[ale] Canonical makes Apple look so good...

[Pat Regan]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2011 14:22:53 -0500
Don Lachlan <ale-at-ale.org at unpopularminds.org> wrote:

> Gah. This is resembling more and more the conflict between Canonical
> and Debian, where Canonical wanted Debian to commit to hard release
> deadlines. If you've ever waited on a stable Debian release, you know
> the mantra is, "When it's ready." There are many developers who work
> on both Ubuntu and Debian (likely far more than Ubuntu and GNOME), but
> the community at large was opposed to Canonical's "request".

The glacial pace of Debian releases is the reason I switched to
Ubuntu...

I ran exclusively Debian from the late nineties up until Ubuntu 5.04 or
5.10.  For my own purposes Ubuntu has meant "Debian with a 6 month
release schedule."  

It has been so much easier than running Debian testing or unstable.  I
don't have to think ahead and make sure to pin packages.  I don't have
to hope that a package I need today is actually currently installable.

I didn't run a standard desktop environment on Debian, and I on my
Ubuntu machine I still run pretty much the same desktop.

Am I the only one running Ubuntu for this reason?

> And now, a year and a half later, Canonical is swinging its stick and
> saying that if a project doesn't agree with them and accept their
> plans and vision and code, it's wrong. We owe no allegiance to
> Shuttleworth or Canonical because they release GPL'd code; if they're
> misbehaving, it doesn't matter what the license is.

I'm way too uninformed on these softer, more political topics.  I don't
feel that I have enough information to do anything other than give
Shuttleworth the benefit of the doubt and assume that his blog post is
sincere.

I don't know what all Ubuntu is really contributing upstream.  The
feeling I get is that they doing much heavy lifting when it comes to
the lower level bits and pieces.  They seem more focused on the
(default) desktop user experience.

I don't really care much about any of that but most of the UI stuff
Mark Shuttleworth has blogged about has been interesting.  I think
"windicators" are a neat idea even if only to provide easy per-window
volume controls.  I think Canonical's take on ios/android style scroll
bars for the desktop is a step in the right direction.

I think my mother will love Unity.  She only understands maximized
windows and doesn't really understand the task bar.  I'm glad someone
is pushing something like this, I think it is a great experiment.

Getting back to the required upstream changes to Gnome...  Do we think
he's being sincere?  Do we think there was interest from the Gnome
developers a few years ago?  Do we think they actually did sound like
they'd welcome the code?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Gnome project suffers from a case
of Not Invented Here syndrome.  Lots of projects do, even open source
ones.

Pat