[OT] Upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 Beta

[Richard Gaskin]

Peter Alcibiades wrote:

> They are telling you something, the folks at Ubuntu.
>
> Its fluxbox.  Or Openbox.  Or maybe it could even be WMII.  Or that Finnish
> tiling WM I was using a few months back. F1 for the man pages, F2 for
> terminal.  What else do you really need?
>
> I suspect they are telling you something else.  They are also whispering
> quietly:  why not run it on Debian....?  Those guys don't reinvent the whole
> thing from scratch every six months.  Maybe they know something?

I recall a member of this list who, in response to my suggestion that 
the Linux world pool their resources around a single distro, argued that 
diversity is a benefit to the community.  I've come to share that view.

Even within Ubuntu, there are diverse options:

- Within 11.04 you can still choose the Classic appearance right in the
   login screen if you prefer it over the new Unity look and feel, in
   the same way that Mac users could log into Classic if they preferred
   during the first few years of OS X.

- Ubuntu offers an LTS edition ("Long Term Support") which is released
   on a three-year cycle very much like Debian, and like Debian still
   sports Gnome 2.

And of course there's the world of other distros available, diverse 
enough to cater to nearly every possible taste.

The Gnome 2 look and feel is dead, and it's not Canonical who killed it 
but the Gnome project itself.  They're moving on, and the world is 
moving forward with them.  Gnome 3 is the future, and for the end-user 
it comes with Gnome Shell, which looks far more like Unity than either 
looks like Gnome 2.

There's even been talk that Fedora and openSUSE may consider adopting 
Unity down the road, just as Fedora's also looking to follow Ubuntu's 
lead with adopting Wayland in the future (for those of you who haven't 
been following, Wayland is a more modern OpenGL-based display server 
being developed as replacement to the ancient X, similar in some 
respects to Apple's shift to Quartz in OS X).

If there's any message being delivered by Unity, it's simply this:

    For Linux to grow, it needs to focus on the end-user experience
    in a way that appeals to a broader audience than just long-time
    Linux enthusiasts.

Like Canonical, the Gnome, Fedora, openSUSE, and other teams understand 
this, and each in their respective ways are working toward that same goal.

Personally, I find this bold new thinking across the Linux community 
very exciting.

Mac Classic had its day, as did Gnome 2.  Sooner or later it becomes 
time to grow.  That time is now.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
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