Virtual Kingdoms

I think Ubuntu would be improved if Canonical took a more democratic approach. Let’s start with an excerpt from Canonical’s mission statement: “To realize the potential of free software in the lives of individuals and organizations by: Delivering the world’s best free software platform.” Ubuntu wants to succeed on the desktop. All in all its actually real people(meaning non-developers) who use and want to use Ubuntu will be what makes it a success.

Every new version of Ubuntu has a few obvious changes. Some recent changes have been the removing of ctrl alt backspace as default, making the update manager automatically start, waiting 60 seconds on shutdown, computer janitor and others. I think that there should be an easy way to vote on these new changes. Having some kind of monthly or bi-monthly poll on Ubuntu’s website, would be a good way to prevent frustration as well as cruft build up. Just because developers think a certain feature is the greatest thing since sliced silicon, doesn’t mean it will be embraced by the community. (Keep in mind I am a FLOSS programmer.) Some of these changes annoy me and some of them are okay. The recent changes that make Ubuntu more like windows or mac should be removed right away. Like the pop up update your system message. Which was even more annoying than on windows because you have to manually close it every time. Luckily they have removed that, but replaced it with something just as bad. They just make the whole update manager pop up. Which is a bad idea for computer-illiterate users. Personally I think its even easier to ignore than the old way. Not many people are going to use buggy clones of proprietary software when they can just get pirated copies just as easy. To really succeed on the desktop Ubuntu must stand out as it’s own by being original, easy to use and stable. Which IMO makes gnome a very good choice. Launchpad is also a very Ubuntu has been pretty good at being original but some things are lacking. Completely hard crashing during a user switch is not a very good advertisement. (Which had to do with the buggy ATI graphics drivers. Which albeit is AMD’s fault. But the OS should catch it before freezing the whole computer.) I think Ubuntu would improve if they were more open and took users input more into account.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Open Source / Free Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.