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The takeawayThe takeawayPosted Nov 3, 2011 21:46 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)Parent article: Ubuntu focuses on mobile devices
The takeaway from this is the phrase 'legacy desktop.' When you hear somebody put 'legacy' in front of a tech you depend on, don't be suprised when they hose you. So if you aren't planning to be on tablets or some other vapor in the next couple of years you should be planning a migration from Ubuntu. Because if you don't, WHEN (not if) you find yourself abandoned you won't get any sympathy from anyone with a clue who read the writing on the wall. Some would say Unity is already an abandonment of the desktop, which isn't far from the truth. Same goes for GNOME Shell.
Don't think we have ever seen lemming like bahaviour as bad as this. Abandoning all development on the desktop when it still has overwhelming market share and there is currently zero hardware available for running this future touch interface of the future on and pretty close to zero on the horizon. If ya really think touch is the future it certainly makes sense to be designing to work with it, but to just toss everything on some leap of faith that "If we build it, the hardware will come.. and the users will actually want it." makes no sense to me.
So now is the time to be investigating alternatives. Walk, don't run toward the exit. There is still time to get out in an orderly fashion since there are still supported releases that are usable on a desktop. The trick is to not wait too long.
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The takeaway Posted Nov 4, 2011 11:57 UTC (Fri) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
The beauty of Linux is that it's open. Ubuntu is just a distro. Few of the people who use it today, did so half a decade ago, and most can easily substitute a different distro if/when Ubuntu no longer satisfies.
I use Ubuntu, but the thing is, I don't really use *ubuntu*, I use Firefox. I use Eclipse. I use Thunderbird. I use php. I use gcc. I use a dozen other programs, but ubuntu itself isn't a significant part.
The distro needs only be easy to install, easy to maintain, and capable of launching the programs I actually use. Atleast half a dozen distros fulfill these requirements today.
Key lesson is that a software-vendor can only screw you over to the degree you've made yourself dependant upon software that is only available from them. Don't do that if and when you can help it.
The takeaway Posted Nov 9, 2011 12:04 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
My wife is a fairly typical user and she got updated to Oneiric last night. Unity and gnome 3 got a (very shouty!) thumbs down. Like most users she wants her interface to just stay the same as it was before - not even change the colours, never mind how it all works. And not icons for everything, nor annoying slidy bars so things move around. It's all hateful, and, as you say, obviously optimised for tablets/netbooks/phones which is not what you want on a desktop/laptop.
The obvious escape direction is Debian, which isn't afflicted in the same way by 'UI designers'. Sadly that doesn't solve the 'gnome has gone all annoying too' problem, for which xfce seems to be the easiest way back to something reasonably familiar.
This is probably a pretty common reaction. But it's interesting to see non-geeks feeling pretty much the same about their UI as us geeks do when presented with all that annoying shiny stuff we didn't ask for. Apparently there are people who like it, I just don't seem to have met very many of them.
Disgusting analogy of the day Posted Nov 10, 2011 11:22 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] It sounds like a prostate exam: they are extremely annoying at the beginning, but then certain people cannot get enough of it and it becomes something they do for pleasure. For the rest of us it remains extremely annoying. (I'm sure female readers can think of an analogy that suits their gender, but I think mine is disgusting enough for today.)I'm only partly joking, partly trolling.
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