Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

insights.ubuntu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 470 posts

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

#171

Post by GraemeLion »

0xFFC wrote: post #58

I knew this was happening. They invested on Unity8 in quite reverse way. They had opportunity to make unity8 excellent desktop environment (they had money and workforce) and after becoming most popular de in linux environment they could continue that to mobile space(they are most popular linux distro already). Putting money on phone portion instead of desktop portion of the unity8 was biggest mistake i cna imagine. I…

The only thing I can guess is they thought that to succeed in convergence, they would have to win the phone market, and that was the harder market to design for and react to. So, they built for that and tried to win the hardware developers/companies.

I suspect they thought if they got that, they could converge things back on the desktop

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

#172

Post by Scarblac »

WD-42 wrote: post #16
mtgx wrote: post #7

Does that mean they're going to make it easy not to have the taskbar on the side - or god forbid, even put it at the bottom by default ? I remember that "convergence" with mobile was the primary reason why the Ubuntu UI was designed the way it was and why the taskbar was put on the side. Yes, I realize a lot of Ubuntu users have already gotten used to it, and some may even prefer it, but I'm sure the majority of new…

Have you ever used Gnome? There is no taskbar :)

To me as a Firefox-and-terminals user, the main difference between the two is that Unity has a fugly taskbar always on the left of my screen where I don't want it, and windows have their menu somewhere unrelated to the window (at the top of the screen). If Gnome doesn't have either, great!

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

#173

Post by Touche »

gerbal wrote: post #170
NM-Super wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do I live in an alternate universe? Do people really think this looks good? http://toastytech.com/guis/ubuntu114defaultunity.jpg

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

#174

Post by DCKing »

frik wrote: post #136
hd4 wrote: post #125

I'm one of the people who asked for less NIH in Ubuntu in the recent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 but I didn't think they would take it this far. Jokes aside, it's sad that Unity won't be developed further. I'm one of the ones who loves Unity 7, it's always been faster and less memory hungry than GNOME or KDE for me. I will just have to cling onto the LTS for as long as possible. In the long-t…

Gnome 2 and KDE 3 were pretty good. Then both shells lost their way. Why do they try to be a bad clone of macOS rather than keep being a Win98 on steriods (KDE 3) or a more simple shell for normal users (Gnome 2).

I dislike that people speak in such absolutes on this. You're expressing a personal opinion.

In my opinion, Gnome 3 is amongst the best desktop shells I've ever used. It's focus on simplicity in the base, while including extensibility using, well, extensions is unparalleled. I like that I can choose my own complexity and features without resorting to editing config files or hacky black magic. It's only marred by a subjective lack of quality, quantity and consistency in applications, as is the entire Linux/Unix desktop.

So to each their own. I also think KDE 4/5 are much nicer than KDE3.

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

#175

Post by justinclift »

gshulegaard wrote: post #57

I may be a minority, but I am very saddened by this. Not because I have any particular love for Unity, but rather I share Mark's conviction that convergence is the future. Love or hate it but Unity was IMO the best shot we had at getting an open source unified phone, tablet and desktop experience...and now this is effectively Canonical not only shutting down Unity, but refocusing efforts away from convergence and tow…

MaruOS might be interesting for you:

http://maruos.com

https://github.com/maruos

Only the Nexus 5 and 7 are fully supported at present though.

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

#177

Post by tradesmanhelix »

dullgiulio wrote: post #161
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.…

1. Agreed. However, it looks really bad for them as a company to behave this way toward their users, both back in 2010 when they moved away from Gnome and now in 2017 when they're moving back. Both moves have been done without regard for and without consulting with the community. For a FOSS company, that's bad business and I think it will hurt their bottom line in the long run.

2. I think these are two unrelated points. To clarify:

a. Canonical hyped Convergence and Ubuntu Phone, but never delivered on the hype. That's bad, both for their company image as well as for the entire FOSS community as a whole. It makes us seem like a joke.

b. They shipped Unity. Now, they're trying to un-ship it. They've handled the entire situation very poorly. Not upset that they did ship, just saddened by the way the entire situation was handled.

I would argue that Ubuntu is the de-facto standard for cloud and IOT. They've achieved a ton of success in becoming a standard at least there.

No one is saying that didn't try. What I'm asking is: Should the community give Canonical a gold star for trying? Will opponents of FOSS software? I don't think so, because overall the failed hype around Ubuntu Phone and Convergence just looks bad and I think Canonical has handled the entire situation since 2010 very poorly.

Not sure I quite understand what you mean by, "We cannot always have our cake and eat it too." Personally, I just wanted Canonical to follow through with the hype and deliver on Convergence and Ubuntu Phone.

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

#178

Post by simondedalus »

Touche wrote: post #173
gerbal wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do I live in an alternate universe? Do people really think this looks good? http://toastytech.com/guis/ubuntu114defaultunity.jpg

they like the absence of all of gnome's chrome and the smooth animations and transitions.

me, i like gnome 3 and unity. all told i think this is really good news from canonical, for wayland, for gnome, for desktop linux in general, etc.

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

#179

Post by curt15 »

Touche wrote: post #173
gerbal wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do I live in an alternate universe? Do people really think this looks good? http://toastytech.com/guis/ubuntu114defaultunity.jpg

It certainly makes better use of space than the thick header bars that gnome ships with by default. At least one Gnome developer seems to think so too https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2015/10/17/time-to-use-he...

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

#180

Post by rlpb »

gshulegaard wrote: post #57

I may be a minority, but I am very saddened by this. Not because I have any particular love for Unity, but rather I share Mark's conviction that convergence is the future. Love or hate it but Unity was IMO the best shot we had at getting an open source unified phone, tablet and desktop experience...and now this is effectively Canonical not only shutting down Unity, but refocusing efforts away from convergence and tow…

I'm with you. I'd like a fully free software stack across my personal devices, and I also thought that Ubuntu had the best chance of achieving this. I think the issue is in a business model that would work for Canonical.

OTOH, most of the hard work is done. My Ubuntu Phone mostly works. The stack is complete. I'd love to see interested people taking that code and keeping it going. I'd spend spare time on contributing if this were to happen.

(I'm a Canonical employee and Ubuntu developer, but not on the convergence/desktop/phone side, and my opinions here are my own and not that of my employer)

Post reply on HN