Ubuntu Linux has lost its lustre?

With its focus on usability, Ubuntu with Canonical is supported by many as the best Linux distribution ever and its Distrowatch rankings tend to reinforce this belief. Not only is the distro most frequently downloaded today from this site, but all the many changes of earth-shaking that announced promise to keep it exciting in the future.
For those of us who love Ubuntu, then, it was painful and perplexed to read recent blog post by Bruce Byfield titled, "love Ubuntu: where did it go?"

Growing concerns and criticisms on report of Ubuntu with the open source community at large are focus of Byfield and he comes out with a variety of possible reasons. Chief among them, however, is "the gap between the expectations created by Ubuntu and Canonical in their early days and their growing tendency to focus on commercial interests," he writes.

Byfield "instead of being the Member of the community business model that his first appearance, Ubuntu/Canonical today increasingly seems concerned with their own interests rather than those of FOSS as a whole," he says. "Certainly there are sound business reasons for the change, but many people interpret it as proof of hypocrisy".

More than 50 comments quickly appeared on Datamation, where column of Byfield was first published, and it wasn't long before the crowd of Slashdot got wind of the topic as well--to the tune of some comments of 760 or better.

"Ubuntu made some choices mute recently in the selection of layout and GUI package," wrote GameboyRMH on Slashdot, for example. "Matters are not huge, but issues PITA and this is what has caused a lot of hate Ubuntu.

"Over the years people have been getting more and more pissed off by the fact that Ubuntu is a distro bleeding edge and updates tend to break stuff," added GameboyRMH. "Because of these problems a lot of people have been switching to Debian".

On the other hand: "if people don't like Ubuntu does not have to use it," noted shellbeach. "There's a billion and a distro out there, catering for any whim or fantasy everywhere ... and if not you can always roll your own. If Ubuntu change enough to be unpopular with end users, then some other distro will intercept and we'll all be praising that one.

While geeks were busy offer more such thoughts on Linux through the blog, Sam Varghese of iTWire was moved to publish a post with your take. The title? Nothing but the provocative "Ubuntu: there was never any to begin with love."

"People who write FOSS often are inclined to see the entire phenomenon through misty eyes and portray the people involved as to first" opined Varghese. "This is manifestly untrue--every open source project was started by someone who wanted to scratch his own itch; that helps others is only guarantees ".

More comments followed from there until it became hard to find discussions of any other topics going on in the Linux blogosphere. Linux girl wore his boss flame-retardant and set out to learn more.

"Ubuntu has only itself to blame," said Barbara Hudson, on Slashdot, a blogger who goes by "Tom" on the site.

"Watch the heavy trying to get developers to synchronize their release cycles with Ubuntu--it runs counter to the philosophy" will be released when ready "most open source projects, including the linux kernel," Hudson said. "This was a demand-based marketing that got what he deserved: a total refusal."

Despite the fact that has been around for more than six years, "just don't look like Ubuntu has a clear vision of what it wants to be when it grows, or a path to profitability," he added.

As regards the netbook interface unit, e.g., "jump in netbook market contraction with both feet is a way to be a small fish in a small pond," said Hudson.

Wrong decisions guided by short-sighted marketing "," in other words, are "the real face of Ubuntu," said Hudson.

Slashdot blogger hairyfeet saw it differently.

"This is just another reason why the best thing that could make the canonica is a fork only everything away from the ' Community ' and go out right" Linux girl hairyfeet said. "I mean, here you have the community having a fit about Canonical and not sharing them upstream, yet this simple fact is upstream doesn't want to go where it is Canonical leader!"

Linux on the desktop hairyfeet "still have lower numbers than the margin of error, yet the community never ask, ' what are we doing wrong and what is the other guy doing right?" she asked. "NO! You must be a m $ conspiracy, ' and if people would just ' embrace the power of CLI '--which I swear I had a Linux Guy actually say I like is the strength or something--because then things would be all hearts and roses. "

That, however, "is a lie and Canonical and Shuttleworth know this, why are trying to create the first ' Linux for human beings ' instead of Linux for CS nerds," added hairyfeet. "Canon has done more to make Linux accessible to the masses that has ever happened before."

Perhaps the most philosophical musings, however, were from a consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack.

"At the end that doesn't matter," Mack said Linux girl.

"Ubuntu has had a big effect on the FOSS ecosystem and many usability changes were moved upstream, where all other Linux distributions now have access to them," explained Mack. "If Ubuntu is pushing things too far in ways that do not wish that their customers, there will be another distro to take their place."

Fedora and openSUSE Linux Drop drive efforts

Canonical made quite a splash of autumn, when it announced that the interface units used in his edition of Ubuntu Netbook would become the default interface of the Linux distribution as well as desktop version starting with version 11.04 or narwhal Natty.

Previously used Ubuntu, GNOME shell by default. Conflicts on design issues between Canonical and the GNOME project, however, apparently caused canonical move instead to shell and 3D multitouch enabled units.

Not long after the announcement of canonical, developers on projects both Fedora and openSUSE indicated that they would start implementing unit on their distributions as well. Whereas now, Ubuntu is the Linux distribution of no 1, according to Distrowatch, Fedora is no 3 and openSUSE is no. 5.

«Still stuck on this Bug»

"Unit of an interesting project," wrote Fedora Developer Adam Williamson back in December. "I want to look at and compare it with GNOME Shell and I think very few others do too, so it looks nice a package so that you can run both on Fedora."

This week, however, both efforts apparently stuck.

Williamson of Fedora, for example, said on Monday that he "had little time or inclination to do much with unit/Poulsbo.

"The drive is still stuck on this bug that promised the upstream maintainer to look after Christmas (I presented Last change prompted on Jan 25, and it was crickets from)," explained, noting that his work effort is entirely voluntary. "If I had the inclination might have set up a repo for side carry on building stuff, or spied on ajax to include the patch anyway. Only I didn't. "

"Lack of satisfactory"

Nelson Marques of the openSUSE project, meanwhile, has encountered similar obstacles.

Marques "packaging unit was much of a problem, but the implementation is to be translated in frustration," he wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. That "and the lack of satisfactory results may lead to situations pre-burnout, and not I'm walking that road."

Marques cited problems encountered as part of his frustration, including "Compiz git different behaviour on different snapshots", and "gconf defaults requests from the drive and backup and restore operations from openSUSE defaults."

Compiz is a window manager that is used by default to unity in narwhal Natty.

"Maybe it's wiser to wait for some more development from upstream, before examining the question," concluded Marques. "openSUSE is supposed to be stable and reliable, and I don't see this branch of Compiz correspond to those two quality yet."

Ubuntu is isolated

Both developers did welcome the involvement of other stakeholders in the effort, and Marques said that he would look into it later, "once there is an official release of Compiz from branch that you need for unity".

In the meantime, however, seems narwhal Natty--whose final version is expected to be published at the end of April--will be the only one with the unit turned on by default, at least for the foreseeable future.

The unit can now be seen in the second alpha version of Natty, which is now available for download on the Ubuntu site. A video on YouTube shows the release in action. If you have checked out the new interface, please share your impressions in comments.

Follow Katherine Noyes on Twitter: @ Noyesk.