Ubuntu has always confused me. It seemed like such an obvious gag from the very beginning, a theme job on Debian unstable without much engineering teeth. But people went crazy for it. The resources would have been better spent working directly with and on Debian, and offering support/consulting/employment to do so and it made Mark's intentions seem seriously dubious to me (although aside from the ad spying thing he hasn't really done anything egregious as I feared initially). It's water under the bridge now and the two have learned to coexist, but I think the future of Debian is unquestionable while Ubuntu has a SPOF in Canonical. I heard a rumor that Shuttleworth is trying to sell Canonical right now. He approached Red Hat and they weren't interested. I can't substantiate that, just hearsay.
I don't think it's a secret that Shuttleworth is looking for outside investment, or at least to put the company on a more stable financial footing. That's why Unity was dropped.
As to you other point, their goal was to make a Linux distro that was easy to install, setup and use for the ordinary person (or ordinary geek at least). They might have lost their way a bit in recent years but they were initially remarkably successful. Sure others had tried to do the same before them but for its time Ubuntu was by far the best of them.
That's more arguable nowadays but that doesn't undermine what they achieved.
Yup, things were different 10 years ago and Ubuntu really made a lot of things easier. Back then getting 3D acceleration to work was a real nightmare (for a linux newbie like me) at the time. Or WiFi drivers. Or getting your system to play videos, because you didn't have the correct gstreamer-* packages.
10 years later and pretty much every distro works out of the box on pretty much all hardware, but back then Ubuntu was definitely ahead of the pack in these regards.
> 10 years later and pretty much every distro works out of the box on pretty much all hardware
I do appreciate the strides Linux has made since a decade ago, but I still think that's crazy talk. I've never seen laptop hardware that Linux "works out of the box" on, and I've installed it on at least 15 laptops in those ten years.
I mean if "works" is defined to mean something equivalent to what macOS or Windows do. Wi-Fi, webcam, bluetooth, graphics acceleration, highres screen, sound, fingerprint reader, keyboard backlight, hardware volume/brightness controls, multitouch trackpad... at least some of those things are always broken on any mainstream distro I've tried, including Ubuntu.
Doesn't mean Linux isn't awesome, but saying it works out of the box on almost all hardware is a pretty radical downward redefinition of "works".
> I've never seen laptop hardware that Linux "works out of the box" on, and I've installed it on at least 15 laptops in those ten years.
I've recently bought a HP ProBook (a xx75 model) for dual booting of Linux and Windows 7. Imagine my surprise when in Linux everything was working out of the box, whereas in Windows I had to actually use another laptop first in order to load WiFi drivers. Even USB 3.0 ports didn't work under Windows out of the box.
To say nothing about the nightmare it is to find out what is actually broken in Windows. Should you use the Control Panel wireless applet or the vendor supplied GUI app with non-standard UI?
> I've never seen laptop hardware that Linux "works out of the box" on, and I've installed it on at least 15 laptops in those ten years.
Buy any > 2 year old Dell Latitiude and it will work out of the box. Maybe the (IMHO useless) fingerprint reader not, but all other stuff will work. Had at least 5 different models.
Also highres screen is an issue which is not fixable because you need to fix every software. Same applies to Windows in this case but it does a better job in pixel scaling non-HiDPI apps (but they are still ugly as hell in many cases).
FWIW, I was recently launching the same Ubuntu live USB stick on 4 different laptops to do some disk maintenance. Out of what you mention none of them had a fingerprint reader and I haven't tested Bluetooth (although I think the icon was there), but everything else that you mention worked out of the box with the single exception of WiFi on one of them (Macbook), which only needed a firmware blob to be added.
And it was Ubuntu 16.10, because that's what I found on some USB stick lying around and was good enough.
From my personal experience, my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro is almost 100% supported - the only thing that's not right is the detection of various keyboard orientation modes (tent mode, presentation mode, tablet mode), so the keyboard and touchpad isn't reliably disabled when it should and the UI isn't notified about laptop/tablet mode switch. Looking forward to 4.16, which apparently carries some fixes in this field.
However, while it worked correctly on the Windows installation which came together with the laptop (until I've removed it an hour later :P), some time later I had to install Windows for a moment, so using the chance I wanted to install all the OEM drivers to see how it works there (of course, out-of-the-box it didn't work at all ;)) but... I couldn't. Seems it's only supported by the installation prepared by the manufacturer (and by its recovery partition), nothing else. Even the automatic screen rotation didn't work - a thing that works reliably on Linux.
While probably "all hardware" is a big stretch, from my experience there's is a big chance that everything actually will work out of the box and it's definitely way better than it was 10 years ago, when for instance I had to install OSS4 and get all apps to play nice with it just to get the sound card on my desktop supported :P
> I've never seen laptop hardware that Linux "works out of the box"
Look for almost any Dell these days. I've used 6 (Vostros, Latitudes, Precisions) in the last couple years and all worked flawlessly from the start (except for the fact I had to uninstall Windows in all but one Vostro). I also use Linux on a small and light Acer "Cloudbook" (a Chromebook-like that comes with Windows). This last one was a bit confusing to install because of the UEFI/eMMC combo, but after understanding the peculiars of the installation, it worked perfectly ever since.
I made the jump to Linux in the last 5 years. Confused by the myriad of distributions I downloaded a few of the more popular ones and ran them in Virtualbox.
Ubuntu was noticeably faster and more stable so I chose Ubuntu. It turns out that what I was really seeing was Ubuntu was faster and more stable in Virtualbox and since that is the only way I can get Linux on my work desktop this is important to me.
I'm sure many people use Linux this way, so this will continue to be important.
Maybe Debian would be OK now, but Gnome 3 takes up far too much of the screen on my laptop with menu bars, and this is why I am sticking with Unity for now
I've been doing Linux for two decades so I know that was the perception at the time. It was almost all marketing though, with just a bit of lucky time window alignment, i.e. the releases happened to be at slightly better cutoff points and therefore had better upstream kernel/xorg/mesa/cups/whatever in the most critical days of 6.04 and 8.04.
So you thought Debian's desktop install and setup process was as simple as Ubuntu's? I don't think that's true even today. And Ubuntu made changes and compromises that I don't think Debian ever would so simply being a Debian installer wouldn't have worked out.
It feels like rewriting history to simply brush off most of their engineering efforts as simple being marketing.
Yes, I did think that. The only hard part about Debian was finding the right ISO. The docs and installation experience were fantastic. To this day their landing page is kind of confusing, especially to a layman, so I'll give you that.
Regarding the early days of Ubuntu, you've got to consider that where Ubuntu came from is not where we are now. When I first encountered Ubuntu, it was one of the first to try to make something polished for the desktop and not try to charge a lot of money for it. This was and is a very different purpose to Debian and did require customization.
Ubuntu's competitors were never Debian, but Mandrake Linux and SUSE. Ubuntu shipped out free CDs internationally and encouraged you to take more than you needed to spread the Ubuntu. In the days of 56k modems this was amazing. This was the era when compiling your own kernel was a fairly normal part of desktop Linux tinkering.
Today there are polished distros that just work, Fedora being a great example. Ubuntu wouldn't personally be my choice for desktop or servers for some years now and I haven't used Ubuntu on the desktop since about 2006 and on a server since 2012. Already by 2007 there were nicer out the box experiences such as Linux Mint.
Were it not for Ubuntu (and Mandrake before it), I would probably not have got into Linux until several years later. It was Gentoo, Slackware and Arch that taught me the internals.
I ran Fedora for a few years on my Dell laptop and I have to say that it didn't just work.
The thing that makes Ubuntu stand out to me is the very large size of it's user base compared to other distributions.
This means that things like edge cases in hardware are much more likely to be addressed, and there will be more chance of other users having the same problem, therefore more chance that you will find a solution.
There were layoffs in Cannonical in 2017 and the decision was taken to end Ubuntu Touch and ongoing development of Unity.
Mark Shuttleworth made a public announcement that this was in preparation for an IPO.
In light of these public announcements about the future of the company I would find any rumour that he tried to sell to Red Hat to be a bit lubricious.
For me, Ubuntu was the best successor to Mandrake, regarding the focus on desktop users and out of the box hardware support, even it required closed source binary blobs.
If Shuttleworth is indeed trying to Canonical, it wouldn't surprise me, the reality is that there isn't any big money to be earned on Desktop Linux.
Regular desktop users aren't going to pay for enough books, videos, on-site trainings or support, to make FOSS desktop development a viable longterm business.
As seen by the netbook failure (yes Microsoft also helped there) and the Android fragmentation, OEMs rather pick a distribution and change it to create "product differentiation" than actually just plain stick to the hardware part.
The two most successful Linux based desktop environments, ChromeOS and Android, hide the Linux parts so deep, that it could be changed by another POSIX like kernel and almost no one would notice.
Even Tizen is now more of a brand than anything else (Tizen RT is TinyAra not Linux).
I don't find that to be true. Both go to extended lengths (but not herculean lengths like RHEL) to provide ABI and API stability over a defined set of time. The primary difference is that Ubuntu LTS releases happen on fairly hard calendar boundaries with a well defined two year schedule. The Ubuntu 6 month releases seem like an antiquated idea to me, a stabilized rolling release like Debian -testing would be a better fit for the Linux desktoper. So LTS to LTS they are quite similar https://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.release-life... and modern Debian stable releases have been taped out smoothly on a roughly 2 year schedule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history.
> a stabilized rolling release like Debian -testing would be a better fit for the Linux desktoper
I have been running openSuse Tumbleweed on my desktop and a laptop for the past year. It is not perfect, but it comes close to being what you describe.
The main problem is that the multimedia experience is not that fun without at least one additional repository, and that I need to re-install the nvidia driver upon every new kernel version. Other than that, I have been quite happy with it.
Huh, I haven't run an Ubuntu desktop in several years but I don't remember that being the case (i.e both locked the software down pretty tight). I found Debian Backports to be helpful for the few things an admin might want to go out of phase on for servers. Though to reiterate, I think the desktop class of user would be better served by a stabilized rolling release like -testing in this decade where things generally work better and LTS works against you.
>The resources would have been better spent working directly with and on Debian
Debian is a slow bureaucratic political organization and works very hard to punish those who want too use it for business. Even if Cannonical had spent double the money, they'd probably get 1% of what they were able to do with Ubuntu.
>and offering support/consulting/employment to do so and it made Mark's intentions seem seriously dubious to me
Why should they not offer support to those who want too purchase it?
>although aside from the ad spying thing he hasn't really done anything egregious as I feared initially
The "spying" you are referring to is what Google Chrome and all the browsers do with what you type in your search bar. All Cannonical did was send your search queries to an HTTP endpoint. What are you searching in your app drawyer anyway that you don't want sent anywhere. It's not going to be anything other than the list of apps you have installed and all Linux repos can detect what apps you have downloaded from them.
> is what Google Chrome and all the browsers do with what you type in your search bar
Not all browsers do that by default, Firefox for example asks you whether you want that or not, and the Tor Browser has it disabled by default. However that doesn't change the fact that all those who do it by default should correctly be labeled as "spyware", e.g. Google Chrome.
Looks like this post is giving impression that Ubuntu 18.04 will use Unity, but that's not true. Official Ubuntu will be still using Gnome desktop environment. In this video some guy is running Unity 8 on Ubuntu 18.04, to show it's possible.
which basically does "apt install unity8-desktop-session". So the default desktop environment is GNOME, and this is just showing off Unity 8 as an alternative.
Given this is unity and not Gnome, does this mean that typing in a file explorer window will select matching files folders in the current directory? (Forward search I think it's called?)
Because currently, Gnome in 17.10 performs recursive search and it's terribly annoying and unhelpful and there doesn't appear to be any way to change it.
That would be a feature in Nautilus, Gnome's file explorer. Unity uses/used it as well, so I would expect it to behave in the same way unless patched or reconfigured (if that is at all possible).
I really wish that at least unity 7 is an official/semi-official flavour for 18.04. I'm perfectly happy with my workflow on 16.04, and have no desire to switch to Gnome, Plasma or anything else. None of the other alternatives come close enough to the simplicity, intuitiveness and stability of unity 7 at the moment. This is of course subjective, but without unity, I see very little reason to use Ubuntu over other distros.
