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I can see how Shuttleworth is drawing inspiration from Apple and MS Surface, but normally, you don't announce that X will be developed in secret, you develop X in secret, and then announce it!!
(Honest question) Is there any user-friendly alternative to Ubuntu? I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet-annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is barely half a pixel thin.
It really depends on what you consider user friendly. If you want fast access to the top ten applications you will normally use and an OS that is almost entirely hidden go for crunchbang ( http://crunchbang.org/ ) (video demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBuqWPcsTig&feature=relat... ) . CB has been my distro of choice for several years now.
I recently tried about 10 different "lightweight" distros on an old P3 with ~128 MB of RAM, and Crunchbang was the only one that ran ok and felt polished. (IIRC puppy linux was the only other one that ran fine, and it's just hideously ugly.)
My favorite distro was one that prominently mentioned that it could run on low end systems like mine. It turned out that the installer needed more RAM than the distro... I suggested to the developer that this be mentioned on the download page, and he seemed confused/offended! :(
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Not sure if joking or not... I keep running into big bugs in windows all the time and I'm using it only as an outlook box.
> I keep running into big bugs in windows all the time and I'm using it only as an outlook box. Examples of said big bugs?
And that's a proper laptop with a clean system, part of an AD, running only outlook the whole day.
On the other hand ubuntu natty used at the same time as the main machine, usually handling heavy development, testing and a number of VMs didn't surprise me once.
Canonical has gone mad. More and more it seems like this company is the worst thing that could happen to linux. Seems like embrace and extinguish to me. Make a distro the best among others, so novices can tentatively take their first steps in it. Now botch it, kill it and burn them so badly they would never come back to linux again.Sigh!
This can be a reason Shuttleworth is afraid of critics. Imagine a new feature will be "Ubuntu Premium": a package of brand new professionally developed productivity apps, ranging from webdev and graphics to security products. It's the next logical step after the introduction of ads.
If such an unpopular feature was announced today, Ubuntu will lose its users way before the release of v13.
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If you want to avoid the tiny-yet-annoying bugs, switch back to Windows (that's what I did) (OS X is good too).
Yes, unfortunately with all the things Linux gets right, there's always those tiny but annoying bugs. Windows and OSX have fewer because they have huge budgets and strong management to make sure things are polished.
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Oh, right the guy who said: "Unity 3D behaves spectacularly on all tested hardware, including old and new graphics cards. The performance is quite good, the responsiveness is great, and you even get reduced power consumption."
Yet it somehow causes 10fps+ drops in virtualization, and is nigh unusable on older hardware (yes yes anecdotal and meaningless i'm sure). Again, I wouldn't care if they would have just left 2d alone. I for one am getting very tired of being told how I should be using my computer.
When you say thinks like Unity is a pile of crap, i look at the pile of crap a neighbor dog left on the lawn and think that would never display emacs.
Also, no gun to your head. run whatever you like man. I'm only engaging you because you're kind of being a jackass. I think you have something useful contribute, because you're clearly passionate about Unity. It's just hard to get you to say exactly what you mean.
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> I keep running into big bugs in windows all the time and I'm using it only as an outlook box. Examples of said big bugs?
Service host (was that the correct name?) crashes at least once a week. Service host suddenly takes 90%+ of cpu. Start bar hiding behind windows. Sleep randomly causes hibernate or reboot instead. Network doesn't work properly after resuming the system (take cable out, plug in again - works). System update hangs forever. Copy anything formatted + paste into outlook -> rarely causes whole machine to freeze for ~2min.…
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Yet it somehow causes 10fps+ drops in virtualization, and is nigh unusable on older hardware (yes yes anecdotal and meaningless i'm sure). Again, I wouldn't care if they would have just left 2d alone. I for one am getting very tired of being told how I should be using my computer.
See, right there, that's perfect. Concrete examples of stuff that's wrong and what they could do better. Great comment. When you say thinks like Unity is a pile of crap, i look at the pile of crap a neighbor dog left on the lawn and think that would never display emacs. Also, no gun to your head. run whatever you like man. I'm only engaging you because you're kind of being a jackass. I think you have something useful…
I'm being a jackass because frankly I am tired of Canonical's shit. I can sort of forgive unity, okay, fine, ignoring what your users want in a UI seems to be the in thing nowadays (c.f. Microsoft, Gnome).
The Amazon lens was a bridge too far. I don't care if it's opt out - any form of advertising in a core OS component should be optin, not the other way around!
What put the final nail in the coffin for me was Shuttleworth's flippant response to those concerns.
And now with this whole "developed in secret" thing, the coffin reaches 5 feet under. As far as I can tell, Ubuntu's only real asset now is popularity. (And even that's declining, if the Distrowatch numbers mean anything...)
Rank Distribution H.P.D*
1 Mint 3403
2 Mageia 2462
3 Ubuntu 2042
4 Fedora 1522
5 openSUSE 1311
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Yes, unfortunately with all the things Linux gets right, there's always those tiny but annoying bugs. Windows and OSX have fewer because they have huge budgets and strong management to make sure things are polished.
On the other hand, I've encountered issues on OSX that I simply couldn't fix. With Linux, if you care enough about a bug you can generally find some workaround. (Assuming it's not driver related!)
It was the driver bugs that drove me back to Windows - doing multi-monitor is a pain in the rear, and suspend/hibernate would often break on distro update in the rare cases they worked before. Getting an up-to-date Web browser is a big plus for Windows over most Linux distros too (I know about Debian testing, Arch, PPA's, etc. - I said "most").
He is paying to have code developed to help improve Ubuntu and he happens to want to get somewhat polished versions of it before they release to public. Why is this bad? Sometimes people release early/often and that works for them. In this case Shuttleworth and by extension Canonical believe that releasing at the polished stage is beneficial.
Plus its not like there is some uber-secret group in a dark chamber coding this stuff up -- you just have to be an ubuntu developer with a little bit of traction to be part of it.