Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

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In terms of user interface have those standards delivered?

I remember fonts being really screwed up for a long time. Longer that it should have been. Just getting anti-aliased fonts was major deal.

Then graphics drivers are a mess. I blame manufacturers of devices here. But still treating it as a black box I just see that is inferior. I know Linus flipped of NVidia but at the same time is a chicken and egg problem. Why should they bother to improve their drivers? To make GNOME 2 desktops look shinier? You criticized Compiz, ok, what is the alternative?

Google did pretty much the same with Android. We have surfaceflinger, dalvik, custom IPC mechanisms. Now they are trying to slowly merge some of them in.

> Maybe this is the kick in the pants Linux needs to increase adoption.

That is what I think. Here is a company that tried to push and everyone resisted and said "you must adhere to standards defined by a 20 year old plus graphical server". I think that is silly. Let them innovate. I for one, am excited for them.

> Let them innovate

If Canonical were good at it, everybody would be saying "yeah, go for it!"

But they're not.

Every time they strike out on their own, they seem to end up producing overly complex, badly performing, messes, with tons of issues, that everybody hates. bzr, unity, ...

The only reason people use any of their stuff is because ubuntu pushes it on their users, and people with little experience end up using it by default. Sound familiar...?

[Worse, with Mir, they seem to going for the lockin effect: "mir will integrate especially well with unity"... >< ]

That perception, that Canonical is not competing on fair terms—almost anything they come up with, no matter how awful, will come with a built-in user base—is one of the big reasons they get so much flack for this sort of thing. If it were just some guy in his garage hacking on his new display server after lunch every day (like, you know, Wayland...), and gaining users the hard way, by being better, then nobody would blink an eye.

For that reason, I think people expect more maturity from an influential company like Canonical. They expect them to play nicely and work with others (e.g., if they think they've identified issues with wayland, work to fix wayland; or cooperate in designing a next-generation replacement) instead of striking out boldly on their own every 15 minutes.

Again, if they had proven really good at it, they'd get a pass to some degree—but they haven't. Instead, by making technical merit less of a factor in determining what becomes widely used, they're effectively reducing the overall quality of FOSS. Can you blame people for being annoyed?

Can you elaborate on what you dislike about bazaar and Unity? Or how Canonical is able to "force" a vcs on its userbase?

I've used Unity since it was released, never had any issues, and generally think it's the best GNU/Linux window shell around.

Bazaar is also ridiculously simple, and I've started using it as a front-end to every other vcs. The support for git is a little rough, but I can do in one command what git users have to do in four, so I deal with it.

I think that the vocal minority of Ubuntu power-users (which is sort of a laughable term) hates change. This is what made Unity such a "failure" when really it's a pretty great system.

Launchpad supports Bazaar only. That's one of the "top ten reasons" to switch to Bazaar according to the docs [1].

That said, I don't really think Canonical is "forcing" anyone besides playing the "defaults" card in the distribution they control, and even then you can simply not use the stuff is installed by default (although I think that making the desktop dependent of some applications that I may not want to use is a little bit against the bazaar philosophy of Linux distributions).

[1] http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to-b...

EDIT: formatting

Launchpad, like Github, is offering a service and that too free. It is not a valid argument. It would be like asking Github why don't they support other VCS.

> making the desktop dependent of some applications that I may not want to use

Examples please.

But github does support other VCS!

Really? Link please

https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...

Supporting parts of subversion client is not same as subversion repository.

I don't know if it is a valid argument or not, but according to Bazaar docs it's one of Bazaar's strong points.

AFAIK the official Lanuchpad FAQ says Bazaar is the best VCS for the project:

https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+faq/37

And apparently they can (or want to) support only one. Fair enough.

I don't know if this constitutes a "power user" usage pattern, but watching a colleague try to work with Unity with dual monitors was hugely amusing.

I'm curious to know what you can do in one command in bazaar that you need 4 in git to do.

Here's my power user setup for dual monitors with Unity:

1. Plug in dual monitor to HDMI port. 2. Use Unity.

What did your colleague have trouble with?

(Four might have been slight hyperbole, but git is a usability nightmare. I forget what exact task I can do in one command that it takes 3-4 to do in git, there's probably some set of absurd arguments to do it in fewer, but I don't know them and am not willing to spend hours reading tutorials to discover what magic buttons I have to press to get git to do what I want.)

> What did your colleague have trouble with?

I remember him trying to move a window to the other monitor and having bounce back repeatedly. Very funny to watch.

> git is a usability nightmare.

No argument here. The design of the commandline UI is terrible ("git checkout" is the first offender you're likely to meet). However, it's powerful enough that I'm using all the time, occasionally bridging with SVN when needed. Once you get hooked on cheap local branching, you can never give up.

Eh, Bazaar has cheap local branching as far as I care about. And yes, I don't have to deal with git checkout.

Window management can be funny -- I think there's a bug in compiz where a display will "reject" windows if they're too large (when minimized) for the display. This causes the drag-to-top motion to hit the display the window is currently on, and so it goes back to the original display. Using control-alt-numpad5 works, as does unmaximizing your windows and making them smaller than your smallest display.

[if Canonical were] gaining users the hard way, by being better, then nobody would blink an eye.

Maybe they are "being better".

I have no doubt that technically Wayland is better than Mir, but for me (as a user who lost interest in configuring Linux back when FVWM95 was considered interesting) I don't care.

I use Ubuntu (including Unity!) because it works. I never, ever want to deal with weird configurations to work around some bug, and for the most part Ubuntu lets me avoid that.

For me, "better" means "it just works". No other distro does that as well as Ubuntu.

(BTW, Unity isn't that bad once you've used it for a while)

I agree. I for one, also like Unity. My mother who is in her late 60 also learned it quickly now likes it. Interface is less cluttered and easier to use.

At first there was a small learning curve, but I don't remember often thinking "hmm, I wish I had my GNOME 2 environment or my KDE environment back".

Maybe I too got old and spending hours tweaking my GUI settings just stopped being fun. I just want to fire up the machine and get work done.

I beg to differ. I used Redhat, Mandrake, Gentoo, Debian, and now Ubuntu and I have been happily using Ubuntu for a long time now. Unity is great. I barely need to do any configuration with it, everything just works. Under the hood it's still good ol' old-school Linux.

I have tried Mint on 2 other computers for all the talk about Mint being the next great Distro, I find it to be far less stable than Ubuntu. I have also started only using Ubuntu's LTS releases with a handful of PPAs to get more recent packages. Helps with stability a lot.

Yes. I shall follow with interest and run Ubuntu if my hardware allows. CentOS and Debian are there as lifeboats if needed.

Choice is good!

Is Mint with Debian finally taking off?

That has the potential to be a really easy choice for desktop users, but a couple years ago it wasn't very smooth at all.

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