Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of what the people involved say or write publicly, this conflict and others like it are really about power.

With several dozen million Ubuntu desktop users worldwide[1], Canonical has become the gravitational center of the FLOSS desktop and a promising platform for other form factors. No other FLOSS desktop comes even remotely close in terms of mass adoption.

As a consequence, many other FLOSS projects that historically have perceived themselves as more important "upstream projects" to the Ubuntu desktop have now become, effectively, contributing projects to Ubuntu. It is now they who depend on Canonical to reach and interact with the vast majority of FLOSS desktop users.

For the individuals who identify themselves with those other projects, this tectonic shift in power has not been enjoyable. More and more of them are gradually realizing that if they want to continue working with Canonical, it will have to be on Canonical's terms.

--

[1] There were over 25 million Ubuntu users at last count: http://blog.canonical.com/2013/10/01/ubuntu-pre-installed-an...

How does KDE depend on Ubuntu? It's not like KDE will cease to exist if KDE is not included in Ubuntu. And besides, Canonical is more than welcome manage their patches for KWin (or fork KWin) if they really want it to be included in their distribution with their own unique Windowing stack (Mir).

I think the problem here is the attitude coming from Mark Shuttleworth which is a terrible example for the rest of the Ubuntu community. Regardless of what Shuttleworth believes, KDE is a own standalone open source project and does not owe anything to Canonical/Ubuntu.

And likewise Canonical owes nothing to KDE. I think KDE wants to be on Ubuntu more than Canonical wants KDE...

If that's the case, why would Canonical lobby hard to patch Mir into KDE?

Because KDE is still relevant in terms of desktop market share/adoption %. They should not give that share up without a "fight", although they may prefer to use a word like "trying".

Because they don't want to break functionality and get blamed for things. If people refuse to support them though, that's another issue. And it IS ridiculous that KDE continues to support Windows but won't support Mir..

KWin doesn't support Windows

As Martin points out elsewhere, the only reason KDE supports Windows is because QT does and it therefore requires almost no effort.

Nobody lobbied hard. Somebody sent somebody some mails and all of a sudden it's made out as if canonical was lobbying very hard and putting major pressure.

I refuse to believe there was major lobbying until I see actual emails (and the number of emails).

It wasn't just "someone", it was Mark Shuttleworth taking time out of his day to attack the person in a public blog post. That's pretty major no matter which way you look at it.

It's not like KDE will cease to exist if KDE is not included in Ubuntu.

I think a fewer users -> fewer contributors -> slower feature velocity -> fewer users death spiral is possible.

KDE has been around a lot longer than Ubuntu and will continue to exist for a lot longer. You mention the word "spiral" but I would say KDE has a lot more legs than you give it credit for.

> slower feature velocity

I wonder if this is not a positive thing after all, for a mature project. I do not think KDE should add new features at 200 mph speed. I think Ubuntu is actually going too fast.

>It is now they who depend on Canonical to reach and interact >with the vast majority of FLOSS desktop users.

It doesn't say depend on to be able to write code. Or depend on to be able to have a github account. Or depend on to be able to exist.

It says depend on to reach and interact with the vast majority of FLOSS desktop users.

> There were over 25 million Ubuntu users at last count

And Ubuntu and Unity are still a bug ridden mess. I know it's about money and manpower and it's hard to fix sometimes complicated bugs but I've switched to KDE recently just because of the annoying bugs in 13.10.

Some examples:

- No Menu on Eclipse Kepler (it's only the most used FOSS IDE) - there is a workaround on askubuntu through.

- While moving a lot of files with nautilus my system starts grinding - turns out gvsd-metadata occopius 4GB memory and one cpu core. Nautilus uses 1GB memory and and another CPU core.

- indicator-application uses 100% CPU randomly

- Firefox colors are pale after switching windows

- Random artifacts on GUI elements while working with the system for a longer time.

- Drag and Drop does not work reliably.

- Switching Windows and Workspaces does not work reliable.

- I can start Firefox in Lightdm without beeing logged in. Just add an event then Evolution starts up. Let's you also happily sends Mail through the lightdm user.

- Without Evolution adding an event does nothing. Just does not work.

- etc.pp

KDE exhibits none of these problems so far.

It's an open secret that non-LTS Ubuntu releases are akin to beta.

Some of these issues are also happening in 12.04 LTS. We use Unity and 12.04 LTS on 40 workstations at my university. I'm at the moment the student admin so I'm seeing maybe more bugs than others. All of these issues are on launchpad but nobody cares. My professor - after switching from 8.09 to 12.04 could reliable reproduce several unity bugs in the window switching and icon handle code.

If Unity and Ubuntu would be more stable and more polished (e.g. good support for legacy apps like ghostview and emacs/xemacs in Unity) and stable file management, few memory leaks - it would be an fantastic system. I really like Unity and the ideas behind it but sometimes you can't really work the system.

> I can start Firefox in Lightdm without beeing logged in. Just add an event then Evolution starts up. Let's you also happily sends Mail through the lightdm user.

That's pretty darn bad. You have reported this, right?

it's an old bug - I added an comment: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-datetime...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com