Are Ubuntu's Glory Days Over?

[satanboy]

"The Ubuntu apologists are making all sorts of noise about how Canonical is targeting a new market (tablets and similar screen resolution devices), but we've seen this show too many times before," explained Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. "Red Hat didn't get to be profitable (something that still eludes Canonical) by dumping their target customers every year to chase new opportunities."

read more: technewsworld.com

 

[MyWorld]

I read the report yesterday, and yes, Ubuntu lost a lot of shares due to Unity, a whole lot more than they bargained for.

But that is not the end, I have hope still for Ubuntu, although RedHat may be profitable, the driving force behind most FOSS projects for the last +/- 6 years has been Ubuntu, and RedHat shined in their absence. IIRC RedHat does not even release patches upstream anymore, everything is kept in-house to try and stay profitable.

Lets see what Wayland and all the other future tech "upgrades" have to offer before we discard Ubuntu.

One thing though, they will keep loosing ground if they do not take more care of their UI, Unity IMHO was never meant to go mainstream on desktop PC's, that was a bad move on their part.

 

[MickZA]

From the article:
I've been observing a lot less competence lately with updates breaking packages, compiz breaking Unity, et cetera," Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza told Linux Girl. "I don't think that Unity is the problem, I think that rushing things that aren't ready is.

... and that, I think, was the major problem with 11.04, I expect the 11.10 release will resolve the current problems and Canonical to have learnt a valuable lesson from this debacle - Vista anyone

Shuttleworth had committed to Unity for this release because of the delays in releasing Gnome 3 and was not prepared to break the Ubuntu April, October release cycle for the sake of a better experience. Ironically I believe this attitude is what forced the Gnome 3 team to finally get off their collective butts and, in collaboration with Fedora 15, release a superior UI.

Don't count Ubuntu or, for that matter, Gnome 2 out just yet. There's still plenty of life in both, after all, Fedora has released some real dogs in the past and is still going strong

 

[adrianx]

I don't think Cononical has been the driving force behind most FOSS projects at all. This guy seems to agree: http://gregdekspeaks.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/red-hat-16-canonical-1/

 

[MyWorld]

I don't think Cononical has been the driving force behind most FOSS projects at all. This guy seems to agree: http://gregdekspeaks.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/red-hat-16-canonical-1/

FOSS is bigger than just Gnome, and by driving force, I did not mean they actively developed everything, they just got a lot of devs developing for FOSS who would otherwise not have bothered.

Or to put it another way, would the Gnome desktop and Linux be the same today if Ubuntu never existed? You cannot deny that Ubuntu have had a mayor impact on FOSS.

Even thought the source you quoted spews fire at Ubuntu, you read the comments and he cannot deny that a lot of the work they do at RH for the desktop, if not most of it, is because of Ubuntu contributions (bug reports).

I may have been harsh on the RedHat comment.

I do not like Ubuntu one bit, but one cannot deny the impact they had on Linux in general.

 

[AstroTurf]

I Like unity but preferred 10.10..