Ubuntu Unity hanging by a thread as wunderkind maintainer gets busy with life The Ubuntu Unity project is in trouble because its maintainer, a Linux whiz kid, has had less time to work on it due to his studies. Now other team members are appealing to the wider Ubuntu community for help. Taking to the Ubuntu forums earlier this week, Unity team member Maik Adamietz admitted that things in Unityland aren …
That last sentence is pretty amazing.
This really is emblematic of much of the more fringe Linux features and options. The maintenance of these things is often the passion project of one or a few exceptionally dedicated individuals. Pretty shocking to hear about a 10 year old leading the effort though.
> Pretty shocking to hear about a 10 year old leading the effort though.
I wrote about him a few years ago:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/04/rudra_sarsawat_ubuntu_projects/
He's not 10. He was born in 2009; he's about 16 now and off to university, as befits a legit prodigy. And uni work comes first.
A couple of people so far have offered help, but it is not yet apparent if they have the appropriate skills.
And there was precious little financial reward for the abuse as well. I daresay community acclaim simply will not make up for the stunted emotional growth due to lack of socialization. What a horrific admission. Let the bleeding thing die if this is what it takes to resuscitate it.
You seriously think that the boy was being forced to do this? And that it *had* to mean he suffered "stunted emotional growth due to lack of socialization"?
Where are you getting your data from? You have proof that *he* needed to spend so many hours on it that he was incapable of finding time to socialise as much as he wanted to? And note that he is changing his own priorities on his time now, which is the whole core of the story, so what evidence do you have that he was being prevented from doing so previously?
As the saying goes "citation needed".
(And, no, saying that *you* feel *you* would be incapable of doing what he did is *not* useful data).
Once you provide data to back up your claims then we can discuss where culpability lies.
I am a physician. I have more than passing experience in this area. It's worth keeping in mind that brilliant children are often so obsessed with their passion, that they neglect other things. The job of childhood, is to become facile at a multitude of social functions, not just programming and allied technical skills. Spending too much time on the one, necessarily means spending less on the others. This is factual. Not 'feelings'.
There are also frequently unscrupulous adults who facilitate the titular wunderkind's activities for benefits to themselves, leading to the unbalanced state I described. Cajoling this young person to maintain Unity, when it is clear that they need to move on, fits into this category.
Your dismissive 'citation needed' apparently disregards very clear data from the American College of Pediatricians on both the detrimental effect of excess screen time on children's brain development, and the subsequent deficit of 'face-to-face' interactions leading to increased anxiety levels and poor physical conditioning. Refer to apeds.org if you are curious.
Again, these are real things. Despite my jocular title, which was clearly poking fun at the situation, there are indeed reasons for concern here.
If this is insufficient to satisfy you, then you are simply being argumentative. I am just taking a moment off looking at the Reg in between writing a grant proposal and getting supper for my children, and don't really have time for a Monty Python sketch.
Cheerio.
Thanks for sharing your professional view, which is why we read the comments on El Reg, albeit usually about IT things. But I'm guessing that you're not a native English speaker, because "facile" nowadays has a derogatory meaning rather than the original one from Latin. "Proficient" might be a better word.
> Your dismissive 'citation needed' apparently disregards very clear data from the American College of Pediatricians
My 'citation needed' apparently indicates that I do not regularly read publications of the American College of Pediatricians, admittedly a shocking omission for anyone who hopes to claim some knowledge of the computing arts and allied professions and one that clearly warrants that my call for correction of such irresponsible lack of commonplace study be casually derided as being 'dismissive'.
Speculation about the home-life of someone you have never met doesn't actually qualify as "sharing your professional expertise". Also, you're in no position to diagnose anything from such distance and were you actually in a position to diagnose professional ethics guidelines would prevent you from sharing such information about a patient. I know all this without being "a physician", what's your excuse?
Bullshitting on the internet or potentially criminally unprofessional?
Lack of socialisation? What utter nonsense...!
That guy started secondary school able to tell everyone he was the maintainer of a Linux distro. And not even some obscure project with 2 users, one that people will have heard of.
I bet the reason he has had to step back is nothing to do with studies. The adults fucked up by assuming he was too young to be told what a condom is, so he now has kids with half of the girls at his school!
.
*Ummpf* *wipes eyes* what is that noise? Oh, my alarm clock is going off... Time to shower and get breakfast I guess... ;)
Why is a whole distribution --- not just one program --- being promoted by Canonical as an official flavour of Ubuntu when it depends on a single schoolboy (or even a single adult)? This strikes me as a breach of Duty of Care to him, as well as to the community.
Because the child concerned put it up for a vote in 2022 and the vote won. When that happened, they listed multiple contributors, and they still have multiple contributors, just multiple contributors not all of which know enough to completely maintain it. Canonical is not responsible for ensuring people who work on external projects are making good decisions no matter whether they link to them or not. However, given the current status, that link might get taken down soon enough if 25.10 can't get released because 25.04 will go out of support in three months.
The tiled Unity interface was what caused me to drop Ubuntu years ago. I don't care for tiles, in Linux or any other (Win 8) OS. I ended up with Mint MATE, which I like very much. Still think Ubuntu is a great idea and worth supporting, but they have made some questionable decisions.
Maybe some of the big companies that make money and use open source should chip in some time and money. I mean Bezos probably spends more on diesel polluting the worlds ocean than it would to keep some of the 30,000 he’s laying off on staff through April release date. It would help smooth their redundancy…
Maybe the Microsoft Azure Linux team could help out? Let’s not forget the Larry Ellison bulletproof Linux team.
Those Linux people are working on Linux, the part they use and have the skills with, not keeping an unpopular and not very supported desktop environment compatible with a specific distro. I doubt there is a single company that relies on Unity as a UI layer; while a few people might run it out of preference, they can easily migrate to any of several maintained desktop environments. There is a reason that Canonical stopped developing Unity in 2017 and why the team that picked it up was so small. There's another reason why the most active version of Unity these days is a fork optimized for mobile. We have a hard enough time convincing companies to support the things they do use. You're not going to have any success getting them to support a component they don't use and wouldn't notice if it disappeared.
How about the complaints from users who did not like the Windows 8-style attempt to merge mobile and desktop views. Canonical had the same reason for trying that that Microsoft did when they were building a phone OS, but they discontinued that too. Microsoft had to change their UI too. If it had been popular, more people would have run it and maintained it. A few people liked it enough to continue development, but not very many because there were quite a few people arguing for Ubuntu to drop it even earlier than they did.
I moved from Debian to Ubuntu probably around 2006 on my main laptops(for better hardware compatibility). Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was the last version I used on my systems, since the next LTS had Unity. I went to Mint/MATE and haven't looked back. I never actually tried Unity, but really had no interest in a significant UI change (even now). I have managed to compile one of the most critical bits of my MATE experience, an app called brightside which hasn't seen an upstream release since late 2004 (http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/b/brightside/) even now on Mint 22. Ubuntu 16 I think was the last time they shipped with brightside, which provides edge flipping for virtual desktops in GNOME, something I have used going back to around 1998 (originally with AfterStep). Getting it to build clean on Mint 22 required about 17 other packages to be built from source as well(fortunately all built cleanly based on original source deb files, though I did have to hack a few of them up to build).
Kind of ironic perhaps if Unity as a desktop environment is struggling, when MATE, which maintains a GNOME v1-style(at least, if not more than style) UI is a much older UI than Unity. Thought it was interesting that it seems that Mint 22 ships with pretty much the same version of MATE that Mint 20 did (there is a newer version of MATE too). Not that it matters much to me the version it has works fine, a few bugs here and there that I have long figured out how to workaround/live with.
Same.
I describe mint as the fixed version of Ubuntu. Because I started using it when they made Ubuntu completely unusable.
I don't know what their current UI is called, but last time I looked at desktop Ubuntu they seemed to have replaced that single tasking UI with a newer, still single tasking, UI.
Fedora etc have also done that single tasking UI crap. I think it is the entire GNOME project that has been replaced with a single tasking default UI???
It's like these UI designers think the primary use case for a computer is to have a single browser window open, and probably complain about being forced to include a hidden method of opening a terminal window at the same time... The sort of people who think you can make expensive purchases on a phone, right?
It seems that for most of us this tiling interface phase is not our cup of tea.
However, the fact that a rather talented youngster picked up on it might point to changing desires and requirements of an interface among the younger generations. If that's the case, maybe our desire to retain familiar UI schemes could actually be slowing the move to Linux among the next generation.
Good on Saraswat for setting boundaries. We're all going to get older (or worse : not) and have life changes, it's important to have succession planning for anything important from early on. Naturally of course everyone will do the typical human thing of leaving it *beyond the last minute* even after being told that the person is moving on.
There appear to be only two developers (including Saraswat) involved with Ubuntu Unity, it's rather off to let all this fall on the shoulders of a 10-15 year old. It's not on to stick this on the shoulders of a single adult, either, which is likely to be the result if they find a schmuck stupid enough to take this on.
It's not just community flavours of Linux distributions, so much of open source is in a string and sealing wax situation. I know there is a limit what can be expected for free, but there are literally multiple parts of Unix that haven't been significantly re-engineered in thirty plus years, and even in the 80s would have been considered barely passable compared to competent commercial engineering. For all the billions of people using it, there's very little free resource.
Stick a donation link on the project page, and *pay* people to do it too.
They should be secure enough by design to be OK if they are not updated. We need operating systems that are inherently secure. This requires a new OS working in tandem with new mobo hardware, protecting memory, so that malware cannot interact negatively with the OS and software cannot be altered. This is feasible, and a better use of funds than AI.
I had the pleasure of meeting Rudra at the first and second in-person Ubuntu Summits. I made sure to introduce him to Mark Shuttleworth, and he was a minor celebrity wherever he went. I think I heard that a bunch of GNOME developers took him to dinner the first year.
He's a driven young man, whom I had only heard good things about, and it was nice to meet him since I had only switched off of Unity in my upgraded Ubuntu because I had a book to write and needed to use the default interface. If I had my way, I'd still be using Unity today. I told him I wasn't using the flavor, because I'm picky about themes, but that his hard work ensured I could still use Unity even on default Ubuntu.
Myself and another young contributor found his mother, who had supported his passion but said she was finally realizing the scope of why he thought it was so important. She said she supported him in anything he wanted to do as long as his schoolwork came first, and we impressed upon her what a big task he was doing and how important it was that he continued his schooling. Which it sounds like he's now doing.
Focusing on his education and getting a start on his adult life is *not* a weakness. It's strength. And the team working on finding contributors to continue Ubuntu Unity is likewise a strength. I remain proud of Rudra, Maik, and everyone else working to make Ubuntu Unity stronger. Software doesn't maintain itself, and I hope that anyone who can contribute will do so. That's not just code, but also documentation, support, and sometimes even encouragement.
The hazard really talented young people often face is boredom from the lack stimulation and challenges in their education and more generally. Finding a creative outlet and a supportive community has likely enriched his young life.
If nothing he has demonstrated the discipline and commitment that many adults lack. Accepting that all things must end and that there is a time to move on, is evidence of growth and maturity.
"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: ..."
Heaven knows the planet is in dire need of talented courageous young people.
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