Four points to achieve to solve Bug #1

[duke.tim]

• #1 Stability
• #2 Ease of Use
• #3 OEM Support
• #4 Marketing

#1 Stability Ubuntu has a record of having bugs, fixing them, and then breaking new things in the next release. There has been progress but it still is not comparable to other OSes. This is only really about visible bugs that a user will notice (unfortunately). [things of major importance to the user would be: UI, Networking/wifi, sound,video, cd/dvd/blueray, Mouse and Keyboard, Bootloader, Webcam and of course printers]

#2 Ease of Use Unity has made major progress here, If I had to teach someone how to use a computer I would choose Ubuntu since the interface is so simple! Unfortunately #1 is also involved. Without stability ease of use can be impaired.

#3 OEM Support Probably one of the harder things to fix. This will likely naturally improve with an increase of market share. The other solution is to find 3rd party companies that are willing to sign a deal with Canonical (small ones?)

#4 Marketing It is great to have a fan base, but this will only take Ubuntu so far. Advertising would help a lot, Youtube for youth (and other demographics), Radio with a conservative spin (in the U.S. at least), Television with pop-culture, and of course the WWW. The target should be the young or new to computing since they will provide the least resistance to learning a new system.

What are your thoughts? Pro's, Con's, rants, raves, Humorous comments, Other things required for Market growth?

[Thewhistlingwind]

The most important thing is to make it easy for application writers to distribute their applications for Ubuntu.

If it takes me say, an hour, to get my application onto Ubuntu (Assuming it's already platform agnostic.) Marketplace, why not?

No ones going to turn down potential exposure to 13 million users if it's easy enough to get to them and their small enough for it to effect their bottom line.

[duke.tim]

That is a very good point. People like programs

I wonder how well the programs in the software center would hold out on phones and tablets since 2014 sounds like the potential release of Ubuntu on mobile devices.

[KiwiNZ]

4 Marketing It is great to have a fan base, but this will only take Ubuntu so far. Advertising would help a lot, Youtube for youth (and other demographics), Radio with a conservative spin (in the U.S. at least), Television with pop-culture, and of course the WWW. The target should be the young or new to computing since they will provide the least resistance to learning a new system.

Have heard the term 'going off half cocked'?
Despite wishful thinking ubuntu is not ready for mass marketing. To attempt that now would be counter productive terminally damaging.

[duke.tim]

yep, hence it is last on the list. I guess getting windows/mac only games supported on Ubuntu would help too.

[KFoder]

#1 : In my eyes stability has never been a problem on Ubuntu, I have always had less stability problems with Ubuntu than I've had with Windows, just install and run

#2 : Until recently I was happy with the usability, simple and easy to use, but powerful enough to allow customisation (that could be made somewhat easier though), but after unity, I'm very unhappy with the usability, it is almost non-customisable very non-intuitive, and very click heavy, in many cases even the W7 desktop is better (and I don't like windows) ! For me Unity is a killer (gnome 3 is even worse), and I'm very much contemplating some other (usable) desktop !

#3 : Really is a problem, even though the Linux community does a great work to bring new hardware to our platform, we will always be lagging behind because the manufactures of the hardware won't support Linux, that in it self makes Linux a hard sell to the young folks.

Interesting enough much of the newest hardware do support Mac's (which more or less is based on Linux) but it's still almost impossible to convince the producers to recompile their code for Linux, even though it should be fairly simple.

Even offers to build their code for Linux under a non disclosure agreement has in many cases been turned down. Something I do not understand as I would expect a hardware manufacturer to be interested in supporting as many os'es as possible.

#4 : I'm not shure I would want a commercially backed marketing campaign, not before we have a better OEM support and more commercial grade software (eg. games), but nothing stops any who wants, to spread the word in the local media, on you tube or where ever you can.

Kim

[aysiu]

If I had to rank the points you make in order of importance, I'd do it 3, 4, 1, 2. The OEM support is absolutely most important. Marketing is second place. And stability is almost a tie for second place, but that can be polished over time. Better ease of use is always welcome--it's easy enough now, though.

[BrokenKingpin]

#1. Switch to a yearly release cycle. With a 6 month release cycle, each release is buggy as ****. Would also be nice if you could enable a repo to keep things rolling.

#2. Drop Unity and switch to KDE for the main releases. If they spent the time to configure KDE properly they could have easily got a really nice end user desktop.

[duke.tim]

The new Desktop Interface Unity(3D) isn't bad, other than a bit of a lag compared to Gnome 3. I do miss customization though.

[Paqman]

I think we need to forget about Bug #1. If Linux was ever going to erode Windows' position it would have done so already.

The Linux community produces a lot of great stuff, and there are a lot of areas where desktop Linux is better than Windows. Is that not enough? Expecting our little niche desktop OS to somehow beat down the sweaty 900lb gorilla of Redmond is unrealistic IMO.