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Ubuntu 17.04 review

arstechnica.com

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Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#71

Post by sqeaky »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #55
microtonal wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going back to why Canonical dropped it, I'm pretty sure that's because they are giving up on the Linux desktop in general. Indeed, Canonical had the same realization as Red Hat ~2000-2003: there is no money in the Linux desktop, there is a lot of money in enterprise services and support. Since Canonical has to make a profit, it is smart of them to drop unprofitable projects such as the phone.

And now Ubuntu has passed Red Hat in the # of servers metric because devs like me choose their Linux server OS based on familiarity with the Ubuntu desktop OS.

While I agree this should be a column in the ledger tracking their costs and benefits, this is a hard sell to an accountant.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#72

Post by keithpeter »

jamescostian wrote: post #18

I never understood why Canonical's attempts to be "brave" (as Apple would call it) result in Canonical pulling out, while attempts by other companies like Apple don't. For example, Canonical made a very brave decision to switch to Unity, and now they're having to move away from Unity, which hints that there were enough users against it, and they pushed Canonical into this position (along with Canonical trying to allo…

I think Canonical is attempting to identify other investors, and the 'due diligence' on that resulted in a desire to focus on server/container type activity and to pull out of projects that have no obvious commercial value in the medium term.

Have a look here...

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cl...

So nothing to do with organisational bravery, or indeed the relative quality of the design, just cold hard cash and revenue streams.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#73

Post by sfifs »

jamescostian wrote: post #18

I never understood why Canonical's attempts to be "brave" (as Apple would call it) result in Canonical pulling out, while attempts by other companies like Apple don't. For example, Canonical made a very brave decision to switch to Unity, and now they're having to move away from Unity, which hints that there were enough users against it, and they pushed Canonical into this position (along with Canonical trying to allo…

Developing Unity is a cost center. Presumably there's not much revenue from developing it. Presumably the money being spent on it is better spent on server side where people do pay Canonical money for support.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#74

Post by sqeaky »

ungzd wrote: post #27
jamescostian wrote: post #18

I never understood why Canonical's attempts to be "brave" (as Apple would call it) result in Canonical pulling out, while attempts by other companies like Apple don't. For example, Canonical made a very brave decision to switch to Unity, and now they're having to move away from Unity, which hints that there were enough users against it, and they pushed Canonical into this position (along with Canonical trying to allo…

Even Microsoft can't afford bravery and have to revert almost every time.

Microsoft is not even in a position to think that way. They are constantly doing ass-backwards things that their enterprise and government customers want. So many of the messed up decision with Active Directory are because some upper manager that didn't know what was going on demanded a feature or threatened to switch away from microsoft.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#75

Post by tgb »

jamescostian wrote: post #18

I never understood why Canonical's attempts to be "brave" (as Apple would call it) result in Canonical pulling out, while attempts by other companies like Apple don't. For example, Canonical made a very brave decision to switch to Unity, and now they're having to move away from Unity, which hints that there were enough users against it, and they pushed Canonical into this position (along with Canonical trying to allo…

Admittedly, when Apple "killed skeumorphism" it had already been killed by most of their rivals some significant time before. Microsoft already had Metro; Google had flat, skeumorphic-free designs for a long time but never had made a big fuss over it (until that Duarte android thing got big). Ubuntu's Unity situation is rather different.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#76

Post by ashark »

holtalanm wrote: post #21
lotsoflumens wrote: post #13

I predict a resurgence of interest in KDE. ... despite the numerous Plasma crashes lately.

I used KDE until they released that godawful Plasma desktop. Don't get me wrong, it looks absolutely BEAUTIFUL, but it crashes constantly, and it is a crapshoot on whether or not it will actually even BOOT within a virtual machine.

OK, so it's not just me.

I installed 17.04 over Win10 on my desktop a couple weeks ago—my first time making a serious go of Linux on the desktop since whenever Ubuntu wasted a ton of my time with their half-baked PulseAudio "upgrade", which was a long time ago at this point—and started with KDE (I know from some dabbling that I hate Unity), but was hitting application crashes and long busy-cursor issues at a rate of several an hour, across many K-series applications—including settings, and the file manager. I constantly had little "something crashed" icons in the tray (which, by the way, failed to be interactive when clicked, so they just sat there). After a few days of that I switched to Gnome (which on an SSD and a four-core desktop class processor with a pile of RAM is now tolerably responsive) and that all stopped.

Still no cure for awful tearing every time I scroll in FireFox :-/

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#77

Post by bryanlarsen »

microtonal wrote: post #70
bryanlarsen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now Ubuntu has passed Red Hat in the # of servers metric because devs like me choose their Linux server OS based on familiarity with the Ubuntu desktop OS.

On the other hand, Red Hat's revenue is steadily growing[1] and there are very few RHEL desktop users. Fedora is probably also less popular than Ubuntu and its derivatives. [1] https://investors.redhat.com/financial-information/financial...

I'd be very surprised if Ubuntu's revenue wasn't increasing at a much higher rate than Red Hat's.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#78

Post by ashark »

oblio wrote: post #41
lotsoflumens wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - it's very annoying. There seems to some strange interaction with Oracle Java that it just can't handle. The KDE bug reporting process is completely broken. You need an account on their system just to report a problem. I suspect that a large number of problems are never reported because the process of documenting them is just too difficult for most users. There is no automated crash reporting at all. As far as I…

It's nothing new: Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers. Or if you want to see a funny image, click this link: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html If you're easily offended, google instead for "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers".

Funny, that's also a very common way for bug reports to be closed on Google's official Android bugtracker.

Re: Ubuntu 17.04 review

#80

Post by expectocode »

esrauch wrote: post #14
reacweb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what are all those shortcuts ? AFAIK, you can customize gnome easily.

The one big one for me is Super+number to jump to a window (super+3 to switch to the third window on the toolbar). Both Windows and Unity support this, but there's no way to get it on most other linux DEs (with Cinnamon there are plugins but they are really buggy). Not sure about gnome though. https://askubuntu.com/questions/813262/which-desktop-environ...

This is available in GNOME using the Dash to Dock extension. Screencast: https://u.teknik.io/MoEYx.mp4
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