Open Source Culture: Problem #1

I like how Canonical decided to be more open about secret projects they work on. At least that they now involve some people outside of Canonical to get feedback is great. I think a lot of problems with the new "Amazon Suggestions" feature could have been avoided like that. Sometimes it just takes an outside perspective to see some problems.

And I don't think it is a problem between Open Source and secret projects. Sometimes this is a much better approach then to be open from the start. It's more about the psychological side than code improvements or testing. Often Projects fail because motivation of the contributors fades away. People just tend to move on as they loose interest.

That's why I really dislike bad comments to some newly released code. It's new, surely it has it's problems, just like anything new has. At least some others seem to share my opinion. I think Jono Bacon put it right on his blog:

The Genesis Of Free Software Projects | jonobacon@home: "when sometime decides to create Free Software either as an individual or as a company, they have the right to create the first iteration of that feature however they choose. Their investment of time, money, or both in building Free Software earns them a right to put together a first cut that meets their needs…this is the very nature of scratching an itch."

Comments like "you should have used X instead!" are just wrong. Especially for things that are open and you get for free. Even more so if the one releasing something didn't event get paid to do so. The only thing these comments do is discouraging someone which cares about free and open software. So people writing such bad things are only discouraging other people to do such tings. You are destroying your own system here.

This is something I still see way too often on blogs. This is really bad for open software ...

Ubuntu 12.04 - first impressions

So I've been using Ubuntu 12.04 for a few months now. Mostly on my netbook but also for about three weeks on my new XT3 Laptop and a few days on my main machine at home. There is a lot to like about this release. It's well polished and refined. The Unity interface really starts to shine now. So like with the last release here are my first impressions on Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise Pangolin":

• Unity is fast. It feels very snappy to use even on my aging netbook. It's great to use like this.
• Finally, the most important aspects of Unity can be easily customized. And even more using MyUnity from the Software Center.
• The Unity multi-monitor improvements are very welcome. As a developer I usually use at least two monitors. With this release of Unity it is fairly usable, at least on pair with Windows.
• Love the changed Unity Dash front page. The old one was never of use to me. This might have (after some time) the applications right there that I actually want to launch.
• Overall the "attention-to-details" changes made are all really nice and all over the place. Everything behaves better, simpler, faster.
• Linux hardware support is getting to a point where you can expect it to work better than windows (just like with my netbook as well as my brand new laptop). Microsoft really needs Windows 8 and it needs it soon or they gonna loose the edge they had for so long.
• The newest XBMC Media Center is very easy to install and very nice to use. With all the Android and iOS apps out there acting as great remotes this is awesome! And it's as simple as logout and login to get to it and have a great media center experience.
• Improvements to the Software Center are great. I'm starting to use it more often.
• Desura is also awesome and has a lot more Linux games now. It went from 48 games about 6 months ago to 130+ now. Also I should mention that you can play a lot of GoG.com games easily on Linux (DOSBox/Wine). Just if the Desura games arn't enough for you.
• Wine has improved a lot. It works well with a lot more games and it integrates much better into the system.
• My Wacom Tablet, Webcam and Android Phone seem to work as expected. No configuration or modifications needed.
• Startup speed is great. With an SSD Ubuntu tend to use half the time Windows 7 takes to the login screen. At least on my Desktop and Notebook this is the case. I have no need to hibernate my computers. The difference isn't big with the short start times already there.
• Most of the first impressions for Ubuntu 11.10 still apply here.

I like this release, it's a good improvement over the last releases (as usual). But as with any LTS release software packages are not as up-to-date as I'd like. So I already can't wait for an other "normal" release that isn't as conservative. Ubuntu 12.10 will be more to my taste. And I already can't wait for it.

As usual a list of things I didn't like will follow shortly after the final release. As some things I already found might be fixed by then. I think the dislike list is going to be shorter than for any other release I've written one, but we'll see ...

Humble Bundle for Android

The Humble Bundle for Android (pay what you want and help charity)

Android, nice :)

Internal competition is healthy

Internal competition is healthy, but depends on strong and mature leadership

true in a lot of ways. From the blog posts on planet ubuntu/gnome I got a very similar impression.

Gnome 3 no ‘max’ & ‘min’ buttons

Gnome 3 removes ‘max’ and ‘min’ window controls – but why?

I welcome this change. I can totally understand the reasoning behind this change for Gnome 3's Shell. The linked posts are worth a read. I'm sure there are people disliking this as it is a very basic change of something that has been there for a long time. But there are nowadays just better, more intuitive ways to change the window size. And minimizing doesn't make much sense the way Gnome Shell works.

I'm still waiting for the Ubuntu button change to get justified.

Ubuntu, Canonical and motivations

Mark Shuttleworth - Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption

very insightful post. Totally true in my opinion as an outsider from Ubuntu/Canonical. I'm just a regular user of Ubuntu and thats just what I see Canonical and the Ubuntu Community do every day. And I love it! Hope they continue for a long long time with that.

Best Part of the long post:

When Ubuntu was conceived, the Linux ecosystem was in a sense fully formed. We had a kernel. We had GNOME and KDE. We had X and libc and GCC and all the other familiar tools. Sure they had bugs and they had shortcomings and they had roadmaps to address them. But there was something missing: sometimes it got articulated as “marketing”, sometimes as “end-user focus”. I remember thinking “that’s what I could bring”. So Ubuntu, and Canonical, have quite explicitly NOT put effort into things which are obviously working quite well, instead, we’ve tried to focus on new ideas and new tools and new components.

Nautilus Mockups

The perfect File Manager? | OMG! Ubuntu!

very nice design, would love to see that implemented in gnome :). Very Chrome like ^^

Ubuntu 10.04 Post-Install Guide

The Silent Number: Ubuntu 10.04 Post-Install Guide: What to do and try after installing Lucid Lynx!

great guide to explore some nice software after a ubuntu install :) ..

I'm so excited about the (Linux) World in motion

I follow a lot of "planet" feeds (mainly planet.ubuntu.com, planet.gnome.org). I like getting the information on the latest and greatest features of various apps I use daily. I get the feel that Linux (I mostly watch Ubuntu stuff) is getting more and more momentum with each release. I think that Gnome, Debian, Ubuntu are definitely going into the right direction and more and more people start to jump in. Really great to see this.

Also I'm always looking out for the next good improvement. For example each time I see the default Gnome font dialog I hate it. With a few 100 fonts installed its just not usable. I'm glad I recently found this http://live.gnome.org/Design/GTKFontDialog which aims to redesign the old dialog. I like to see work on these problematic but very basic areas of a OS a lot.

There are areas of Linux where I would say its ahead of other OS systems, other areas where its about equal and there are still areas where it's behind the others. The font dialog is such a area which reminds me more of Win95 than anything modern. Gnome this needs a fix badly!

An other thing is Gnome Shell. I'm still not convinced that the Gnome Shell project really brings the usability improvements it aims (or claims) for. I installed it and gave it a short try. Its not bad at all but still I don't see the benefit I get from this. It makes just switching and launching applications more time consuming but easier to follow (good for a newb). What it really achieves is to make the old broken system of virtual-desktops usable for the first time. I just ask myself if that's worth it or not ...

But it's not finished so I wait and hopefully on it's release it will be an improvement to the current Gnome Desktop. It wouldn't be bad especially from the diversification point of view. Gnome (and Linux) should not be too similar to other OS systems as with that people start to think that things should work exactly the same. They just don't understand that Linux is different and works differently. Thats also an issue I see that the new Gnome Shell addresses neatly. But still if there is no benefit from it people will simply not use it.

Oh and btw. I tried Moblin on my netbook as well. It uses a similar concept to Gnome Shell and is very usable for that type of UI. But I still wouldn't use it on a desktop.

Still I'm excited about the future of Linux, great times ahead :) ..