2c about the development of ubuntu

[Udo 'Robos' Puetz]

On Sun, 01.01.06, Christian Bjälevik <nafallo at magicalforest.se> wrote:

Hi Christian and List.

> > Is it me or is there a certain shift from "linux for human beings" to "linux
> > for the corporate environment - free!". I would think that already enough
> > companies cater for the server side of linux: ibm in conjunction with ...,
> > novell and such that in that area there are enough players. Like I said, and
> > microsoft said, the licensing cost is - for a company - neglectable to the
> > cost of support and the cost of e.g. oracle.
> > What I see is this: canonical can more easily make support contracts with
> > companies about servers at the moment - BECAUSE "linux isn't ready for the
> > desktop". That was - at least I understood it like this - what ubuntu wanted
> > to do. Make linux more userfriendly to the human behind the machine on his
> > desk. THEN companies will approach canonical about support contracts for
> > linux on the desktop. Fewer, in smaller volume, but _that_ was what I
> > understood Mark was spending his money on. Surely ubuntu will amortize
> > itself faster with more focus on the server - but was that the intent? From
> > what I read in Mark's remarks about dapper drake he wants it to go head on
> > against vista - not windows server 2000something. I think there is this
> > notion about "linux not ready for the desktop" (I run it solely, on lots of
> > machines) _because_ nobody is doing something about this. I thought ubuntu
> > was. Am   I   wrong?
> > Cheers
> > Udo 'Robos' Puetz
> 
> Why shouldn't we go head to head against both Vista and Windows Server?

Because we should concentrate our resources! That is my whole point! 20+
people are - in my opinion - waaay too few to do everything!

> Ubuntu, GNOME, Debian, Linux as much as everything else in the Free
> Software Community are already collaborating on making Linux Desktops,
> aswell as Servers, more and more userfriendly. Ubuntu already have a
> nice desktop (even my father seems interested in switching out XP Home),
> and we will probably never stop making that better. 

But they can devote only that much time to it as they have free for it. For
instance, as you know, lots of free software was born because an itch had to
be scratched. A developer is already a little bad working on a program because
they tend to look differently on it and it's functionality than a "normal"
user. For instance, if it fulfills their needs for it and has these
features, then it's good for them. For a normal user a simpler program, with
less features, might be better. And it's hard for a developer to "blank
their minds" about what dma means and how to partition stuff (they know this
by heart) and program it for - e.g. your father. And if they spend most of
their time on the console checking wheather the kernel does what is it
supposed to do the less they wander the menu and find inconsistencies there.
You can't find what you don't see!

> Edubuntu and Kubuntu
> isn't where most of the paid develops work. They work on Ubuntu, and so
> have always worked on Ubuntu-Server. This wasn't named before, but the
> packages for apache2 have always been there since warty (you are free to
> check ;-)).

I don't worry a second about apache2 since they can - and probably have -
copied that verbatim from debian! *That* doesn't need any UI-love! 

> What the "new distribution" gives is yet another InstallCD
> with more server-tools than gnome-thingies shipped on the CD. Ubuntu
> 6.04 is our first "Enterprise Release", but we won't do what Redhat and
> Fedora does and make it another distro. It will still be Ubuntu, just
> with longer support :-). Here is aswell a reason to have the "new
> distro". 6.04 will have 2 year longer support on the server than on the
> desktops.

Aha, and either you are assuming that there will be lots more paid
developers in the future or how is a developer supposed to handle all that
work? Fixing arguably UI shortcomings (where they will have to argue about
- which also takes time) AND preparing the new 2.6.29-server kernel AND
still fix bugs in the then way old 2.6.15 kernel. 

> What I really want to say with all this is that the paid resources still
> goes where it have gone since warty, so what's the fuss/issue? :-)

If that would be the case, I wouldn't have written my 2c, I would have
thanked you all and my whole email would probably landed in the developer ml
in order not to rob you of your time. But, see my first mail, I _see_ that
resources don't end up where they should (in my opinion). I didn't have
problems with breezy on one strange machine, I had them on 5 machines of my
own and others at work! Look for instance here:
http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=20395
That bug is pretty severe since when you reinstall - what I *had* to do on
some of my machines (have upgraded other machines from potato to sarge
before) I would rather have --set-selections work! 

> Sincerely, /C - who has run Ubuntu on his server since 4.10 and never
> seen a horrible broken system except development

Not to call you "not a human being" but ubuntu doesn't primarily cater to
you, does it? I at least understand ubuntu's slogan "Linux for Human Beings"
as an answer to "Linux is only for geeks" and with human beings people with
little or no prior linux knowledge. You, me and all people in this list
aren't human in that sense then. We are geeks and if the automounter fails
we look through dmesg where the kernel has found the usb drive and mount it
by hand. But to 95% of this worlds population this is unfortunately
"in-humane"!
Cheers
Udo 'Robos' Puetz

> -- 
> Christian Bjälevik <nafallo at ubuntu.com>
> 
> 
> --
> ubuntu-devel mailing list
> ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
> http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
> 

-- 
Robos - 
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