Some screenshots of our new DE agnostic menu

[lukefromdc at hushmail.com]

I haven't dumped Ubuntu over Shuttleworth's capitalism, but I have dumped
Unity, Software-Center  and Ubuntu One and do not distribute them to my friends.
This is where the focus seems to be on monetized software, CLA agreements, etc.

I distribute older GNOME 2 Ubuntu,  Ubuntu with gnome-shell frippery, Ubuntu with
Cinnamon,  or Mint to folks I set up computers for. An upcoming media machine will get 
a US-based install. All my current live USB sticks are either Mint or UbuntuStudio. Too
much work to first"clean" Ubuntu, then remove Unity and install Cinnamon, then get all
my media packages. US is "pre-cleaned" and the media packages are already there!
I can add Cinnamon and my old US-based themes and icons to it and esentially have
my desktop, with about 2 hours of work and bugfixes. Hopefully the meta I am working on
will make that a one-click job.

In short, I have  dumped the portion of Ubuntu that is being modified for the
tablet/phone/always online and monetized model. I am reying on the community
to blow the whistle if anything really ugly (like a low-level network stack that phones home)
ever gets into Ubuntu repos. There has in fact been an outright malicious distro,
SphinxUX OS or something out of Egypt, and it was revealed on Phoronix within a
week of their initial lurid performance claims.

Ubuntu flavors and external derivatives probably are going to be out of the 
whole Mir/Unity/Amazon/smartscopes/ubuntu phone line that Ubuntu is
focussing on. Word is that XFCE will stay on X and X will stay in repo,
for instance. LightDM might become Mir-only, but there are plenty of 
other display managers.

 The base system of Ubuntu Server is unlikely to be changed
as servers require simplicity and security. Real worst case scenario would
be to add Debian's Mesa stack and Wayland stack (for compositing DE's)
or X stack (for non-compositing DE's like XFCE) and build the Ubuntu
flavors on top of that. That would not be needed unless the Mir patches
make Mesa unusable with X or Wayland.

On 06/22/2013 at 1:09 AM, "Ralf Mardorf" <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> wrote:
>
>On Fri, 2013-06-21 at 20:41 -0400, lukefromdc at hushmail.com wrote:
>> There are additional reasons not to depend on USC: One of them
>> is that it is reported to be very difficult to install in Mint, 
>into which
>> people might want to install US metas. All Ubuntustudio packages 
>> are accessable from Synaptic in Mint, as it uses Ubuntu repos.
>
>That's not a valid argument. I also can't use US meta packages for 
>my
>Arch Linux install ;) and I suspect hat even with using "alien", 
>they
>won't fit to openSUSE either. Mint is a PITA, it's terrible 
>broken, I
>once tested it myself and if people try to fix it, they ask the 
>Ubuntu
>or Debian community, how to fix the borked, customized 
>Ubuntu/Debian
>called Mint, while we don't know what's different for Mint.
>
>> The other reason is that folks who do not want support for paid 
>> software in their machines (myself included) often remove 
>> software-center and install Synaptic.
>
>This is a very good argument, but OTOH it doesn't change the bad 
>brain
>of Mr. Shuttleworth. For sure, he made Linux more popular, but 
>OTOH he
>brings some bad influences too Linux. His gift is "hardcore 
>capitalism"
>and perhaps nothing else. If you install a clean Ubuntu, you'll get
>links to Amazon etc., removing them from my install, won't clean 
>the
>dirty Ubuntu policy.
>That's why Quantal perhaps is my last Ubuntu (Studio). I still 
>follow
>Ubuntu Studio and I didn't decide to drop Ubuntu forever, but it's 
>very
>likely that I'll do it.
>
>For now I'm using Arch + Ubuntu, but in the future it might be 
>Arch +
>Debian. I'm undecided.
>
>Regards,
>Ralf
>
>
>
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