Has Ubuntu lost it's Ubuntu?

[buzzingrobot]

A few things to remember:

1. All of Linux has made significant technical progress since the first release of Ubuntu. The changes in Ubuntu over that time correspond with that progress. Being more professional is a good thing.

2. It is a mistake to project individual opinions (Unity "hate') on other people. If Unity was as universally loathed as many people would like us to believe, no one would choose to install it. Ubuntu is available with a range of desktop environments, and no other distribution nurtures as many derivatives of all shapes and sizes. If you can't do it in Ubuntu, you probably can't do it in Linux.

3. The fact that Ubuntu has survived all these years, and the breadth and depth of its software base, is down to the fact that Canonical (Shuttleworth) money makes that happen. Like Red Hat and Suse, Canonical fund paid staff to design and develop. To date, it appears Canonical has never turned a profit. That cannot continue indefinitely. Not because Canonical is a greedy corporate evil. But, because a business cannot survive unless it replenishes the resources it expends. (That's true even for warm and fuzzy non-profits.) The monetization efforts we've seen included in the most recent Ubuntu releases are, it seems to me, rather desparate efforts to find a way to derive some revenue from Ubuntu so it does not become a permanent Mark Shuttleworth charity.

4. Someone motivated to use Linux primarily for ideological reasons, and not because of the nature and quality of the software, would be better advised to consider a distribution like Debian.

[Dragonbite]

Nothing wrong with Ubuntu evolving. Any good company/organization is going to evolve and change over time. Some companies go from start-up to mature company while others never make it out of start-up mode.

The start-up mentality and management is different than a mature company's management, which is why one step often taken is to oust the entrepenuer that started things and bring in somebody experienced with the more stable mature company's management.

Whether Ubuntu is justified or not, doesn't mean people cannot remember the "good old days" of when Ubuntu was a started.

[3rdalbum]

Although Linux is defaultly network-based by nature (so it could never lose it's humanistic character completely), these were the images and movies originally distributed with the distro.

Yeah; and do you possibly remember what everyone said? "Poo-brown". "I hate the brown". "Ubuntu should look more professional and less brown".

I'm not downing/hating Ubuntu but it appears to be heading away from it's simplistic, humanitarian beginnings and moving towards corporate goals like every other OS before it.

Canonical is a company, Ubuntu is not a community distro, this has always been the case.

and the desktop was so configurable to the user. Everything that was distributed with it, inspired community and sharing, creating, and shown out sparks of inspiration went into the wallpapers and images. Ubuntu had goals that it said it wouldn't violate and it has (trying to maintain a single CD image in size).

Sometimes you have to grow and mature, and usually that means moving away from a tweaker's paradise and more toward an end-user product. Think about it: The first personal computers were very much build-it-yourself and program-it-yourself. Very rudimentary ways of interacting with them. Eventually you lost some of the freedom of tweaking and making outrageous hacks, because it was necessary to make computing easier for a wider audience.

When people still accidentally drag their Windows taskbar to the side and don't know how to get it back to the bottom, you know that the ability to customise the location of the taskbar does not pay off. The 0.5% of users who do it may love the feature, but it will totally frustrate the 10% of users who accidentally move it and don't know how to move it back.

Tying Ubuntu's size to a particular storage technology was short-sighted. Much like how, in the UK, a CD single can't contain more music than a vinyl single otherwise it gets classed as a "budget album".

Sure, the code's free and open but the average user is stuck with the desktop if they don't understand that code.

There are other desktops; some are modern desktops with few customisation features, but many are still a tweaker's paradise. Find one that suits you. Don't blame Ubuntu - the Unity desktop was not the first Linux desktop to lose features in its maturity.

Are we still allowed to say we have Ubuntu, even though we're slowly moving away from a community driven OS and towards a private, locked down, desktop?

Ubuntu was never a community-driven operating system. Never. A lot of people seemed to believe that it was, and then got indignant when "OMG Ubuntu is selling software now!", but Ubuntu has always been directed by Canonical and community-contributed features were only ever included when they suited the commercial aims of Canonical. Not that it's a bad thing: Other distros, even as late as 2006, were still shipping two web browsers, three desktops and five text editors on their default install. And an icon editor, if you were really lucky.

[ki4jgt]

Another way to look at it though, if Ubuntu never evolved, it would have gone stale. Ubuntu is a business and businessess have to turn a profit, if it was just throwing out un-innovative releases every six months rather than taking risks and promoting new things, we would be complaining about it being behind the times.

As for no longer fitting on a CD? So what? things get bigger, more technical and 700mb is quite limiting, by increasing this size they are able to package a bigger, better and higher quality OS that they want to be accessible and usable by everyone (Unity not withstanding)

Ubuntu doesnt want to be the best linux distro, they want to be the best distro for everyone, they have to take risks and stand on toes.

From a personal standpoint? I'm just happy they got rid of the brown!

I didn't say uninnovating. I love Unity and would love to see it flurish as a company (with the user in mind) but every release seems to just add a little more than the last one and it usually feels as if the additions are business in nature. I'm not saying to keep the same flaw distro after distro. I'm saying to regain perspective. Ubuntu's vision in the past doesn't appear to match it's current visions but THAT past vision is what has brought Ubuntu to it's current state. For example, users are required to use a bunch of programs that they don't necisarily need. One, the chat plugins. A ton of people probably don't use the built-in chat features b/c they represent security issues (people can tell when you're online and can bug you all hours of the day). They also require the user to be online anyways so why not download them (like gstreamer mp3 plugins) when the user get's online? Then you have tools in a distro that's supposed to please the crowd, which would never be used by most of the crowd. The ones who would use these tools are forced to use less innovative ones b/c they've all been switched out for dumbed down versions. Don't get me wrong either, Ubuntu shouldn't remove the corporate plugins. It's gotta make money. It's giving out for FREE (as in BEER) what I'm sure has taken tons of man hours to create but it needs to go back to considering the individual user.

I never understand this complaint. Seriously, who still install with CDs?? The CD is bulky, slow and has low data capacity, it is going the way of the floppy(who still know what is a floppy?). I don't get the idea that if an OS does not conform to the limitation of an obsolete medium then there must be the fault of the OS,--being too "bloated".Most computers made in the last 10 years support booting from usb and many netbooks don't even have a cd rom. Linux supports booting from usb for a long time (which Windows only recently does) I have never installed a Linux distro with a cd, I would rather keep a few of multiboot usbs than a stack of CD's, too fragile and take up too much room.

Whenever I read guys in forums and tutorials telling others to "download the iso and burn a CD" and matter of factly talking about the fine points of burning speed, I feel like slapping these people over their heads. Hello?? burning a CD? It is not 2005 any more!!

Believe it or not there are still some computers which do not boot from flash-drives and why waste an entire DVD (4Gigs) on a few extra megabytes?

I'm not as concerned about that as I am Ubuntu leaving it's roots, it's goals, it's plans from the beginning though. I just used that as an example b/c it was the first thing that came to mind as one of Ubuntu's "goals" from the past.

Bah. Half of that's Gnome's new way of handling settings, and then there's Unity, which couldn't possibly be as featureful (and useful) as it is with a lot of config options built in. There's still tweaking to be done under the hood - though I admit that I'd never had to recompile anything for a tweak before using Unity. = /

Well, I mean yes Ubuntu has been handed a curveball when Gnome switched their deving to gnome-shell. That put ubuntu to having not only to manage the OS but to also manage the DE. I just wish they would offer more customization for the user instead of making us feel like mindless drones that have to do what everyone else does now. Sure, you can replace an icon png file and change a few colors but when Ubuntu started out it was fully customizable. I wish Unity would consider a module layout. The sidebar could go anywhere along the screen (even at the bottom). The search bar, results, filters in the dash were all modules that could be placed any way you liked. New modules could be added by other programmers. You could keep the dash out of certain parts of the desktop, you could change theme colors, Compiz-settings still allowed you to make those awesome modifications to windows, you could make your window transparent when you didn't want other people looking at it (I would always turn the transparency down when I was younger so I could see something and no one else could).

I tend to agree that Ubunut is evolving and becoming more corporate-like.

I understand why they are doing it (to become self-sufficient) but that doesn't mean I don't long for the simplicity, flexibility and basically "fun" that Ubunut elicited in the beginning.

The logo used to be multi-colored before, and the animal names were "fun" and "quirky" and made Ubuntu stand out from the rest. When you pare down Linux distributions enough, there is really very little difference. Ubuntu brought ease of use to Linux and was just like a party more than a platform.

I would love it if Ubuntu Gnome would try to "go back to its roots" with making Ubuntu fun and quirky again (no necessarily brown) and bring back the multi-color logo. While Gnome isn't as flexibile as it used to be, the Classic Session should elicit some nostalgia (enough Red Hat, not Fedora, will be using it when shipping their next version).

I still miss my old Ubuntu cap which was black and with the multi-color Ubuntu logo on it.

You know you can change the Icon right? I found a tut for online last night.

A few things to remember:

1. All of Linux has made significant technical progress since the first release of Ubuntu. The changes in Ubuntu over that time correspond with that progress. Being more professional is a good thing.

2. It is a mistake to project individual opinions (Unity "hate') on other people. If Unity was as universally loathed as many people would like us to believe, no one would choose to install it. Ubuntu is available with a range of desktop environments, and no other distribution nurtures as many derivatives of all shapes and sizes. If you can't do it in Ubuntu, you probably can't do it in Linux.

3. The fact that Ubuntu has survived all these years, and the breadth and depth of its software base, is down to the fact that Canonical (Shuttleworth) money makes that happen. Like Red Hat and Suse, Canonical fund paid staff to design and develop. To date, it appears Canonical has never turned a profit. That cannot continue indefinitely. Not because Canonical is a greedy corporate evil. But, because a business cannot survive unless it replenishes the resources it expends. (That's true even for warm and fuzzy non-profits.) The monetization efforts we've seen included in the most recent Ubuntu releases are, it seems to me, rather desparate efforts to find a way to derive some revenue from Ubuntu so it does not become a permanent Mark Shuttleworth charity.

4. Someone motivated to use Linux primarily for ideological reasons, and not because of the nature and quality of the software, would be better advised to consider a distribution like Debian.

I don't mind the attempts at money. I do think they should be more organized and I'm NOT spouting Unity "hate." I've actually grown to love unity but I am shouting frustration that the goals used to found the OS (the ones which brought it to where it is) aren't what they were.

Nothing wrong with Ubuntu evolving. Any good company/organization is going to evolve and change over time. Some companies go from start-up to mature company while others never make it out of start-up mode.

The start-up mentality and management is different than a mature company's management, which is why one step often taken is to oust the entrepenuer that started things and bring in somebody experienced with the more stable mature company's management.

Whether Ubuntu is justified or not, doesn't mean people cannot remember the "good old days" of when Ubuntu was a started.

But the startup is what brought in the followers, the Ubuntu sheep (if you will) LOL.

[Linuxratty]

I agree it had to change..While I don't agree with everything Shuttleworth has done,I understand why he did it.

[ki4jgt]

Ubuntu was never a community-driven operating system. Never. A lot of people seemed to believe that it was, and then got indignant when "OMG Ubuntu is selling software now!", but Ubuntu has always been directed by Canonical and community-contributed features were only ever included when they suited the commercial aims of Canonical. Not that it's a bad thing: Other distros, even as late as 2006, were still shipping two web browsers, three desktops and five text editors on their default install. And an icon editor, if you were really lucky.

Then why was the video I linked to ever included in the OS and why was the named derived from a word that MEANS "community?"

[ki4jgt]

I know this propably went a little far but I did this about the time I created this thread. It's a bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...a/+bug/1193978

[buzzingrobot]

I've never been sure just exactly what a "community" distribution is supposed to be. "Community" is just an internet buzzword used to describe a group of people whose single point of commonality is the use of a certain kind of software. It's as legitimate to talk about the Windows "community" as it is the Ubuntu "community". It's a word used to make us feel part of something and, hence, boost brand loyal.

If, though, by "community" we really mean "all volunteer and anti-corporate", then we really ought to say so.

In any case, decisions need to be made in the management of any software, and communities cannot make decisions. Even distributions like Debian and Fedora, which make a big deal out of community, create small groups of individuals who have the responsibility for managing the product. Perhaps they make an effort to measure the consensus of opinion in the community, but that can really only be an educated guess. I don't know of any distribution that hires professional pollsters to see what users are thinking.

If some folks don't like the way Ubuntu is going these days, they can always fork it, in the grand tradition of Linux.

[prodigy_]

Ubuntu but it appears to be heading away from it's simplistic, humanitarian beginnings

Heading away? Oh my. Dear OP, where have you been since 2009? The Ubuntu you dream of is rotting in its grave. There's literally nothing left and that's the reason why the community is crumbling.

[castrojo]

I just wish they would offer more customization for the user instead of making us feel like mindless drones that have to do what everyone else does now. Sure, you can replace an icon png file and change a few colors but when Ubuntu started out it was fully customizable. I wish Unity would consider a module layout. The sidebar could go anywhere along the screen (even at the bottom). The search bar, results, filters in the dash were all modules that could be placed any way you liked. New modules could be added by other programmers. You could keep the dash out of certain parts of the desktop, you could change theme colors, Compiz-settings still allowed you to make those awesome modifications to windows, you could make your window transparent when you didn't want other people looking at it (I would always turn the transparency down when I was younger so I could see something and no one else could).

I think you're mixing up Ubuntu's values with customization. For a lot of people (me included) having a more reliable consistent desktop that is easier for people to use is more important than moving the launcher. For all those cosmetic features you've mentioned we've gained a ton more real features (like proper multimonitors support and better multitasking) than say, having windows catch on fire. For the search bar, results, and filters, those are already modularized, people can mix and match scopes as they see fit and people do write different scopes and lenses for different services.