A sit-down with Ubuntu founder Mark 'SABDFL' Shuttleworth Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth spoke to The Reg FOSS desk at Ubuntu Summit 2024 in The Hague about the Linux distribution's success, its missteps, his regrets, and what he'd tell his younger self. In 1999, Shuttleworth sold his South African digital certification authority, Thawte, to Verisign, which paid $575 …
That's a very nice interview, but I think that Shuttleworth's perspective of what was significant about them comes from his perspective on what he spent time on rather than how it affected people outside of Canonical.
Unity on the other hand only came into existence because early Gnome 3 was absolutely dire and nearly everyone thought they were on a course to crash and burn. Not even the company behind it, Red Hat, were willing to ship it as the default desktop on their distro. It looked like Gnome was destined to die and the only realistic alternative was KDE.
As a company which had placed so many of their bets on having a usable Gnome desktop, Canonical was in a very difficult position and I suspect that Unity was born out of desperation, to have something actually usable for their flagship desktop.
So they hired an actual UI designer who came up with Unity. It was actually pretty nice. Then Gnome started copying Unity (something they will never admit to) and evolved into something actually usable. Once that happened, the reasons for Unity to exist went away and Ubuntu were able to ship a Gnome desktop that gave them all the important bits of Unity.
[Author here]
> Unity on the other hand only came into existence because early Gnome 3 was absolutely dire
Well, TBH, I had my own theory about that:
https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/
But to be fair _everyone_ involved vigorously contests this -- totally without any substantiation, references or citations, of course, just abuse and frequent _ad homs_ -- but I have had some interesting counter-views after this story resurfaced last year and exploded a bit on both Hackernews and Lobsters.
The rest, though, I agree with.
One thing about Unity separates the weenies and posers from the hardcore, and damned few will admit it:
Unity honours Windows's keyboard UI. If you know how to drive your computer from the keyboard, Unity worked great (and is still OK today) and you can ignore how MacOS-like it looks.
Anyone who's a mere point-and-drool merchant who wouldn't know Alt+F4 from Ctrl-C was confused because stuff wasn't in the same place.
Unless they knew how to use a Mac, of course, in which case they were fine.
Those guys can't use their computer any more if you move the taskbar to the left, though, and their opinions are for me as valuable as their tech skills.
I'm not a patent lawyer, but from a user perspective Gnome 2 was as far from Windows as any GUI that I've ever used, except perhaps Windows 3. I was originally using Mandrake (later Mandriva), and the default install included both KDE and Gnome (it was a big stack of CDs).
KDE was very Windows-like, and I had no difficulties adapting to it.
Gnome 2 on the other hand seemed to be from another planet and I would look at it, find the concepts alien, and then go back to the very Windows-like KDE.
However, Mandrake/Mandriva started going down the tubes (new management brought in by investors), and I had to find an alternative. After evaluating what was out there, I settled on Ubuntu. The default desktop for it was Gnome 2, so I decided to suck it up and get used to it, learning it bit by bit on Mandriva until the day I was ready to make the big jump and install Ubuntu instead.
Gnome 2 was alien, but it was actually pretty good, once I got used to it. I wasn't afraid to try something new, and I felt that Gnome 2 was actually easier to use than Windows in terms of getting things done.
However, Gnome 3 was a different story. Instead of just being an adaptation of Gnome to the new GTK version, they decided to exercise their creativity and strike out in a "bold new direction" in user interface concepts. This was the classic example of group of programmers trying to be innovative UI designers and not really understanding how the average person thought or interacted with a computer. The result was a design which required a lot of mouse movement from one side of the screen to the other to get anything done. Using early Gnome 3 for an extended period of time has been compared to be like sawing wood.
As for Unity, they dropped broad hints which said the UI designer contracted by Canonical (the report was published and free to use by anyone) had in fact been heavily inspired by Apple Mac. This wasn't just a matter of the window control buttons being on the left, but also the function (although not location) of the dock and other things. They didn't say it outright though, as that would invite lawsuits from Apple. I can't give you a source for this, but I did read about it in various articles. I wasn't familiar enough with Apple Mac to make that connection myself.
When the Gnome 3 developers finally realized that they were on course to being a footnote in computer history and put their misguided "creativity" back in a box on the shelf, then it started becoming more like Unity.
When Gnome 3 progressed far enough, Ubuntu was eventually able to ship a version of it with extensions that made it very similar to Unity. I found the transition from Unity to Gnome 3 completely seamless as a result. I still put the window buttons on the left though, as that makes more sense from an ergonomic perspective (most of the other things the mouse needs to do are also on the left).
Two explanations have been given for the dock being on the left side of the window in Unity (and later in Ubuntu flavoured Gnome). According to the pundits it was to avoid lawsuits from Apple. According to Canonical it was because modern monitors were much wider than they were tall, so the Unity UI design contractor said it made more sense to use horizontal screen space than vertical screen space. I suspect the latter is the correct reason. It does make more sense to have it on one side of modern wide monitors.
As for the Windows keyboard UI, that was copied from OS/2 when that was a joint project with IBM, and cane from inside IBM as CUA (Common User Access Guidelines). This was intended to provide a common user experience across IBM's product line, from mainframes (I don't know how that was supposed to work), to minis, to Unix workstations, to PCs. Microsoft kept that when they split off and went in their own direction with Windows.
You can find IBM CUA if you google for it. It was considered to be public spec which was free for anyone to use. It's no surprise that Linux distros implemented it instead being different for the sake of being different.
> Gnome 2 was as far from Windows as any GUI that I've ever used
How very bizarre. It is _extremely_ Windows-like, with a trivial rearrangement to make it slightly less obvious. Basically, the same functional elements have been split up and separated to make it less obvious, that's all.
* The Start menu has been split into 3: Apps, Places, System.
http://toastytech.com/guis/fd7.html
* The single integrated taskbar has been split into 2, with a lot of wasted space.
* The top panel holds the 3 parts of the Start menu, then the equivalent of the Win98 Quick Launch bar, still on the left as in the original; and the rest is the system tray, now bigger but still growing in from the right.
* The bottom panel holds the app-switcher buttons, flanked on the left and right by some trivial new features: a show desktop button on the left (which Vista aped on the right), a virtual desktop switcher on the right (which Windows 10 finally gained, but only on a keystroke so it didn't panic the horses), and the trashcan (because the GNOME team seem to hate desktop icons for some reason).
The functionality is identical but spread out a little.
You've never used anything less like Windows 9x? Oh, my, you can't have got out in the world much, then.
Here is a quick list of things radically less like Win9x:
* Lisa OS: multitasking and file-based, but doesn't have apps or programs as core abstractions; you tear "stationary" off "template pads" to make new files and the invisible apps handle their own types of template. Global menu bar at the top, which Windows and GNOME never had.
* Classic MacOS. Much simplified from the Lisa for a 128kB machine with no fixed disk. Replaces the Lisa's template system with simple "programs" and "documents" to save disk and memory space. No visual buttons for apps or windows; no app launcher other than the file manager; critical functions right on the desktop, such as drive icons and trashcan.
This was protected by patents: that is why Win95 had to put the drive icons in a folder.
Later gained abstractions for networking, symbolic links, and multitasking, but some felt bolted-on. E.g. the Apple menu for sysadmin stuff became user-customisable and you could make it into a Start menu analog, but the OS didn't do that by default.
* DR GEM: a copy of classic MacOS, but menus are drop-down not pull-down.
* Amiga Intuition, AROS, MorphOS: again a Mac rip-off, but the menu bar is hidden until you right-click a new top status bar. Clunky but avoids a lawsuit. Folders do not show all contents unless specifically requested; files must be assigned icons by the developers. Drives have device names, a little like VMS, which is better than just meaningless letters but not as helpful as MacOS volume names -- but that's an option.
* RISC OS: no menu bars; the first taskbar-like panel ever, which radically holds drive icons; an app folder, an early ancestor of the Start Menu but sadly not global, just for apps bundled in the ROM; window button controls to send to the back of the Z order; dialog boxes constrain mouse movement so you must choose an option; no file open or file save navigation, so you must drag to the filer to save; intelligent use of 3 mouse buttons, so there are only context menus, but the right mouse button _adjusts_ instead of simply acting -- meaning no need for a scroll wheel.
* OS/2 2 WPS: folder based, but folders are virtual abstractions and not part of the filesystem, which is mostly hidden. Driven by a template system much like the Lisa, but poorly supported by 3rd party vendors. Uses different mouse buttons for dragging, selecting options etc. Preference settings is direct so there are no "OK" and "Apply" buttons: click something and it happens immediately. Uses tabs very widely, much more so than Windows 9x in the early days, but intelligently (if not prettily) they are vertical and colour-coded. Differentiates windowed from full-screen command prompts, whereas Windows let you toggle, later removed from Vista due to the introduction of a compositor. Linux never offered the choice.
* EPOC 16: keyboard-only GUI with file management integrated into the program launcher.
* EPOC 32: touchscreen GUI but most apps run full-screen all the time so there's no window management; keyboard summoned menus; app launcher integrated into status bar and silkscreened onto the display bezel.
* Sun OpenLook, Irix, CDE, etc: a chaos of experimentation and ideas but multiple quite usable GUIs;
* Sun Looking Glass: a true 3D UI -- flip windows over and there are settings on the back; no need to minimize when you can stack windows on their sides to put them out of the way, but still read the titles like book spines.
https://medium.com/@enricofuria/looking-glass-by-sun-microsystems-a9f7b49308d8
That's without going into stuff that's more exotic, like Smalltalk or Symbolics Genera, which have GUIs but they are for programmers not users, so they expose the code and the IPC of the OS directly rather than end-user-level metaphors like "file icons".
Take a proper broad look at the whole field, outside of the PC world, and GNOME 1 and 2 are obvious blatant Win9x clones, just with a very minor rearrangement.
I absolutely refute your assertion, I hope persuasively.
gosh "Sun Looking Glass" I'd completely forgotten about that. I remember poring over the screenshots and details about that in Byte, a couple of us (as students) tried to code up an equivalent on the PC at the time, but somewhat hamstrung by both our ability and the power/tooling available at the time.
I was convinced that was going to replace all user interfaces at some point soon.
Gnome2 was pretty far from alien man. All the creature comforts were there. Start menu analogue, the same window furniture etc etc...there were a few of us that heavily customised it in a way that would make it alien, but out of the box it was pretty straight forward.
Most people that used Gnome2 (who will never admit it) would get rid of the bottom bar, put the top bar at the bottom and would place a task switcher in the now bottom bar which pretty much made it basically Windows-alike.
What Gnome3 did was piss everyone off at the same time. It became weirdly alien to pretty much everyone apart from the desktop agnostics....you couldn't really customise it, so they pissed off the hardcore fans...window furniture was gone or in the wrong place and there was no start menu...so they pissed off the lightweights.
> and would place a task switcher in the now bottom bar which pretty much made it basically Windows-alike.
Exactly. 100% this. I did.
I wanted it vertical on the left, but GNOME 2 couldn't handle that and MATE still can't. Some things go vertical, mostly the wrong ones, some stay horizontal (mostly the wrong ones), it has no concept of rows of entries, some get HUGE and some ᵥₑᵣᵧ ₛₘₐₗₗ and it all becomes a jumbled mess.
Yes, indeed.
When people say "it's really customisable" what they generally mean is they can turn it in Windows easily...I highly doubt that the vast majority of folks out there are "customising" to the extent of /r/unixporn and applying max weebage to their desktop...they just aren't.
That's why people tend to like KDE, it's the simplest transition from Windows...out of the box it's basically the Windows setup with some spit and shine.
Gnome3 and later variants thereof, have always been their own thing...which isn't easy to transition to. I personally admire the balls Gnome had for going off the rails the way they did...they were essentially the first mainstream developer to decide "fuck this, lets do it our way" without worrying about familiarity. Did it work? Depends on who you ask...it was definitely ballsy and they have a new group of fans and users that appreciate what they did, and those fans and users are uniquely theirs now...not just refugees from somewhere else...I think that's what stings the KDE fans these days, they're the ones that have to handle all the shitty refugees that have their heads stuck in Windows land. The ones that switch to Ubuntu and end up on Gnome that stick with it and give it a fair shake, aren't really a problem.
As another poster said, this was an interesting insight into how Shuttleworth saw things.
I disagreed with a lot of the later stuff and moved upstream to Debian.
But then, I'd still be on MacOS had it not been for the early Ubuntu releases, so see icon.
Strange no mention of the server side of things? Ubuntu is pretty common as a server I gather with support.
> Strange no mention of the server side of things?
I had to drastically trim our interview, and we continued talking for another 15min after the end of our slot, but I didn't record that part.
I'd argue the LXC/LXD stuff is entirely server-related.
There is a lot of server stuff I've never touched myself, such as Landscape and Juju, that I personally have no need for. Oddly the company doesn't talk about it much. I presume someone somewhere likes it.
What it's aimed towards now is bringing the stuff that's survived from the phone project -- Snap, Mir, Core, IoT self-maintaining OSes -- into more general desktop and end-user use. It will be interesting if it can get it right.
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I've known Mark from his days running Thawte (I was one of the Web Of Trust identity verifiers).
I spoke to him after setting up Ubuntu, and had not changed much. Let's not forget that his engineering insight led to a certificate company that managed to comfortably run rings around Verisign with far fewer people because it was engineered right so it's no surprise that Verisign immediately handed over a substantial wad of cash when they had the opportunity to buy it.
BTW, Mark shared a fair chunk of that money with his staff.
Sure, he is driven, but there's no other way to convert a vision in reality. There's never a shortage to naysayers..
Thawte was amazing back in the day... I hated having to give Verisign as much money as they demanded for their certificates (back in the day when it was 4 years per cert). Thawte was much more cost effective, and his tiny crew in the early days (i.e. his family) were a pleasure to work with. When he sold the company, I was devastated in the sense that Verisign effectively got their hands on a great competitor, but at the same time I thought, "Good for you, Mark, good for you! Not bad for a boykie from Cape Town!"
Had the same view with another major IT company in Johannesburg who gave the incumbent telco Telkom a massive run for their money when it came to Internet comms... They were expensive but so so worth it. And when Dimension Data first bought a slice, I applauded, and did the same when Didata then bought out the owners completely. :-)
Unity dash, Ubuntu 12.10. It included Amazon paid affiliate links in desktop search. I'm disappointed reg has such a short memory, it was quite controversial. And yes, Ubuntu is quite like Windows, has been since Poettrering.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/online-shopping-features-arrive-in-ubuntu-12-10
Also:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/10/ubuntu-wont-fix-nsfw-content-in-amazon-unity-results
I am not an anti-snap (?) user, I actually install it and run snapd even on Linux Mint or Tumbleweed. I fail to understand this:
"It seems to me that some of the opinions I am seeing online about snap are changing, and people are becoming more positive. I've had no problems with it in 24.04 or 24.10. "
I relied on Snapd for several things which were critical for business and I had to clear tens of GBs of data which it happily wastes on a tiny SSD. Right now, as I am reading the article, I happen to have Terminal running that I install "hw-probe" to figure out my SSD specs. It takes minutes, on an i5/32GB RAM with a SSD. It is a console only application that interfaces with the web. A very tiny one
Did the author upgrade to those insane massively multicore CPUs or what? I am asking as a guy who even does have balls to suggest developers that they should ignore the "image" and ship snaps if it will serve them. E.g. "waydroid" could have amazing benefits for reachability if it did it.
> Did the author upgrade to those insane massively multicore CPUs or what?
Nope. The piece was written on a 13 year old Thinkpad with a spinning hard disk for `/home`. The OS is on an SSD. My opinions are based on reviewing Noble and Oracular on this hardware. It is a quad-core i7 but it is a dozen years old.
Note, the snap integration into the desktop doesn't really apply to Unity, and I personally dislike and do not use GNOME. However, things like Snap update progress bars reflect real stuff I have seen users asking for.
SNAP is a 4-letter word. Why the hell did the designers get addicted to the Poettering way of doing stuff?
A daemon running all the time, taking resources? Hell NO.
SNAP IS BANNED in my company. Anyone proposing using it gets told politely, No, or there is the door.
As a result of Canonical's machinations, we standardised on Debian for desktops and A RedHat distro for servers. We use Rocky Linux these days. Gnome is also not allowed. As has been said, the devs lost the plot with V3.0 and are still on a mission to nowhere.
> A daemon running all the time, taking resources?
Go on then. You obviously care about this, as your anger demonstrates.
So, you must know, without even checking: how _many_ resources? How much RAM is it using? How much CPU? How much quicker does your computer run without it?
Can you measure it? Let's see your numbers. I want to know what the performance delta is that you're so upset about.
> I had to clear tens of GBs of data which it happily wastes
FWIW on my Github I have taken a few commands from Alan Pope and written a little script which purges old snaps. I use it on most of my machines.
Have it, for nothing.
https://github.com/lproven/purgesnap
Download, stick in `/usr/bin`, `chmod +x` it and you're good to go.
I run it once a month or so.
"The early years are described by Lionel Dricot in a blog post entitled 20 years of Linux on the Desktop"
....urgh.
As I never knowingly miss an opportunity to chew on these sour grapes: some pretty typical Ubuntu revisionism, there. Much as they'd like to pretend they invented Linux on the desktop, nope. There were plenty of desktop-focused Linuxes around long before Ubuntu. I worked for Mandrake. There was also SUSE (mainly aimed at the desktop at the time), Red Hat (which had been aimed at desktops for a while before and was in a sort of transitional phase at the time), Lycoris (yup, that was a thing) and probably some others I'm forgetting, it's been a while.
Ubuntu's primary innovation was to bring in a pile of money which was used for marketing and giving the product away for free. Everyone else had to charge money because, you know, they needed to figure out a way to pay people to work on it. Shuttleworth handily had a giant pile of money lying around, so he didn't have that problem.
Here's a random Mandrake 9.0 review from 2002 to make the point. Which was part of a week of "Linux on the desktop" reviews that also covered SUSE, Red Hat, Lycoris, and Libranet (which I'd entirely forgotten about). https://www.extremetech.com/archive/52240-review-mandrake-linux-90
No, I disagree.
I used Red Hat Linux from 4.x on. It was awful.
I reviewed Mandrake and Mandriva. It worked but it was rather ugly and kind of clunky. It was not all that. It was, notably, a pig to dual-boot, as RHEL and Fedora and SLE are today. And Pop OS come to that.
No, Ubuntu is not claiming it invented desktop Linux. It made _free_ desktop Linux work and work well for ordinary folks, using FOSS, and contributing the changes upstream.
Sure there were end-user distros but they cost money. Some were great. Most asked lots of difficult questions and forced the user to make choices and selections they were largely not equipped to make. OpenSUSE still does.
Today, this continues in the enterprise world, but the problem of choice is solved by simply removing all the choices. Enterprise distros are tiny with very restricted package choice.
It is a very partisan response to decry the efforts of the distro that made the free experience good to point out that there were other good experiences if you paid for them. That, ISTM, is deeply counter to the whole FOSS ethos.
The first for me was Red Hat too and then I tried for fun a bit of everything. One that impressed me then long ago was Helix Code (Ximian later) and that was Gnome of course.
But I did settle for KDE on Mandrake Mandriva and now Mageia. It still annoys me that their reputation was "good for beginners". I started as a programmer in 1968 and I wasn't looking for a particularly complicated only for experts made distro. And still there was in the beginning linuxconf and what not.
I did pay twice for Mandriva I think, but I think Mandrake and later always had free downloads too.
I tried Ubuntu twice but both times they offered a screen with a huge character size so you got no where from there during install and I did not bother with it any more.
There are several fine Linux distros but I have decided to stick with one European as we need the knowledge here too.
"I did pay twice for Mandriva I think, but I think Mandrake and later always had free downloads too."
Yeah, to Liam's point about F/OSS principles, Mandrake/iva I think always (it's been a long time and we tried a lot of equally doomed business plans, there might have been some brief time when this wasn't true) had a "free" edition, which was 100% F/OSS across 3 CDs, and free of charge. The paid editions were more discs, but all the F/OSS stuff on them was available from online repos if you ran the Free edition. The only bits you were really *paying* for were proprietary things - principally NVIDIA drivers and other proprietary hardware drivers which were relevant at the time, also stuff like Flash (long time ago, like I said). I think the Free edition also came out (at least officially...) a bit later than the paid editions.
So Ubuntu didn't even really innovate giving away a F/OSS desktop distro for free. It innovated giving away one *with proprietary stuff in it* (especially the NVIDIA driver) for free. And mailing it to you if you didn't have the bandwidth to download it (another thing that was a consideration at the time).
But...the title of the blog post isn't "20 years of Free-As-In-Money Linux on the Desktop". It's "20 years of Linux on the Desktop". It starts out "Twenty years ago, I had an epiphany: Linux was ready for the desktop" and then tells a little story about how he'd go around with Debian and Knoppix CDs and all the problems he had trying to deploy a desktop using those, which makes an obvious implication that there was no better desktop Linux option available at the time. That paragraph concludes with "With GNOME 2.0, I felt that Linux was ready for the desktop. It was just really hard to install. And that could be fixed.", again implying that nobody else was already *doing* that. Which several of us were. The blog later says "When you have a good idea, it’s probably because this idea is already in the zeitgeist of the time", but then goes into a long story about UserLinux, as if that was the *only* other case of anyone else having the same "good idea" - again utterly failing to acknowledge that several companies had already been trying to make the same "good idea" work for several years at that point.
If the blog was about how 20 years ago he'd been fortunate enough to run into a guy with a giant pile of money who was willing to burn lots of it on giving desktop Linux away for free, I'd have no objections. That's essentially what you said in your comment, too. And hey, there are much *worse* things zillionaires could choose to use their giant piles of money for! On the whole, Mark doing that with his giant pile of money was good for a lot of people. I just wish they wouldn't constantly present it as if they invented desktop Linux from a blank slate in 2004, cos they didn't. They just - as you said - made it free. Using an approach nobody else could use, because nobody else had a giant pile of cash lying around, they all had to find *some* way to pay their workers.
(Also, insert 1990s diatribe about the different meanings of "free" here. The "free" in F/OSS is not "free as in cost". I disagree that making something available for zero dollars is a fundamental part of "the whole FOSS ethos".)
Well, OK, this is better, but I still disagree.
The thing is that the paid-for-edition-which-funds-a-freebie thing still means there's a two-tier system: there are freeloaders, and there are Proper Users, the ones who paid for it, the real guys with the real product. Usually there is something else going on here, such as paid users get access to the support fora or something.
Plus of course we need to note that Red Hat, and SUSE too, are still doing this. There's a big pool of free users on free products who get updates but no actual support, no guarantees, and there's the really rather expensive paid-for product for big enterprise customers.
And if you think that is an artificial distinction, then I would say: just *look* how pissed off all the CentOS Linux users were when it was killed. They are not interested in Fedora. They wanted their bit-for-bit identical stable enterprise OS and they wanted it for nothing.
And a lot of them loudly announced that they were taking their ball away and switching distros when CentOS was killed. They did not want Stream. They did not want Fedora. They wanted RHEL but without paying.
(I am reminded about the joke about farming subsidies... my uncle just to not grow cabbage, but then he learned he could make more money not growing wheat instead, so he switched to not growing that.)
All the CentOS Linux users announcing loudly and angrily that they were taking the money they weren't paying for COL and would now not give it to Debian instead.
But for me this proves the point: two-tier systems _matter_. It's not just perception or a minority view. This has real large-scale impacts.
And remember, I am on Red Hat's side on this one. The GPL only says you must provide source code _to your users_. Not to the world. Not to everyone. TO THE USERS. Commercial product where there are no users who aren't customers? Then only they get the source. No problem. Fair, reasonably, non-discriminatory, and entirely justified.
> (Also, insert 1990s diatribe about the different meanings of "free" here. The "free" in F/OSS is not "free as in cost". I disagree that making something available for zero dollars is a fundamental part of "the whole FOSS ethos".)
Yeah, well, tell that to Redis. Tell it to Hashicorp.
It is foolish idealism, nothing more, and that misguided appeal to a mythical noble human nature is having real world repercussions.
"The thing is that the paid-for-edition-which-funds-a-freebie thing still means there's a two-tier system: there are freeloaders, and there are Proper Users, the ones who paid for it, the real guys with the real product. Usually there is something else going on here, such as paid users get access to the support fora or something."
Well, sure, if you want to look at it that way, but...I didn't make any argument or claim about which approach is "better", that's not my point at all. My point was only ever frustration at Ubuntu acting like no kind of desktop Linux existed before they came along. If you want to argue that desktop Linux a rich guy gives you for free is "better" than desktop Linux with some kind of business model, sure, go ahead, but it's not an argument against my point, AFAICT.
I would just point out that the "rich guy gives it away for free" model has an obvious built-in flaw, which is that at some point the rich guy gets bored, or dies, or the big pile of money runs out. Canonical being a private company it is impossible to know a lot for certain about how this looks from the inside, but from where I'm sitting, it looks a lot like they've been cutting back on investment in the desktop side of Ubuntu for a while, and trying to come up with *some* kind of sustainable business model. There was a lot of noise about shopping it around to outside investors a few years ago, though I don't know where that went in the end, or if it's still going on.
(Liam knows this, but for anyone else following along, I now work for Red Hat, so am of course the furthest thing from an unbiased observer. Eat this comment with as large a pinch of salt as you like.)
Also:
"There's a big pool of free users on free products who get updates but no actual support, no guarantees"
You don't get "guarantees" of "support" for Ubuntu if you don't pay for it either, do you? I mean, just like Fedora, if it's broken, you get a 100% refund! If you need help, ask in the forum, and you might or might not get an answer.
If you want actual "support", you pay for it - https://ubuntu.com/support
The core part for me was that Ubuntu took a much more pragmatic approach to solving their customers's real world problems. The major headaches at the time, not non-hacker types, were X configuration/drivers, dual boot, Wifi and codecs. Most other distros were either philosophically against anything non-F/OSS/proprietary that users had to do command line "magic" to get the basics working.
The combination of these made a basic installation competitive with Windows 9x/2k/XP
* dual boot/FAT/(later NTFS), so people could low risk test drive Ubuntu and share files
* Wifi drivers, even with `ndis_wrapper`
* proprietary/third-party video drivers so X could stand on first boot without terminal deep dives, and
* mp3/audio/video codecs, flash
* availability through free CDs, CD toasters, etc, like AOL's carpet-bomb discs got everyday people onto the "Information Super Highway"
These were the Microsoft's "Linux is a cancer" sabre rattling days.
Canonical took a chance. Having deep(er) pockets helped (a lot).
I believe they were the first distro to indemnify users against patent suits, specifically with Microsoft in mind. With that, the business community starts paying more attention.
Mandrake/iva already had this exact approach. It wasn't philosophically against anything non-F/OSS (in fact selling you non-F/OSS stuff was more or less the business model). It tried as much as possible to work on as wide a range of hardware as possible (ahh, the literal days I spent sifting through graphics card PCI IDs and wishing I had never been born) and be entirely GUI driven.
Of course, this being the early 2000s and the whole thing being run on a budget that might have bought *half* a shoestring in a liquidation sale, it didn't always succeed. But the idea was not new.
Hello AdamWill, and all the best.
I very much agree, I have used/tried at least ten different Linux distros and the only one I have paid for was Mageia. Not forced to pay, but as I saw it as a means to support them and you get it all on a stick with some documentation too in the mail.
What you do "for free" now is that you download the iso image or choose an other method. Regarding the non-free parts you decide if you want them or not when installing. I would choose to install that too.
One I could mention apart from Mageia as fine was Sabayon and one as "annoying" was one with an Indian background, perhaps not around any more, which when booting instead of displaying "booting linux" said "booting and the name of that distro". Too much for me.
We had a decent one in Finland too for some years.
And there are many very language specific around the world too.
I generally target BSD, so I'm not so fussed about Ubuntu (I think I have one system with what was Ubuntu game edition installed, it works well). However, surely Mir is absolutely a competitor for Wayland, it's absurd to say otherwise!
It takes effort to support each display server, and if most of the effort concentrates on one server/protocol set, then that is 'winning'.
Nice that they're coming around to the OpenBSD pledge model of application design, where programs are restricted to only the APIs they sign up for.
As to the SNAP based model, my understanding was that despite the size of snaps this removes dependency issues. Given that I would currently rate FreeBSD as utterly unusable for the average user as a desktop OS, not least because it is not uncommon to upgrade or install a program and have it break other previously working programs due to updated dependencies, I would rather have large amounts of disk space used and a dependency manager running, than have to update unrelated applications after installing a new one, just to keep my system working.
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