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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 21:15 UTC (Mon) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281)In reply to: Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) by jspaleta Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)
> 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.
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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.
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