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Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)Posted Oct 25, 2010 18:54 UTC (Mon) by Arker (guest, #14205)Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)
Global menus are great, I dont understand why anyone wouldnt want them. On the other hand: He argued that the "files and folders way of thinking is completely broken" and should be displaced by a more search-centric model and Zeitgeist-enabled tools that rely on context. That sounds like dangerous nonsense to me.
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Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 20:10 UTC (Mon) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]
Files & folders are a lot like democracy; it's a terribly broken solution that just happens to be better than anything else anyone has come up with.
I'll be interested to see the next version of Ubuntu. I don't get the difference between this and gnome-shell or why the various developers involved in these projects are doing it separately, but hopefully the end results will make that clearer...
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 20:25 UTC (Mon) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]
Other than this silliness of calling them "folders" instead of "directories" what precisely is "broken" about them?
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 21:09 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
The fundamental problem with thinking the directories/files methodology can be replaced with a search model (something MS proposed years ago BTW) is failing to realize many people remember where they put things, but not what they called them. This is as true in real life as it is in computer files and it's the primary reason the file/folder methodology continues to this day. Until there is a real AI to act as a personal assistant and remember the names and content (much like in real life where the assistant handles the files) there will be little success with a search based file structure.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 25, 2010 21:59 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
While I generally agree with you, keep in mind that the modern generation of search solutions tends to search the contents of files, not just their names.
Both KDE and MacOS X have done a lot of work in this direction, and for a lot of the Mac people I've met it's become indispensable. (In KDE people still tend to turn it off because the indexing overhead has often been too noticable.)
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 25, 2010 22:51 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Tracker is pretty good. I've used it in the past, but I don't have it turned on right now.
It works and I think something like ZeitGeist would actually be REALLY F-ING useful for me at work.
For folders I frequently use in a GUI I arrange things according to date. When I am on the command line I've started using 'ls -ltr' habitually.
There comes a time when managing files manually and having well-laid out directories for managing information just does not scale.
Search helps a lot, but it would be even more useful to find ways to naturally be able to track _relationships_ between data. That would be fantastic.
Anybody who thinks that directory/file structure for managing information manually by humans....
How many times (and be honest) you were browsing the internet and found some interesting image or pdf or tarball or anything and you downloaded it and openned up in the default application.... and then _later_on_, maybe hours or weeks or months later decided that you wanted to look at that file again you just ended up searching the internet for it _again_ and _redownloaded_ it just because it was quicker and you were in a hurry?
I don't know about you, but it's much easier to remember text in a document, how I found a document, or relationships between different data (in some way shape or form) then it is to remember what I did with a file after I was done with it.
Anyways; GUI file managers are all piles of crap anyways. I rather use Nautilus compared to Finder or Explorer, but all three of them a pretty irritating to use. Especially when using Windows I always long for a nice Unix shell and on Windows machines I use a lot cygwin is universally installed. There just has to be a better way.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 7:57 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (subscriber, #52523) [Link]
"Anyways; GUI file managers are all piles of crap anyways. I rather use Nautilus compared to Finder or Explorer, but all three of them a pretty irritating to use. Especially when using Windows I always long for a nice Unix shell and on Windows machines I use a lot cygwin is universally installed. There just has to be a better way."
I miss FAR (http://www.farmanager.com/index.php?l=en) on Linux, it's _the_ best file manager in existence. Everything else seems clunky in comparison, including the 'most advanced' GUI managers like Dolphin in KDE.
Try it on Windows. Though it does have a steep learning curve, kinda like emacs/vim.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 10:34 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 11:27 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (subscriber, #52523) [Link]
It only _looks_ like, unfortunately. It's nowhere close in functionality and ease of use.
There's a project to resurrect MC: http://www.midnight-commander.org/ - it _might_ one day produce FAR's rival. But it's still not comparable, so far.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:20 UTC (Tue) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]
It's a gui, but have you tried Kommander?
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 17:11 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (subscriber, #52523) [Link]
Do you mean 'Krusader'?
I think, I've tried all the two-panel managers in Linux. http://freshmeat.net/projects/XNorthernCaptain/ is most close to FAR in 'spirit' but its functionality is severely lacking.
It's certainly possible to live in Linux without file managers, but sometimes it's almost painful to write series of commands which can be done in a few keypresses in a good file manager. Does not happen that often, so it's not a deal-breaker.
I guess, users of vim/emacs feel the same when they are forced to use less powerful editors.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:56 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
I actually think there's a need for both methods, applied to mostly different files. There are files that are part of a larger logical structure (source files in a project or chapters in a book you're writing), and these are stable enough to get a familiar filesystem location and the files have familiar names; there are also files that are not given memorable paths or names (either because the user doesn't expect to need them again, because the user didn't think about naming, or because the user's choice of name turned out not to be memorable), and these can be found with search.
I think the directory method is several orders of magnitude more effective at handling those files for which it is at all useful, so abandoning it would make certain important things extremely inefficient for many people. But it's also nearly useless for many other things, and search is better for those. In real life, I don't put every paper I have into some folder or other, because that kind of classification doesn't really make sense for everything; but I do put all of my tax records for the same year into a folder, and even having an effective content search wouldn't mean I could live without these folders, because I sometimes need to go through exactly those documents, and they don't share any content features which are distinctive.
I'd actually really like to see a system where users get some storage with names and some storage that's indexed, where either can be used but the defaults are sensible. Mainly, I think that files should only be in some particular directory when created with a "New File In This Directory" interface, and otherwise they're all in a single directory with random names that gets indexed. That is, using filenames for files should be supported and efficient, but there shouldn't be any encouragement to do it except when the user actually wants to.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 28, 2010 7:25 UTC (Thu) by russell (subscriber, #10458) [Link]
Just wondering. What is Search going to do with data that it can't analyse?
I have a directory tree in my home directory with 16 million map tiles, and lots of other non searchable stuff such as source code. What's it going to do when it see that. Spend days analysing them? Will I be forced to move stuff out of my home directory that isn't searchable? I think there is a big difference between a home directory where I control stuff and the internet where I don't.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 31, 2010 12:31 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
On the internet, you also don't spend your system's time and disk bandwidth doing the indexing.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 23:39 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] many people remember where they put things, but not what they called them. Really?? I'm just the opposite. I remember what I call things, but forget where I put them. find or locate help me out. I like files and directories as a way to organize things.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 2:03 UTC (Tue) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link] Different people think in different ways. The system shouldn't force them to think one way or the other. For people that work most effectively with folders, that interface should be supported. For people that deal most effectively with search, that should be supported too. Some people will benefit from having both available.The kind of thinking that "folders are bad, search way better, so we're going to do away with folders and use search instead" should be studiously avoided.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 14:36 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Different people think in different ways. The system shouldn't force them to think one way or the other. We are in violent agreement on this point. That's why I get irritated when developers try to engage in social engineering and force the One True Way of doing things on their users.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 21:32 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] I remember what I call thingsWhich only works well if you're the one who names them. If you don't have control over the name- either because it's automatically named by whatever creates it or because you're collaborating with somebody else and they named it- then it can be hard.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 27, 2010 15:48 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] If you don't have control over the name- either because it's automatically named by whatever creates it or because you're collaborating with somebody else and they named it- then it can be hard. True, which is why at work we use a revision-control system to collaborate on documents and we enforce naming guidelines. Yes, I successfully have non-technical people trained to use Subversion rather than mailing around things like "Press Release Foo - Revision 2 (DFS-Rev-1)" I'd love to have them on git, but Subversion was a steep-enough learning curve. :)
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 12:01 UTC (Tue) by Quazatron (subscriber, #4368) [Link]
And why can't we have both?
Sometimes you remember the location of a file, sometimes the name or content or creation date.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 1:11 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] The thing that's broken about folders/directories is that they impose a hierarchical model of file relationships that doesn't necessarily represent our mental model of their relationship. Each file has many properties, and I may care more about one property at one time and another property at a different time. If I sort them into a directory structure, that inherently imposes one specific organization on them that may make it difficult to find what I want if it turns out that I care about a different thing. That may not be a big deal if I'm looking for one specific file, but it can make life very tough if I'm looking for a whole class of files that may be scattered across a whole directory structure.As an example, I'm a photographer. I tend to sort my photographs into folders first by the year when I took them, then by a general subject (e.g. pictures I took when hiking), then by more specific criteria depending on the subject. That's OK when I'm looking for specific pictures- I can narrow things down a lot by remembering an approximate date and subject- but it's severely limiting if I want to do something more. I may want to do something more complicated, like search for all photos taken in a specific location, or taken with a particular lens, or with a shutter speed slower than 1s, or even all pictures taken within 1/2 hour of sunrise. Those are all criteria that I might want to consider using, and they're all things that I potentially could search on based on the metadata within my images*. But I obviously can't sort my pictures into folders according to all of those criteria. The only practical approach is to have really good support for metadata searches. There are currently programs designed specifically to support that kind of searching for photographs, but it would be better if it were supported at the OS level. *My camera can automatically geotag my images, which would let me sort them by location or even let me calculate local sunrise time and see if they were taken close to sunrise.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 10:38 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
For pictures, the situation is quite nice, with all that EXIF. And for audio-files there's ID3.
But where are the tools to edit EXIF-tags in movies?
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 10:55 UTC (Tue) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]
While the EXIF indexing is probably the right solution for you, I want to object to your notion that somehow can't sort your pictures into directories according to all of your criteria.
There is fundamentally no problem with this. A file can have a number of names and positions in a traditional directory hierarchy. There are a number of practical issues, such as that you have to delete all instances of the file to actually delete it which may not fit a photography collection, but there are issues with any system.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:12 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] What you're saying is that we can work around the problem with the current system.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 18:26 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] That's not a very practical solution. Pre-sorting into a whole set of directories according to my different criteria is theoretically possible, but has some severe limitations. Directory structures work best when the metadata in question takes on a relatively limited set of values. So it will work fine if I want to sort based on traditional photographic criteria, like lens, aperture, shutter speed, focal length, etc. But that type of sorting breaks down for values like latitude, longitude, or time, where there are literally millions or billions of possible discrete values.There's also the a matter of practicality. Yes, I can theoretically create a whole set of parallel directory structures each of which serves as a a way of sorting according to different criteria. But the more different criteria I use, the more cumbersome that solution gets. Just adding and deleting files gets to be a pain, since it involves creating or deleting numerous links. You'll wind up needing to create a whole set of new tools to create and maintain your fancy link structure. And all you're really doing is duplicating the functionality of a database- probably badly. At some point, it gets easier just to have the computer maintain a proper database rather than trying to do it with links. Once you've built the tools to maintain the database, a whole world of other possibilities opens up. You'll be able to use standard database queries to look for your files. Adding new file types only involves figuring out what kind of metadata they might want to use. There's a lot more upfront effort, but the potential payoff is huge.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 11:36 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
What we need to fix these problems is file tagging via extended attributes. In addition to the 'canonical' file path each file could have a tag cloud of simple text labels, which might if well integrated into a UI come to replace hierarchies for most people's organizational needs.
I was looking around the other day for this because I wanted to start tagging images that are not always JPEGs and I figured someone must, by now, have developed a scheme for using extended attributes for file tagging. What I have found so far is that nothing for this is published anywhere, even if some application or other may implement it, and there's certainly no common standard.
On a *nix system a hard link acts a lot like a tag: One or more names is associated with a file. The down side to hard links is that adding a lot of them, like 20 or more, for a single file purely for the purpose of 'tagging' it becomes a management nightmare. Extended attributes would work nicely for simple label tagging, though it would be nicer if tags could be typed so that dates (date taken, etc) could be stored this way as well.
If file tools knew about tags in extended attributes then it would be a simple matter to add a few to any file and have a VFS which lets me see one directory per tag on any file on the system and drill down to specific files. Some indexing would be required for that, naturally, but even without it we could certainly all benefit from moving MP3 and JPEG tags into metadata where they belong, writing them back to the files only when we're ready to transfer across the network.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 14:37 UTC (Tue) by jackb (subscriber, #41909) [Link]
"There are currently programs designed specifically to support that kind of searching for photographs, but it would be better if it were supported at the OS level."
You mean something like a filesystem that supported arbitrary file metadata and exposed it in a way that made it accessible to all programs without needing to go through a separate API?
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 19:13 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] Honestly, I'm more of a user than a developer, so I don't really care that much about implementation details. What I know as a relatively sophisticated user is that my files are automatically generated with a ton of useful metadata, but that the system does a really poor job of taking advantage of it to make my life easier. I don't know enough about the potential tradeoffs to know if it's better handled by the kernel maintaining extended file attributes or by having the desktop environment keep it in a relational database. What I do know is that there's lots of data that we're not taking full advantage of, and that seems very wasteful.
Why directories are 'broken' Posted Oct 26, 2010 10:37 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
Watch any nontechnical person using Windows or the Mac. When a file is saved (from the office suite, from a browser download, wherever) they usually have no clue where it went. There is then a hunt through various incomprehensible magic places to find the file when they want to attach it to an email, etc. Either that, or they avoid folders altogether and save everything to the desktop background, that being the only place they can find it.
Arguably, it's not the folders model itself that is broken but rather Microsoft and friends who have broken it by obfuscating the directory hierarchy away from the user and making crappy filepickers in each application rather than a simple, usable file browser that's common to the whole desktop. But in its current state, and for most users, the nested-folders model isn't working well.
Why directories are 'broken' Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:59 UTC (Tue) by cry_regarder (subscriber, #50545) [Link]
"Arguably, it's not the folders model itself that is broken but rather Microsoft and friends who have broken it by obfuscating the directory hierarchy away from the user and making crappy filepickers in each application rather than a simple, usable file browser that's common to the whole desktop."
Amen!
Why directories are 'broken' Posted Oct 26, 2010 20:25 UTC (Tue) by droundy (subscriber, #4559) [Link]
Alas, inkscape (and probably other programs) breaks things in much the same ways. It ignores its initial working directory, and instead maintains two distinct "working directories" for saving and opening, which are preserved across instances of inkscape and unaffected by the location of the file currently being edited.
Having recently used inkscape a bit, this was *very* frustrating. It'd be lovely if our GUI programs could use the "folder" approach nicely...
Why directories are 'broken' Posted Oct 26, 2010 20:23 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
once they figure out that they can have everything go to the desktop, and have folders there, most people start using folders fairly well.
the problem is that the OS/application defaults put the files somewhere else that makes sense to the application developer, but not necessarily anyone else
Why directories are 'broken' Posted Oct 27, 2010 14:33 UTC (Wed) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
> Watch any nontechnical person using Windows or the Mac.
Yes. I have observed that for almost 15 years. People cannot find a file unless it is on Desktop. This has become worse with recent tendency to use Downloads or similar folder by default to save files.
What is interesting is that many people seems just remember the location of the file on desktop and if the icons is rearranged they have some hard time initially. For those people the button that MS have added in Windows 98 (or something) to show the desktop was a real productivity boost and so was the ability to drag files from the desktop to open them in applications (like mail attachments etc.)
Yet it seems all those modern interfaces do not try to explore that tagging by visual location on the screen.
Why directories are 'broken' in Windows apps Posted Oct 30, 2010 0:37 UTC (Sat) by stevem (subscriber, #1512) [Link]
Absolutely. I can't count the number of times my gf asked me for help to find the document that she just edited by clicking on links in email or IE.
Now she's got a Linux machine and she's much happier.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 20:22 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I think its important to compare and contrast what Mark Shuttleworth Said 6 months ago about Unity and what he is saying now.
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/383
particularly the section on the relationship between Gnome Shell and Unity.
Was he talking about Unity being a direct competitor to Shell six months ago? Nope. He went out of his way to talk about how Unity as a design concept complements Shell. He went out of his way to paint Shell as not netbook appropriate(contrary to any statement by the actual Shell developers) so he could make strategic statements about Unity's value as netbook optimized.
Does anyone really think that Shuttleworth and Canonical in general didn't have a 6 month+ plan in place for Unity in May? Do you really think the change in the strategic messaging around Unity from "complementary" to "competitor" is something that didn't anticipate back in May when Shuttleworth wrote his mealy mouthed assessment of the relationship between Unity and Shell?
6 months from now how different will the strategic messaging around Unity be then?
Just because Canonical messages something in one release cycle does not mean its set in stone. In fact, its the very things they say which are said and meant to assuaging criticism that point to areas where further changes are already planned inside the Canonical fenceline.
So with that, I take all the current fear assuaging statements with regard to trying to position Unity as _still_ a GNOME desktop with more than a pinch of salt and suggests to me that Canonical is going to be investing in developing applications which are Unity-centric and not stock GNOME compatible as part of a continuing integration via diversification strategy.
-jef
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 20:32 UTC (Mon) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
I generally disagree with you Jef, but in this I 100% agree.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 22:14 UTC (Mon) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
But both Nokia and Litl actually submit things back to upstream GNOME and the various projects that GNOME uses. I am well aware there are some statistical errors with Dave Neary's GNOME census[1], but still it is a bit telling. Combined with other[2] similar[3] studies it shows a troubling picture.
Per linkedin the employee count:
The point I am trying to explain with completely meaningless statistics is that Nokia and Litl contribute to what the world accepts to be the meaning of the term "upstream". They work well with others and don't spin fud or make up new meanings for the word upstream.
[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 21:15 UTC (Mon) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
> Does anyone really think that Shuttleworth and Canonical in general didn't have a 6 month+ plan in place for Unity in May?
Wow, you really have a high opinion of their planning skills.
Not that I think they suck at it. Just that they are like everyone else.
6 months ago, they might have had some thoughts about using Unity in general, but didn't know how it would progress. 6 months pass, they reassess in light of current progress in Unity and GNOME Shell, and they decide to go with Unity. So what. You see a lot of malice here, but it seems to reflect more of you than of them.
Disclaimer: I don't care either way about Unity or GNOME Shell, never tried either, don't see the need for a 'new desktop' shell or metaphor or whatever. Very happy with current GNOME, I swear by gedit as my IDE of choice.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 21:17 UTC (Mon) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link]
>> Does anyone really think that Shuttleworth and Canonical in general
>> didn't have a 6 month+ plan in place for Unity in May? > Wow, you really have a high opinion of their planning skills.
+1
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence".
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 21:21 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Are you suggesting that Canonical is managed by a collection of incompetents? Hmm.
-jef
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 0:11 UTC (Tue) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
> Are you suggesting that Canonical is managed by a collection of incompetents?
"Just that they are like everyone else."
I believe here "incompetence" is most likely just a hyperbole to the fact that they are fallible like every other human in this planet. Thus, you should not attribute it to malice, just to fallibility.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 0:40 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Oh absolutely...fallible. People make mistakes..the malicious and incompetent, the philanthropist and the miser, the pure of heart and the cynical. We all make mistakes and I have no intention of stating that Canonical is acting either maliciously or incompetently when I talk about the mistakes they are making as I see them.
So with that little semantic sidebar in mind. I'll reiterate my point.
Canonical has been making a huge mistake with its half-hearted appeasement messaging aimed at GNOME developers and GNOME supporters. They are misrepresenting their own business interests and sowing additional discord over a much longer time period.
It's a hell of a lot easier on everyone when a business entity stops pretending they are interested in open collaboration and just do their own differentiated in-house development without trying to manage perception in the community about how externals feel about that work.
The mistake Canonical continually makes is prioritizing perception over reality. Yes some people are going to be miffed at seeing yet another corporate entity doing differentiated development. That will cause unavoidable injured feelings. But its insult on top of injury when employees of that company bend over backwards to avoid saying that is what they are doing and try to put some backspin on the situation.
-jef
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 0:12 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well they are human.
But I think that it's probably possible for them to change their minds. Call me crazy to think that people can possibly change decisions over the course of months. A grand conspiracy theory about how Shuttleworth planned ahead and lied six months ago in order to somehow (and completely pointlessly) blindside the anti-Ubuntu brigade into compliance is probably the least likely thing that could of happened.
It's worth noting that the Arstechnica article mentions that Unity is to be based on Compiz instead of Mutter. However the the current 'alpha' version of Unity shipping with 10.10 is based off of Mutter. So I expect that they did, in fact, mean Unity to be the compliment of Gnome-shell, but aiming for 'lite' environments. It seems, however, that the Ubuntu folks ended up being displeased with Gnome-shell's progress and direction and decided to just make Unity be the default for everything so they would not have to maintain two different desktops shells.
Also it's worth noting that between Mutter and Compiz the Compiz project is the one that has been more mature and used longer by more people then Mutter. That instead of working on improving and integrating Compiz into something more Gnome-like the Gnome Window Manager folks decided that they should write their own based off of Metacity. Compiz is not something difficult to work with either. It's designed to be extensible from the get-go as you can tell by the wealth of plug-ins and add-ons.
One can just as easily accuse the Gnome project of being victims of NIH syndrome as it is to accuse Ubuntu trying to fork the Gnome desktop. (Also I feel that both statements would be ignorant ones.)
Besides. I've been using Gnome-shell for several months now on Debian I tried out Ubuntu 10.10. Today I installed the netbook add-ons and found that Unity is better. My opinion, of course. I am not crazy about the button ordering, but it works a lot better with Unity and unified menus thrown in.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 0:27 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Are you seriously saying that you really thought Canonical was going to invest in Unity and _not_ make it the default for its Desktop at some point? Really? Did you even read the blog post from Shuttleworth I referenced.
6 months ago Shuttleworth mentioned that Unity was going to be offered as the basis for an Ubuntu Light desktop directly to OEMs. Not just a netbook offering...but a desktop offering...directly to OEMs. Canonical does not have the manpower to support multiple desktop interfaces with OEM customers.
The only plausible paths moving forward was either Canonical was going to ditch Unity as a failed experiment or double-down on its bets and make it the default for all its supported offerings to streamline its support offerings. It's simple business economics. Canonical isn't profitable. If they are serious about being profitable they have to make a decision and focus on a coherent support strategy. Regardless of what you think about Unity from a technical or political pov, it makes absolutely no business sense to support it as well as other offering that can be made to do the same thing from an engineering business standpoint. The don't support Kubuntu as an OEM offering for the very same reason.
-jef
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 1:55 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Hrm. My bad.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 2:42 UTC (Tue) by TRS-80 (subscriber, #1804) [Link] I'd call Mutter more mature - it's basically the continuation of Metacity development, just with a new name. Which is not to say I know which one is better for Unity, all I know is that Mutter and Gnome-shell are highly integrated.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 22:24 UTC (Mon) by j1mc (guest, #56848) [Link]
Per Matt Zimmerman's recent blog post (http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2010/10/20/ubuntu-and-qt), we can gather that they'll be bringing in their own Qt apps into Ubuntu.
To me, it wouldn't matter if Canonical / Ubuntu were using Unity if contributing to Unity didn't require assignment of copyright for your contributions to Canonical. If that weren't the case, then people could take the best of both worlds between Gnome-Shell and Unity and do whatever they wanted.
I don't even care if they're putting QT apps into Ubuntu. I don't care that it's not Gtk. Qt is open and free. Even Nokia doesn't require contributions to Qt to be given over to Nokia.
But the copyright assignment requirement effectively keeps Canonical out on their own island, and what you contribute to these Canonical-initiated projects could eventually be made proprietary. Caveat contributor.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 4:51 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] My take is you're right except that I don't think the goal is to diverge from GNOME. Rather, I think Shuttleworth has its own vision, that he wants to implement on a rapid timescale, and it will never be possible with GNOME. GNOME is a democracy (like India) and slow-moving. Ubuntu is a dictatorship (like China) and gets thing done fast. But unlike with India and China, people are free to leave GNOME or Ubuntu, so there is no real downside to the dictatorship. Most free-software projects (including most FSF projects) are in fact dictatorships -- the main freedom developers have is to fork, and that happens only under extreme provocation. So there is nothing new here. So Shuttleworth wants to do something radically different, without being hemmed in by the requirements of the GNOME project or other distros. Good for him. If it works, it's still free software and others can benefits. If it fails, it doesn't hurt anyone else.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 11:40 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]
I agree with your post mostly; I think you're right about the motivation. I think you're wrong about the 'no harm' though.
Already Ubuntu has a set of APIs which no other distro has, and which they either patch into applications to use or (rarely) have upstream developers put into the application on some kind of switch. As their UI becomes more and more specific, that's only going to increase.
Additionally, their development of Unity comes at the opportunity cost of driving forward Gnome's UI work: Canonical could be in there contributing directly to upstream, but instead they're not - over seemingly small-beans design choices.
It's hypocritical and disingenuous to support projects like LibreOffice while requiring copyright assignment for your own projects. It's also hypocritical to claim to be a Gnome-based distro when all your development happens outside Gnome (I don't buy that Ayatana is an "upstream" in any sense of the word). To be a member of a community, you have to contribute to that community, not take away from it.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 14:56 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Yes, the copyright assignment part is discomfiting: but the FSF claims that they do it to be able to defend the copyright, and as long as they insist on using that argument, anyone can.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:27 UTC (Tue) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]
There's an enormous difference. Read what the FSF actually
promises in return (vs the hot air information silence surrounding Canonical).
* The FSF promises to *never* make their software proprietary.
* The FSF, as a non-profit, with a public charter stating its goal
I trust the FSF completely. Given that most of Shuttleworth's
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 17:23 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] The FSF promises to *never* make their software proprietary. True, the software will remain free, for their definition of "free". It will never actually be "proprietary" but the licensing can and has become more restrictive: ie, GPLv2 -> GPLv3. Contributors to GCC and other FSF projects have seen their contributions relicensed under GPLv3, because of the "v2 or later" clause that accompanied all FSF GPlv2 projects. Projects like FreeBSD consider GPLv3 too restrictive, and have refused to include recent versions of GCC into their base. When you say you trust the FSF completely, you mean the GPLv4, whatever its terms, will be acceptable to you. I trust neither the FSF nor Canonical, but it doesn't really matter to me. Even if Canonical "makes their software proprietary" at a future date, they can't erase the free versions that are already out there and users who are dissatisfied are free to fork. Worst case, it's like the BSD licence and there's nothing wrong with that licence. This is a less likely scenario than the FSF introducing an unsatisfactory GPLv4: because the GPLv4 will still be "free software" by most definitions, the motivation to fork will be less, whereas if Canonical "makes their software proprietary" and the software has any value to others, a fork is pretty much guaranteed.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 17:41 UTC (Tue) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link] Contributors to GCC and other FSF projects have seen their contributions relicensed under GPLv3, because of the "v2 or later" clause that accompanied all FSF GPlv2 projects.To the extent that that's true it's got nothing to do with copyright assignment. With the FSF priojects older contributions are still available from older versions under the older licence, and any project that was formerly available on a "v2 or later" basis (of which there are many, including non-FSF ones) could equally be taken to GPLv3 by later contributions being added with a "v3 or later" licence.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 18:36 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link]
Great point. The "v2+" issue is orthogonal to the "copyright assignment" issue. It should also be noted that GPLv2 is too restrictive to the BSD advocates, so it perhaps shouldn't be shocking that GPLv2+ and GPLv3 are.
A big point to note about the "+" issue is that the "+" ensures forward-compatibility with future GPL releases, i.e. GPLv2 is incompatible with GPLv2+. Perhaps some will see it as a conspiracy from the FSF, but it's arguably a logical consequence of the "no further restrictions" in the GPL that ensure end-user freedom (at the expense of the mid-users' freedom to restrict others' freedom, BSD advocates will note).
The GP has a fair point, however, in that the "+" implies a non-legally-binding trust in the FSF to not go where you don't want them to in future GPL releases, with the benefit of forward-compatibility and the ability to fix "bugs" in the license (e.g. tivoization and the MSFT-NOVL deal; the scare quotes are there because it's clear that not everyone agrees that these are bugs in the license).
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 18:42 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (guest, #56877) [Link]
"GPLv2 is incompatible with GPLv2+" should read "GPLv2 is incompatible with GPLv3, while GPLv2+ is not."
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:49 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
The devil is in the details. The FSF makes a solid legal binding statement about _not_ relicensing under proprietary terms that contributors can rely on. The FSF can't just decide to sell proprietary version of the code you assign copyright to them under their standard assignment agreement...or they would be in breach.
Canonical makes no such legally binding promise-back. The details of the contributor agreement matter...and will continue to matter. Canonical's contributor agreement makes zero effort to provide unpaid external contributors that their interest are protected.
I sincerely hope that when Rick Spencer (Director of the Ubuntu Engineering Team) says:
That needs to include a change in Canonical's policy with regard to external contributors to actually mean anything at all.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 19:08 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Did I say that I thought the _goal_ was to diverge from GNOME. No I have not said that. Just like it wasn't my _goal_ to run over that little girl on her bicycle this morning when I was rushing as fast I could possible go in my car to get from home to work. It was not my _goal_ nor my _intent_ to kill that child. I just wanted to get to work as fast as I could possibly could. Surely my end goal justifies the means of execution(pun intended) to achieve them.
I would not want someone to think that I thought Shuttleworth _meant_ to do direct harm or any damage to any existing project in the FOSS ecosystem on which he's relying on. If thought that, I would just come out and say that. I fully understand that many and even possibly all of his intentions are noble. But even the noblest intention can do harm through poor choices in execution.
Verily, its the noblest of intentions that do that can do the deepest harm because invariably other people give too much benefit of the doubt to the overtly well-meaning and are more reluctant to be critical of their chosen means to reach their very popular and well-meaning goals.
-jef
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 27, 2010 4:24 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Yes, but
(a) GNOME is not a little girl (b) Shuttleworth's intentions are to make money using free software. Not charity. And there's nothing wrong in that.
I suspect if it had been Microsoft or Apple who had adopted GNOME for their next desktop, but replaced the default shell with a thing called Unity, which was free software, we would be applauding -- not nitpicking on copyright assignment or damage to the upstream.
Canonical are a commercial business, just as much as Microsoft or Apple. And they are as focussed on ordinary desktop users (and, now, netbook/tablet users) as Microsoft and Apple. They just happen to be doing it using free software.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 27, 2010 5:04 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Yes the stated intention for Canonical is to make money. No argument from me on that score. By they way, six years into their experiment how is that going for them? Back in 2006 a Canonical exec was on record as saying he was anticipating seeing Canonical reach profitability in 2008.
http://news.cnet.com/Canonical-seeks-profit-from-free-Ubu...
Oops. It's...let me see now..late 2010 unless my watch has stopped..and still not profitable. Every couple of years Canonical widens its focus and the goal posts to profitability move back further into the future. I can understand why some would interpret any criticism of such behaviour as questioning that very fundamental intention of wanting to be a a real grown-up self-sustaining company.
But again for literally the 3,768 time today Canonical's _intentions_ has never been the _intent_ in any of my criticism. I am very deliberately not questioning _intention_. I very specifically question choices in execution and strategy..particularly those which run counter to previous statements made by Canonical execs. These criticisms run across multiple subjects because well..Canonical execs seem to say a lot of things that really don't match up with their stated intentions.
I continually wonder why defenders of Canonical keep reading all criticism of anything Canonical chooses to do as criticism of the companies intentions. Intentions and execution or not the same thing.
-jef
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 20:40 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
> Global menus are great, I dont understand why anyone wouldnt want them.
Count me as someone who doesn't. Global menus prove very confusing when you have multiple programs running and visible at the same time. Granted, on small monitors I usually have programs maximized and alt-tab between them, but when I don't, I want the menu attached to the individual application, not the screen.
Personally, I'd rather see menus universally integrated into title bars, similar to the Firefox title button. I'd also rather see more functions moved *out* of menus into more appropriate locations.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 1:12 UTC (Tue) by duffy (subscriber, #31787) [Link]
Global menus are also fail on OS X. AFAIK Apple has still not resolved this issue. It's fairly embarrassing.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 1:46 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] Global menus were fine on a shoebox-style Mac with a 512 by 342 pixel, 9 inch screen. On a current iMac, with a 2560 by 1440 pixel, 27 inch screen – more than 20 times the number of pixels and nine times the area –, maybe not quite so. Not to mention that the current MacOS is more amenable to running more than one program at the same time, which way back when wasn't really a big issue.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 2:35 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
Don't worry, Apple is fixing that -- the next version of OSX "Lion" is apparently going to have as a major new emphasis full-screen apps.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 10:27 UTC (Tue) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> Global menus are also fail on OS X.
My experience is that the global menu on Ubuntu is more usable than the OS X one (if you ignore a couple of bugs). The reason being the rather strange focus policy on the Mac, and the fact that applications stay alive (and with their menus active) after you close their last window - together these lead to the menu at the top often belonging to a different application than I (admittedly a Linux user, not a Mac one) tend to expect.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 21:23 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Global menus are great, I dont understand why anyone wouldnt want them. Because menus should be attached to the thing they're associated with. I prefer window-local menus to global menus, and I like appropriately-designed context menus even better.
Ubuntu Netbook and global menus Posted Oct 26, 2010 22:45 UTC (Tue) by sladen (subscriber, #27402) [Link]
so naturally, when a window is maximised to the dimensions of the screen, the menus should be attached to the screen?
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 4:24 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
An analogy is the folders view of e-mail, which was standard until gmail came along. You'd save different mails in different folders depending on its purpose or origin. But gmail automates the classification based on contents (you can still step in and do it manually): an email can belong to several folders but needn't be physically copied among each.
Such a thing would be a great way to handle files. I may be working on a document (or a set of notes) as a part of two projects, and depending on which project I am looking at, I want a different set of files to be visible, including that document. But I don't want two copies of that document. When I make changes, I want the changes to be visible in both places. (Yes, symlinks can do that, but maintaining symlinks is a bit of a pain. And it would be nice if the computer could automatically say "These are the other documents on your system that could possibly be relevant to what you are doing...")
But to *really* push the envelope, existing filesystems like ext3 aren't enough, either. And putting a database/search-tool on top of the filesystem is an ugly hack.
The fear is that moving to the "search-centric model" using a filesystem that is built on the "files and folders way of thinking" will lead to huge confusion, in the short term at least.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:18 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] All we need to do is to add some additional metadata to each file, then index it. A simple tagging system would could duplicate what gmail does even if the indexes were per-app.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 10:44 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
> Global menus are great, I dont understand why anyone wouldnt want them.
Try working with them with sloppy focus instead of that stupid "click-to-focus-paradigm".
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 19:58 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] Global menus are great, I dont understand why anyone wouldnt want them. Because they're no longer ergonomically optimal by Fitt's Law. According to Fitt's law, the time it takes to move to a different spot on the screen depends on D/W, where D is the distance to the spot and W is the effective size. Since global menus run to the very top of the screen, their vertical size is effectively infinite. So the vertical move to a global menu is faster than that to a window menu, which requires a degree of precision that slows the pointer movement down. (This is especially obvious when using a low precision pointing device like a track pad.) With a small screen, like the original Macs, people tended to keep their windows sized almost as big as the screen. The difference in travel distance to a window menu vs. a global menu was small, and it was generally faster to get the mouse to a global menu than to a window menu. With larger modern monitors, that's often no longer true. The global menu is always on the upper left of the screen, making it inconvenient when using a window that's positioned far to the right. In that case, the shorter horizontal distance may make a window menu faster to use than a global menu. That's especially important because most modern monitors are wide format, so it's common to spread windows horizontally. Also, the vertical positioning advantage of a global menu only applies when moving from the window to the menu; the move back to the window is faster with a window menu than a global menu. Between those factors, global menus have lost most of their ergonomic advantages, which were the main thing they had going for them. As a practical example, imagine a dual monitor set-up with the desktop spread across both monitors. If you position a window on the right monitor, you'll have to move your mouse all the way back to the left monitor to do use a global menu. I don't know about you, but that seems awkward enough that I'd rather go with window menus.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Nov 2, 2010 13:22 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Global menus are great, I dont understand why anyone wouldnt want them.
Because it's like taking all the knobs, buttons, and switches from every device in your house and putting them all in one place.
If you want to use your microwave, now you have to go up to it and tag it, go over to the switch box and operate it, then go back to the microwave to get your food.
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