Canonical has failed with Launchpad and now with Unity convergence. But one cannot say they didn't try. Unity in particular is pretty good for daily usage (my opinion) and version 8 looked very promising, at least in the showcases.

We cannot always have our cake and eat it too.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#162

Post by CaptSpify » Wed, Apr 05, 2017, 8:05 PM UTC

senko wrote: post #43

stcredzero wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From where I am sitting, going from upstart to systemd just seemed like an exercise in inconvenience.

As a web dev/devops guy, most of my interaction with both is to set up service files. Switching was relatively easy and I found systemd servics files to be sensible and easy to write. And now I don't have to maintain separate Debian/Ubuntu variants. So from my purely practical non-sysadmin perspective - a positive change.

There's a lot of good things in systemd, and service-files are definitely one of them.

But we could have a system that works like service-files without all the downsides of systemd.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#163

Post by binarycrusader » Wed, Apr 05, 2017, 8:07 PM UTC

Grue3 wrote: post #146

dumbmatter wrote: post #104

This is awesome. When that "What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?" post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 was up recently, I wanted to say "Get rid of the abomination that is Unity" but figured it'd just be flamebait. Little did I know how close my dreams were to coming true!

Gnome (for major versions > 2) is even worse than Unity though. They should've chosen an actually usable DM like Cinnamon.

Respectfully, I disagree. I've been using GNOME since at least 1.2 or 1.4. I've also used Unity in recent years simply because that was the easiest thing to use when using Ubuntu on one of the systems I have it on. However, it took very little effort for me to start using GNOME 3 in its latest incarnation as it is fairly similar to the Unity interface Ubuntu ships in many respects.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#164

Post by DCKing » Wed, Apr 05, 2017, 8:08 PM UTC

As an end user, I like this news. Unity was never for me (I run Gnome Shell on all my distros, including Ubuntu), I was not particularly enthused by Ubuntu phones, and Canonical getting on track with Gnome and therefore Wayland means we're making amazing progress to a more unified modern Linux desktop ecosystem.

But it's also very sad. Canonical tried to bring the open source technology to consumer devices, failed, and never really looked like succeeding in the first place. Although they made the Linux desktop accessible to new large audiences (including myself), they too cannot make the next step in making the technology a real success on the general consumer market.

Ironically, their desktop popularity gave them large popularity amongst developers and sysadmins, which now allows them to have a great business case to sell to enterprises for cloud and IoT. The same guys that boosted the popularity of Linux with a desktop for everyone are now going to be making almost all their money on enterprise licenses for headless systems. Ugh.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#165

Post by tradesmanhelix » Wed, Apr 05, 2017, 8:09 PM UTC

smartt wrote: post #123

Paul-ish wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand is Shuttleworth basically said "the market has spoken, and does not want an Ubuntu phone." But I checked their website a few times a year to see if I could buy an Ubuntu phone and always saw a message about "Coming soon" or "sold out". How was the market supposed to get their hands on Ubuntu phone?

I'm in the same boat. I backed the original Ubuntu Edge indiegogo campaign, but it never happened. And I would check the site periodically to see if there was a phone that shipped/worked in the States (and there never was) or if it was running on anything newer than a Nexus 5. FirefoxOS phones were pretty much the same story. Limited hardware that wasn't available in the US market. With both, it may not have been a l…

The shotgun approach that both FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Phone took saddens me - I think they could have done very well had they focused on acquiring power/niche users instead of trying to be a mass-market consumer product from the get-go.

When the iPhone first launched, it wasn't adopted by everyone. I remember when, in ~2009, I and a few friends were the only ones I knew who had an iPhone. It wasn't until around 2011 that pretty much everyone I knew had a smartphone.

The basic business lesson is that you have to "cross the chasm" from early adopters to mainstream users - you can't just start selling a new product to everyone and expect to succeed without massive resources, and even then your product can still struggle (see: Apple Watch). Really, the only way to pull it off is to establish a niche market before targeting the general market. This book [1] does a great job of explaining the process - Mozilla and Canonical execs would do well to read it!

Sadly, many startups don't seem to have very good business sense and long-term thinking. "If we're not the iPhone yesterday, then we can't compete and we might as well 'pivot' and 'focus' on our 'core offerings'" - not true! There is a market for a user-respecting, fully (or even mostly!) FLOSS smartphone, but my parents certainly aren't going to buy one - they just got their first iPhone last year after all - so sell to me and people like me, not them. Then, maybe in 6-8 years, once the platform has matured and the FLOSS benefits become obvious, you'll start to break into the general market and start to challenge iOS and Android. But I don't think most companies are down for that; sadly, most are just focused on next quarter's profits instead of building something lasting.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-3rd-Disruptive-Mainstr...

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#166

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 05, 2017, 8:10 PM UTC

tradesmanhelix wrote: post #100

"Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence" Translation: "We don't really care that much about Linux on the desktop because it's not making us much $$$." Dear Canonical, Your actions are a huge let down to the community. You caused a lot of strife with the move away from Gnome to Unity in 2010, and now you're ripping the rug out from under even more users after feeding us crap about converge…

[deleted]

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#167

Post by CaptSpify » Wed, Apr 05, 2017, 8:10 PM UTC

jhasse wrote: post #141

CaptSpify wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are your pain points? Because not being able to install most of the apps in the Play Store also applies to Ubuntu Phone. Mostly being able to find OOTB tools that I want. I use f-droid on my android and I usually end up just going back to the play store to find anything worthwhile. The Ubuntu phone gives me a real OS that I can just "apt-get install" something, then make a shell-script or something similar to…

> Mostly being able to find OOTB tools that I want. I use f-droid on my android and I usually end up just going back to the play store to find anything worthwhile. Okay but to be fair: If you had the Play Store on Ubuntu Phone you would probably also go there a lot more often. Especially for OOTB experiences ;) > The Ubuntu phone gives me a real OS that I can just "apt-get install" something, then make a shell-script…

> If you had the Play Store on Ubuntu Phone you would probably also go there a lot more often.

Actually, I would probably not, though I can't deny I would be intrigued to have it as an option. I am able to set up most of the things that I would want via something like apt, or shell scripts or similar

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#168

Post by GraemeLion » Wed, Apr 05, 2017, 8:12 PM UTC

vrutkovs wrote: post #91

pkd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could always use keyboard shortcuts to access the menu. Unity also let you search through the menu items with the Alt key - no manual navigation necessary. I thought that integrated menus are a great idea - even Apple does it. It saves vertical space and looks "at one" with the rest of the system.

GNOME has solved in a radical way by simplifying menus, so you need neither search nor frequent mouse/keyboard navigation. Honestly 'even Apple does it' is a poor argument. If global menu would be a really good and generally accepted idea we'd see it implemented in GNOME and KDE (via extensions at least).

https://vizzzion.org/blog/2016/10/plasmas-road-ahead/ Global Menu being implemented in KDE 5.9.

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#169

Post by Apocryphon » Wed, Apr 05, 2017, 8:13 PM UTC

ThatGeoGuy wrote: post #18

I get that they're moving away from convergence, but what does this ultimately mean for Ubuntu as a mobile OS? In the grand scheme of things, what does this mean for users who want a completely FOSS stack for their phone (let's ignore the baseband for now)? As far as I can tell, this just means that your only options are Android or iOS. It's not easy to get a Jolla/SailfishOS phone that will work on most Canadian or…

What about Plasma/Mobile for KDE on your phone?

Re: Growing Ubuntu for Cloud and IoT, Rather Than Phone and Convergence

#170

Post by gerbal » Wed, Apr 05, 2017, 8:14 PM UTC

NM-Super wrote: post #47

s_kilk wrote: post #8

> We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Legitimately never thought I'd ever see this. Possibly the best thing that could happen for desktop Linux in this age. Edit: and of course this would mean Ubuntu/Canonical and Fedora/RedHat basing their desktop OS's on the same platform, which can only mean easier development of desktop software and services.

I'm a bit torn. I like the design of Unity more than I do that of Gnome, but I think that less fragmentation is extremely desirable. Ultimately, I think it's a good, necessary move. Linux on the desktop will only happen when the environment is at least as uniform as that of Windows—from the perspective of application developers, at least.

Canonical bending their demonstrated ui talents may just lead to a better Gnome 3 experience.